Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam formally withdrew the mainland extradition bill that sparked months of protests.
Did this quell all protests against communist Chinese rule?
The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong continue against the wishes of those in charge. High school students began the school year in gas masks and joining hands to form human chains. College students held a strike, waved flags, and chanted protest slogans.
After a summer of demonstrating in the streets, outside municipal offices and in the airport, students refuted the government’s wishful assertion that once they returned to school the months of pro-democracy protests that have roiled the city would come to an end.
“The government thinks it can quell the movement when students return to school, because we can only come out during the summer,” said Owen Lo, 16, a high school student. “But that’s not true.”
He said he was afraid of the repercussions he and other students might face but “seeing so many students selflessly gambling their future to express their demands to the government, it is infectious, and makes me want to come out and do something for Hong Kong.”
One of the challenges the protesters have faced has been Chinese censoring of the internet. It appears they have found a new system to use, Mesh messaging.
How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn’t use the internet.
That’s exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Fransisco startup Bridgefy’s Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other — and the public — using no persistent managed network.
And it’s led to swift growth for Bridgefy: downloads are up almost 4,000% over the past 60 days, according to Apptopia estimates (Apptopia is an app metrics company).
The app can connect people via standard Bluetooth across an entire city, thanks to a mesh network. Chatting is speediest with people who are close, of course, within a hundred meters (330 feet), but you can also chat with people who are farther away. Your messages will simply “hop” via other Bridgefy users’ phones until they find your intended target.
Others not satisfied with the extradition bill’s demise? Hong Kong Christians.
The withdrawal of an extradition bill that threatened religious freedom in Hong Kong is not enough to satisfy Christians and others amid protests there, a Christian advocate told Baptist Press Wednesday (Sept. 4).
“Their anger lies with the excessive use of police/force, police brutality, and prosecution of protestors or activists in the past few months,” International Christian Concern’s (ICC) Gina Goh told BP.
“These are the direct results of (Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie) Lam’s refusal to withdraw the bill in the first place,” noted Goh, ICC’s regional manager for Southeast Asia.
“Eight lives perished for this cause,” she said, “and the demonstrators want to continue to pursue justice and democracy so their fellows did not die in vain.” Goh referenced suicides since June, which climbed to nine Wednesday, of Hong Kong residents who expressed frustration and anger with current events in Hong Kong.
All of this may remind you of another incident where Chinese citizens stood up to their government and demanded democracy. That didn’t turn out so well.
Though Hong Kongers had rebelled against the authorities before, the Tiananmen protests were what awakened their political consciousness, and their sense of the difference between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty became acute. The CCP drew the opposite lesson, becoming so fearful of popular political mobilization that it insisted that Hong Kong’s laws be effectively unchanged from 1984, when the Sino-British Declaration on the city’s handover was agreed, through to the official transfer in 1997, unless reforms were authorized by the Party itself. It even demanded that a labor law passed in early 1997 guaranteeing the rights of collective bargaining be scrapped, which it was soon after the handover.
Since then, Beijing has sought to pass an antisedition law, attempted to promulgate “patriotic education” in Hong Kong, and restricted the territory’s ability to choose its chief executive. The heavy-handed, unyielding stance Beijing has taken against this summer’s protests has only served to “pour oil on the flames,” as a Chinese proverb says, pushing Hong Kongers into a corner: They must fight for their freedom once more, or become slaves to Beijing’s imperial rule.
How much can the ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong be compared to Tiananmen? On the protesters’ side are plenty of similarities. For one thing, the “silent majority” of the population did not always remain passive or follow party orders in 1989. Ordinary Beijing residents were the ones who risked their lives to brave the fire as tanks and machine guns made their way to the square. Much of the same is happening in Hong Kong today: Students and young people have been at the forefront of the rallies, but a wide array of residents have joined them, including civil servants, accountants, medical personnel, the elderly, and others.
Yet the differences are also significant. The regime in Beijing has changed a lot in 30 years. The Chinese economy today is far larger, and Hong Kong’s proportion of it substantially smaller. The tools available to the state are also much greater than they were in 1989, with a more powerful security apparatus and myriad economic levers at its disposal. At the same time, Hong Kong’s institutional infrastructure is far more advanced than any other Chinese city in its ability to serve Beijing’s global ambitions. Hong Kong still operates a U.S.-dollar-denominated currency market that is part of the global financial system, the only one in China, and is key to Beijing’s many projects worldwide, not least the Belt and Road Initiative. So Beijing would be loath to go too far in eroding these institutions. Donald Trump has also linked the CCP’s response to the protests to his ongoing trade war with China.
Beijing has done well to grant Hong Kong’s protesters some of what they want in withdrawing the extradition bill. Yet China must also investigate police abuse, give amnesty to arrested protesters, and reopen political reform toward comprehensive universal suffrage in the territory.
Of course, it may not, reckoning it can wear down Hong Kong’s protesters. Given the city’s history and its rapidly politicized population, that would be a miscalculation.
I would not expect Beijing to acquiesce to additional democratization demands. Then again, I wouldn’t expect them to allow the extradition bill to be withdrawn, either. This suggests that China’s economic position, already battered by the President Donald Trump’s trade war, is more precarious than most realize. I suspect that as much as 40% of China’s “economic miracle” is smoke and mirrors, built on an unrecorded mountain of bad debt that’s been siphoned off into untold millions of private pockets. Maybe that’s the calculation that’s prevented China from Tiananmening the Hong Kong protestors en masse, lest they send the entire house of cards tumbling down. But as I’ve stated before, if push comes to shove, I doubt China’s ruling communist party will hesitate to slaughter thousands (if not more) if it feels its grip on power is even remotely in danger of slipping.
Tags: Carrie Lam, China, Communism, Foreign Policy, Hong Kong, religion, Tiananmen Square