When President Bush meets today with the president of Red China, Jiang Zemin, at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, they are scheduled to have a barbecue lunch. What’s really being roasted on a spit, however, are what remains of the freedoms of Hong Kong. These have eroded steadily since Great Britain surrendered the colony to the Communists. That surrender was billed as as the start of “one country, two systems,” but it unfortunately has been headed in the direction of one country, one system. Beijing picks Hong Kong’s leader. The current office holder is nicknamed “the Handshake” for the moment when Jiang Zemin signaled he was Beijing’s choice by greeting him in the Great Hall of the People.

The latest assault on freedom and democracy in Hong Kong is an effort to implement “Article 23” of Hong Kong’s basic law, which includes vague language against “subversion.” As the chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, Martin Lee, told The New York Sun during a visit to our editorial rooms yesterday, “This has posed an immediate threat to press freedom, religious freedom, and freedom of association.” Mr. Lee says the proposed law could be used, for instance, to throw the Catholic bishop of Hong Kong in jail for maintaining contacts with the underground Catholic church on the Chinese mainland. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote to Mr. Bush this week to note that “religious freedom conditions have deteriorated in the past year” in China. It’s something that the president and his political and policy advisers might ponder not only as part of the struggle for Midwestern Catholic swing voters, but also as a point of bedrock principle — and of American law.

The U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992 declared: “The human rights of the people of Hong Kong are of great importance to the United States and are directly relevant to United States interests in Hong Kong. A fully successful transition in the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong must safeguard human rights in and of themselves. Human rights also serve as a basis for Hong Kong’s continued economic prosperity.” Yet the State Department’s response so far on Article 23 and other Chinese Communist actions in Hong Kong has been invertebrate.

The history of the years since President Bush’s father took office in 1981 as vice president has been of freedom and democracy on the march around the world — in Eastern Europe, in Taiwan, in South Africa, in Latin America, even, thanks to George W. Bush, in Kabul. Hong Kong is an exception to the trend; there, the tide seems to be running in the other direction. President Bush surely has it within his power to signal to his barbecue buddy the value America places on Hong Kong’s remaining freedoms. The longer-term struggle goes beyond that and involves spreading freedom and democracy to mainland China.