In case anyone had doubts about the Chinese regime's intentions, the new police stationed in Hong Kong since July 1 to enforce security legislation unilaterally passed in Beijing has arrested 71-year-old media mogul Jimmy Lai , accused of collusion with a foreign power, an accusation that may carry life imprisonment.
The rule of law, the division of powers and public liberties no longer existed in the former British colony. Nothing remains of the original idea of two different political systems, one authoritarian but totalitarian, and the other of liberal democracy, capable of coexisting within the same country. All this has been known since this infamous legislation was passed behind the back of the Hong Kong Parliament and in contravention of the basic law of the former colony, but the material evidence of the authoritarian exercise on Hong Kong freedoms was still lacking, and has not been long in coming. .
The legislative elections scheduled for September, in which a severe defeat of the regime's puppet candidates was expected, have been postponed under the excuse of the coronavirus. Twelve of the democratic candidates have already been preemptively annulled. The images of businessman Jimmy Lai detained and handcuffed, together with the entrance and search by hundreds of police officers from the office of his newspaper Apple Daily, illustrate the magnitude and exemplary nature of the disaster. Without tanks or deaths like in Tiananmen in 1989, the Xi Jinping regime is completing the operation to destroy a free and democratic society.
None of this would have been possible without the bleak international landscape of trampled freedoms, from Belarus and Russia to India and Turkey, passing through Poland or Hungary. Nor would it have happened without Donald Trump's complacency with dictators and his transactional vision of international relations, which is counted in commercial benefits for his country but not in the defense of democratic freedoms and values. The series of sanctions now launched by Washington will contribute little to alleviate the dictatorial slab that has fallen on Hong Kongers, although it will undoubtedly serve the electoral rhetoric of the presidential campaign and may even bear fruit in a future commercial peace between Washington and Beijing.
The blow that freedom of expression has just suffered in Hong Kong - as it is suffering in other authoritarian parts of the world - is also a promise of intolerance for all of China, starting with Tibet and Xinjiang, and constitutes a threat to Taiwan, and even for the world's media, who will be able to see their correspondents persecuted there.