If reports of Gaddafi’s most egregious abuses turn out to be true, I suspect they will still pale in comparison to those Chinese leaders not only committed during their brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, but are committing today in their continual vigilance to attack any sign of democratic expression as if it were the plague…
Yet, instead of issuing condemnations and imposing sanctions, Western leaders are acting as if the human rights abuses the Chinese commit are pursuant to political and cultural norms that are sacrosanct.
(“Sanctioning China but Not Libya?” The iPINIONS Journal, March 3, 2011)
As this quote indicates, I had just cause during the Arab Spring to repeatedly invoke the foreboding precedent the Chinese government set in 1989, when it brutally cracked down on student-led protesters for camping out in Tiananmen Square and demanding democratic freedoms.
Well, I am constrained to invoke the same precedent now that student-led protesters in Hong Kong are emulating their Arab peers, and honoring their Chinese predecessors, by taking up the embering torch of democratic freedoms in China, and doing so by camping out in their version of Tiananmen Square, Tamar Park.
Hundreds of students have begun gathering for a protest in a park in Hong Kong’s city centre, on the second day of a week-long boycott of classes.
The students are protesting against China’s recent decision on how Hong Kong’s leader should be elected.
Student leaders said 13,000 took part in Monday’s boycott held at a university campus.
(BBC, September 23, 2014)
No doubt this was inevitable ever since Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997. Back then, China provided adequate assurances that it would honor the democratic freedoms Hong Kong citizens enjoyed under British rule by touting the principle of “one country, two systems.”
Except that it began undermining that principle almost immediately by limiting freedom of the press and curbing the free expression of dissident political views. Not to mention its brazen attempts to implement totalitarian measures like an anti-treason law and a patriotic education curriculum.
This is why it came as no surprise in August, when China made an outright mockery of that principle by ruling that Hong Kong citizens would only be allowed to elect their chief executive (the territory’s top government official) from a list of the chosen few candidates nominated by a committee wholly beholden to Beijing.
In other words, Chinese leaders are determined to demonstrate that Hong Kong is not to China what Scotland is to Britain: a truly autonomous region within one state. Instead, notwithstanding the 1984 handover agreement between Britain and China or the Basic Law, which guarantees democratic freedoms for Hong Kong citizens, it’s more the case that Hong Kong is now to China what other regions have always been: subject to Beijing’s de-facto totalitarian rule no matter how much de-jure legal autonomy it purportedly enjoys.
Therefore, I fear the only issue here is whether these student protesters will give up their demands and return to classes before Chinese leaders do to them what they did to their predecessors in Tiananmen Square. As sympathetic as I am to their cause, I pray they will be guided – not only by the tragic outcome of Tiananmen Square, but by the boomerang outcome of Tahrir Square as well – to give up their demands and return to classes before the tanks come rolling in … again.
After all, it would be tantamount to suicide for Chinese leaders to give in. Not to mention the pandora’s box of similar demands that would immediately flow from other regions, including Xinjiang, Uighar … and Tibet, if they do.
But, if Beijing learned anything from Tiananmen Square, instead of sending in tanks again, its leaders would send in local police to quarantine the protesters in one area and ensure access to vital businesses and public services. They would then just let the protesters vent their spleens until they become too hungry, thirsty, and/or tired to continue and begin begging to go home. In other words, show that vaunted Chinese patience by simply waiting them out.
Stay tuned….
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