Happy Dependence Day, Hong Kong! 400,000 Protest Chinese Rule—but Secession Is Not on the Table

July 1st is one of the most common days for a national holiday in the world, mainly because countries that get their independence gradually, peacefully, through bureaucratic means, tend to stage hand-overs at the precise middle of the year; it is a neat calendar division, it doesn’t interfere with other holiday seasons, and weather is nice enough to celebrate anniversaries.  So July 1st is Canada Day, Republic Day in Ghana, Independence Day in Burundi, etc. etc.  (Countries born in revolution also tend to have summer independence days, mainly because hot weather is when peasants get riled up enough to revolt: no one felt like storming the Bastille, in December, and if the founders of the Swiss Confederation had solemnized the Rütlischwur on February 1, 1291, instead of August 1st, they would’ve frozen their schällä off.)

The current flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

But July 1st also marks some sad bureaucratic transitions that few celebrate.  This week in Somaliland, nationalists mourned their nation’s involuntary absorption into the Somali Republic on July 1, 1960.  Likewise, July 1, 2012, was also the occasion for 400,000 or so citizens of China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (H.K.S.A.R.) to stage mass street protests amid the swearing in, as the territory’s Chief Executive, of Leung Chun-ying, regarded by many as more than a bit too cosy with the mainland Chinese government.  The date was the 15th anniversary of—and here the Chinese Communist Party’s unique gift for naming festive celebrations really comes to the fore—Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day.  (Break out the firecrackers, eh?!  You have to say, though: at least it does not have as skin-crawlingly Orwellian a name as Serf Emancipation Day, the anniversary of the consolidation of Beijing’s brutal rule over Tibet.)  July 1, 1997, was when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (U.K.) transferred sovereignty of the economically powerful city-state of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.).  This fulfilled a promise made by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the Chinese dictator Deng Xiaoping in the Sino-British Declaration of 1984.  The U.K.’s 99-year lease on the New Territories, which formed most of the land area of the colony of Hong Kong, was to expire in 1997, and the U.K. and the P.R.C. agreed that in 1997 Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, though they had been ceded to the U.K. in perpetuity by treaty, would be transferred to Chinese sovereignty as well.

This, one would think, had all the makings of a disaster.  Recall, China annexed Tibet in 1959, in the midst of the massacres and famines of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, during which perhaps as many as a quarter-million Tibetans died in a largely engineered famine.  Shortly afterward, thousands of Buddhist temples in Tibet were demolished in the ideological madness of the Cultural Revolution.  (See my blog article on Chinese rule in Tibet.)  All of this, in 1984, was a recent memory.  Why would Thatcher, self-declared global champion of individual economic and political rights, willingly deliver a flourishing peaceful mini-republic into the blood-soaked hands of what was and still is (and there’s really no nice way to put this), measured corpse for corpse, quite easily the most murderous regime in the history of the world?

Well, first of all, the 6 or 7 million Hong Kongers themselves had no say in this.  This was a deal struck by great powers.  But the British extracted an agreement that for fifty years Beijing would, under the “one country, two systems” provision, refrain from imposing political and economic aspects of Chinese socialism in Hong Kong and would allow Hong Kong to continue to enjoy its political and economic “way of life,” including freedom of speech, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, freedom of religion and the press, and a free market.  It would also retain its own currency, the Hong Kong dollar.  There was the niggling little fact that Hong Kong was not democratic and was more or less ruled directly from London through an appointed governor, which was a tad embarrassing because on this front there was far less moral high ground to lord over the Chinese.  But the British scrambled at the last minute and pushed through some democratic reforms in time for democracy to count, under the terms of the handover, as part of the Hong Kong way of life that would stay in place until 2047.

The old colonial flag of Hong Kong was in evidence in this year’s July 1st protests.

