Vandalism of the Chinese national emblem at the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong is a mistake. It makes it easier for Beijing to present mass protests in Hong Kong as a foreign plot. Photo: Reuters
Opinion
Opinion
by Philip Bowring
Opinion
by Philip Bowring
When bad ideas happen to Hong Kong protesters and Beijing
Protesters in Hong Kong made a strategic mistake when they vandalised the liaison office. But over in London and Beijing, the authorities are labouring under dangerous delusions about their power
Understand your enemy. Know your own weakness. To the protesters on Sunday, the central government’s liaison office might have seemed a suitable target, given its constant interference in Hong Kong’s affairs in defiance of the Basic Law. Attacking inanimate objects may seem preferable to attacking people, as happened in Yuen Long. Yet it was a grave error.
The liaison office and its plaque are not just symbols of the Communist Party and central government. Because they are also seen as national symbols by the majority of mainlanders who have always lived under the red flag with five stars, vandalism to them has made it that much easier for Beijing to present mass protests in Hong Kong as a foreign plot.
Meanwhile, observers should not be surprised if the party had a hand in the violence in Yuen Long. After all, this was the party behind the 1967 riots, bombings and killings that left some 50 dead. The leader of the riots was Yeung Kwong of the Federation of Trade Unions. Subsequently, Tung Chee-hwa awarded him a Grand Bauhinia Medal, Leung Chun-ying attended his funeral in 2015, and Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor sent a message of condolence praising his work.
But that 1967 mix of violence and appeals to patriotism and anti-colonialism ultimately failed, and the British colonial system would survive, indeed prosper, for another 30 years.
Whatever political skills the British then possessed, however, have since gone up in smoke, as should their illusions about their current power and their impossible dreams about a return to the glorious past. The British seizure of an Iranian tanker in Gibraltar, reportedly at the United States’ suggestion, was a dubiously legal act given the lack of United Nations sanctions on oil deliveries and unsurprisingly led to tit-for-tat retaliation from Iran, which seized a British tanker in the Gulf.
Now the very same British foreign minister, Jeremy Hunt, who competed for the right to lead Britain out of the EU, has to appeal for EU solidarity against Iran at a time when sensible EU nations are focused on limiting the damage done by US President Donald Trump’s renouncing of the nuclear accord with Iran to which the Obama administration, EU, Russia and China had been signatories.
There was a time when Britain managed the decline of its power with grace and realism. Now it is merely ridiculous
This is the very same Britain which has talked up a Brexit future of returning to Asia as a naval power, with a base in Bahrain and facilities further east, perhaps forming an alliance against China’s growing naval might. But Britain’s navy is now so small, with 77 commissioned vessels and 30,000 sailors, that it can barely protect its home waters, let alone have any meaningful force projection capability.
Sending the occasional frigate into Asian waters to emphasise freedom of navigation just sustains delusions that Britain matters. It feeds into Boris Johnson’s dream that somehow Britain will be great again by going it alone, rejecting its place in Europe and endangering the unity of its own kingdom.
There was a time when Britain managed the decline of its power with grace and realism. Now it is merely ridiculous, as reflected in the character of its new prime minister and of a Labour opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn – like Johnson, a man living in another age.
Underestimating opponents also looks likely to be a problem for China. Giving its sovereignty claim for South China Sea the same status as its claim for Taiwan is not only historical nonsense, it also ensures the countries along the same stretch of ocean will remain latently, if not actually, hostile.
Promising investments to foreign leaders can work temporarily but it is unlikely that 100 million Filipinos and 100 million Vietnamese will walk away from their sea rights, or that the 250 million Indonesians will not find ways and allies to keep China at a long arm’s length from their archipelago and its crucial straits: Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, Makassar.
Chinese nationalist mythology will also not solve issues relating either to the Uygur and other Turkic-speaking peoples of Xinjiang, or to their cousins across the border in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, almost all of whose populations remain at least nominally Muslim.
Last week, the State Council Information Office released a white paper titled “Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang”, attempting to convince the world that Xinjiang has long been part of China and that ethnic cultures in Xinjiang “have their roots in the fertile soil of Chinese civilisation and make up an inseparable part of Chinese culture”. The history of the Central Asia over the past two thousand years is indeed complicated but this paper seems destined to delude the Chinese themselves and infuriate the peoples to China’s immediate west, who themselves only recently escaped from the Russian empire.
Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator
