Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation director Marion Smith said in a Thursday interview with the Daily Caller that China’s new Hong Kong national security law would be the “death of Hong Kong as we know it.”
The legislation, which passed in China’s National People’s Congress on Thursday, will override Hong Kong’s Basic Law and allow Chinese state security agencies to directly exercise control over matters of local security. This, in effect, would give mainland China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) greater power in cracking down on the Hong Kong protests that have gripped the city for over a year.
Police fire tear gas to clear pro-democracy protesters during a demonstration in Hong Kong (Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)
After Hong Kong was handed over to China by the United Kingdom in 1997, the two countries signed an agreement in which China promised to uphold the principle of “one country, two systems.”
This principle provided Hong Kong with greater autonomy and control over its internal affairs, but more importantly preserved its free-market system and rule of law. As a result, Hong Kong’s autonomy allowed the city to emerge as a global financial center, which positively benefited its trade relations with foreign countries like the United States. (RELATED: Pompeo Declares Hong Kong ‘No Longer Autonomous From China’ After Communist Crackdown)
Smith commented that Hong Kong’s freedoms are viewed by China as an “existential threat” to the CCP’s grip on power, and that the goal of the national security law is to ultimately transform Hong Kong from “a bastion of free enterprise and prosperity, to a captive city controlled by the CCP.”
“Hong Kong doesn’t want to be absorbed into the same system that massacres protestors,” he said, referring to the 1989 massacre of student protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Smith also called the CCP “the greatest intellectual and material threat to our way of life,” adding that CCP suppression and censorship is a testament to “just how important truth and memory is to justice and freedom today.”
In response to this threat, Smith recommended that the United States act quickly in order to defend the values of the free world. He noted that “Beijing and the CCP are an anti-civilizational force” and their expansionist ambitions have the potential to destroy free civilization itself.
“Our fellow citizens have watched with horror as the CCP has stepped up its campaign to conquer #HongKong, thrown millions of Muslim #Uyghurs into modern-day concentration camps…No wonder Americans want to decouple our country from China and hold that regime accountable.”
— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) May 28, 2020
Some of his policy recommendations include accepting political refugees from Hong Kong, decoupling the American and Chinese economies, banning Confucius Institutes from American universities and strengthening ties with Taiwan.
Smith concluded by reiterating how consequential China’s takeover of Hong Kong is, and that the move has allowed the world to see the CCP for what it really is. “We made a mistake in trusting the CCP,” he said.