Hong Kong’s Message
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Hundreds of thousands of residents of Hong Kong took to the streets yesterday in a protest march to demand democracy. The event marked the seventh anniversary of Great Britain’s handover of its former colony to Communist China. That handover promised “one country, two systems,” but what has happened since the British left is that freedom and democracy in Hong Kong have declined under Chinese Communist domination. “Beijing people ruling Hong Kong” is the way one hero of the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong, Martin Lee, described it yesterday in the Asian Wall Street Journal.
The Chinese Communists are afraid that the ideas of freedom and democracy might spread from Hong Kong to mainland China, where political freedoms are virtually nonexistent. That is why some of the key democratic leaders in Hong Kong, like Mr. Lee, are banned from mainland China. And why the government-controlled press on the mainland censors news of the drive for democracy in Hong Kong.
A State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said yesterday, “It is up to the people of Hong Kong and the Government of Hong Kong to determine the pace and scope of democratization. It is our long-standing policy to support Hong Kong’s move toward electoral reform and universal suffrage.”
When support for freedom and democracy overseas is debated here in America, one objection often raised is that the foreign ground is less fertile than some idealistic Americans believe. “We can’t want freedom more than they do,”this argument goes. Yesterday’s march was a vibrant demonstration that the people of Hong Kong do want freedom and democracy. It is not a desire imposed by America but one that stems from the people of Hong Kong themselves. The residents of Hong Kong that we have met welcome American support in their struggle. With it, they may achieve their goal of freedom and democracy for Hong Kong. Then the struggle will be to spread those ideas from Hong Kong to mainland China, so that “one country, two systems” becomes “one country, one system” — with the one system being a free and democratic one.
