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One of the most important struggles on the planet is taking place right now between the people of Hong Kong and the dictatorship of General Secretary Xi Jinping.
My next podcast on Sunday, June 23 will be on the meaning of the struggle in Hong Kong. This is an extraordinarily important moment.
The Communist Chinese system wanted to extend its ability to prosecute people in Hong Kong by passing a new law that would make it easy to extradite people from the Special Administrative Region to the mainland court system. Hong Kong residents saw this as a direct assault on their rights under the agreement that returned Hong Kong from British control to Chinese control.
The principle had been established that there would be one country but two systems. The British belief in the rule of law, due process, and free news media had been continued even after the colony left British control and was once again Chinese territory (which it had been before 1842).
Under British rule, Hong Kong had become an astonishingly wealthy and prosperous city-state. Its 7.4 million people are intensely entrepreneurial. It has the highest concentration of extremely wealthy people of any city in the world and the largest number of skyscrapers. Its low tax system has been studied by economists as a model for supply-side economics and was in many ways a model for President Ronald Reagan. Alvin Rabushka’s Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom is a good example of the impact the low tax, high growth, wealth creating system had on modern economists.
As the British left, the entrepreneurial, hard-working, and creative millions in Hong Kong worried that they would be absorbed into the mainland dictatorship. They were assured that they would be part of a “one country, two systems” model in which Beijing would manage foreign policy and national security but Hong Kong would retain its unique characteristics.
However, from the beginning, freedom was limited as Beijing insisted on a limited electorate (largely dominated by supporters of Beijing). The average Hong Kong resident has little impact on the government and knows it.
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See Also:
(2) China: The Perfect High-Tech Totalitarian State
(3) China strategically withdraws in Art of War offensive
