Hong Kong's long hot summer

The immediate provocation of this year's pro-democracy protests in the special autonomous region of Hong Kong is a proposed extradition law reportedly allowed for the transfer of local defendants to the mainland for trial. This was seen by opponents as a way for the Chinese Communist Party to deal with local dissidents on its own terms rather than those set by the treaty that transferred control of Hong Kong from Great Britain to the People's Republic. The treaty lets Hong Kong retain its own political and legal system, with extensive civil liberties absent on the mainland, until at least 2047. For all intents and purposes, Hong Kong dissidents are protesting, sometimes violently, against the inevitability of greater control by Beijing and its Communist regime. But if anything, the extent of the protests, which have included vandalism of the local legislature and demonstrations targeting mainland tourists -- who will probably get in trouble with their government merely for being victims of circumstances -- could hasten that day. 1989 taught the world that Beijing abhors "turmoil," and there's hardly a better word to describe what's been going on in Hong Kong. One person's turmoil, of course, is another person's dissent, and inevitably the Hong Kong protesters have had many sympathetic observers outside China. Even though the extradition bill is a creation of Hong Kong's own legislature, the protests are widely perceived to be against the mainland. That perception legitimizes them in many eyes, even though Hong Kong is at least theoretically a liberal democratic entity. One wonders whether all the Americans cheering on the protesters would cheer as loudly for demonstrations of similar size and intensity against some new policy of their own president or some new measure from their lower house of Congress. The simple answer is that some would and some wouldn't depending on who's being protested. Legitimacy is relative -- and meanwhile, foreign support for the actual protesters feeds the Chinese Communist narrative that the protests are, to use an American term, astroturfed, fueled by foreign money if not by foreign governments. None of this means outsiders should express solidarity with Hong Kong dissidents concerned over the ultimate loss of their civil liberties. But we had better understand that people power will not prevail there. Beijing doesn't care how repression might look to the rest of the world as long as the Communists control what their own subjects see of it. Hong Kong has no chance of becoming an independent state, and not even terrorism will deter Beijing from consolidating its power there when the time comes, if not before. China has experienced terrorism, and has answered with mass re-education camps. If people in Hong Kong want to escape that fate -- if they value their right to complain more than anything the mainland can offer them -- they should plan to be elsewhere in 2047, if a barricaded world will have them.