BEIJING: Despite destructive chaos right in Europe’s own backyard, its politicians still find substantial time to lecture China on how its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region should be run.
The European Union recently released its “Annual Report on Hong Kong for 2021”, accompanied by some predictably disparaging commentary about the claimed deterioration of fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong. This is the 24th such report.
The EU never felt the need to conduct such surveys on Hong Kong when the British ran the territory, governing for over 140 years by relying on a governor-dominated, democracy-free system.
Imagine if, each year, Beijing issued annual grandiose reports such as this, telling Brussels to fix this, that and the other governance lapse and blunder, management of internal disorder and riots, pandemic controls, or absconding EU members. Within a nanosecond, we could expect to see the EU high representative in orbit, powered by fury at such impertinence directed at the EU from outside its hallowed borders－and from the Far East no less. In fact, this will not happen precisely because China does not unilaterally intrude into the internal affairs of other nations in this way.
It is useful, at this point, to consider how some EU members have tackled certain intense governance problems. These have presented significant challenges－though less grave than those faced by Hong Kong during the multimonth insurrection that began in June 2019.
France had to grapple with serial violent political demonstrations and riots, known as the “Yellow Vest” protests, which began in November 2018. By mid-2019, there had been 11 deaths, some 2,500 civilian injuries, plus 1,800 injuries among the security forces. The number arrested soon totaled over 8,000 with, typically, more than 25 percent of those arrested being remanded in custody.
The approach to containing the rioting was aggressively focused. The interior minister said that “we are not going to respond to Molotov cocktails with nice feelings, and we are not going to protect the order of the republic with soft words”.
–The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
