Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, July 1.
Photo: Ivan Abreu/Zuma PressSomewhere along the line, Beijing decided it didn’t need Hong Kong anymore. That has the makings of an epic miscalculation.
Recent events have highlighted the extent to which the territory’s earlier freedoms were always held at the whim of the Chinese Communist Party. The only surprising thing about the violent suppression of protests and the draconian security law that entered into force Wednesday is that they didn’t happen sooner. There’s no external force to stop Beijing and never really has been.
No army will invade Hong Kong now to protect its people from subjugation to Xi Jinping; no army would have invaded a decade ago, either. The U.K. will extend British residency rights to millions of Hong Kongers. But any resulting exodus is no more or less an embarrassment to Beijing than it would have been if it happened in 1997, when Britain ceded its former colony to China.
The Communist Party’s previous restraint arose not from external coercion but from an assessment of its own self-interest. The motivation was primarily economic. A backward, impoverished country emerging from the maw of Maoism—as China was when Beijing promised Hong Kong autonomy in negotiations with the British in the 1980s—needed some nexus to the outside world.
Hong Kong’s free port would serve as a conduit between the then-just-barely-starting-to-open south of China and capitalist markets abroad. The territory’s financial system, with its Anglo-Saxon rule of law, would offer a passage into China for much-needed foreign investment (and, although only whisper it, a tunnel out for the corrupt spoils of the mainland’s statist economic model).
These advantages were so great that Communist Party leaders felt they could, or rather had to, overlook the territory’s democratic precocity. The risk associated with tolerating a form of self-government in Hong Kong, and with tolerating demands from the citizenry for more, was worth the economic benefits of hosting a global economic center on China’s doorstep.
Mr. Xi thinks that balance of risk and reward has shifted. If the problem is stated solely in the terms his predecessors set out, he’s right.
Hong Kong’s usefulness to Beijing as a financial center has declined steadily as China’s domestic capital markets have grown. The question is not whether Shanghai is a perfect substitute for Hong Kong, because obviously it isn’t. The threshold is whether Shanghai is good enough at intermediating between Chinese businesses and foreign and domestic capital. With enough squinting you can see your way to a “yes.”
Similarly, the significance of Hong Kong’s port to China’s economy was bound to decline sooner or later. As supply chains have lengthened while trade wars escalate, who can say that any one port constitutes critical infrastructure anymore?
This, however, misses the more important role Hong Kong came to play for mainland China, a role Mr. Xi ignores at his peril. The city used to represent Beijing’s commitment to its word. Now it represents Mr. Xi’s willingness to break that word.
It sounds quaint in a world increasingly defined by hard-nosed realpolitik and great-power competition. Who cares what the Communist Party does in Hong Kong if its intentions in the South China Sea or in its Uighur concentration camps are clear enough?
Yet precisely because Beijing has stirred so much suspicion with those actions, it benefited from abiding by its treaty obligation to Hong Kong’s autonomy. The idea was that the Communist Party might be slippery at every opportunity, but when pressed would stick to its black-letter commitments.
Mr. Xi may come to regret casting off that credibility so cavalierly. China’s economic diplomacy can’t succeed without it. Witness how Europe’s mood on Huawei has soured steadily as the Hong Kong crisis, and more recently the coronavirus pandemic, have ground on. Beijing is asking the rest of the world to trust its national-champion technology company while demonstrating that China can’t be relied on in other matters.
On the political and military fronts, the sort of fecklessness Mr. Xi is exhibiting in Hong Kong may carry a steep cost too. The bill will come due if ever Mr. Xi must try to negotiate himself out of a foolish military escalation in his neighborhood—such as a border dispute with India. Nations with less credibility enjoy fewer options.
A previous generation of Chinese leaders understood Hong Kong’s capacity to help make China a prosperous nation. Mr. Xi has squandered Hong Kong’s capacity to make China a serious nation.
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
"now" - Google News
July 03, 2020 at 12:04AM
https://ift.tt/2BmD1fr
Beijing Will Miss Hong Kong Now That It’s Gone - The Wall Street Journal
"now" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35sfxPY
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Beijing Will Miss Hong Kong Now That It’s Gone - The Wall Street Journal"
Post a Comment