2021 was the year Communist China smashed the imagine liberty and democracy in Hong Kong, with only modest opposition from the civilized world.
The flicker of hope kindled by the 2019 protest motion was ruthlessly extinguished as decades-old papers and activist companies were methodically taken apart by Beijing’s puppet government.
The huge 2019 demonstration movement was sparked by Hong Kong’s fear that a law making criminal extradition to China simpler would harm the island’s autonomy, as laid out by the Basic Law established when the U.K. gave Hong Kong to China in 1997.
Pro-democracy protesters march on a street as they participate in a presentation on December 8, 2019 in Hong Kong, China.( Image by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images )The guiding principle of the Basic Law was”one country, two systems”– Hong Kong would have its own legislature, and its people would have flexibilities unknown to the subjects of the routine in Beijing. At the height of the demonstration motion in 2019, pro-democracy activists imagined increasing their autonomy and loosening Beijing’s grip on the Hong Kong federal government. The fifth of their famous”5 Needs”was universal suffrage, which would have permitted the people to vote for all lawmakers and the chief executive, rather of just half the seats in the legislature or LegCo.
In this Wednesday, July. 1, 2020 file photo, protesters against the new nationwide security law gesture with 5 fingers, symbolizing the “Five demands– not one less” on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China from Britain in Hong Kong. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
After stopping working to close down the demonstration motion with cops brutality, the puppet government in Hong Kong stepped aside and let Beijing impose an extremely totalitarian “nationwide security law” on the island, bypassing its legislature and smashing the core tenet of Basic Law.
The law, which entered into effect in June 2020, set the stage for 2021’s crackdown by criminalizing all opposition to the government as sedition and treason. Even the most affordable criticism of human rights violations was unexpectedly deemed a hazard to China’s national security. Critics of the routine were presumed to be “collaborating” with foreign powers and dealt with like opponent spies.
The nationwide security law quickly strangled the demonstration movement, as demonstrators understood the gloves had come off and they would be punished as traitors and subversives for assembling in public. The law was viciously efficient at shutting down student activist groups, the lifeblood of the demonstration movement. University administrations installed political officers and monitored the student body for any indication of dissent.
By the middle of 2021, numerous students had pulled out of Hong Kong universities as their moms and dads made plans to run away abroad to escape the witch hunt. In September, the university system announced plans to by force “inform” students in the magnificences of the nationwide security law at every level, from main schools to college. This amounts forcing the children of Hong Kong to listen to dangers from the Chinese Communist Party for an hour a day throughout their entire academic careers.
The national security law was utilized as a cudgel to smash Hong Kong’s previously dynamic pro-democracy media. Age-old anti-communist publication Apple Daily was required to close down in June. Exceptionally heavy need for its last issue was a last gesture of defiance from freedom-loving Hong Kongers, but the death of Apple Daily also felt like a funeral service for a buddy.
< img src ="https://media.breitbart.com/media/2021/12/AP21175138534118-1024x683.jpg"alt =" A female tries to take a photo of last concern of Apple Daily in front of a newspaper booth where people mark time to purchase the paper at a downtown street in Hong Kong, Thursday, June 24, 2021. Hong Kong's sole staying pro-democracy newspaper has released its last edition. Apple Daily was required to close down Thursday after 5 editors and executives were apprehended and countless dollars in its properties were frozen as part of China's increasing crackdown on dissent in the semi-autonomous city.(AP Photo/Vincent Yu) "width="1024"height="683"/ > A lady tries to take a picture of last concern of Apple Daily in front of a newspaper booth where people queue up to purchase the newspaper at a downtown street in Hong Kong, Thursday, June 24, 2021.(AP Photo/Vincent Yu)Apple Daily creator Jimmy Lai, 74, will most likely invest the rest of his life in jail, along with some of his top executives. The federal government invested 2021 slapping them with one”sedition”charge after another, all the way through the recently in December. The Communists kept beating the corpse of Apple Daily till its moms and dad business, Next Digital, was required to liquidate. The message to other Hong Kongers who might dare to defend flexibility and democracy was clear.
