Visas could do more than sanctions to help Hong Kong and punish China.
If the United States wants to help the people of Hong Kong, it needs to think beyond sanctions and consider the role it has played time and again for victims of political repression abroad — open America’s borders and offer a place of refuge, freedom, and prosperity.
The State Department says it no longer considers Hong Kong to be autonomous from China, a result of both China’s increasingly heavy-handed rule and a larger deterioration in the US-China relationship. The larger trend toward erosion of the “one country, two systems” policy has provoked repeated waves of mass protest in Hong Kong and sporadic efforts at pushback by the West. The new State Department designation will potentially lead to American sanctions as that pushback escalates.
Sanctioning China may serve as punishment for its action, but there’s no realistic chance that the United States is going to force China to change its mind on such a fundamental policy issue. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. But it means that whatever the merits, it’s not an idea that’s going to deliver much help to the people of Hong Kong.
Hongkongers’ first choice would be to stay in their homes and enjoy the autonomy they were promised. But the US can’t really deliver that outcome to them, and failing that, many of them would enjoy the opportunity to build a new life in the United States.
An influx of skilled migrants from Hong Kong would benefit many American communities. The specter of tens of thousands of people fleeing Chinese rule for American shores would be a tremendous propaganda victory for the United States. And pulling it off would be a proof of concept for what should be a key tool in Sino-American competition — that huge numbers of foreigners may welcome the opportunity to move to the US.
The notion of one country with two systems is inherently flawed in ways that would be known to any American familiar with Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech.
But back when Hong Kong was originally handed over from the UK to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1990s, China was a much poorer country than it is today. The relative prosperity of Hong Kong stood out enormously, and the Chinese government had self-interested reasons to avoid killing a goose that laid golden eggs. In the West, meanwhile, it was fashionable at the time to believe that China’s growing integration into the global marketplace would lead to an increase in political freedom.
In subsequent years, we’ve learned that the opposite is the case — China remains authoritarian, but its large domestic market gives it leverage to convince Western companies to cater to the political sensibilities of the PRC.
While one can very reasonably hope for a democratic future for China, there are no particularly positive trends in that direction.
