I was in Hong Kong in the week leading up to the protests set off by the extradition bill. Cabbies were telling tales of people being disappeared, the new extradition law, and the great faith they had in Trump, given his anti-China rhetoric at the time.
I felt bad, sensing they had some fundamental misunderstanding of his character. A lot of people in the US did too, at the time, but these people were so much more desperate that it seemed even worse to give them false hope of support.
They day after I left, the protests broke out. I couldn't really do anything. So I watched thew news. They got very little help -- some visa support from Britain a year later was probably the most substantive.
And it turned out Trump truly was just a showman. The executive order that was spun to look like some kind of hard response was in actuality just a codified US rubber-stamp on China's goal of absorbing Hong Kong: it basically said Hong Kong was no longer sufficiently autonomous for the US to treat it any different from China, and removed preferential treatment as a result.
We're not going to see the same level of protest again, even now with stricter direct security laws. The people of Hong Kong have learned that the world won't support them, regardless of how vocally some figures make their rhetoric.
China held the cards.
No amount of jawboning by western democracies would have stopped China.
Taking economic steps (like banning China from SWIFT or imposing sanctions like we are doing with Russia now) would have been ineffective and costly.
Military action would have been absurd.
There was no solution to the problem other than to let China do what it wanted with HK.
But that's to be acted upon in cooperation at the international level. Surely the US had enough sway at the time to result in more action than the sternly written letters and an executive order to 'retaliate' by giving China exactly what it wanted -- US officially acceding to the fact that HK has lost its autonomy 30 years earlier than agreed and scheduled.
At home, I'd have started by opening up immigration from Hong Kong quite a bit more than we did. We eventually broadened eligibility for people from Hong Kong, but only made the visas valid until February 2023, which was a year and a few months from when we got around to it under the next president.
And that wasn't enough. People leaving under such a visa would only place targets on their back for their eventual return. We should have made much such visas longer with a path towards permanent citizenship attached.
Beyond that we should put a lot more effort into fighting transnational repression. Not just limited to things like the bounty placed on a US resident by the new HK leadership, but across the board. If you want a list of examples, China features quite heavily on the list of example incidents from the FBI:
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/transnat...
There has been a deterioration of freedom across the globe. In part we owe this to GW Busch and co who prompted different areas of gov to be more aggressive in detecting dissent in order to find extreme dissent, in part we owe this to technology --it's too easy. This has overflowed into other areas such as Covid dissent and sometimes including sociopolitical dissent, etc.
Who is making that claim? What evidence do they cite for their claim?
A: Yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan," and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan," and you will not be punished.
Being an economic powerhouse, China didn't want to mess too much with Hong Kong's winning formula in the past. But with China's explosive growth the past two decades, Hong Kong is less and less important in the grand scheme of things. No reason to give "just another Chinese city" any special treatment.
> Hong Kong's share of China's GDP has been shrinking over the past 25 years. In 2021, Hong Kong's GDP was equivalent to 2.1% of mainland China's, down from 18.4% in 1997 when it reverted to Chinese rule. [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HONGKONG-ANNIVERSARY/klpykr...
