“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”- Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974)

Soon America Will Look Like Hong Kong

By de Andréa

Opinion Editorialist for

‘THE BOTTOM LINE’

Posted October 18, 2019

If you would like to write me direct with a question or a comment on this or other articles, you can email me at writedeandrea@hotmail.com

In the middle of the night, pro-Parliamentary Democracy protesters hauled a ten-foot tall statue known as “Lady Liberty” to Vitoria Peak overlooking the once free Chinese Island of Hong Kong as protesters clashed with riot police in the city below. The statue depicts an injured young Chinese woman in goggles and a helmet, holding an umbrella in one hand and a black flag in the other and proclaiming the protesters’ rallying cry, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

The last time I was in Hong Kong it was in the mid 1960’s and was under the Parliamentary Democratic rule of Great Britain. For 150 years Hong Kong was leased from China by the Brits. The Hong Kong harbor between Vitoria Island and Kowloon was speckled with the red sails of Chinese Junks. In some of the holds were Chinese families smuggled out of Red China. They would likely end up in the subhuman conditions of a cardboard shack on the muddy hillsides of Hong Kong’s Suzi Wong district, made famous by the movie of the same name. Even that was better than anything in Communist Red China.

At midnight on July 1, 1997, Hong Kong reverted back to Chinese rule in a ceremony attended by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prince Charles of Wales, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. A few thousand Hong Kongers protested the turnover, which was otherwise celebratory and peaceful.

A little history

In 1839, Britain invaded China to crush opposition to its interference in the country’s economic, social, and political affairs. One of Britain’s first acts of the war was to occupy Hong Kong, a sparsely inhabited island off the coast of southeast China. In 1841, China ceded the island to the British with the signing of the Convention of Chuenpi, and in 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was signed, formally ending the First Opium War.

Britain’s new colony flourished as an East-West trading center and as the commercial gateway and distribution center for southern China. In 1898, Britain was granted an additional 99 years of rule over Hong Kong under the Second Convention of Peking. In September 1984, after years of negotiations, the British and the Chinese signed a formal agreement approving the 1997 turnover of the island in exchange for a Chinese pledge to preserve Hong Kong’s capitalist system as well as its Free Independent Democracy. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong was peaceably handed over to China in a ceremony attended by numerous Chinese, British, and international dignitaries. The chief executive under the new Hong Kong government, Tung Chee Hwa, formulated a policy based on the concept of “one country, two systems,” thus preserving Hong Kong’s role as a principal capitalist democracy in Asia.

Hong Kong today

But the agreement between Beijing and Brittan of a free capitalistic state for 50 years was short lived. Freedom is all the Chinese in Hong Kong have ever known and now they are experiencing for the first time what it means to suddenly be thrust into Communism.

The Hong Kong protesters are now fighting for liberty, but they’re also fighting for their lives as Beijing tightens its grip on the city. Videos of riot police chasing and beating protesters in the streets.

Police had planned to use the hotlines of social media to let members of the public post photos and videos of protest activity, allowing police to gather intelligence on the protesters. After suspending the hotlines, Facebook issued a statement saying “WhatsApp is primarily designed for private messaging and we take action to prevent bulk and automated messaging.”

Twitter has also been willing to push back against the Chinese state’s attempts to use its platform to undermine the protests. In August, Twitter said it had discovered a “significant state-backed information operation” designed to discredit the legitimacy of the pro-democracy protesters and spread disinformation. The company suspended nearly 1,000 accounts it said were being used in a coordinated manner by Beijing. Around the same time, after news reports that China’s official state news agency was promoting tweets attacking the protesters, Twitter announced it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media organizations.

Twitter and Facebook are the exceptions to a disturbing trend of U.S.-based companies bowing down before the Chinese Communist Party. Witness the recent spectacle of the NBA censoring fans on American soil and shutting down questions from reporters asking players for comment on Hong Kong. It wasn’t enough to apologize for Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey’s tweet supporting the protesters. With billions invested in China, the NBA is apparently willing to import Beijing’s authoritarian methods to the United States.

