Unlike the frog slowly boiled in water which does not realise that anything untoward is happening, things are changing so fast in Hong Kong that people are only too aware. The slippery slope to tyranny has recently proved to be both steep and very slippery since the Mainland Chinese overlords broke their promise, made in 1997, that no significant changes would take place in the former British colony turned ‘special administrative region’ (SAR) for at least 50 years. This was the co-called ‘one country, two systems’ which would ensure political and legislative freedom for Hong Kong and the right to maintain its own international links. China’s broken promise means that a record 290,000 people left in in the first half of 2023 meaning that half a million people had left since 2021.
China, which exercises tight control over the Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo), moved early after the handover to increase its control over the population with the proposed Article 23 to the Hong Kong constitution seeking to implement greater state security, meaning restrictions to freedom and harsher punishments for those who criticise the state. There were massive protests in 2003, then the famous ‘umbrella movement’ protests in 2014, both of which were peaceful. However, in 2019 there were violent clashes between protesters and the police, specifically over proposals to ‘extradite’ Hong Kong dissidents to Mainland China for prosecution. The COVID-19 crisis could not have come soon enough for China as, despite it slowing down implementation of Article 23, this surely helped to keep people off the streets. A period of reflection, in the aftermath of the 2019 riots, has clearly led to renewed enthusiasm for Article 23 and the LegCo has come off the blocks with a vengeance.
Since Covid restrictions were lifted in Hong Kong, considerably later than most of the rest of the world, the Chinese Government has moved apace to strengthen its grip on the legislative processes in the SAR. The LegCo is responsible for implementing Article 23, but this should not pose a problem as the Chief Executive of the LegCo, currently John Lee, is appointed by the Chinese Government and all members of the LegCo are approved by Beijing. In fact, all candidates in elections, including district elections, must now be approved by Beijing. The result has been a dramatic lack of participation by the voters of Hong Kong down to a new low of 23% in the most recent elections. Previous turnouts have been over 70%.
As a periodic visitor to Hong Kong, what is happening seems less like a slippery slope than a series of step changes. Each time I return colleagues, mainly the expatriate ones like me, recount fresh horrors such as their primary school children being taught mandatory lessons in ‘the nation’s achievements under the Chinese Communist Party’. There are weekly flag raising ceremonies of the Chinese and Hong Kong flags at educational institutes, including universities, which staff and students must attend (expatriates are excused) with suspension of students who are disrespectful.
Use of and proficiency in English has declined since the handover, some say aided and abetted by China which, despite the numbers learning English there, has itself been turning its back on English language. There is certainly some suspicion about English language teaching being used as an opportunity to spread dissent and, of course, declining use of English helps to undermine the international status of the once bilingual entrepôt, thus increasing its dependence on China.
Having just returned from a short visit to Hong Kong, I get the distinct impression that this is the last time I will see the place prior to the implementation of Article 23. This week the LegCo has been fully occupied with debating the new security measures which will see much harsher penalties for any activities considered to threaten the security of Hong Kong including life imprisonment for insurrection and treason. Such is the pressure from China to implement Article 23 that the LegCo has fast-tracked the legislation and conducted both first and second readings of the bill within hours of its latest manifestation being tabled.
There is no effective opposition to the bill from within the LegCo. Dissenting members such as Leung ‘Long Hair’ Kwok-hung have long since been prevented from standing. Long Hair has frequently been in prison. There has been some straining at legislative gnats over wording. Regina Ip, a former Secretary of State for Security and no stranger to criticism over her own enthusiasm for Article 23, has queried the nature of “external forces” mentioned in the bill. Her query is around the vagueness of the term and what it includes when the use of “foreign forces” would have been clearer. However, the explanation is undoubtedly that Beijing wishes the legislation to cover Taiwan which, while it is ‘external’ to Hong Kong is not considered ‘foreign’ in the eyes of China. Ip favours simply naming Taiwan in the Bill.
