Hong Kong’s democracy protests have been overrun in the headlines by the new, and in some cases deadly, coronavirus now spreading from the Chinese city of Wuhan.
But to wave aside Hong Kong’s massive democracy movement as last year’s news would be a terrible mistake. That movement has been the healthiest and most clarion response of modern times, anywhere on the planet, to the basic ailment long amplifying out of China — which, despite the current acute medical crisis, is not actually a viral disease, but instead the long-running tyranny of China’s communist party.
For Hong Kong, the medical face masks are nothing new. Huge numbers of Hong Kong’s protesters have been wearing them for months, not to ward off illness, but to protect themselves from identification and potential arrest by China’s quisling administration in Hong Kong.
China’s mishandling of its viral outbreak is now provoking questions abroad about the competence of its rulers and the reliability of whatever information they release. As the number of reported infections soars into the thousands, as the death toll enters triple digits and cases appear as far afield as Illinois, it’s clear that China’s authorities have botched this at every step.
First, they sat on the growing signs of an alarming new virus, doing little or nothing. Then they defaulted to blunt coercion, trying to forcefully quarantine more than 50 million people, while failing to provide them with the resources and leadership to fight the disease. Such projects as the high-speed construction of a 1,000-bed hospital in Wuhan for people stricken with the new virus make for impressive drone footage, but do not begin to address the real scale of the threat or the needs of millions of endangered and terrified people.
The core problem is that China, for all its high-tech gloss and high-speed trains, remains saddled with a communist-structured political system. However efficient this might look from afar, it is configured to promote repression, misery and ruinous error. Incentives are grossly skewed to promote the party line, never mind the realities. Inside mainland China, this is too often obscured by propaganda coupled with tight controls over any sign of dissent.
For clarity, turn to the recent scene in Hong Kong, where the British colonial legacy of rights and freedoms is under attack by China, but not yet gone. Calling on America and the rest of the free world to stand with them, Hong Kong’s people have been wielding their waning rights and freedoms via massive protests since last June, to signal a vital warning about China.