Hong Kong is restive yet again, giving some anxious moments to China — to which its ownership was transferred back from coloniser Britain in 1997. For megacity Hong Kong’s 7.5 million inhabitants used to the freedom and civil rights they enjoyed under the British for a century and half, these are progressively days of restrictions. Protests had often erupted into the streets, which China managed to subdue with a mix of tact and cane-charging. This time, protests erupted over the local administration’s order to send blacklisted people in exile to the mainland.
Notably, the order was swiftly withdrawn, but the protesters are in no mood to relent or stop their offensive. They insist that China respect the limited autonomy granted to the money-rich Asian business hub under the re-unification agreement two decades ago and stop the red nation’s designs to impose more controls on their lives. They deserve all our sympathy.
Curiously, China is accused of scuttling the “one nation, two systems” arrangement; and this at a time when it was called upon by Pakistan to challenge India at global fora for New Delhi’s efforts to change a similar system in Kashmir. That these two scenarios arose around the same time is a reason why China can be trusted to adopt a neutral stand vis-a-vis Pakistan’s Kashmir plea to it. It looks like a similar sentiment was evident in the discussions visiting foreign secretary S Jaishankar had with his counterpart in China.
China now says the protests in Hong Kong have shades of “terrorism”. It is giving such a patently unjustified or wrong twist to the tale with the obvious aim of invoking harsh repressive laws under the anti-terrorism legislation, which it used liberally against the Islamic fundamentalists in its western provinces close to the “isthans.” Its hope is to suppress the democratic means of street protests, through use of brute state power. The Chinese governments had handled previous protests in Hong Kong with tact, persuasion and limited use of power. President Xi Jinping is well-advised to avoid harsh steps.
Peaceful protests like in Tiananmen Square had been brutally repressed by China in the past and earned international condemnation. It could happen again. India, on the other hand is facing militancy and terrorism of the worst kind in Kashmir. At the minimum, this is time China reviews its strategy of helping anti-India terror outfits operating from Pakistan by way of influencing decisions at UN and other world bodies as it did in the past.
eom