Xi Jinping Visits A Hong Kong Changed By Covid, Protests To Swear ...

HONG KONG — Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday defended the “one country, two systems” form of governance in Hong Kong in a rare visit to the Chinese territory amid a deepening authoritarian crackdown by Beijing.

Xi was in Hong Kong to swear in its handpicked new leader, John Lee, as the former British colony marks 25 years since its return to Chinese rule. The trip, Xi’s first outside mainland China since January 2020, is widely seen as a victory lap in a once politically raucous city where even the smallest signs of dissent are now being stamped out.

“Having gone through ups and downs, people have learned the hard way that Hong Kong cannot be destabilized and cannot afford to seek chaos,” Xi said, avoiding any direct mention of the large-scale antigovernment protests that captured global attention for much of 2019.

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While the city must be run by “patriots,” Xi said, it must also maintain its unique status and strengths, including as an international financial, shipping and aviation hub. That status has been challenged during the coronavirus pandemic by “zero-Covid” restrictions that have kept Hong Kong and mainland China largely cut off from the world.

Xi said there was no reason to change the “one country, two systems” principle, which was designed to give Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy after the 1997 handover.

Critics say that autonomy, as well as the pre-handover political freedoms that Hong Kong residents were promised they could keep for the first 50 years under Chinese rule, has been gravely undermined under a national security law Beijing imposed in 2020. 

“They will portray Hong Kong as a successful example of ‘one country, two systems,’” Nathan Law, a pro-democracy activist living in self-exile in Britain, said this week. “But for many Hong Kong people, including myself, all we can feel is a deep betrayal and also anger and sadness because we have never felt like Beijing respects our community and the promises they gave to us.”

Hong Kong has undergone seismic change since Xi’s last visit in 2017, when he warned against any challenge to Chinese sovereignty. Two years later, the city was convulsed by months of pro-democracy protests that sometimes turned violent, with some protesters calling for Hong Kong independence.

Beijing responded by imposing the national security law, saying it was necessary to restore order. Since then, almost 200 people have been arrested on charges of subversion, secession, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces, including journalists and many of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy figures. Multiple pro-democracy news outlets have shut down, and the local legislature now lacks any pro-democracy opposition.

The crackdown in Hong Kong has been widely condemned internationally, with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling on Thursday for Hong Kongers’ “promised freedoms to be reinstated.”