Along with the unseemly haste with which implementation of Article 23 is being pursued, the accompanying rhetoric is being ramped up. Offenders jailed under security laws can forget about early release; decisive action is needed to “eradicate ‘causes of chaos’ and ‘evil’ forces”; new offences have been created among the 39 included in the bill; and the burden of proof, once accused, will rest with the defendant.
The run up to the handover provided material for novelists Paul Theroux and John Burdett. Theroux in Kowloon Tong envisaged public executions at the Happy Vally racecourse and Burdett envisaged in The Last Six Million Seconds that the handover would provide the opportunity for an horrific crime the investigation into which would be hampered by the Chinese police. The immediate aftermath of the handover was a considerable anti-climax for such catastrophists as, at least for the first few years, nothing significant happened. Burdett’s novel was a work of fiction, and the handover was merely used to frame another of his gruesome crime novels. Theroux was undoubtedly making a point in his novel. But for how much longer will it remain a work of fiction?
John MacNab teaches at a university in Hong Kong.
Stop Press: The South China Morning Post reports that residents may need to have a “reasonable excuse” if they have saved old publications later deemed seditious, according to Hong Kong’s Security Chief. He made the comments to lawmakers scrutinising the city’s Domestic Security Bill after being asked if it will be a criminal offence to keep copies of the now defunct Apple Daily tabloid.
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I think this article is called damming with faint praise.
The praise seems to me real, and to have admiration in it. If anything, I felt it was the criticism that failed to go home
The British constitution will not matter a jot because Britain will cease to exist once white British people are in a minority.
But would it matter if changes to it had helped to make that possible?
Yes, that’s a good point.
I am not sure when the rot really set in.
My impression is that people in former times were generally happy to make observations about race that would now be considered “racist”. At some point that started to change and now people are afraid, even to admit to themselves, that they might hold “racist” views. Certainly since non-white immigration into the UK started in earnest, “anti-racism” has been drummed into us. Maybe it started with the drive to abolish the slave trade. I am not saying that the slave trade was right or that we should not have abolished it or that we should go back to it – but we seem to confuse quite rightly not treating people as property with the perfectly natural preference for your own tribe.
Yes, terrible confusion,
Both the author and David Starkey seem to take the view that the post-Restoration constitutional settlement was a universally good thing, only to be broken later by the likes of Blair and co.
This is a fairly conventional view, and carries with it a whiff of the Whig interpretation of history, which holds that the political evolution of this country has been one of progress whereby power has been gradually transferred from an abolutist monarchy to our present representative democracy.
If only.
This view also informs much of what’s taught in schools as history, from what I can gather.
It was only when I read Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) that I started to see things a bit differently.
Although it’s a novel rather than a political tract, it does mark the origin of One Nation Conservatism, which is still a view much in play even today.
Put simply, Disraeli’s view was that the post-Restoration political settlement had put too much power in the hands of Parliament, and by sidelining the role of the monarch, had left no voice to defend the interests of the common people of this country.
Then as now, Parliament was stuffed with vested interests.
The results at the time had become very evident. The common people, pushed off the land by parliamentary acts of enclosure, had in many cases become desperate wage slaves often living in shockingly bad conditions.
Disraeli correctly identified this, and tried to re-invent the Conservatives into the party which would balance the interests of the common people and the capitalists who had brought about such material and technological progress, thereby assuming the role which in previous times had been enshrined in the monarch.
With the rise of the Labour movement to power or a share of it in the early 20th century, maybe it was considered that Parliament had finally reached a balanced and fair representation of interests, and that at last the common people had proper advocacy in the seat of power.
In retrospect, we can now see that this was probably a high point and that things have gone downhill very badly since, with vested interests very much back in charge.
The Labour Party has morphed into a bizarre embodiment of bad ideas who only cultivate their client class of state functionaries and poorly-educated graduates. They certainly don’t represent what we might call the traditional Working Class. The Conservatives reject any kind of ideology so just go along with the drift, becoming the Socialism Lite party, continuation One-Nationers, whose aspirations never rise above a bit of managerialist tinkering.
Once again, the interests of the common people have been sidelined.
