China furiously defends its Hong Kong free speech fiction
Tom Rogan
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Beijing is outraged over a press freedom event held at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva this week. The event called attention to the annihilation of free speech rights subsequent to a national security law being introduced in Hong Kong. As reported by Reuters, Beijing first pressured foreign diplomats to avoid the United Kingdom-organized event. Now that the event has concluded, China is expressing fury over what it entailed.
The Chinese Communist Party’s governing authority in Hong Kong declared that it “strongly disapproved of and firmly rejected the baseless remarks, slanders and smears” at the U.N. event. These remarks were, it said, “distinctly despicable and doomed to fail.” It added that “since the implementation of the [national security law] the media landscape in Hong Kong has remained vibrant. As always, the media can exercise their freedom of the press in accordance with the law. Their freedom of commenting on and criticizing government policies remains uninhibited as long as this is not in violation of the law.”
This ludicrous defense is a contradiction in terms.
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After all, the national security law restricts freedom of the press on the most critical of all press freedom concerns. Namely, the right to criticize governing authorities and express countervailing opinions. As proven by the use of the national security law to shut down independent media outlets such as Apple Daily and throw their owners into the gulag, there is no such thing as a free press in Hong Kong. Beijing knows this, of course. But it also knows that international scrutiny of its war on freedom is unhelpful for its economic interests.
True, the greed of American companies such as Amway, Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, Mars, Merck, Dell, HP, Pepsi, and Johnson & Johnson leads them to ignore utterly their own human rights standards when it comes to Hong Kong. True, some multinationals such as Britain’s HSBC bank even endorse the Hong Kong national security law. But Beijing also knows that increased international public attention to its actions will, even if at the margin, deter foreign investment with China. City authorities can claim all day long that China “faithfully lives up to this top priority of the principle of ‘one country, two systems.'” Still, China’s imprisonment of free speech advocate Jimmy Lai and so many other Hong Kong democracy activists proves that the opposite is true. Beijing can screech about trusting in “win-win cooperation,” but it has shredded its obligations under the Sino-British joint declaration. That legally binding treaty obliges China to maintain Hong Kong’s democratic character and rule of law until at least 2047.
For communists who can’t do math, there are 24 years between 2047 and 2023. And in Hong Kong, Beijing is showing only that the enforcement of its dark vision for the world is well in progress.