2021 was the year Communist China smashed the dream of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong, with only modest opposition from the civilized world.
The …
2021 was the year Communist China smashed the dream of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong, with only modest opposition from the civilized world. The flicker of hope kindled by the 2019 protest movement was ruthlessly extinguished as decades-old newspapers and activist organizations were systematically dismantled by Beijing’s puppet government. The massive 2019 protest movement was sparked by Hong Kong’s fear that a law making criminal extradition to China easier would damage the island’s autonomy, as laid out by the Basic Law established when the U.K. gave Hong Kong to China in 1997. The guiding principle of the Basic Law was “one country, two systems” – Hong Kong would have its own legislature, and its people would have freedoms unknown to the subjects of the regime in Beijing. At the height of the protest movement in 2019, pro-democracy activists dreamed of increasing their autonomy and loosening Beijing’s grip on the Hong Kong government. The fifth of their famous “ Five Demands ” was universal suffrage, which would have allowed the people to vote for all legislators and the chief executive, instead of only half the seats in the legislature or LegCo. After failing to shut down the protest movement with police brutality, the puppet government in Hong Kong stepped aside and let Beijing impose a brutally totalitarian “ national security law ” on the island, bypassing its legislature and smashing the core tenet of Basic Law. The law, which went into effect in June 2020, set the stage for 2021’s crackdown by criminalizing all opposition to the government as sedition and treason. Even the most reasonable criticism of human rights violations was suddenly deemed a threat to China’s national security. Critics of the regime were presumed to be “collaborating” with foreign powers and treated like enemy spies. The national security law quickly strangled the protest movement, as demonstrators realized the gloves had come off and they would be punished as traitors and subversives for assembling in public. The law was viciously effective at shutting down student activist groups, the lifeblood of the protest movement. University administrations installed political officers and monitored the student body for any sign of dissent. By the middle of 2021, hundreds of students had pulled out of Hong Kong universities as their parents made plans to flee overseas to escape the witch hunt. In September, the university system announced plans to forcibly “educate” students in the glories of the national security law at every level, from primary schools to college. This is tantamount to forcing the children of Hong Kong to listen to threats from the Chinese Communist Party for an hour a day during their entire academic careers. The national security law was used as a cudgel to smash Hong Kong’s formerly vibrant pro-democracy media.
