A Profile of Hong Kong by Bruce Herschensohn

New York: Beaufort Books, 2021
180 pp. $9.99 (Kindle)

Bruce Herschensohn, who died last December at the age of eighty-eight, was familiar to a generation of Californians, due, first, to his decades as a political commentator on Los Angeles radio and television; and second, to his 1992 run for the United States Senate, in which he narrowly lost to Barbara Boxer. A devoutly principled and gentle man, Herschensohn insisted on focusing his campaign on ideas instead of ad hominem attacks, which earned him the respect even of those who disagreed with his political views. And there were plenty of those, his opinions being labeled “extreme” even by many of his fellow Republicans. He supported the flat tax, the privatization of Social Security, the sale of all government-owned land, the elimination of the Department of Education, and the abolition of all “affirmative action.”

But his main political interest was foreign policy, particularly relations in Asia, and in this book, he paid a final tribute to his greatest love of all: Hong Kong. He first visited that city in 1960—and kept returning every year. “Once you have visited Hong Kong,” he wrote, “it would never stop visiting you” (28). He adored its beautiful skyline, its stubborn people, and its political liberty—“almost a relaxed form of anarchy,” as he called it in his 1999 book Hong Kong at the Handover. Indeed, he called Hong Kong “the epitome of free enterprise . . . the combination of the dreams of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand.”¹

Hong Kong is less than 450 square miles, smaller than the island of Kauai, Hawaii, but home to some 7.5 million people—among the highest population densities on the planet. It has no natural resources to speak of but has a GDP of $366 billion, a higher average per capita income than the United Kingdom, and the longest life expectancy in the world. The key to its prosperity, of course, is freedom. Governed for nearly a century by the British instead of by the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong enjoyed relative liberty under a government that—although retaining certain illiberal features of British colonial law—was far freer than anything offered on the totalitarian mainland.

Beginning in the 1960s under the governorships of free-market devotees Sir John Cowperthwaite and Sir Philip Haddon-Cave, the city’s economic productivity multiplied by a breathtaking 180 times, making it a larger economy than those of Ireland or Israel, and making its contrast with the PRC one of the world’s clearest demonstrations of the superiority of free markets. With moderate and simple taxes, mild regulations, and no minimum wage, Hong Kong’s prosperity stood as a testament to the power of capitalism. And with its free press and robust tradition of political protest, it helped dramatize the universal value of intellectual freedom as well. It also served as a refuge not only for those fleeing from the PRC, but also for escapees from communist Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and North Korea, who found there a home where they could pursue happiness in safety. “The inhabitants of Hong Kong prove on a daily basis,” writes Herschensohn, “that no one knows better what to do with liberty than those who have lived under an absence of liberty” (67–68).

Yet hovering over Hong Kong’s gorgeous skyscrapers was the ominous deadline of 1997. That was the year the UK’s ninety-nine-year lease of the New Territories was due to expire, and that expiration was the pretext by which Chinese dictator Deng Xiaoping declared in 1982 that the PRC would insist upon the total relinquishment of Hong Kong.

Pretext is the right word, because although the handover of Hong Kong has often been characterized as “returning” the land to its proper possessor, the reality is more complicated. As Herschensohn explains, control over what is called Hong Kong—but actually consists of the island of Hong Kong and the Kowloon Peninsula, together with 370 square miles of Chinese mainland and small adjacent islands called the New Territories—was actually the subject of three separate agreements between Britain and the Chinese Empire in the 19th century. The first, signed in 1841, was called the Convention of Chuenpi. The second, adopted in 1842, was known as the Treaty of Nanking. Both of these ceded control of Hong Kong to the British “in perpetuity,” which, as Herschensohn emphasizes, “mean[s] forever” (6). Only the third document, adopted in 1898, was actually a lease, and it pertained only to the New Territories, ending after ninety-nine years. Yet, Deng used that 1997 deadline as an excuse to demand that the entire district, not just the New Territories, be handed over to his communist nation. The Chuenpi Convention and the Nanking Treaty, he asserted, had been “unequal,” because they were extracted from the emperor under duress after his forces were defeated by the British military, and because the modern Chinese government considered everything the empire did illegitimate. Consequently, Deng announced, “the Government of the People’s Republic of China is not bound by” those two agreements (36).

