Free Hong Kong?

Hong Kong skyline

In college, I subscribed to the idealist school of foreign policy. After I graduated, however, my preparation for a debate on U.S.-Sino relations vis-a-vis Taiwan, made me realize the complexity of international relations, and caused me to change my view. To wit:

[E]ven if China annexed Taiwan tomorrow, reunification would not spell disaster. As various Chinese officials have said, a reunified Taiwan would enjoy even greater autonomy than Hong Kong. In theory, Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. In practice, Hong Kong retains its own legal system, currency and customs. A major international center of finance and trade, it is also an economic dynamo. For these reasons, Taiwan’s reunification would occur more in name than in substance. It would amount to new letterhead on a government memo, not serfdom.

Though he challenges this "one-country-two systems" view, Gerald Baker ends up bolstering it. Here's the crux from his article in the current issue of the Weekly Standard:

The results from ten years of Chinese control have been mixed. Hong Kong is distinctively freer than anywhere else in China. But it feels as though it is on a long leash. The basic civil rights China promised to maintain look robust enough. Freedom of religion is an obvious reality in the territory, attested to by the fact that the chief executive, or governor, Donald Tsang, is a devout Catholic who attends mass daily. The rule of law—essential to Hong Kong's efficiently capitalist way of life—has also been maintained. The government has been successfully challenged in court on a number of matters by Hong Kong's fiercely independent judiciary.

The right of assembly is also a practical reality. In June, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people gathered as they have every year for the last 18 years to denounce China's human rights record.

More important, it was this type of direct democracy that produced perhaps the most significant political event in Hong Kong in the last five years. In 2003, with the former colony suffering heavily from the SARS crisis, and the government trying to create aggressive new security laws, a half million people marched through the streets to demand the right to vote and to protest a bumbling pro-Beijing administration. They forced not only the withdrawal of the legislation but also in the end the removal of the territory's pro-Beijing chief executive.

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No Chinese Left Behind

The United States still retains the world's best universities, but after reading Nick Kristof's non-hysterical report from China, I fear for our current kindergarteners:

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

Here in [Taishan], the students show up at school at about 6:30 a.m. to get extra tutoring before classes start at 7:30. They go home for a lunch break at 11:20 and then are back at school from 2 p.m. until 5. They do homework every night and weekend, and an hour or two of homework each day during their eight-week summer vacation.

The second reason is that China has an enormous cultural respect for education, part of its Confucian legacy, so governments and families alike pour resources into education. Teachers are respected and compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in America. . . .

A third reason is that Chinese believe that those who get the best grades are the hardest workers. In contrast, Americans say in polls that the best students are the ones who are innately the smartest. The upshot is that Chinese kids never have an excuse for mediocrity.

Chinese education has its own problems, including bribes and fees to get into good schools, huge classes of 50 or 60 students, second-rate equipment and lousy universities. But the progress in the last quarter-century is breathtaking.

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