The People Versus
Unlike their counterparts in the democratic West, the protesters in Hong Kong are advocating to retain one of the fundamental legacies of British colonialism. By Fred Pawle.
There is a word missing from almost all the reporting of the escalating protest movement in Hong Kong against China’s proposed interference in the island city’s justice system: colonialism.
No, not China colonising Hong Kong. The island was originally Chinese and was handed back by Britain in 1997 when its lease over the territory expired. The handover had been diplomatically negotiated, and China tentatively agreed not to interfere in the island’s continuing peaceful prosperity. Not all residents trusted China’s word. In the decade before handover, more than 500,000 people emigrated.
MRC Executive Director Nick Cater, a former foreign correspondent in Hong Kong, returned in 2015 and found the pessimism he had reported on back in the 1990s had at the time proved to be unfounded. This was emblematic of the widespread optimism about China at the time. Economic prosperity was seen as the vehicle upon which liberty would spread throughout the nation. China was expected to eventually resemble Hong Kong, not vice versa.
How quickly times change. The following year, China's “paramount leader” Xi Xinping was elevated to its “core leader”, after which his totalitarian agenda became more and more apparent. The centrepiece of this vision is the social credit system, a mind-bogglingly intrusive network of facial-recognition cameras and other surveillance methods that monitor China's citizens 24/7 and reward approved behaviour with material and social benefits. Such interference in people's lives would be difficult without an arbitrary legal system in which dissidents are summarily convicted, sentenced and often never seen again.
Which brings me back to colonialism. The protesters in Hong Kong are, in a stark contrast to their counterparts in developed democracies, desperately advocating in favour of Britain's colonial legacy. To be specific, they are protesting to retain the principle of common law, which would be seriously diluted if a new proposed law, supported by China, allowing people accused of certain crimes to be extradited to the mainland is introduced.
This is a frightening prospect for anybody potentially considered a troublemaker by Beijing. Attending court to defend a charge in Hong Kong only for the trial to be moved to China would be like packing for a holiday in Hawaii and landing in Antarctica.
Chinese law is dictated by the ruling party and imposed by its discretion. British common law, by contrast, evolves in open courts and applies equally to all citizens. The million people who took to the streets of Hong Kong this week did so to preserve a freedom that only their British heritage can deliver.
Ironically, in countries where common law and equality remain intact - Australia springs to mind - it is popular to deride British colonialism as a pernicious force best consigned to the dustbin of history. The vitriolic resistance from Australia’s leading universities to the Ramsay Centre’s proposal to establish a degree in Western (read: British) liberalism is a case in point.
Hong Kongers would die for such intellectual luxury. And given China’s record on dissenters, some of them probably will before this current skirmish is erased from the streets.
Reading the newspaper reports from Hong Kong this week, you could be forgiven for thinking that the dispute was about little more than an isolated injustice. The Guardian, for example, played an uncharacteristically straight bat, describing the proposed extradition law as an erosion of “civil rights”. Nowhere did the Guardian mention the term “common law”, let alone the virtues of British colonialism.
The protesters in Hong Kong are, like the women who risk imprisonment and torture by removing the hijabs in Iran, demanding the freedoms we take for granted. They deserve more than our complacency.