China’s recently announced “security law” in Hong Kong further subjugates the city to mainland rule. The mainland leftists understand that the dissent in Hong Kong is not going to die down by itself. If left unchecked, these kinds of “pro-democracy” protests (which are really just resistance to power, not necessarily anything to do with “democracy” at all) can be contagious.
Whether or not China ends up using troops and tanks, I don’t see how this HK takeover / repression is any different than the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was carried out precisely to put an end to “reform experiments” in a rebellious vassal state. It worked, too: the dissidents were driven underground for decades.
I wonder if, in the decades hence, we will see the same kind of things in HK that we saw in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War: samizdat press, dissident intellectuals sent to gulags, competition with the West over client states (this time, in the Pacific Rim / South China Sea) and perhaps most disappointingly, an enchantment with the “Chinese way” among a certain cadre of western intellectuals who, as they have done in the past with other regimes, will almost certainly forgive China’s crimes because of their sympathy for its ideology. As Solzhenitsyn described:
We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism’s crimes. And when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them.
In the case of China, we can include among the “Western intellectuals” the internationalist corporations, who are making such a killing helping China to monetize its poverty (and then, when that is exhausted, to profit from its enormous consumer market). While secondary to mass immigration, our status as a net importer and the reduction in GDP and reduced demand for labor that it entails has been a further depressor of real wages in America since the early 1970s, impoverishing tens of millions of people and creating massive wealth inequality. Trump’s efforts with China re protectionism are a good first step, but wholly inadequate.
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