Feelings were mixed in 1997, and most of the celebrating was being done by the jingoists that rule from Beijing.  Many non-Chinese fled Hong Kong between 1984 and 1997; there would have been many, many more if London had allowed Hong Kongers the same rights to settle elsewhere in the U.K. as other U.K. citizens enjoyed.  As things unfolded, Hong Kong has indeed been allowed to maintain its free press, its freedom of religion, its free-market economy, and its (newly minted) democratic system (though a version of the free-market economy has spread to other areas of mainland China as well).  Beijing imposes international-style border controls between Hong Kong and the rest of the P.R.C., and there have been no significant impositions of Chinese-style repression in Hong Kong.  Astonishingly, there are even vehement, well-attended protests in Hong Kong on every anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres, though of course you’ll never read about that in newspapers on the mainland.  On paper, Hong Kong has pretty much all of the civil liberties one expects to find in, say, a western European nation.  And China has even resigned itself to the fact that Hong Kong popular culture (like Taiwanese popular culture), with its decadent, western-style films and music, now floods the mainland.  Nor are there significant controls on reading material and broadcasts that cross from Hong Kong to the rest of China.  This would be almost impossible, anyway, and Beijing is reconciled to the fact that it cannot prevent the educated elite of the mainland from being exposed to “dangerous western ideas” like human rights and democracy.  After all, mainland Chinese are still, to an astonishing extent, constrained from ever acting on those ideas.  (That may or may not be changing, but not because of Hong Kong per se.)  When I lived on a university campus in mainland China in 2011, I bought a pirated, re-typeset, paperback-book-style copy of The Economist every week at a newsstand, downloaded electronically via Hong Kong but printed on campus, including all of the rabidly anti-Communist editorials and reports on events such as the arrest of Ai Weiwei that Beijing would prefer its citizens not get too much detail on.  This was clearly tolerated by the authorities, but everyone understood that displaying a “Free Ai Weiwei” banner would not be.)

QE2 in the HKSAR

Despite all this, however, Beijing controls Hong Kong’s borders with the outside world and the flow of people from the mainland into Hong Kong, so in no way can Hong Kong be used as a conduit for people to escape the gigantic prison camp that is the P.R.C.  And it is an open secret that Beijing manages to influence Hong Kong’s political system, by corrupting political parties via entanglements with Hong Kong’s organized crime syndicates—many of them now fully infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party—and by a network of secret police that keeps Hong Kong under as much surveillance as is felt necessary, so that any dissent which looks like it might slop over the border can be acted upon.  When one thinks about it, it would be surprising if this weren’t the case.  More ominously, though, Hong Kong police are increasingly treating protestors and dissidents—especially in the labor movement, which is one area of vulnerability in party rule on the mainland—in a way that is not terribly characteristic of, say, western European nations.

A “flash stencil” of Ai Weiwei projected by a protestor onto the People’s Liberation Army barracks in Beijing

with the words, “Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei?”

Still, this year’s July 1st protests were surprisingly bold.  People were overtly rankled by the fact that the swearing-in ceremony was conducted entirely in Mandarin—Mandarin in a Beijing accent—rather than in the Cantonese which most Hong Kongers of all social classes—along with tens of millions of others across southern China—speak.  (Mandarin and Cantonese are called dialects of Chinese, because they use the same writing system, but in every other respect they are separate languages.)  China’s president, Hu Jintao, who attended the swearing-in, was heckled during his address by a protestor waving a flag and shouting about Tiananmen Square; the poor chap was hustled away by security officers.  Hong Kong’s old colonial flag, with the Union Jack, was flying in all sorts of places, making a clear point that those were the good old days.  And opponents of Chinese rule in Tibet targeted Hu’s appearances with flags, banners, and chants—something that, just a few miles to the north, could earn someone a one-way ticket to a re-education camp.  (That’s not an exaggeration: one’s family might never hear from one again.  Disappearances are a real specter that haunts every Chinese citizen.)

Pro-Tibet protestors in Hong Kong

But there are some topics that were not the focus of any of these protests.  Here is one exception to the British-style freedom of speech guaranteed to Hong Kong: it is illegal in Hong Kong, as it is elsewhere in China, to advocate secession from the P.R.C.  So (to my knowledge) there were no advocates of independence for Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Tibet.  It seems that the Tibetan protestors mentioned above focused their discontent on Chinese misrule in Tibet rather than the fact of Chinese rule.


Because of these controls on free speech, it is hard to ascertain to what extent there is support in Hong Kong for independence from the P.R.C.  (It is important to distinguish between independence from the P.R.C. and independence from China.  The Republic of China on Taiwan, for example, is China, but it is not the P.R.C.  The Chinese Communist Party would like to conflate the concepts of China and People’s Republic of China in order to paint secessionists as anti-Chinese.  Semantics is crucial here.)  There is no visible public Hong Kong separatist movement, but there is a concatenation of shifting websites known as the Hong Konger Front, which would like to see a referendum on independence for Hong Kong—a prerequisite for which would, of course, be a lifting of the ban on advocating independence.  There are a lot of ways that independence could play out: Hong Kong as a sovereign state in free association with China which agrees to some semantic fictions alluding to national unity (which is the type of situation Taiwan is gradually evolving toward), a fully independent but close ally (such as Singapore is), or an uneasy relationship of a weak independent state and an economically and politically aggressive former-overlord big-brother neighbor (similar to the relationship between, say, Russia and Belarus).  Gradual movement toward the first option seems possible, but it would have to happen extremely gradually and on Beijing’s semantic terms.  And it would be, de facto, unilaterally revocable at any point at which Beijing decided Hong Kong’s independence was becoming inconvenient.

