It might have been the biggest irony the world has ever seen. That the United Kingdom high court ruled in favor of the United States’ appeal to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US on the same day Washington wrapped up its “Summit for Democracy” has fully exposed the sheer hypocrisy of those Western politicians who had hyped up the “summit”.
The physically feeble Assange faces up to 170 years in prison if he is ultimately extradited to the US and successfully convicted under the US Espionage Act, a World War I-era law. Bad luck has fallen on the WikiLeaks founder, who has since become a fugitive wanted in the US after he published inconvenient truths about official crimes and cover-ups on the Iraq and Afghan wars, including a US military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff, according to a Reuters report.
Nathan Law Kwun-chung must have chuckled when he learned about the jaw-dropping contrast between his and Assange’s fates. Law absconded and became a fugitive wanted by the police for violating Hong Kong’s Public Order Ordinance, a law adopted by the British when they called the shots in Hong Kong, as well as for allegedly violating the National Security Law in effect in Hong Kong by colluding with foreign forces hostile to China after fleeing the city.
Nonetheless, Law might not have felt flattered when he was invited to participate in and have his pre-recorded speech delivered at the virtual “Summit for Democracy” held by Washington. He knew he had an assignment for the “summit” — vilifying China and its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to give “support” to Washington’s China-bashing narratives. And he did not disappoint his host with his Friday speech.
The “Tale of two fugitives”, a drama featuring Law and Assange that has been put on stage for people around the world to view, has placed the sheer hypocrisy of Western democracy under the spotlight: You are our guest of honor when you contribute to our democracy/freedom, or China-bashing, narratives no matter that you are lying and have broken the law; you are our enemy when you are deemed to have rubbed off our “halo of democracy”, no matter that you are telling the truth and working for justice.
Law, the Hong Kong fugitive, has been lionized by politicians in both London and Washington. When the then-US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, visited the UK on July 21 last year, he summoned Law to a meeting. Whatever instructions Pompeo gave Law during their meeting were kept secret. But we knew a month later, when Law wrote on Aug 21 to the then-British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, urging him to impose “targeted Magnitsky sanctions” on HKSAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and other Hong Kong officials as well as central government officials.
“For me, democracy backsliding is not an abstract theory but a personal and painful story,” Law claimed in his speech delivered at the “Summit for Democracy” on Friday, which was no more than a replay of the slanderous words he has been uttering in his campaign to please his foreign patrons by bad-mouthing his own home city and motherland.
The truth is, democracy has advanced by leaps and bounds in Hong Kong since its return to China on July 1, 1997. During the 150-plus years of British rule of Hong Kong, the governors appointed by the British monarch took all the power, serving as the head of both the executive branch and the legislature. The governor also appointed most, if not all, of the members of the legislature.
In contrast, by 2012, or just five years after Hong Kong’s return to China, the electoral system for Hong Kong’s legislature had been expanded to the point whereby 35 of the legislators, or half the total, were elected by popular votes while the rest were elected by electors from trade-based functional constituencies. Hong Kong would have realized 100 percent universal suffrage had the SAR’s path to full democracy not been interrupted by separatists and subversives like Law, whose political organization, Demosisto, had been openly promoting Hong Kong’s independence from China under the guise of “self-determination” until it disbanded after the promulgation of the National Security Law for Hong Kong in June 2020.
Law’s abhorrence of the National Security Law and the subsequent electoral reform for Hong Kong can be explained by the fact that the two measures have effectively deprived him and his peers of any chance to promote their separatist agenda in Hong Kong.
However hard the likes of Law, as well as their foreign patrons, are trying to bad-mouth Hong Kong’s democratic process, they cannot hide the fact that democracy is progressing steadily but surely in Hong Kong in an orderly manner that dovetails with the SAR’s actual situation, as evidenced by the upcoming Legislative Council election, wherein some 4.5 million of the city’s 7.5 million residents are slated to cast their votes.
The author is a current affairs commentator.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.