Paul Chan Mo-po, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, presents the budget for the 2020-2021 fiscal year at the Legislative Council in Hong Kong, 26 February 2020.
Photo:
jerome favre / Shutterstock
We almost sympathize with Paul Chan Mo-po, who writes a letter to the neighboring editor. Hong Kong’s financial secretary is upset that the Heritage Foundation has dropped Hong Kong at the top of its annual Index of Economic Freedom after years.
Mr Chan has the impossible task of denying what anyone can clearly see: the Chinese Communist Party is rewriting Hong Kong into its own mainland image. That was the point of Heritage’s Ed Feulner in his explanation on these pages last week. Until Singapore took the top spot in the index, Hong Kong had ruled No. 1 for 25 years. As the foreword to the 2019 index noted, “The Hong Kong government has placed full-page ads promoting its number one position.” But China’s aggressive assimilation of Hong Kong, Mr. Feulner wrote, turns it into just one Chinese city.
Mr Chan disagrees, citing “the principle of one country, two systems.” This was Hong Kong’s promise of autonomy, embodied in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which set out the conditions for the return of the former British colony to China. What Mr Chan does not say is that Beijing has made it clear that the joint statement is a dead letter.
In 2017, Lu Kang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, called the joint statement “a historic document that no longer has any realistic meaning.” Hong Kongers have every reason to believe him after seeing China rammed by an unpopular national security law whose provisions include allowing Beijing to bring some Hong Kong cases to China for trial.
Mr. Chan wants readers to believe that economic freedom continues regardless of political oppression. But China is not Singapore. In China dissenters simply disappear. Foreign businessmen could be arrested and held as diplomatic hostages as two innocent Canadians now have to pressure Ottawa not to extradite a Huawei manager to the US.
Economic freedom? Tell that to Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai, who remains in prison for invoking the National Security Act, quashing the common law presumption of bail that supposedly applies to Hong Kong. Xia Baolong – Beijing’s top official for Hong Kong – says only true ‘patriots’ are fit for the city’s ‘administrative, legislative and judicial bodies’.
China also dictates corporate boardrooms. Two years ago, the Civil Aviation Administration of China demanded that Cathay Pacific Airways ban any employee who participated in “illegal protests” from flights to mainland China’s airspace, and began providing information on all crew members before a flight to China would be approved – lowering the stock price. Last May, former Hong Kong CEO Leung Chun-ying called for a boycott of the London-based HSBC bank for failing to openly approve the national security law. The CEO soon signed a petition in support of the law.
Our advice to Mr Chan is to stop trying to convince the world that Hong Kong is what it used to be and accept that he is now flacking for the man who really runs Hong Kong: Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Main Street: Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai is going to jail – and Pope Francis says nothing. Images: Reuters / Zuma Press Composition: Mark Kelly
Copyright © 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the March 11, 2021 print edition.