Commentary | Alvin Y.H. Cheung, Hong Kong: The End of Delusion
As the Hong Kong and Beijing governments continue their assault on civil society in the territory — through tactics ranging from arbitrary arrests and attacks on the legal profession to the gutting of liberal studies and the inculcation of loyalty to the CCP in the guise of "patriotism," neither "China experts" at large, nor professedly left-leaning academics, have engaged in any critical self-reflection on their culpability in Hong Kong's demise, writes Alvin Y.H. Cheung.
As of this writing, even the most determinedly bullish observer must admit that Hong Kong is sliding into authoritarianism. Party-controlled media are turning up the invective on the new Chair of the (still-independent) Bar, for having the temerity to suggest that there should be changes to the "National Security Law" ("NSL") unilaterally imposed on the territory in 2020. Four days before the Court of Final Appeal was due to hear a bail application by opposition media magnate Jimmy Lai, freshly installed Chief Justice Andrew Cheung was summoned for a one-on-one meeting with Chief Executive Carrie Lam – a meeting that should set alarm bells ringing about the prospect of "telephone justice." Meanwhile, police confirmed that 97 have been arrested under the "NSL" - a number that fails to include a growing number of frivolous, openly partisan arrests and prosecutions under other offences.
Hong Kong's descent into the abyss poses two urgent questions: how did things get this bad, and what can now be done? In answering them, both mainstream "China experts" and the self-proclaimed "left" must confront their complicity in Hong Kong's demise.
How did we get here?
In a November 2019 piece for Lawfare, I wrote that US-based China commentators had "badly misjudged" the political atmosphere in Hong Kong during the anti-rendition bill protests and subsequent District Council elections. As I documented in that article, the "China hands" systematically understated or ignored the extent to which the Beijing and Hong Kong governments ran roughshod over the Basic Law and Sino-British Joint Declaration. Two particular instances spring to mind. First, in 2013-2014 numerous commentators sought to foist Beijing's Boss Tweed-esque "electoral" arrangements for Chief Executive – arrangements that left the Hong Kong public with no meaningful choice – upon a population that, quite understandably, wanted nothing to do with it. Second, the 2019 protest movement emerged against a background of systematic elimination of "legitimate" forms of political participation, and growing impunity for police violence. Yet the overwhelming response among China pundits was to engage in performative hand-wringing over violence by demonstrators, even as acts of brutality by police officers and pro-Beijing actors from 2014 continue to go unpunished. Given this long history of wilful ignorance by the China-watching community, it is scarcely surprising that Beijing would feel free to engage in further repression in Hong Kong, without fear of repercussions.
What now?
What is more galling, however, is that "China-watchers" – particularly those on the left – appear to have learned nothing from the past year. In a recent article with the notorious disinformation site Grayzone, former American Ambassador Chas Freeman – a frequent contributor to the Quincy Institute's site "Responsible Statecraft" – chose to blame Hong Kongers for their own predicament, characterising the 2019 protests as waving a red rag in front of a "dragon." In a similar vein, other prominent left-leaning commentators – some of them well-known signatories of the 2019 "China is Not An Enemy" open letter – have persistently vilified Hong Kongers for the heinous crime of demanding some voice in their own future, blaming them for the repression meted out by Beijing and its local proxies. Even as these "experts" decry criticism of Beijing as Sinophobia, their refusal to attribute moral agency to the agents of repression in Beijing and Hong Kong is far more demeaning and dehumanising.
“For decades [Hong Kong] has not been so much a subject of serious study, as a vehicle for ideological fantasy.”
It should scarcely be surprising that these "analyses" should have varied so little, even as facts on the ground in Hong Kong changed virtually overnight. For decades the territory has not been so much a subject of serious study, as a vehicle for ideological fantasy. Neoliberals, casting about for the "free market" of their dreams, mistook Hong Kong's oligarchy for one. Self-identified "leftists" inveighing against the evils of Western colonialism saw in Hong Kong a vehicle for "decolonisation" – whether the local population wanted it or not. Yet – as so often occurred throughout Hong Kong's own history – voices from the territory itself were ignored, belittled, or shouted down. Speaking from my own experience in seven years' worth of public panels and closed-door meetings with China "experts" across the political spectrum, far too many instances of "analysis" and policy prescriptions have been based on factual misapprehensions and wishful thinking than anything I observed in my years living and working in the territory.* On the contrary, the field of Chinese Studies as a whole has shown much more interest in gatekeeping, searching for "moderates" in Beijing in their own image, and enforcing self-serving standards of "civility" than in their ostensible subject of study.
Even now, as Hong Kong's middle classes flee for the relative safety of Brexit Britain and multinationals consider moving their arbitrations to Singapore, the field of Chinese Studies remains in denial. Faced with mounting evidence – much of it produced by the PRC government itself – of a genocide in East Turkestan, supposedly respectable "China experts" continue to deny that a genocide exists, or to weasel their way around calling it one. For as long as the field of Chinese Studies does not engage in a long-overdue reckoning with its own culpability in the humanitarian crises in Hong Kong and East Turkestan, and for as long as the field does not recognise that it studies real places with real people facing real problems, it will have no moral or intellectual authority to pronounce on what has gone wrong, or on what a principled, ethical response would look like.
*To name but one example: one commentator – regularly published on an ostensibly peer-reviewed online website – has asserted, without any factual or legal basis, that the Joint Declaration no longer has any effect as a matter of public international law. Another prominent “China is Not an Enemy” signatory, who shall remain anonymous, insisted in a 2019 event that the PRC Government's “Basic Policies” enumerated in the Joint Declaration were merely “temporary,” without acknowledging that the Joint Declaration itself stated that these commitments would continue until 2047. That both of these elementary errors should have been permitted to see the light of day speaks deeply ill of Chinese Studies as an academic "discipline."
Dr. Alvin Y.H. Cheung is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and a Non-Resident Affiliated Scholar at NYU's U.S.-Asia Law Institute. His research addresses the systematic abuse of sub-constitutional legal norms and institutions by authoritarian regimes.
To cite this essay, please use the suggested entry below:
Alvin Y.H. Cheung, “Hong Kong: The End of Delusion,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, February 8, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/URUL3385.