By Philip Yeung
Hong Kong was once the darling of the world. Even Hollywood was in love with it. But who has killed the romance? It is not China. That credit goes to the bad actors from the West.
Here, money is not the root of all evil; politics is. This glittering city, with eastern mystique, western charm, and ice-cool efficiency, was a place of conspicuous consumption, giddy on punk and possibility. An oasis of calm and throbbing energy, no place on earth could match it in de facto freedom. We didn't need one-person-one-vote to live a free-wheeling life. Well-ordered to a fault, with no queue-jumpers or corrupt officials, the city had found its rhythm. Everyone was equal before the law—no one needed to be lawyered up as they do in the US. For the freedom-minded, it was the nearest thing to paradise on earth.
Then came Chris Patten, the last British governor, clutching his political bible, with a mission to convert the locals, descending on the city like a knight in shining armor. He decided that this Asian city rocking with entrepreneurial vitality needed his creaky British system. Tragically, in his transplant operation, the patient died.
Soon, a politicized Hong Kong was deep in political turmoil. Patten had dragooned the city into an alien state of misery. People who were busy making money were now told to make waves, kicking up a category-10 typhoon that swept everything out to sea: law and order, family ties, and lifelong friendships. Trust died. The economy nose-dived. Its legendary Lion Rock spirit was broken. Politics had killed the city.
What a costly political flirtation! It interrupted its commercial genius. Its ultra-rationality degenerated into lunacy. Even 12-year-olds now started shouting slogans, calling for Hong Kong's independence from China, fantasizing about an Eden that never came. Its burning barricades so excited that old witch of US leftist politics, Nancy Pelosi (whom Trump calls "an evil woman"), that she declared our burning streets "a beautiful sight to behold."
At its height, foreign spies were crawling all over the city, with agitators making frequent pilgrimages to Washington. America is not pro-Hong Kong. Only neurotically anti-China. Let's not kid ourselves, America didn't care two hoots about us. Just ask Iraq, where a million people perished. The US did not go into Iraq to deliver democracy to its people, but for its own agenda. Likewise, it exploited our city to vilify China.
Taiwan's peaceful reunification with the mainland became another casualty. The dream of one-country-two-system reunion across the Strait died in the fiery streets of Hong Kong.
Post-handover, China stuck to its end of the bargain, allowing China's vocal critics and columnists to thrive as overhyped defenders of freedom, when our freedoms didn't need any defending. Beijing swallowed hard, bit its tongue, and refused to take the bait until the agitators crossed a red line, paralyzing the city with vandalism and violence for nine months. University presidents, whose DNA was designed for defending the freedom of speech, became targets of abuse, cowering in corners from mad-dog protestors-- not exactly the picture Patten had painted for our political salvation.
Sadly, Europe and the rest of the West bought the US bias, demonizing the control of the unrest as acts of "political suppression", when Beijing had refrained from enacting the National Security Law for over 20 years.
These insurrectionists are no freedom fighters. Notable among them were a couple of tenured academics whose lives were growing too dull and soft behind the university walls. They were just shameless copycats. From New York's Occupy Wall Street, they gave Hong Kong its Occupy Central. And from North Africa, with its Color Revolutions, they coined our Yellow Umbrella Revolution.
For all the fire and fury, what was the fuss all about? The fight was foolishly over "one-person-one-vote". Except the political gains are peanuts and peppercorn-for the simple reason that under the Basic Law, Hong Kong's chief executive, chosen by an Election Committee, is subject to the final approval of the Central Government. The fight was thus over something meaningless. It was misleading advertising. Besides, where were these brave freedom fighters during the colonial rule when protestors faced incarceration or instant deportation?
To understand Hong Kong better, we must go to Singapore, where they do things differently. For one thing, its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, brooked no nonsense from the meddlesome foreign press. Singapore jealously guards its own system, keeping Western reporters and activists at bay. Another thing in Singapore's favor is that it is not complicated by the C-word. American agents leave Singapore in peace because China is not in the picture.
Finally, after a prolonged paralysis, karma came. The agitators are now either in jail or have hightailed out of Hong Kong, with the likes of Henry Tai rotting behind bars and his co-conspirators exiled to Britain, where they are crying into their cups, tasting the bitterness of their third-class citizenship.
The Hong Kong tragedy proves that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to governance. To the American-style democracy, as it clings to guns and religion, I say no thanks. Who needs the chaos and tantrums of a bully, though duly elected as president? Our local political copycats have worshipped a false prophet. The city was left to pay the price, costing it a lost decade and a detour in our destiny.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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