For a fable about the fate of freedom in Hong Kong, it’s hard to top the story of the seditious sheep books.

“What is so frightening and subversive about a children’s book series featuring a flock of sheep?” an excellent Washington Post editorial on the topic asked. It is a good question for the Chinese Communist Party, whose hold on power in Hong Kong and in the rest of China is so brittle that even picture books aimed at children are considered a threat.

If you did not catch the Post editorial, you might have missed the news of this situation. Five authors of the books — Lorie Lai Man-ling, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan, and Fong Tsz-ho — were sentenced on September 10 by Judge Kwok Wai-Kin to 19 months in prison. The charge was “conspiracy to print, publish, distribute, display and/or reproduce seditious publications,” Voice of America reported.

The criminal accusation rested on the theory that the wolves and sheep depicted in the books were allegorical representations of the Chinese Communists and Hong Kong. The aptness of the depiction was duly demonstrated by the communist tyranny’s reaction to it.

If President Biden were serious about bringing freedom to China or even about containing communist influence in Asia or globally, he’d be giving a prime-time speech about the sheep.

“This is the difference between communism and freedom,” a bolder, less-sheepish Mr. Biden might explain to the world. “In the communist system, if you write a book that the government doesn’t like, you get thrown in prison. In America, we have lively democratic debates about what books should be assigned in school. Here in America, though, unlike in Communist China, we aren’t throwing children’s book authors in jail.”

Hong Kong Watch, a British nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement that the conviction “demonstrates how far freedom of expression has declined in Hong Kong.” The group said a lack of international reaction “will only encourage the further targeting of authors, journalists, trade unionists, and ordinary individuals who are deemed a threat to Xi Jinping’s authoritarian state.”

That this all is unfolding amid the mourning of Elizabeth II is a particularly sad irony. It was Margaret Thatcher who signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 for the “Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” When the Union Jack was lowered over Hong Kong in 1997 and replaced with the Chinese flag, Elizabeth pronounced that Britain was “proud of the rights and freedoms which Hong Kong people enjoy.”

Now, as the seditious sheep-story authors can attest from their prison cells, the formulation about enjoying freedom would be more accurately rendered in the past tense.

In dismantling British “colonialism” in Hong Kong, Thatcher and Elizabeth II effectively allowed Hong Kong to become a Chinese Communist colony. There was no decolonialization. There was just a swapping of the identity of the colonial authority, from a British one to a Chinese Communist one.

I’m not blaming the late queen for the jailed children’s book authors. The guilt for that abuse of freedom rightfully belongs to the Chinese Communist dictators. 

There were those, though, who saw it coming and who warned at the time, back in the 1980s and 1990s, that the United Kingdom was striking a bad deal with Beijing. Those foresighted critics said then that the British government should allow in anyone who wished to emigrate from Hong Kong to London, as an escape from the constraints of communist rule.

Prince Charles, now King Charles III, was in Hong Kong for the handover ceremony in 1997. Let the experience be a reminder to the new king and to any other ruler tempted to strike a bargain with the communists: There is no point to it. The communists can’t be trusted. It’s like a sheep trying to negotiate with a wolf. The children’s book authors languishing in prison understand that, now, probably better than either the British monarchs or President Biden.