Proposed flag for a Republic of Hong Kong

Certainly, Hong Kong would never want to forego having the P.R.C. as a trading partner, but there are few city-states that would be more economically viable than Hong Kong as an independent republic.  Hong Kong is, arguably, the financial capital of the Eastern Hemisphere.  Hong Kong has the seventh-busiest harbor in the world, the ninth-most-heavily-traded currency, the sixth-largest stock exchange in the world, and the sixth-highest G.D.P. per capita (higher than that of the United States).  If Brunei and Singapore can be wildly successful independent states, so can Hong Kong.  No one disputes this.  (So, incidentally, could Hong Kong’s smaller sister city, the casino resort of Macao, which Portugal transferred to P.R.C. sovereignty two years after Hong Kong’s transfer.)

Given the discontent that so many hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers gave full throat to on July 1st, it is hard to imagine that a referendum held in free conditions could favor staying in the P.R.C.  Being in the P.R.C. offers no advantages to the people of Hong Kong other than free trade with the mainland—and free trade with the mainland is something many other independent states enjoy and which it is easy to imagine an independent Hong Kong enjoying as well.  And, truly, even significantly restricted trade with the mainland, in a context of an uneasy and troubled alliance, would still leave Hong Kong enough economic activity to guarantee an extremely wealthy, flourishing state.


Chinese nationalists and the official line of the Chinese Communist Party would have us believe that any divisions or partitions of China are deeply offensive to “Chinese national feeling,” at a very visceral, cultural, deeply historical level.  It is hard to convey just how fanatically focused on this point official Chinese political propaganda tends to be.  Nonetheless, that doesn’t seem to prevent there being a vast mainstream full-independence movement in Taiwan.  (President Hu visited Taipei a couple days after his Hong Kong visit, and was met by throngs of angry protestors there as well.)  Nor has the majority of Singaporeans who are Chinese ever produced the faintest hint of a desire for political unification with the P.R.C., even in an empty symbolic way.  And this is to say nothing of non-Han parts of China (the Han are China’s dominant ethnic group) such as Tibet, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (“East Turkestan”), and Inner Mongolia, where—and this is in a way a separate issue—there are independence movements.  More to the point, it was not in any sense the Chinese majority in Hong Kong—the Han Chinese majority in Hong Kong, not incidentally—who clamored for a return to rule from Beijing.


It could also be pointed out that other Han-dominated parts of China, especially the special economic zones where capitalism has been very successfully introduced, would make perfectly viable independent states.  Guangdong (formerly Canton) province, bordering Hong Kong, comes first to mind, but there are others.


But when we see the international scorn that Beijing is willing to have heaped upon it for its Tibet policy (and for the Tiananmen Square massacre), and when we see the decades of international diplomatic isolation that it endured rather than bend in its territorial claims on Taiwan, and when we see the preoccupation with squelching Uyghur separatism that dominates its relations with powerful neighbors like Pakistan and Russia, then we begin to realize that Beijing would do anything—absolutely anything—necessary to keep Hong Kong part of “China.” They would exterminate every citizen of Hong Kong if they had to.  They would nuke the place if they had to.  I’m not even joking.  That’s how meshuggeneh the official ideology is on the question of territorial integrity.


Hong Kong’s people understand this, too.  That is why, among the open heckling of dictators, amid the Union Jacks and vocal protests on everything from Tiananmen Square to Tibet to Ai Weiwei, there were no picket signs saying “Independence for Hong Kong.”  Hong Kong may be in many ways a free society—they are not a totalitarian society, they only live in the shadow one—but on this one point they have acquired the personality trait of victims of a totalitarian society: they seem to be censoring their own thoughts for ideologically incorrect ideas before they even get around to thinking them.


[Related articles: “China, Tibet, and the Politics of Reincarnation” (March 2012), “The World’s 21 Sexiest Separatists” (April 2012) (featuring profiles of three different pro-Tibet activists), “What Is a Colony? The United Nations’ Definition Needs an Overhaul” (June 2012), “10 Ethnonationalist Causes That Might Disrupt the Olympics” (July 2012).]