Set aside the fact that dictatorships have no legitimate right to govern; the fact that the treaty and convention were signed at gunpoint after China’s military defeat is irrelevant. Such things have never been considered grounds for disregarding international agreements; the same could be said of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—by which Mexico surrendered to the United States everything from California to Texas. Nor has the fact that a treaty was signed by an illegitimate government ever been considered grounds for ignoring it; the 1933 German treaty guaranteeing the rights of the Catholic Church was signed by the Nazis but remains in force today. Deng’s argument for shrugging off the permanency of the treaty and the convention, therefore, was essentially communist propaganda.

The lease of the New Territories, however, certainly was coming to a close, and it was unlikely that Hong Kong Island or the Kowloon peninsula could have survived without the New Territories, where nearly half of Hong Kong’s residents live. And in the 1980s, it seemed even less likely that Britain or the United States would invest much political or military effort in ensuring compliance with the treaty or the convention. When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher entered negotiations with Deng in 1982 to renew the lease, she had little leverage. She told the region’s residents “that Great Britain had a ‘moral responsibility’ to Hong Kong,” writes Herschensohn, “and that Great Britain took that responsibility ‘very, very seriously,’” but after two years of discussions, the PRC got virtually everything it wanted: the New Territories, the peninsula, and the island (37).

The two nations issued a “Joint Declaration” promising that Hong Kong’s inhabitants would enjoy the same “rights, freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association,” and so on, after 1997 that they enjoyed under British rule, but these pledges were obviously meaningless (39). Guarantees such as these “are not uncommon in constitutions of communist societies,” notes Herschensohn, “but with or without them, communist societies have simply done those things they wanted to do at the time they wanted to do them” (40). The Joint Declaration also promised to maintain Hong Kong as a “special administrative region,” enjoying a degree of economic autonomy until 2047, under the so-called Basic Law, which inaugurated the PRC slogan, “One Country, Two Systems” (153). Yet, those words were worth little more than the pledges to protect individual rights, and since the handover, the PRC has regularly exercised its power over Hong Kong to diminish the freedoms enjoyed in the region, particularly the rights of free speech and protest.

Hong Kong people (the term the residents themselves prefer) greeted the outcome of the Deng-Thatcher negotiations with a mixture of dismay and defiance—a defiance of sometimes quixotic proportions. After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, they began hosting annual vigils to commemorate the fallen, drawing tens of thousands of participants annually. Even twenty-one years after the handover, in the summer of 2019, protests against a bill to extradite to the mainland any defendant accused of a crime in Hong Kong grew to some 1.7 million people. Yet there was always a sense of self-conscious futility to such disobedience. Perhaps the most telling example in Herschensohn’s account is the “Rice Paddy Babies”—dolls sold in Hong Kong in the 1980s to parody the then-fashionable Cabbage Patch Kids. Each Rice Paddy Baby came with a miniature British passport, begging buyers to help them emigrate to the United Kingdom (47).

Emigration, in fact, was essentially the only hope for Hong Kong people. Yet despite recognizing a “moral responsibility” to them, the British government failed to follow through. One out of ten residents held British National (Overseas) passports, but Parliament soon made it clear that these did not guarantee any “right of abode” in the United Kingdom. Chris Patten, the British governor who presided over Hong Kong after 1992, urged his country to let in refugees, only to provoke a Conservative member of Parliament, John Carlisle, to respond that “Britain should not become a dumping ground for every traveling Chinaman” (98). Such reactions, Patten later observed, “was hardly edifying, and it gave the distinct impression that Britain cared less about its colonial subjects than they deserved.”² Although the UK did ultimately approve entry for some 225,000 escapees, it imposed a complex set of procedures and bureaucratic applications that in practice barred many from even qualifying.

