World-China Forum

Civil Liberties Within Limits After 12 Years of Beijing Rule

It was a raucous display of free speech outside Hong Kong’s Legislative Council last week: construction workers demanding increased spending on public works, retirees agitating for heftier pensions, and legislators, wearing black T-shirts printed with tanks, calling on the Beijing government to apologize for the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square two decades ago.

In the 12 years since it passed from British to Chinese rule, Hong Kong has remained a bastion of civil liberties unknown in mainland China, under an arrangement dubbed “one country, two systems.” The result has been the continuation of a freewheeling press, an independent judiciary and a well-oiled bureaucracy. On Thursday, tens of thousands are expected to turn out for a candlelight vigil in Victoria Park here to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, in which hundreds of students advocating democracy were killed. In the rest of China, any mention of the events at Tiananmen Square has been banned in the news media or public discourse.

But many democracy advocates and civil libertarians here are increasingly anxious about whether laissez-faire Hong Kong can maintain its independence from Beijing’s authoritarian grip and its distinct identity as an amalgam of Western and Chinese sensibilities. Last year, Beijing postponed direct elections — to 2017 for the chief executive and 2020 for the full legislature — and its critics say China is wielding a heavier hand in Hong Kong’s affairs. A growing roster of overseas visitors whose politics irritate Beijing have been denied entry to Hong Kong, and pro-China legislators have blocked efforts to include an uncensored account of Tiananmen Square in high school textbooks.(ANDREW JACOBS, New York Times)

As China destroys its culture, Hong Kong proves that its people care

The west's admiration for China's rush for wealth is becoming like the left's interwar praise for ­Stalin's Soviet Union. It is a triumph of materialism over ­humanity. If there is one place on earth I have long wanted to visit, it is old Kashgar, fulcrum of the silk road, Peter Fleming's "oasis of civilisation" hovering between the Pamir mountains and the Taklamakan desert. It was used for the Afghan movie The Kite Runner, Nato having rendered the real location, Kabul, too dangerous for filming. Now the old city is to be systematically demolished. The steamroller of destruction that is China's rush for wealth is claiming yet another casualty for world culture.

Reports from Beijing indicate that 65,000 houses, dating in layers back over two millennia, are decrepit and at risk from earthquakes. They will be cleared and their native Uighur inhabitants forcibly removed from the maze of alleys, mud-brick walls, courtyard houses and 40 mosques to new estates five miles from the city. Already the city walls and moat have gone. Now the old city itself is coming down, with only a zone to be rebuilt "in Uighur style" for the million tourists who visit Kashgar in search of silk road romance. They will be shown what a local official calls "an international heritage scenery". (Simon Jenkins, Guardian)

Hong Kong MPs demand Tiananmen apology

Hong Kong lawmakers have demanded that Beijing apologise for suppressing the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. They have debated the crackdown in one of the few Chinese cities where it can be openly discussed.

"While it's been 20 years since the crackdown, Hong Kongers still feel the same about it. They still think it was a massacre. They still think the Chinese Communist Party needs to be held accountable," said lawmaker Lee Wing-tat. "You can see how stubborn Hong Kongers are on this issue. It makes me proud to be a Chinese living in Hong Kong," Lee said.

A poll released on Wednesday showed that 69 per cent of Hong Kongers think the crackdown was a mistake and 61 per cent believe the Chinese government should stop condemning the protests. The survey by the University of Hong Kong, based on random telephone interviews with 1,011 people earlier this month, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. (Yahoo News/AFP)