[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Prince William Lands in the Middle of a New Cold War over the Falklands

Oh, dear, do we really have to have the Falklands War all over again?

Two months before the thirtieth anniversary of the brief naval conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands, the issue of conflicting territorial claims has arisen again.  The catalyst for the latest chapter in the Falklandic saga is Britain’s decision to station Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, second in line to the throne, in the South Atlantic archipelago colony as part of his military service.  Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, pointed to the fact that William has been photographed in uniform on his deployment, referred to his arrival as a deliberately provocative “militarization” of the Falklands by the British, and compared him to a conquistador.  Coming amidst growing British exploration of oil reserves in the South Atlantic, William’s deployment has become the occasion for a reassertion of Argentina’s claim to the islands they call the Islas Malvinas.

Prince William dressed like a search-and-rescue pilot or,

as Argentina sees it, as a conquistador

However, it is not clear that it was a deliberate provocation.  More likely, no one in the U.K.’s Foreign Office or at Buckingham Palace considers Argentina’s claims anything except a nuisance that can be safely ignored.  For the most part, they are right (and certainly they probably never predicted that William’s antipodean stint would be more controversial than his younger brother Prince Harry’s combat deployment to Afghanistan).  Argentina is nonetheless now planning to bring the Falklands dispute before the United Nations, though Fernández has ruled out her country seeking a military solution.

Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

What is at the root of the dispute?  The Falklands, a remote windswept territory not far from the Antarctic Circle, were uninhabited until the modern period.  The French established the first settlement, Port Louis, in 1764, and two years later the British claimed the islands, unaware that the French were already in there.  In 1767, France sold the Falklands to the Spain, which placed it under their colonial administration based in Buenos Aires, in what later became Argentina.  In 1770, Spanish forces expelled the British settlers from their Falklands settlement at Port Egmont, nearly bringing the two kingdoms to war—this near the end of a long century during which the Spanish and British empires battled each other on various fronts for global naval supremacy.  The settlers were allowed back, but the British pulled out militarily in 1774 as they concentrated their naval strength in preparing for a looming American Revolution.  However, Britain still asserted a claim on the islands—as did the Spanish, when they departed the Falklands in 1811.  In 1820, four years after Argentina’s declaration of independence, a Connecticut-born naval mercenary named David Jewett was swept off course to land on the once-again-uninhabited archipelago and raised the Argentine flag, claiming the Falklands for his employers, the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, as the young fledgling nation governed from Buenos Aires was then known.  After a United States warship destroyed a new Argentine settlement in 1831 and declared the Falklands to be a no-man’s-land, Argentine and British merchants and other settlers gradually moved back and lived side by side in the Falklands until the Argentine settlement was wiped out in an attack by “creole” and Indian underlings who had been armed by American seal-hunters.  By the time the British established the archipelago’s first permanent colony in 1840, which grew and throve, there were no Argentinians left.

Incidentally, the Falklands aren’t the only example of Argentina’s overextended borders.  In 1985, Pope John Paul II had to intervene to settle a territorial dispute between Argentina and Chile over three minuscule Tierra del Fuego islets, Picton, Nueva, and Lennox (Chile got them), and Argentina’s claims to the south do not stop at the Falklands but include also the even more remotely southern South Georgia and South Sandwich archipelagoes (parts of the Falkland Island Dependencies that were eventually made a separate overseas U.K. territory) and even all the way to the South Pole via a sizable triangular slice of the Antarctic pie—in confict with other claims and also in defiance of international agreements that the Antarctic mainland belongs to no nation.

The official Argentine version of its own land and marine territories

The issue of sovereignty over the Falklands lay dormant until Argentina initiated ultimately fruitless U.N.-moderated talks in the 1960s.  In 1982, the neo-Perónist fascist-style military junta that had taken over Argentina whipped up nationalist feeling by invading and claiming not only the Falklands but the even South Georgia and South Sandwich islands as well.  The whole affair ended as anyone could have predicted: the U.K. easily recaptured the islands after a brief war.  There were about 900 casualties, most of them Argentinian.

Interestingly, during and after the war there was some sympathy for Argentina among students and leftists in the U.S. and Europe.  There are probably two reasons for this.  First, the deeply unpopular right-wing Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the U.K. at the time, and it was easy to assume that she must be on the wrong side of any issue—especially in South America, where she was cosy with Chile’s blood-soaked dictator, Augusto Pinochet.  Second, the U.S. was at this time escalating a series of brutal and messy anti-Communist proxy wars in Central America as part of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War version of the Monroe Doctrine.  Doubtless this contributed to the climate in which Argentina challenged the British, and for many American leftists a pro-Argentinian position fit their existing political narrative.  This despite the fact that the Argentine junta was in some ways more right-wing even than Thatcher or Reagan, and despite the fact that the vast majority, if not every man jack, of the Falklands population preferred being part of the U.K.  In the 1980s, Latin Americans had many legitimate grievances against U.S. and western European foreign policy.  But the Falklands issue was not one of them.

