July 3, 2003

(Clearwisdom.net) At midnight June 30, 1997, the official flag of Britain was lowered one last time over Hong Kong, an island city the British had governed for 100 years and regarded as the treasure house of their empire. The next morning, the flag of Britain was replaced by that of China, a nation that has existed for centuries but became a great power only a few decades ago.

At midnight June 30, 2003, about 500,000 people jammed the streets of the city of about 6 million. They could not be counted precisely because they were jammed to the point of immobility, many dressed in the black of protest.

The crowds were different than those at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. The Beijing protest was largely by students and teachers against intellectual repression by the government. The protest in Hong Kong was a parade of rage not just by students and teachers, but by clerks, laborers and civil servants. They were expressing their fury that the Hong Kong government, chosen mostly by the Communist Party in Beijing and subservient to it, was about to betray its promise that it would not narrow the civil liberties given to the people by the British.

In my visits to Hong Kong, I never found many people who believed the Communists. But party officials on the mainland knew executives of international companies would not be happy if they withheld, say, certain rights of the press.

The officials weren't interested in the freedoms of poets and such, but they didn't want anything affecting stock market numbers or company reports. They knew it would scare off foreign investors. And they knew capitalism must be taken seriously. Poetry is often difficult to understand, but not business figures.

Britain ran Hong Kong under a constitution that granted citizens some freedoms - but not too many, you understand. The new government has been working on changes in the constitution, to be enacted soon by the puppet legislature.

I think it is difficult for people who live in the grace of freedom to grasp just how carefully the actions of officials in dictatorships are tracked by their own citizens. The officials are secretive usually but often deliberately let the people know some nasty legislation is being prepared to punish tongues that criticize the government or pass on any information the government considers subversive.

In Hong Kong, Communists have let it be known that Article 23 of the constitution is going to get some new language about "subversion." That may include banning organizations allowed on the mainland, a development that would threaten certain churches and international organizations with human rights leanings. I will not list them because the Communists may have overlooked a few.

But I've heard it said already by Americans and Chinese that the Communist apparatus will use the new Article 23 to persecute the meditation group Falun Gong - probably drive it off the island. The group is hated almost insanely by Beijing for no other reason than that it is admired by millions of Chinese and can get large crowds together just by existing.

Americans are aware of the torture and mass execution of dissidents in China. [...] I commend to your attention a report by Keith Bradsher of The New York Times, citing the attitude of someone who must actually live with the new security legislation. Joseph Zen, Catholic bishop of Hong Kong, said it is "like a knife above our heads."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/97839p-88554c.html