e Leader Xi Jinping has finally shredded the city-state’s foundational autonomy by abrogating the “one country, two systems” terms of Britain’s surrender of its former colony to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.
The draconian “national security” law imposed on Hong Kong by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Beijing would embed China’s secret police in Hong Kong and enable Beijing’s officials to prosecute dissident Hongkongers on charges of treason, subversion, terrorism, separatism and collusion with foreign forces. It’s statutory terrorism, pure and simple. Xi is now openly repudiating the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, a solemn treaty registered with the United Nations that was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong’s post-1997 autonomy for at least another 50 years. But these facts alone do not come close to accounting for the enormity of what has happened.
To find an instructive parallel to the tragedy unfolding in Hong Kong at the moment you’d have to reach back as far as Aug. 21, 1968, when the Soviet Union dispatched columns of tanks and more than half a million heavily armed Russian and Warsaw Pact soldiers to crush a non-violent uprising in Czechoslovakia, forcing a brutal and vicious end to the youthful, democratic Prague Spring….
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