In the face of these and other challenges, Patten decided to transform Hong Kong as much as possible into a constitutional republic during its last five years of effective independence. He lowered the voting age to eighteen, reformed the court system, expanded the number of elected Legislative Council members, and made a point of walking through the city and meeting residents in person. When the PRC, outraged that Patten made political changes without consulting them, condemned his “outlandish, audacious, and criminal behavior,” he replied that he hoped

to make at least some progress in convincing Chinese leaders that this hugely precious community, representing as it does twenty-three percent of Chinese GNP, succeeds not just because of some capitalist equation, but because its way of life helps to sustain its prosperity, as well as its prosperity helping to sustain its way of life. (104–5)

Naturally, Patten was under no illusions that they would be persuaded, but he hoped, as he later said, that by “encourag[ing] the self-confidence of Hong Kong and refus[ing] to chloroform Hong Kong or international opinion about the city’s future,” his reforms might “put [China] on its best behavior” after the handover.³

If it had any such effect, that effect is now waning. In recent years, the PRC has led a series of crackdowns on protestors, adopted a “National Security Law” that allows for arbitrary searches and arrests for vaguely defined crimes such as “collusion with foreign or external forces”; forbade the annual commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre; closed the prominent pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily and arrested its editors; and imposed a screening requirement for anyone running for office, so only officially -approved “patriots” can be elected. The government also began rounding up prominent defenders of freedom—many of them Herschensohn’s personal friends—including seventy-three-year-old Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai and eighty-two-year-old Martin Lee, often called Hong Kong’s “Father of Democracy.” In June, both were convicted of “unauthorized assembly” for participating in a protest march.

Knowing that this was inevitable does not make it less painful, and Herschensohn ends on a note of dismay and foreboding. It is time, he writes, for a U.S. administration to “vastly reduc[e] diplomatic relations with the PRC and give consistent friendship to Hong Kong by introducing U.S. recognition of Hong Kong as a small and strong and independent democracy” (178). But given the recent debacle in Afghanistan, which a weeping President Biden defended by insisting that Americans could not be expected to enforce “policies creat[ed] [in] response to a world as it was 20 years ago,” it is impossible to imagine the present administration having the courage to take such a principled stand.

Herschensohn also recommends the establishment of a “Nations of Liberty Alliance”—an alternative to the United Nations in which membership would be limited to constitutional democracies that protect individual rights; the mere existence of such an organization, he held, would cause the UN to wither away (156).  But undertaking such a project could require American leaders to endorse an unapologetic position that political liberty is morally superior to all forms of tyranny—and precious few politicians in either party can even comprehend, let alone articulate this fact.

Perhaps worst of all is the threat to Taiwan. Communist leaders in China have long labeled Taiwan a “renegade province” despite the fact that it is not and never has been governed by the PRC (149). On the contrary, it is independent in everything but law: a stable society whose people enjoy a high standard of living in a relatively free market and individual freedoms like those once protected in Hong Kong. That is precisely why the mainland regularly makes demonstrations of military force against the Taiwanese and even forbids them from issuing their own passports, having their own telephone area code, or renaming China Airlines (which many incorrectly believe the PRC owns), fearing these things might imply Taiwanese independence.

The PRC also applies the same “One China, Two Systems” slogan to Taiwan that it first adopted for Hong Kong, and there is every reason to believe that, as with Hong Kong, it views that phrase merely as a euphemism for an intention to slowly obliterate the region’s relative liberty. Indeed, the PRC began assembling forces this summer for a planned invasion of Taiwan, and has even constructed a replica of Taiwan’s capitol so its troops can practice an attack.⁴ Given the cravenness of successive U.S. presidents, it seems likely that the PRC will move to seize the island, if not now, at least before 2047, when the promises made in the Hong Kong Joint Declaration expire. That would enable the PRC’s leaders to announce the “reunification” of historical China on the eve of the communist nation’s centennial. Whether determined American leadership might avert such a tragedy is impossible to predict. What is clear is that an upright stand for freedom would at least ensure that the precious gift of liberty is not abandoned like rubbish.

Written in the final days of his life, as Herschensohn learned of the arrests of brave friends, A Profile of Hong Kong was left unfinished, and it ends on a tragic note, with a run-on sentence that reads like a wail of grief. “Many of those who are currently being taken through the streets to Beijing are being sent to be ‘tried’ for ‘crimes’ against Xiao Jinping’s demands,” he wrote,

while in truth those to be tried are the angels of our times as Hong Kong people wanting to retain freedom from birth forward and who have lived in freedom in Hong Kong and who cherish future liberties for all Hong Kong people and for all those who want to join them in being free without fear of freedoms of liberty ever being taken away again. (180)

It is up to us to complete that sentence, and if possible, avert what would certainly be one of the great crimes of this young century.

About Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur is vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute and is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard.

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