This vacuum is what has allowed our rulers to impose mass immigration on our society, something that the people were never consulted on and which had damaged and undermined our shared cultural identity.
We know who the beneficiaries of this are, and it’s not the common people.
The summer riots were a manifestation of this. Others may follow.
To counterbalance parliament as representation of the factional interest of society, something representing its shared interests is needed. This used to be (at least in Germany) a monarchial government existing above and besides parliamentary strife of the parties. This suggests that the problem we’re facing is how to strip parliament of its status as dictatorial institution of power with no regard for anything but itself to put it back into its bottle, force it to accept the existence of legitimate, extraparliamentrial institution of power it didn’t create itself, ie, not His Most Toniest Blairness’ quango straightjacket supposed to guarantee New Labour government even in absence of a New Labour government.
Even the US model of an elected head of government with real power who’s not part of the parliamentary machinery might be suitable for that. OTOH, the traditional model worked fine. It took the parliamentarists to major European landwars to abolish it.
Maybe the only answer is Swiss-style direct government through regular referenda.
Whether that would work in the UK is moot, given that we’re a bigger and more diverse country with a very different history.
It would also require a vigorous and free press and media, something under continual attack.
This essay is puzzling. Professor Alexander very obviously admires Starkey; his essay is full of praise of him. But the title promises, also, to tell us where he is wrong. As someone who also admires Starkey, I was keen to learn where he is wrong but, search as I may, I can’t find it, not much anyway, and nothing developed. It might be expected to follow the heading, “Now for the criticisms”. But it doesn’t, not distinctly.
To begin with, it contains more praise: “[I am] someone who agrees with Starkey that we should read more history … Starkey’s remarkable history of England, and the Union … About the modern time, I, again, find most of the picture persuasive … a great deal to be said for Starkey’s particular history … to say something about the past that enables him to make a copious criticism of the present … almost no sound voices from history [apart from his] … the only historian who has managed to turn history into prophecy in a powerful way. Everyone has something to learn from his recent lectures.”
Alexander is plainly struggling to find anything much wrong. He begins by lighting a damp squib: “His suggestion that we should study history for the sake of the present is [not wrong but] badly formulated” and not all that badly either evidently, for, although “most historical comparisons are naive. In fact Starkey mostly avoids this naive sort of comparison … What he does instead is something subtler … to use the past to explain the present (not to explain what to do in the present, but to explain how we got where we are.”)
He does go on, “But there is a problem even with this. For we cannot restore anything by studying history.” But he has already admitted that Starkey doesn’t offer to use history to explain what to do in the present only to explain how we got where we are. So Alexander not only has not yet shown anything wrong, he hasn’t even shown us what the ‘problem’ is in what Starkey has to say.
There is, in fact, only one place where Alexander finds something wrong with Starkey that he doesn’t qualify out of existence and, even then, he introduces and closes it in a muted sort of a way: “Starkey is rather too admiring of Thatcher. As I said in an earlier piece, Thatcher only understood one of Enoch Powell’s concerns: the managed economy. She did not understand the problem of Europe until very late on, and never understood the problem of immigration, which remains a taboo subject. Starkey, as a humorous atheist, is unwilling to extend his political and constitutional analysis to include religion.”
And then this: “I suppose I dislike some of the cartoonish, or naïve, analogies, such as the comparison of Christian Europe to the European Union. … [The former] appealed to belief, and depended on faith or truth. No one has ever claimed the EU depends on truth or belief. Indeed, it entirely lacks either. … It is a confection, an arbitrary construction, a sort of Heath Robinson conspiracy whereby secular rational universalists – who are influenced by, alas, those English or Scottish habits of universal trade and profit-arousing and rent-seeking as well as by French and German habits of control and planning – attempt to break down all national significance, and, worse, all independent political significance.” And, even that he sums up as, “The story is a bit more dialectical than I think Starkey could admit without damaging his story.”
I don’t think Alexander has himself got a story about Starkey. Except for Starkey’s blankness about religion (which, filled up, might show an unintelligent hostility), Alexander is (not unreasonably) a straightforward admirer. And the title of his essay is seriously misleading.