The Wall Street Journal
‘Tell the truth about China!” has become a rallying cry for protesters in Hong Kong. It is exactly what demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were saying 30 years ago, before many of today’s protesters were born. The truth is that for all China’s economic advances, it remains a brutal, dehumanizing tyranny in which the ruling Communist Party would rather destroy people than give them a genuine say in their government.
I was in Beijing in 1989. I witnessed the Tiananmen uprising and during the long night of June 3-4 saw soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army open fire on their countrymen. By dawn, Tiananmen Square had been cleared of the protesters who had occupied it for weeks. Tanks had supplanted their Goddess of Democracy statue.
I also spent weeks in Hong Kong this summer reporting on its protests, and I found the parallels chilling. Yes, Hong Kong is a different place in a different time under different circumstances. But in vital respects it is the same showdown. China’s dictatorship is once again losing control of a major city to people whose rallying cry is freedom. Rather than give in to their legitimate demands, the Communist Party is readying its guns.
Whatever comes next, the millions of protesters in Hong Kong have been doing the world a heroic service. Like their predecessors at Tiananmen, they are exposing on a world stage the brutality of the Beijing regime. From the only place under China’s flag where there is any chance to speak out, they are shouting the truth, day and night, in the streets and from the windows—while they still can.
During more than 13 straight weeks of protest, Hong Kong’s people have demanded the rights and freedoms—including free elections—that China, in a treaty with Britain, guaranteed to Hong Kong for 50 years after the 1997 handover. At a press conference last week held by Hong Kong’s Civil Human Rights Front, which has organized some of the biggest peaceful protests, spokeswoman Bonnie Leung observed that if the authorities would simply keep those promises, “the whole movement will end immediately.”
Instead, President Xi Jinping and his puppet, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, have defaulted to threats, propaganda and force. Ms. Lam’s administration has deployed riot police, tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons. Officers have made more than 1,000 arrests. China has been pressuring Hong Kong companies, including Cathay Pacific Airways , to fire employees who join the protests. Chanting “Stand with Hong Kong! Fight for freedom!” the protesters have refused to back down. Some told me they are ready to die for their cause. Many of their predecessors did in Tiananmen.
Hong Kong police have begun firing warning shots with live ammunition. This weekend, police were caught on video beating unarmed civilians bloody on the subway. China has been conspicuously drilling troops of its People’s Armed Police across the border, and last week it sent fresh army troops to its garrison in Hong Kong, labeling this a routine rotation to ensure “prosperity and stability.”
China itself is the only threat to Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability. These protests began with a bill that would have allowed extradition to the mainland. Hong Kongers saw that such a law would expose them to a Chinese Communist Party that uses law as an instrument of dictatorship, not justice. In June, to oppose the bill, they held the biggest protests Hong Kong had ever seen; first one million strong, then two million.
Ms. Lam suspended the bill but has refused public demands to withdraw it outright. Without free elections, Hong Kong’s people have no institutional recourse. In 2014 China imposed a rigged system in which Beijing, not Hong Kong, effectively “elects” Hong Kong’s chief executive, who works with a similarly rigged pro-Beijing majority in the Legislative Council. Hong Kongers have no way to rid themselves of Ms. Lam, and no way to oppose her—or her bosses in Beijing—except by speaking up and taking to the streets.
The repeated showdowns, which China could easily have avoided, have turned a thriving hub of world commerce into a protest zone. Business is stricken. Peaceful protesters in huge numbers march week after week through heat and rain. Violent protesters attack the sites and symbols of authority.
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The authorities surround their offices with huge, water-filled plastic bulwarks. From these fortresses they ratchet up the fear and coercion. In Beijing that’s considered patriotic. Under Mr. Xi, Chinese communism is completing its evolution into a more economically efficient totalitarian system of techno-surveillance, brainwashing and the engineering of human behavior via a digital system of “social credit,” backed up by security squads, guns and detention camps. For Mr. Xi, who two years ago had himself installed as president for life, that constitutes “modernization.”
With great courage and at intensifying risk, Hong Kong’s people have brought to the fore a lesson for anyone dealing with China. For this regime, which aspires to world dominance, what matters most isn’t economic development or international treaties, never mind freedom or democracy. As in Tiananmen, the prime imperative is absolute power, whatever it takes.
Ms. Rosett is a foreign-policy fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum.
Ms. Rosett, a Foreign Policy Fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum, a columnist of Forbes and a blogger for PJMedia, is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
The Wall Street Journal
‘Tell the truth about China!” has become a rallying cry for protesters in Hong Kong. It is exactly what demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were saying 30 years ago, before many of today’s protesters were born. The truth is that for all China’s economic advances, it remains a brutal, dehumanizing tyranny in which the ruling Communist Party would rather destroy people than give them a genuine say in their government.
I was in Beijing in 1989. I witnessed the Tiananmen uprising and during the long night of June 3-4 saw soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army open fire on their countrymen. By dawn, Tiananmen Square had been cleared of the protesters who had occupied it for weeks. Tanks had supplanted their Goddess of Democracy statue.