Americans who love liberty—which is now becoming a small majority of us, because of where we fall on the political spectrum—are appalled at this. The People’s Republic of China is an autocratic state under the pitiless rule of the Communist Party of China. It runs the world’s largest concentration-camp network, suppresses religious practice among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, runs a massive organ-harvesting operation among political prisoners and ethnic minorities, and is in the process of creating—with the help of U.S. technology firms—the largest surveillance state in human history.

Contrary to the idiotic blather of the Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, there is no moral equivalence between the United States and China, and almost every American knows it. Most Americans also know that there is no moral difference between the Hong Kong protesters’ struggle for liberty and our own American Revolution. Their cause is so obviously just, so quintessentially American, it has united political figures as disparate as Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Time to Rethink Corporate Welfare

That’s why the behavior of these companies is so jarring. They clearly don’t share the allegiances or principles of the majority of the American people. They are concerned with other things, namely, making billions in China.

One might argue, so what? Companies, especially global companies, are supposed to make money, not play politics. Their only allegiance, as some libertarians like to point out, is to their shareholders.

Okay, fine. If these companies don’t owe allegiance to America and its founding principles, maybe it’s time to rethink what the American people owe them. If Delta airlines is going to affirm PRC territorial claims and adjust its corporate policies to appease the Chinese state, then maybe it shouldn’t receive tax subsidies from state governments and local economic development authorities.

Maybe the monopoly Delta enjoys at its regional hubs in Atlanta, Detroit, and Minneapolis should be up for negotiation. Maybe we should rethink the billions in federal subsidies that go to every major U.S. airline that kowtows to communist China.

Same goes for Apple, and Disney, and all the global firms that do the PRC’s bidding. If Apple’s Tim Cook, who a few years ago publicly defended his decision not to help the FBI’s investigation of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, is going to pull apps Hong Kong protestors use to defy the state, maybe it’s time to stop giving Apple millions in sales tax subsidies every year.

In other words, if these companies don’t owe any allegiance to America, why should America owe allegiance to them? There’s more to the life of a nation than its commerce, and some things really are worth fighting for. The struggle for freedom in Hong Kong is one of them. If these companies can’t bring themselves to cast their lots openly with America and the Chinese people against the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, then we owe them nothing but contempt.

THE BOTTOM LINE: It’s becoming difficult to tell the difference between the Communists in China and the Communists in our own government. A large minority of Americans have become indoctrinated with Socialistic Communist values so that it is almost acceptable to blindly embrace Communism. Are we becoming a bunch of corrupt robots without any moral values or sense of fundamental principles?

Did you know that Hong Kong is more than 12 percent Christian which will go away under Communist rule just as it is going away under the growing Communist rule in the United States. Today there are an estimated 44 percent Christians in the U.S. and shrinking, down from an estimated 85 percent in the 1800’s. The decline began largely in the early 1900’s after the abolition of Americas Free Constitutional Representative Republic and its replacement of a True Democracy which historically has always let to tyranny.

But I am not the only one who saw this coming

Democracy is the ability of a people to elect their own tyrant.-Thomas Jefferson

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. Abraham Lincoln

Hong Kong was a Parliamentary Democracy just as America was a Constitutional Democracy, then in 1913 it became a ‘True Democracy’ now it is rapidly moving toward tyranny.

I guess nothing stays the same…

Think about it.

Thanks for listening my friend. Now go do the right thing, pray and fight for truth and freedom.

- de Andréa

Please pass on this article to everyone on your email list. It may be the only chance for your family and or friends to hear the truth.

The Fine Print

Disclaimer - The writer of this blog is not responsible for the language or advertisements used in links to referenced articles as source materials.

The Bottom Line

Friday, October 18, 2019