APRES PRC

Springtime in Hong Kong: Will Chinese communism soon collapse? (CLAUDIA ROSETT, July 9, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

We have just witnessed Hong Kong's finest hour. To defend their freedoms, half a million people marched peacefully through the streets on July 1, and forced the handpicked satrap of the People's Republic of China, Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, to blink. At the last minute Mr. Tung indefinitely delayed passage of his "antisubversion" law, which threatens Hong Kong's liberties. And while Mr. Tung and his communist backers in Beijing ponder their next move in this showdown between freedom and tyranny, the debate has reopened in Hong Kong on political reform that might finally permit Hong Kong's people to directly elect their own governor.

Before the next shoe drops--which it will--our job in the free nations of the world is to grasp the huge importance of these events, and keep faith with the message the people of Hong Kong have sent.

The government whose dictates Hong Kong's people are protesting is not, ultimately, that of the cornered Mr. Tung in Hong Kong, but that of the People's Republic in Beijing. Rest assured that the dissatisfactions in relatively idyllic Hong Kong are shared in spades by many of the 1.3 billion Chinese under the direct sway of Beijing, who for generations have suffered miseries and indignities far worse than anything Hong Kong has yet endured. Should protests flare up inside China proper that even begin to approach the proportions of those in Hong Kong last week, it could spell the disintegration of the communist regime. As Gordon Chang, author "The Coming Collapse of China" (2001), reminded me this week, "when dictatorships fall, they fall very quickly."

The last time people inside China's borders demonstrated for freedom on such a massive scale was 1989, in the uprising named for its geographic center, Tiananmen Square--though the protests were actually nationwide. Demonstrations also took place in Hong Kong, which was at the time a British colony, but slated to be handed back to Beijing.

Then, too, for a euphoric spell the suffocating lies of China's communist regime were swept aside. Briefly, China's dictators seemed in full retreat. The world applauded the courage and the ideals of the demonstrators. When the regime murdered its way back into control, sending tanks and troops against its own people, we had shock and horror in the free world, and many vows that the nature of China's crude and brutal government, so nakedly exposed, would not be forgotten.

But in many quarters of the free world it has not exactly been well remembered...

George H. W. Bush can be forgiven his tax hikes and even the ADA, both of which could merely be done away with legislatively. It is the failure to intervene in China during the Tiananmen uprising that is unforgivable. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2003 9:41 PM