Tyranny Of Pestilence

The Chinese Communist Party’s refusal to accept responsibility for COVID-19 is no surprise to anybody who has watched it suppress freedom in Hong Kong. By Nick Cater.

The introduction of emergency powers can turn otherwise reasonable people into high-handed commissars.

A ministerial direction designed to safeguard public health is taken as licence by police and council officers to issue tickets to the owners of backsides parked illegally on public benches.

When a dozen police move in to break up a funeral party, as they did at a Queanbeyan cemetery last week, we sense society has become not only less liberal, but a little less human.

Such petty authoritarianism, however, cannot compare with what is happening in Hong Kong. The Chinese Communist Party, like Winston Churchill, is determined not to let a good crisis go to waste. While the western intelligentsia has been monitoring Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, China has been working to keep Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in permanent lockdown.

Despite having won the battle to contain coronavirus, Hong Kong may yet lose the war. Its loss will be measured not in lives but freedom.

Hong Kong has surprised us in the COVID-19 Olympics, the closest thing we have to international competition in these sport-deprived times. 

It has achieved against the odds. Kowloon is the second most densely populated city in the world. Hong Kong has the third busiest international airport and shares land borders with China where, let us not forget, this nasty business began.

Yet Hong Kong (population 7.5 million) has recorded just 4 deaths compared to 10 in Tasmania (population 520,000). The infection rate in Hong Kong is 139 cases per million compared to Tassie’s 406.

Sadly, however, the Hong Kong government’s resolution in controlling the pandemic contrasts with its chicken-hearted appeasement of the Chinese Communist Party.

Late last week Hong Kong police banned a May Day rally, despite the trade union organisers’ promise to march in groups of four 1.5 metres apart. Police claimed the procession posed a “serious threat to the lives and health of all citizens and jeopardised public safety”, setting a precedent that might be used against any demonstration with or without a pandemic.

Pro-democracy protesters are applying to march in Kowloon on May 10, three days after social distancing measures are set to expire. They are not hopeful.

More sinister still, the Hong Kong police have been rounding up political dissenters – even those like octogenarian Martin Lee, a moderate pro-democracy campaigner under British colonial rule. In all, 15 were arrested and questioned last week, a move that may be part of a broader crackdown.

Pro-Beijing figures in the Hong Kong administration are now threatening to implement the dreaded Article 23 of the Basic Law which instructs the Hong Kong government to enact laws “to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government”, a term so broad as to capture the mildest forms of dissent.

Until recently, Hong Kong had a police force people felt they could trust, one that operated with the consent of the people, rather than one that imposed the authority of the state.

A heavy-handed response to police towards some protesters during last year’s pro-democracy gatherings severely damaged that image.

With the arrest of political dissenters in recent weeks, the Hong Kong Police Force has abandoned the pretence that it abides by the liberal principles introduced in Britain in the early 19th century.

As far back as January, the theory began circulating that COVID-19 was a biological weapon that had escaped from a research lab before it could be unleashed on its target: Hong Kong.

In other circumstances, the theory would be as credible as the one that the 55km bridge and tunnel across the mouth of the Pearl Delta was constructed by China to mess with Hong Kong’s Feng Shui.

Yet the part about the virus escaping from the lab has been considered plausible by foreign governments from the start. A lack of transparency by Chinese authorities, including its refusal to cooperate with an international inquiry into the origins of the disease, has added further credibility to a story that at first glance seemed more suited to science fiction.

We know from its own published papers that the Institute of Military Medicine in Nanjing has previously experimented with SARS-like coronaviruses and in 2018 was injecting them into rats. Two years ago, it published a paper entitled Genomic Characterisation and Infectivity of a Novel SARS-like Coronavirus in Chinese Bats. With every twist in the story and every day that China refuses to come clean, speculation grows that the virus was deliberately manipulated and may not after all have its origins in a Wuhan wet market.

The theory that it was intended to be unleashed uniquely on Hong Kong may be a stretch too far. Guilty or not, the CCP certainly had a strong motive. It has also shown a willingness to trample on Hong Kong’s sovereignty to silence dissent.

The pro-democracy riots in China last year drew crack squads of the Chinese military to camp at the borders. Chinese agent-provocateurs infiltrated the protest movement, encouraging it towards violence as an excuse for intervention.

China, in other words, was provoking chaos to give it an excuse to move in. As things turned out, Hong Kong’s civil fabric remained strong, and while there were violent episodes, most demonstrations were peaceful.

Imagine, if you will, a sequel to that movie in which China prepare to unleash a low-level biological weapon that would plunge the region’s health services into chaos, cause mass outbreaks of panic, and require the mother of all lock-downs, the kind only the Peoples Liberation Army does properly.

Having rehearsed its draconian steps in Wuhan, the CCP would have been more than happy to provide its services to Hong Kong, whether invited or not.

Autocracies, in practice, tend to be opportunists rather than schemers. And viruses are not known for obeying commands.

Whether China wrote the script for this disaster movie, however, is less important than the determination with which it is sticking to the plot.

COVID-19: Read the MRC’s coverage of the debate in Australia and around the world