making history in hong kong

By David Geiger, November 16, 2019

Whether we support them or oppose them, we must all recognize that the young people of Hong Kong are making history. Unfortunately, most of the media in the United States seems to avoid showing footage of the protests. After the debacle by the NBA, many here seem to recognize that we are poorly prepared to understand what is at stake, for Hong Kong, for China, for the United States, for all the young people, and for the world economy. It is ironic that the skirmish over NBA support for Hong Kong protesters puts billions of dollars at risk for this capitalistic organization (the NBA and team owners) in the lucrative market for basketball fans in communist China.

This is a passionate personal struggle for the young men and women out on the streets and in the subway stations of Tsim Sha Tsui, Mong Kok, Central, Kowloon, Hung Hom, and other districts of Hong Kong. They are on the streets outside the InterContinental Hotel, and in front of stores like Prada, Tiffany, Hermes, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Sephora. They are mostly in their teens and twenties, for whom this cause is important enough to risk careers, injury, imprisonment, and death.

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We need to understand a little more about the history of Hong Kong, and China too, in order to understand these events and what is at stake here. Keeping this short but still adding several major historical events we can start to understand a little more.

After the opium wars, which stemmed from the primarily British strategy of illegally bringing tons of low priced opium into China for distribution as a way to weaken the barriers to trade by foreigners inside China, Hong Kong was ceded to British control in the in the Treaty of Nanking on 29 August 1842. From that day until July 1, 1997 Hong Kong was under British control, with the exception of 4 years of Japanese occupation during World War II.

It was not until July 1, 1997 that Hong Kong and surrounding territories were returned to their status as sovereign entities of China. It was then agreed that “in accordance with the One Country, Two Systems principle agreed between the United Kingdom and the People’s Republic of China, the socialist system of the People’s Republic of China would not be practiced in Hong Kong…and Hong Kong’s previous capitalist system and its way of life would remain unchanged for a period of 50 years,” through July 1, 2047.

If we conveniently overlook the fact that intentionally injecting opium into a society to weaken it would be a humanitarian and war crime today, then today we can accuse China of all kinds of crimes around theft of intellectual property and unfair business practices. But if we remember that crimes were committed to open up outside access to Chinese markets, it feels right that the Chinese would have little reason to respect our very clearly self-serving laws. And the British occupation of Hong Kong, growing directly out of retaliation for burning 1,300 tons of British owned opium, also casts a shadow over western input into the matter.

It would also help us understand the current expectation by China that parts of China not currently under strict Chinese rule today will and must return to Chinese rule, and are still part of China that they will not abandon, if we know and understand that other parts of China were occupied by the Soviet Union, or Japan, or both for many decades and even a century or more, before being returned to China. Having never been victimized like this, many present day people in countries like the United States have no models or experience with which to understand this kind of blatant occupation by foreign forces.

Not many people, and not many generations of people, can claim to have changed history, to have changed the world. One generation that did change the world is the one just before mine, born in the 1940’s and 1950’s in the United States. In the 1960’s and early 1970s they marched and protested and some died to change the world. They ended a war, ousted a president, and may even be able to take some responsibility for President Richard Nixon being the first US President to go to China in decades, which led to the 1979 normalization of relations with China under President Jimmy Carter.

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One of the most vivid memories from my childhood is seeing pictures and video, almost all in eerie black and white, of the events that occurred at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 when Ohio National Guard soldiers killed four students and wounded 9 others by firing into the crowd of gathered students. See Kent State Shootings to read more.

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This image in particular is a permanent part of my psyche and one of the reasons I can’t look at the situation in Hong king with an unbiased mind. I immediately want to support the individuals who want their country, their government, their rulers to listen and change. They want it so badly they are willing to die for it.

The young people who went to Vietnam in the 1960’s and early 1970’s were also brave and patriotic and many more of them lost their lives than among the protesters. More than 50,000 Americans died in the Vietnam war. But I believe the protesters were in the streets not just for themselves, but for their brothers and fathers and classmates and friends that had already been taken, involuntarily through a military draft system, to Vietnam.

It is important to remember also, that the war between north and south Vietnam was a war over the spread of communism vs. capitalism, with Chinese, Soviet and other communist soldiers supporting and dying with the soldiers and people of north Vietnam and American soldiers were supporting and dying with the soldiers and people of South Vietnam. It was a Vietnamese civil war, but it was fueled with arms and soldiers and money from primarily China and Soviet Union on one side, and the United States on the other.

So now returning to Hong Kong in 2019, we see protesters in the streets of a very wealthy Hong Kong, no jungles in sight. This special place has just a 22 year history of quasi-independence from China and from the rest of the world but all are waiting anxiously to see what the two giants on the sidelines will do as tensions escalate.

It is probably not a coincidence that the United States has aggressively entered into a trade war with China, or that the United States and China both aggressively challenge each other in the South China Sea, where several times just in the last year vessels of the two nations have come very close to collision and international incident.

The United States aggressively sails naval ships between mainland China and Taiwan on “freedom of navigation” missions, trying to send the message that these are international waters. I strongly suspect that if the Chinese navy were to sail identical “freedom of navigation” missions in the international waters between Florida and Cuba that it would not be received well in the United States, yet the United States continues to provoke China with these missions.

Today we have a China that is greatly infused with capitalism as an economic system but still tightly controlled by a single party political system, which has great intolerance for religious freedom and an even greater hold over information, over the very facts of history, that it’s people are not able to access in books and schools and on the internet.

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The United States is a two party system, with its population about equally divided in their devotion to one or the other party, at times appearing ready for a civil war over racial oppression, the rapidly increasing concentration of wealth, and the ability to help less fortunate members of society without being accused of the “sin” of socialism or communism.

So 2019 brings youthful protests outside markets for most exclusive and expensive brands in the world, in an international city where one can find churches and mosques and synagogues, a free press, astronomical housing prices, the longest life expectancy on Earth, and two powerful sleeping giants waiting and watching and flexing their muscles.

References

“This Should Be a Wake-up Call to the Whole World”: Inside the Hong Kong Protests

British Hong Kong