Hong Kong media magnate Jimmy Lai is one of Beijing’s fiercest critics (AFP Anthony WALLACE)
A comparable playbook was followed in December to shut down Stand News, the last of Hong Kong’s major pro-democracy websites. Among the “charges” filed against Stand News under the national security law was that it devoted an act of sedition by reporting on the abuse of protesters accused of sedition.
Similar To Next Digital, the Communist-controlled Hong Kong government stormed the offices of Stand News with numerous law enforcement officer and took both its physical and financial possessions, salting the earth and ensuring the site might never ever rise again.
The national security law was also used as a flamethrower to burn every trace of pro-democracy sentiment from the Hong Kong legislature.
The entire opposition quit LegCo en masse in November 2020, as brand-new laws were passed enabling the client state to expel them without much in the method of due process. These outrages were justified on the premises that pro-democracy lawmakers were committing treason and “undermining” the government by avoiding legislation preferred by Beijing from passing.
An obscene farce of an “election” was held in December 2021, with only loyal pro-Communist “patriots” allowed to run for office. Hongkongers stayed at home in droves, objecting in the only way delegated them. They need to probably brace themselves for another anomaly of the national security law that makes it illegal to avoid voting in the next sham election. There are bills pending in LegCo that would force all Hongkongers to swear public swears of loyalty to Beijing.
The purge of pro-democracy voices from LegCo was accompanied by an assault on unions, culminating in the October break up of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), the city’s largest independent trade union. HKCTU was threatened with prosecution under the national security law due to the fact that its ties to an international trade union apparently made it a “foreign representative” that was colluding with “foreign forces.”
Hong Kong’s largest instructors’ union likewise disbanded in 2021 after the Chinese Communist Celebration identified it subversive for conspiring with student protesters in 2019. A couple of hours after a Communist Party newspaper in China called the 50-year-old Hong Kong Expert Teachers’ Union (HKPTU) a “dangerous tumor” that need to be eliminated of city life, the Hong Kong Education Bureau withdrew its accreditation.
The Chinese Communist Celebration completed its year of horrors in Hong Kong by removing every trace of remembrance for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, an atrocity the program in Beijing is trying to remove from history.
Chinese residents have actually long been forbidden to honor or go over the brutal slaughter of student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, however in self-governing Hong Kong, big candlelight vigils were held every year and striking artworks were developed to make sure the memory of the fallen would sustain.
The vigils were decisively crushed in 2021, initially by utilizing the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to cancel them in the name of public health, and then by using the national security law to maltreat the organizers as subversives. The Tiananmen Massacre Museum was stormed by police in September.
In late December, federal government criminals working under cover of darkness tore down the Pillar of Embarassment, a 26-foot-tall statue of Tiananmen Square victims that has been on display in Hong Kong for over twenty years. Ignoring its Danish developer’s claim of ownership, the statue was unceremoniously tossed into a storage container at the University of Hong Kong.
Other Hong Kong universities quickly did the same and purged their own Tiananmen Square sculptures. International observers mourned the fall of the Pillar of Embarassment as not only the memory-holing of the massacre however likewise the death knell for scholastic freedom in Hong Kong– a chilling caution to students that nowhere on the island was safe for thinking unapproved ideas.
The Chinese Communist Celebration paid little rate for its scorched-earth campaign against liberty and autonomy in Hong Kong. The British federal government grumbled about China’s infractions of the 1997 handover arrangement, stating in December that “the disintegration of liberty in Hong Kong is an affront to liberty and democracy,” but few concrete actions were taken versus the overbearing Chinese government.
“Simply over a year since the intro of the nationwide security law, the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong authorities have used the law and associated institutions versus all opposition, free press and civil society in Hong Kong,” said British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss when rolling out the current grim six-month report on the oppression of Hong Kong.
Chinese officials offhandedly dismissed the report as a hypocritical effort to “develop difficulty in Hong Kong” and “contain China.” This is the language utilized by the Chinese Communist Celebration to deflect every human rights complaint, all the method up to genocide.
As long as foreign money keeps flowing through Hong Kong, as long as Beijing still gets the prestige of hosting the Olympics, Communist injustice will continue. Words can be neglected, just as memories can be removed and statues can be taken apart.