Opinion | Our free trade demands justice

Influential groups in Hong Kong seem to have less and less idea of why the territory exists as a separate entity, what makes it distinct and what makes it thrive, for reasons that are hard to replicate elsewhere. This lack of understanding is not primarily the product of political correctness, fear of Beijing, or the need to demonstrate adhesion to someone else's idea of what constitutes patriotism. Most local people recognise that culture, nation and ruling party are separate identities.

Hong Kong's problem is the bigger one of leaders increasingly failing to realise that its long-term survival depends not on its harbour and deepwater port, crucial though they were in the past and important though they still can be. It does not even rest on the quality of its educational system, the standards of basic administration of law and order and its relative absence of corruption.

All these things are important, as too is freedom: of speech and media, of a legal system which is mostly trusted by the inhabitants, and of concepts that keep some space between executive, legislative and judicial authority.

But the absolute bedrock is none of these. It is the one principle that has existed from the beginning and survived in the face of hostility from the sovereign power - once London, and now Beijing. That is the almost total freedom of international commerce.

That is not just a theoretical principle extracted from a World Trade Organisation manual. It implies being a centre for commercial activity that would be illegal in many other jurisdictions. For sure, the opium trade helped to make such freedom the subject of much criticism - despite it not being illegal in many countries and having a very long history in China itself.

More significant than opium is all the other trade that passed through or originated in Hong Kong which was illegal in other places. What is freedom to trade for many is smuggling to others. Free-trading ports, be they Hong Kong and to some extent Singapore today, or Venice or the Hanseatic states of the Baltic in the past, were ever thus.

In a previous column, I mentioned the gross injustice of sentencing low-paid mules in supposed money laundering schemes to long prison terms. This reflected a curious belief that it is Hong Kong's job to prosecute persons for possible crimes that took place somewhere else. The principle of freedom of movement of money, central to the city from the beginning, has been trashed by lawyers whose ignorance of history is stunning.