People with a clear mind will notice that whenever the legitimacy of China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong is questioned or challenged, the authorities will almost always immediately proclaim its opposition to Hong Kong independence.
It has two obvious purposes for doing so: First, it wants to divert public attention and avail itself of an opportunity to suppress such challenges; and second, it is a whistle in the dark to boost its own courage.
In 2014, when the “Occupy Central” campaign and the subsequent “Umbrella movement” broke out, the world was paying a lot of attention to those developments.
Then-Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英) — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) representative in the territory — lost no time in announcing his opposition to Hong Kong independence and launched a fierce attack against the idea.
It is widely known that no one was proposing Hong Kong independence during the 79 days of the Occupy Central campaign, but Leung used an academic paper printed in the Hong Kong University Students’ Union’s magazine as evidence.
Given the instability of the world situation at the moment, and the US-China trade war, which is creating great problems om China in terms of its foreign policy and domestic affairs, the CCP — not surprisingly — once again loudly proclaimed its opposition to Hong Kong independence.
This time it blamed the Hong Kong National Party — a small, one-man operation that no one had heard of — and banned it.
A 700-page stack of documents serving as “evidence of the crime,” including dozens of charges, was handed to party founder Andy Chan Ho-tin (陳浩天) by police.
The authorities went to every length, going so as far as to use the Societies Ordinance as the legal foundation for its investigation and control — the kind of treatment that is otherwise afforded criminal syndicates.
If the CCP wants to issue threats, and intimidate and repress the residents of a certain place in a certain country, the best excuse it has is to say that it is opposed to their “campaign for independence” and their “attempt to secede.”
However, the CCP has never stopped to consider why people strive for independence, why they want a revolution, or why they want democracy. The party simply never engages in self-reflection. If it did, it would no longer be the CCP.
Speaking about the pursuit of independence, the party is really the pioneer of independence campaigns. As early as the 1920s, Mao Zedong (毛澤東) proposed independence for Hunan Province.
In the 1930s, the CCP officially established the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi Province, and during the 1940s, underground CCP member Hsieh Hsueh-hung (謝雪紅) was secretly organizing a campaign for Taiwanese independence. Hsieh, who was sent by the CCP to Taiwan, is the grandfather of Taiwanese independence.
The CCP is using its opposition to Hong Kong independence as an excuse to repress Hong Kongers, threatening them because it thinks it is an effective panacea.
This is far-fetched to the point of being ridiculous.
If the lackeys think that this will help them relieve pressure on their masters in Zhongnanhai, they are forgetting the teachings of master Mao: “Wherever there is repression, there will be resistance.”
The world is watching the Hong Kong communists’ every breath and every move, and eventually their quack prescriptions will fail and expose them to the ridicule of the world.
Kot Chun is a retired teacher and author from Hong Kong.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
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