Beijing May Choke on Bone of Contention: Hong Kong

With the leaders of two generations of dissent now behind bars or in exile, China’s Communist government has thoroughly and systematically neutralized all significant opposition to its rule--at least for eight months.

After launching its recent campaign to instill the world’s most populous land with a mind-your-manners “spiritual civilization” modeled on the draconian Singapore city-state, the Beijing leadership is hoping for domestic calm as it tries to manage a surging economy and a political succession to the leadership of ailing 92-year-old patriarch Deng Xiaoping.

But the government’s recent success in squelching dissent--culminating this week in the sentencing of student leader Wang Dan to 11 years in prison on charges of “subverting the state”--could be very short lived.

On July 1, 1997, when the British territory of Hong Kong returns to Chinese control, the Beijing regime will be confronted with an organized opposition more sophisticated and stronger than it has ever faced. Mainland refugees, Hong Kong democrats, anti-Communists and religious crusaders are all expected to test the limits of Beijing’s pledge to leave Hong Kong alone for the next 50 years.

Even if Beijing does stick to its promise that--under the principle of “one country, two systems”--political freedoms that do not exist in the mainland will be allowed to continue in the territory, Hong Kong could become a militant staging ground for petitions and other classic Chinese forms of dissent.

One of the first skirmishes occurred Friday when the government ordered Wong Chung-ki and Chui Pak-tai, two Hong Kong activists, out of the country after they attempted to petition officials in Beijing meeting on the future of Hong Kong. Two more activists, members of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, were blocked from entering China on Thursday.

“This shows that people are already starting to test the limits,” commented Lo Hoi-sing, a former journalist who was jailed by the mainland government for sheltering leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing. “But I think the limit is already set. After 1997, they will not allow people to demonstrate.”

Meanwhile, China’s harsh treatment of its home-grown dissidents shows little room for tolerance. In the last year, two dissidents--Tiananmen Square student leader Wang Dan, 27, and Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng, 46, who personify the last two generations of democratic dissent in China--have been given long prison terms on dubious charges.

One charge against Wang, for example, was that he took a correspondence course in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

In his reaction to Wang’s trial and sentencing, outgoing Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten summed up the feelings of many when he said: “I recognize the very considerable concern that many people in Hong Kong, and many people around the world, feel about a sentence imposed on a young man for activities which in most places, including Hong Kong, would be entirely legal.”

By the time July 1 rolls around, the result is likely to be a civil rights collision between the Hong Kong free speakers and their new Beijing masters that will create a new class of dissidents, more skilled in the international arena and better connected than those in the mainland.

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Barrister Martin Lee, chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, plans to introduce a resolution before the colony’s elected legislature condemning Wang’s sentencing. “Today it is Wang Dan, tomorrow it is you and me,” Lee said Friday. Lee, a leading member of the elected body that Beijing says it will dissolve and replace with its own handpicked body, has said he expects some Hong Kong activists to be jailed soon after China resumes sovereignty.

His pessimistic view is disputed by many others, including prominent members of the Hong Kong business community, who contend that freedom of expression will be protected by the Basic Law, the constitutional document that is supposed to prevail in Hong Kong after June 30, 1997.

But democracy advocates contend that much depends on how Beijing chooses to define “subversion.” Could it be possible, skeptics ask, that the definition of “subversive activity” will be different in Hong Kong and Beijing?

In an Oct. 16 Wall Street Journal interview, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen was asked if Hong Kong residents will be permitted to continue their annual June 4 commemorations of the 1989 Chinese army crackdown in Tiananmen Square. His response set off alarms.

“In the future,” Qian said, “Hong Kong should not hold those political activities which directly interfere in the affairs of the mainland of China.”