There are disturbing similarities between China’s attack on Hong Kong’s freedoms and the Myanmar military’s power grab.
UCN News reports.
Over the past six months, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has, in effect, carried out a slow-motion coup in Hong Kong. And while it has done so without resorting to military on the streets, unlike in Myanmar, there are parallels between China’s dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy and General Min Aung Hlaing’s overthrow of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Myanmar.
In both Hong Kong and Myanmar, the dramatic and overt takeover has come from a force that already held real power anyway and could have continued to exert authority without drawing much international attention.
In Myanmar, the military wrote the constitution, which gives it direct control of three key ministries — home affairs, border affairs and defense — as well as total control of the armed forces’ budget and a quarter of seats in parliament. In its power sharing with the democratically elected, civilian-led government — with Aung San Suu Kyi as its de facto head — it had the best of all worlds. It controlled the levers of power but let her take the flak from the international community. Why give all that up?
In Hong Kong, similarly, only a tiny minority of pro-independence activists seriously questioned China’s sovereignty over the city, which it assumed in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” framework.
The CCP controlled Hong Kong’s chief executive, had a majority of legislators in its pocket and dominated the city’s media. As a new report due to be published next week by Hong Kong Watch shows, the expansion of so-called “red capital” allowed the CCP’s tentacles to exert dominance over Hong Kong’s economy, turning the city into China’s ATM machine. Yet at the same time, until a year or two ago, Hong Kong retained at least a veneer of autonomy, with some semblance of freedom — however eroded — and with confidence in the rule of law diminishing but not totally disappeared.
