I remember keenly observing the events leading up to the transfer of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to China in the mid-1990s. In 1997 I watched the ceremony where Robin Cook, then foreign secretary in the Labour government, formally handed the colony back to the Chinese authorities. His understated departure in a tiny motor launch seemed to symbolize the way the British Empire finally ended—not with a bang but a whimper. Like everyone else that day, I wondered when the negotiated arrangement would come to an end, how long the moderate democracy of the new Hong Kong would last.
One striking aspect of America’s protests over the death of George Floyd is the way in which they have spread overseas. Take my native land of England, for example. England no doubt has its racial problems—although Englishmen of my generation tend to think of diversity primarily in terms of class, not race—but protesting the racial crimes of American policemen seems an odd thing to do on the streets of London, let alone Bristol, Birmingham, and Portsmouth. It seems even odder in view of what is happening on the other side of the world, in Hong Kong.
I remember keenly observing the events leading up to the transfer of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to China in the mid-1990s. In 1997 I watched the ceremony where Robin Cook, then foreign secretary in the Labour government, formally handed the colony back to the Chinese authorities. His understated departure in a tiny motor launch seemed to symbolize the way the British Empire finally ended—not with a bang but a whimper. Like everyone else that day, I wondered when the negotiated arrangement would come to an end, how long the moderate democracy of the new Hong Kong would last.
It seems we now have our answer. After years of steadily mounting pressure, the Chinese government has abandoned all pretense of wanting a two-system solution. A bold and brash Beijing is about to bring that world to an end, and probably with a bang, not a whimper. The basic freedoms that we take for granted in the West are set to vanish entirely. And the People’s Republic is already looking beyond Hong Kong to unfinished business with Taiwan. The future is bleak.
Yet Britain’s news headlines are not dominated by events in its most recently ceded colony but by domestic protests about police violence in Minneapolis. Of course, the world is full of wicked injustice and there is only so much outrage to go around. One cannot protest everything; choices must be made in this as in everything else. But it is fascinating that young British people—and the anecdotal evidence indicates that it is young British people—have chosen the horrific death of George Floyd as the issue on which to take to the streets.
Political protest against injustice has always been selective. I remember a discussion I had with a socialist friend over coffee in my college room in the 1980s. I asked her why she was so exercised about apartheid in South Africa but silent on the Soviet Union. She answered that she thought a march in London concerning the situation in a former part of the British Empire would have greater effect than a similar march concerning abuses in a nation with which we had no common history. I happened to disagree, and suggested that her position had more to do with her instinctive left-wing sympathies for a socialist state, but even then I conceded that her argument in itself made sense. Yet its logic scarcely applies in today’s situation: Hong Kong was a colony less than twenty-five years ago. America renounced her colonial status rather a long time before that.