Flag of the Falkland Islands

An interesting parallel situation is Gibraltar, a two-and-a-half-square-mile peninsular rock attached to the Spanish mainland, with a town built atop it.  It was captured by the British in 1704 during the War of Spanish Succession and formally ceded to Britain by Spain at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  British sovereignty over this mostly self-governing territory has over the centuries been a thorn in the Spanish side, resulting in several failed military attempts to retake it and, more recently, frequent diplomatic fusses over it as an anachronistic remnant of European internal colonialism.  Its 29,000 residents are a mix of different Mediterranean ethnicities and cultures, speaking a Spanish creole called Llanito alongside the official English.  In 2002, the Spanish and U.K. governments agreed, after long negotiations, to share sovereignty over the territory, pending a local vote on the question.  But in the ensuing referendum, with a voter turnout of 87.9%, more than 98% of Gibraltarians rejected the plan in favor of the status quo.  (Usually, one never sees such election results unless there’s some dictatorship cooking the numbers, but there wasn’t.)  So there the matter stands.  The British government also opposes integrating it more closely into the U.K. (for example, making it an English county like the Isle of Wight, as some Gibraltarians would like), since of course that would only needlessly antagonize Spain, and has also said that independence, should Gibraltarians ever desire it, would require Spain’s consent.  In any case, there is no independence movement to speak of in the colony.

Gibraltar

Spain’s (very Argentina-like) noise-making over Gibraltar puts it on pretty thin ice given its own position on Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish municipalities located on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, which are the last European territorial possessions on the African mainland.  Along with scattered islands off the coast, they are collectively known as the Plazas de Soberanía (literally, Sovereign Territories) and used to be effectively submerged by the surrounding colony of Spanish Morocco, which included the northern tip of what is now Morocco, including Tangier.  In 1956, Spanish Morocco and French Morocco were decolonized simultaneously and merged as today’s Kingdom of Morocco.  But Morocco claims that the deal should have included Ceuta and Melilla and possibly the other islands as well.  Spain points out that the territories were never part of Spanish Morocco per se and—unlike, say, Tangier—have always been Spanish settlements, with even today no significant indigenous Arab populations (though there are small minorities of Berbers and Jews).  Polls consistently show residents of the territories overwhelmingly in favor of remaining part of Spain, and the Spanish government and public on the mainland tends to agree.   Morocco never fails to point out Spain’s hypocrisy in claiming Ceuta and Melilla while also disputing British rule in Gibraltar.

In 2002, Moroccan forces occupied Isla de Perejil, an uninhabited rocky islet between Gibraltar and Morocco which was claimed by both Spain and Morocco.  Within a week, the Spanish military had retaken the island without resistance and held some Moroccan forces prisoner.  Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, successfully mediated the dispute, and today the Isla de Perejil remains one of the few examples of an internationally recognized no-man’s-land. After that, Morocco has had not much appetite to press the issue of the other islands or Ceuta and Melilla.

The flag of Ceuta

But back to the South Atlantic: the Falklands, like Gibraltar, have no interest in independence, since they already feel more than a little vulnerable.  The 3,000 or so Falkland Islanders are overwhelming British in descent.  (There are some Latin American immigrants, mostly Chilean, but no descendants of the original Argentine settlements.)  Falklanders were granted full U.K. citizenship just after the war, and they even enjoy membership in the European Union (though they use their own currency, the Falkland Islands pound).  The latest claims from President Fernández that the British are practicing old-style colonialism in the Falklands is a bit far-fetched.  The British have already said that they would entertain the idea of independence or return to Argentine rule if Falklanders wished it (though, honestly, why in God’s name would they?).  The British government’s generous position on Gibraltar, its relinquishment of Hong Kong to the world’s most brutal dictatorship twelve years ago, and now its grudgingly permitting Scotland—Scotland!—to hold a binding referendum on independence (see my recent post on this) indicate that, almost more than any other country in the world, the U.K., despite its often bloody colonial past, is now deeply unwilling to rule any territory against the will of its people.  The jingoists in Argentina have never come up with an answer to that one, and I doubt they ever will.