The Bauhinia and the Dragon: the right of peoples to self-determination and the Hong Kong question

Hong Kong’s flag has a red background, like China’s, and out of that bright red emerges a white flower, a bauhinia, with stylised petals that conceal stars, stars like those on the Chinese flag. The flag of Hong Kong, like Hong Kong itself, has something in common with China, but it is not China.

30 August 2019. Twenty-three-year-olds Joshua Wong (founder of the pro-democracy party Demosisto) and Agnes Chow (a member of the same party and former spokesperson of Scholarism, the student activist group that in 2014 launched the Class Boycott that preceded the so-called Umbrella Revolution) are arrested by the police and released on bail a few hours later, albeit with some restrictions on their freedom to move around the hot spots of the protests raging in the city. Three pro-democracy lawmakers are also arrested along with them on “suspicion of obstructing police activities”. By the end of the day, the demonstration planned for the following day, 31 August, has also been called off because of a ban imposed by the police.

This is just one small moment of climax, to be seen within the broader picture of the political and social tensions that have gripped Hong Kong for months, precisely since April 2019, when an amendment was introduced which, if approved by the Legislative Council, would have allowed extradition to China. Citizens did not let it slip by quietly: they soon realised what allowing the Beijing government to extradite a suspect would entail. But to understand why a special administrative region harbours so much distrust towards the central government, we need to take a step back.

1 July 1997. The United Kingdom officially hands over sovereignty of Hong Kong, until then a British colony, to the Chinese government led by the communist leader Deng Xiaoping, who puts forward the theory of “One Country, Two Systems”. This guarantees that Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region, will keep its political institutions and its capitalist market economy for fifty years, that is, until 2047.

Although the agreed deadline is not exactly imminent, the Red Dragon has already begun breathing down Hong Kong’s neck, and certainly not for the first time. As early as 2014, with the Umbrella Revolution, the people of Hong Kong had shown that they were not prepared to calmly accept Beijing’s increasingly heavy political interference in the election of the Chief Executive, who is chosen by a small electoral committee generally close to the Chinese government and then approved by it. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress had decided on an electoral reform that would further narrow the field of candidates for Chief Executive, whose nomination would first have had to go through Beijing.