US President Donald Trump’s latest declaration on the Hong Kong protests seeks to reconcile his earlier conflicting statements. In June, he said that Hong Kong, as a part of China, is an internal matter for those parties to resolve.
In August, he recognized that Hong Kong is also an international human rights concern and called on Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to “do the right thing,” saying that Beijing’s handling of it would affect progress on trade talks if China “works humanely with Hong Kong first.”
Last week, both houses of the US Congress — the US Senate unanimously and the US House of Representatives with all but one vote — approved the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which would impose sanctions against officials who infringe on human rights in Hong Kong, and could remove the territory’s special trade and financial status.
Predictably, Beijing strongly condemned Washington’s latest “interference in China’s internal affairs” and encouragement of political turmoil. However, since Chinese spokespeople have been alleging a US “black hand” virtually from the outset of the protests, the heavy-handed tactics have finally provoked a serious Western response. The US Congress might well have reasoned that if the US will be accused of intervening anyway, it might as well do some good in the meantime.
On Friday last week, Trump was asked whether he would sign or veto the legislation [Trump on Wednesday signed the bill into law]. His answer reflected the competing considerations he suggested he is weighing: human rights and support for democracy versus the need to negotiate an acceptable trade agreement with China.
“We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine. He’s an incredible guy, but I’d like to see them work it out. But I have to stand with Hong Kong. I stand with freedom … but we are also in the process of making the largest trade deal in history,” Trump said.
It suggested a possible reversal of his earlier position that the Hong Kong outcome took priority over a trade deal. Now, he was cautioning that the US position on Hong Kong should not be allowed to interfere with a good trade outcome.
However, Trump hinted at a slightly different line of reasoning when he took credit for the Chinese government’s restraint so far in avoiding a Tiananmen Square-like massacre: “The only reason he’s not going in is because I’m saying it’s going to affect our trade deal.”
In Trump’s mind, and possibly Xi’s, China might be seen as already having done its part on Hong Kong to facilitate the trade talks. Now, that argument might go, Washington must be prudent by not exacerbating the situation, which the act could do by encouraging the protesters to persevere.
Yet, the absence of machine-gun fire and tanks in the streets is a very low hurdle to pass in judging official restraint. Police beatings with batons and metal rods; stomping downed protesters’ heads; shootings with beanbags and rubber bullets; spraying with toxic gases; and choke holds, roughing up and bundling young people into police vans hardly qualify as “humane” treatment.
The number of students loaded into trains and vans and incarcerated in unknown locations is now in the thousands, approaching the death and casualty figures for the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989. There have been reports of torture and “suicides.”
That the Chinese Communist Party’s brutality has not been even worse and more public hardly constitutes “doing the right thing” as Trump requested of Xi. Concessions to the student demands for the release of detainees, police accountability and the guarantee of universal suffrage would have calmed the situation and would have been consistent with Beijing’s original “one country, two systems” promise. Xi’s failure to ensure that result provides more than enough reason to justify Trump signing the act.
If China were to respond by unleashing its army against Hong Kong, Trump should make clear that would immediately trigger the punitive actions provided in the act and would trigger severe international repercussions against China across the board. Along with the concentration camps in East Turkestan [Xinjiang], it would make communist China the pariah regime it should have been after the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Far from weakening the US position in the trade talks, where China needs a deal more than the US, it would demonstrate the US’ indomitable will that Beijing has not previously encountered and which it must now accept in all its dealings.
Trump has several options regarding the legislation, ranging from pro-Hong Kong to pro-Beijing. The course of action he chooses would have broad implications for the future of US-China relations, and for the security and confidence of Taiwan, which Beijing also claims as part of China.
For Xi and China, it is an existential political moment, equal to the economic challenge Trump has created with his demand for internal structural reform and trade reciprocity. If Trump does not shrink from pressing the US’ and the West’s advantage in both confrontations, China will finally be on the way to true integration into former US president Richard Nixon’s “family of nations” and Trump will find himself presiding over a historic moment every bit as monumental and positive for the world as former US president Ronald Reagan’s success in ending the Cold War.
If Trump joins with a virtually unanimous Congress in standing with Hong Kong, it will send a powerful message to the US’ adversaries that domestic political rancor will not tie its hands in the global struggle between freedom and tyranny.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the advisory committee of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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