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Five Pairs of Eyes and We Still Can’t See Why China’s Tightening Its Grip on Hong Kong.
How Long Would New Zealanders Tolerate Protests on This Scale?
THE “FIVE EYES” ALLIANCE has condemned the Chinese Government’s response to Hong Kong’s increasingly violent political protests. The irony of the English-speaking powers taking the high moral ground on this issue is considerable. The island of Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain in 1842 to punish the Chinese Empire for daring to resist the drug lords of the East India Company. It requires a fair measure of cheek for imperialists of this ilk to criticise the Chinese for attempting to reimpose law and order in a territory which is, when everything is said and done, theirs.
At around the same time that the British were overseeing the Chinese government’s enforced importation of the East India Company’s opium, the government of the United States was wrenching control of what is now Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado from the Republic of Mexico. To the credit of the United States, at least some of its people protested vociferously against the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Not only because democratic republics are not supposed to invade and steal other people’s territory, but because they rightly saw the war as a naked bid to extend slavery southwards and westwards across the North American continent.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of the world, British settlers were busily engaged in the genocide of Tasmania’s aboriginal inhabitants. By contrast, in the newly acquired islands of New Zealand, British redcoats were having their arses soundly kicked by Hone Heke at Kororareka.
There will be many in the nations encompassed by the Five Eyes Alliance who take exception to these history lessons. They have no right to be offended, however, by the way such events linger in China’s memory. It was, after all, the so-called “Opium Wars” that marked the sudden and abject collapse of Chinese power. The “unequal treaties” China was forced to sign in the 1800s ushered in a century of shame and humiliation for the state which had, for the previous 20 centuries, dominated the world.
Do the people of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand consider it unusual or strange that their cultures are thoroughly permeated by the legacies and memories of the British Empire? How many novels, plays, poems, movies and television series have celebrated the exploits – real and fictional – of our imperial forebears? Is Brexit even conceivable without the collective memory of “Splendid Isolation”, “The Spirit of Dunkirk” and Churchill’s “Finest Hour”?
If these imperial memories are important to us, then are we truly justified in begrudging the Chinese their own recollections of greatness? And should we really be surprised that she is determined to reclaim what was taken from her? Arguably, it would be even more surprising if she wasn’t? Indeed, simple prudence strongly suggests that China is seeking to reclaim a great deal more than one little island?
Memory is, of course, a very selective faculty. While we proudly remember the way Britain and her empire stood up to Nazi Germany, we prefer to forget that Hong Kong, as a Crown Colony, was very far from being a democracy. Even its much vaunted respect for the “Rule of Law” was motivated more by the need for enforceable commercial contracts than any intention to recognise the rights of the “coolies” who made them profitable. Even the “One Country-Two Systems” formula by which Hong Kong was “returned” (like a library book!?) to China was devised as a means of affording global finance capital a further 50 years of fun and profit.
None of this appears on (or between) the lines of Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ official communications. Instead we are treated to all the standard, historically vacant phrases trotted out with equal hypocrisy in Wellington, Canberra, London, Ottawa and Washington:
“New Zealand is concerned at the impact the new legislation could have on important rights and freedoms enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and in United Nations human rights covenants incorporated in the Basic Law, including freedom of expression and the right to peaceful protest.”
Peaceful protest! Is that what Winston is calling it? There have been peaceful protests in Hong Kong – some of them numbering in the hundreds-of-thousands. But it’s not peaceful protest that has motivated the National People’s Congress meeting in Beijing to take thought for China’s national security. Conservative New Zealanders, alarmed at the latest developments in Hong Kong, should ask themselves how they would have reacted to the events of the past 18 months.
How would they have responded to violent protesters breaking into the House of Representatives, defacing the chamber, and hanging the flag of a foreign power above the Speaker’s Chair? What would have been their reaction to images on the evening news of a policeman being attacked and stabbed by protesters? Could they have looked with equanimity on university students hurling Molotov cocktails, acid, and crossbow bolts at police officers? And if their answer is that none of these violent protest actions would have disturbed them unduly, then they possess vastly more restraint than the forces of law and order in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Some of us can still remember what happened in Londonderry on 2 January 1972 when British paratroopers gunned down 26 peaceful protesters marching against internment without trial in Northern Ireland. Or the events of 4 May 1970, when soldiers of the Ohio National Guard fired on unarmed anti-war student protesters, killing four.
One of the most tragic testimonies to emerge from the so-called “Kent State Massacre” came from a young female student who, upon returning home to her parent’s house in the days immediately following the tragedy, was confronted at the front door by her father. He stared at her coldly and said: “They should have killed them all.” “Even me?” She replied. He turned on his heel, went into his den, and closed the door.
Undoubtedly there are officials in Hong Kong and Beijing who feel the same cold fury as that embittered American dad. The same ones, perhaps, who unleashed the 1989 slaughter in Tiananmen Square. Significantly, they have not, so far, been heeded. The rulers of China have proved themselves more tolerant of violent dissent on the streets of Hong Kong than the two most powerful members of the Five Eyes Alliance were of peaceful protest on their own streets in the 1960s and 70s. That the violence of the American and British states has since been displaced to the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq has only made the killing easier to justify and harder to see.
Protests as intense as those which have shaken Hong Kong would test the patience of even the most liberal of democracies. Confronted with rage as unending and inchoate as that which has assailed the Hong Kong authorities, it is unlikely even the New Zealand state would be permitted – by its own citizens – to undertake no measures to strengthen and protect their national security. What’s more, conservative New Zealanders would be leading the charge.