Columns

Attendees raise a flag that reads 'Liberate Hong Kong Revolution Of Our Times' during a candlelit remembrance in Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2020, after the annual vigil that traditionally takes place in the park to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was banned on public health grounds because of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. AFP

Coincidentally I am writing this column on the 31st anniversary of perhaps the ugliest episode in China’s modern history. That was the brutal crackdown on protestors in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 during which a still disputed number of Chinese were killed by soldiers.

It shocked the Hong Kong people, generally uninterested in politics or what little there was of it, bringing them on to the streets in their tens of thousands in support of their brethren who died while calling for basic freedoms and voicing their protest against corruption. They could not believe that the Communist regime in Beijing would turn the guns on its own people.

What was disturbing to the Hong Kong people was that the sovereignty of the territory would pass from colonial Britain to mainland China in eight years from then.

Every year since then Hong Kong people commemorated the merciless crackdown at Tiananmen with peaceful demonstrations and candle light vigils generally at Victoria Park.

Though the June 4 commemorative ceremonies were banned this year by the police who refused permission on grounds of the coronavirus, it did not stop the Hong Kong people from defying the ban to observe the anniversary.

A news report a couple of days ago in the Chinese news agency Xinhua quoting Foreign Relations Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, prompted this column.

“Sri Lanka expressed continuity of its support on sovereignty of China (over) its territory and national security in relation to Hong Kong. Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena on Monday voiced his country’s continuous support to China’s sovereignty over its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), Gunawardena wrote on his Twitter account. The foreign minister made the remarks after US President Donald Trump on Friday threatened sanctions against China over its national security legislation for Hong Kong. China’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress, approved at its annual session last week the decision on establishing and improving the legal system and enforcement mechanisms for Hong Kong to safeguard national security.”

If Xinhua was trying to imply that Minister Gunawardena was reacting to President Trump’s threatened sanctions against China, it does not cut much ice. It is hardly likely that Minister Gunawardena was trying to take on the US president who has a penchant for threatening everybody near and far with verbal bombardments which often mean nothing.

What concerns me is what precisely Dinesh Gunawardena was intending to say and why he said it almost on the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown.

I cannot think of any world leader, unless it is Donald Trump in one of his early morning tweetskriegs, challenged China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong, which is not an impossibility knowing the president’s eccentricities.

I wonder at the Gunawardena remark unless it is to provide some political ballast with the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown which earned China universal condemnation, only days ahead.

No world leader worth his salt has denied China’s sovereign right over Hong Kong island and the other territories which Britain ruled over until they were returned to China’s sovereignty at midnight on June 30, 1997.

Unless, of course, the minister was implying that since Hong Kong and the other territories such as Kowloon and the New Territories were part of China, the sovereign power could do anything it wanted with them.

That is far from the truth. It is well known to those who have shown a historical interest in with the withdrawal of western colonial powers from the east including Macau which was held by the Portuguese in a different arrangement with China, that Britain and China negotiated a treaty known as the Sino-British Joint Declaration which set out the conditions under which the transfer of sovereignty is done and the validity of this treaty for 50 years from the day China assumes sovereignty. It is an international treaty registered with the United Nations, though in recent years Chinese diplomats have asserted that the Joint Declaration is a historical document and of little practical use, thus discarding it as little value.

My interest in the history of the Sino-British negotiations and the ongoing talks with serious clashes between the two negotiating powers began after I started working for the Hong Kong Standard newspaper in mid-September 1989, some three months after the tragic happenings in Tiananmen which were still reverberating in Hong Kong.

Tiananmen had turned Hong Kong, a special administrative region (SAR) of China before long, into the centre of mass protests, mainland China having clamped down on any protests on Chinese territory.

During the 10 years I spent in Hong Kong both under British colonial rule and under China’s sovereignty it was becoming increasing clear that promises made to the Hong Kong people under the Joint Declaration and the Chinese drafted Basic Law (Hong Kong’s mini constitution) would be gradually broken and the 7 million or so inhabitants of that territory left to fend for themselves.

Both signatories to the treaty would abandon them and the great Deng Xiaoping formula of “One country two systems” under which Hong Kong was to be governed for 50 years jettisoned by those who succeeded Deng in later years.

As one dug deeper into what went on in the negotiations between the two sides and behind them and the squabbles that now and then brought the talks to a screeching stop it was becoming increasing clear that the victims of this coercive diplomacy would be the Hong Kong people who had hardly a voice in the shaping of their own destiny.

The more one talked to prominent Hong Kong personalities and diplomats the more one was convinced that however much Deng Xiaoping would want to make his system work the more it looked chimerical as the months rolled by.

In early December 1991 one of my weekly columns was headlined “Freedoms fast fading into the sunset”. In it I said, “The recent history of British negotiations on Hong Kong has been one of prevarication, chicanery and pusillanimous capitulation”.

If the British used a scalpel to deftly slice away at Hong Kong’s lifestyle, the Chinese were armed with a bludgeon to beat the Hong Kongers into subservience.

What brought about the anti-Hong Kong national security laws in the National People’s Congress in May is clear enough. It is to tame Hong Kong’s emerging young political leaders and the rising voices of dissent among the new pro-democracy groups as seen at last November’s District Council elections which the pro-democracy groups won with ease..

The inability or reluctance of the Hong Kong Government to control and subdue the demonstrations in the city last year surely prompted the central government to introduce laws that allows it to deploy forces to “do a Tiananmen” if things got out of hand.

In the meantime the other signatory to the Joint Declaration is making loud noises about how it will respond to Chinese violations of the Declaration and the Basic Law.

That is a lot of bluff and bluster. Britain needs China more than ever. With Boris Johnson’s loud-mouth utterances about the great virtues of Brexit, it now needs trading partners more than ever to survive in a post-Covid-19 world. It just cannot antagonise China just as Sri Lanka cannot with tons of debt burdening it.

If the Hong Kong people expect Britain to come to their aid, they need not worry. Johnson will wave a few entry visas before them. That is if Cummings is willing.