First we heard of the yellow
vests protests in France, a populist movement from the working middle class who
took to the streets to vent their frustrations on economic issues. Now we have the black shirts protests in Hong
Kong, going now more than 13 weeks. Again,
another populist movement coming from the middle class ranks. It kinds of remind one of a third populist movement - in the US during the last election cycle,
except that in their instance, instead of bullets, the protagonists used the
ballot.
One outstanding thing is how
the HK movement has been able to galvanize the citizenry to gather in very
large numbers even with a very loose organization whose leaders are not even clearly
known. It gathered at one point 1.7
million people on very short notice, almost a fourth of the total population of
the island of about 7 million people. Tech-savvy
residents have created their own networks for communications and dissemination. Thus we hear buzz words like mesh networks or
Telegram, etc.
How could anyone ignore the
numbers? And more importantly how could
one not realize the stakes involved?
Among them are:
In the world of finance, HK
is the third most important global financial hub, behind only London and the US. It cannot afford to be destabilized for long,
without deleterious repercussions worldwide.
The tense rumblings are definitely undermining this pivotal role in this
Asian locale where English is a primary language.
It is an inevitability that
in 2047, HK will truly be molded as part of Mainland China, as per agreement
reached in 1997, and it will be ruled by the Communist government like any
other part of China. Once done, HK will
lose its financial prominence because the major Western powers will never allow
itself to trust in China. But why should
HK be any different from any Chinese city?
But first a little
trivia. Before the ascendency of China
as a looming world power, the Communist government had eyed HK with great avarice
because HK’s economy or GDP then was comparatively huge compared to that of
China. But in the meantime China’s many big cities blossomed and became
modernized and prosperous amidst a riotous economy that was burgeoning to the
point that now, HK’s GDP contribution would not mean that much, maybe
representing only 10 or 15% of China’s total.
But the bigger problem is HK itself. HK became unique HK because of the uncanny combination of the Chinese people’s intrepid nature and their entrepreneurship genius mixed with the vaunted British Common Law. That inimitable combination produced HK, and we know this would become untenable once HK becomes part of the Communist regime of China. Rule of law as known in the West will be alien then, and the HK generations weaned on this cannot survive.
Even with just this, one can
easily grasp the mammoth dilemma that HK truly finds itself.
