Hong Kong is all over the news today. See NYTimes coverage here and here and here and here. I won’t pretend to understand all the issues. But until recently my daughter lived nearby in Shenzhen. So for me there is something more at stake here than mere curiosity.
On This Day in History in 1997, the Brits turned Hong Kong over to China under an arrangement called “One Country, Two Systems.” The basic idea was that you could have a totalitarian central government (China) with a capitalist economic system (Hong Kong). Well, at least as long as the land in question was on an island off the coast. And as far as the economic part of the equation goes, things seem to have worked out fairly well. But of course success of “The China Model” in which economic growth takes precedence over individual rights comes at a cost not everyone is willing to pay.
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The thing is, the Chinese government’s modus operandi has little or no human rights protections built in. So anyone accused of anything can be jailed indefinitely without a trial. In Hong Kong, the sticking point is whether people can be extradited across the channel to face the music on the mainland based solely on an accusation.
The fear is this: A lot of what people are accused of there amounts to nothing more than political dissent. With American Independence Day upcoming on July 4th – in Canada, it’s July 1st, that’s today – we DO have those kind of due process protections built in. So, what’s going on over there right now is frankly a bit alien to us.
I guess if “taxation without representation is tyranny,” then incarceration without a trial is as bad, or worse? As you’re watching baseball and chewing your hot dog and enjoying your constitutionally protected freedom this week, maybe that’s a proposition worth chewing on too. Just a thought.