Hong Kong: Traditionally a destination for dissidents

Some would consider this as youthful naivete or sheer ignorance in view of the fact that Hong Kong’s own freedom of speech has been eroded progressively since 1997, after its handover to China.

Yet he is right to do so. For over a century, especially in the past 60 years, this city has built up its reputation as a refuge for Chinese dissidents escaping political persecution. To those vulnerable to purges by the Chinese authorities, the city has been their biblical Samaritan.

Now Snowden – an American who leaked surveillance activities of the National Security Agency and is wanted by the United States government – has joined the ranks of a long list of political dissidents to use this refuge.

What Snowden has observed is a political tradition that is firmly anchored in the 170-year history of the tiny city on the periphery of China, a tradition that its people are proud of and which distinguishes Hong Kong from the rest of China.

Ever since the rocky island became a British colony in 1842, it has acted as a refuge for Chinese escaping political persecution on the mainland. The first batch of political refugees came in the early 1860s, when the Taiping Rebellion, the first attempt to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, failed.

The late Professor Luo Ergang (1901-1997) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, an expert on the history of the Taiping Rebellion, identified a number of key rebel figures who had made their way to Hong Kong. Among them were parents of future prominent political leaders.

For example, the father of Eugene Chen (1878-1944) was one of them. He fled to Hong Kong first, then to Central America. Eugene Chen later became China’s foreign minister, and successfully negotiated the return in 1926 of two British concessions in the cities of Hankow and Jiujiang, of Hubei and Jiangxi Province respectively.

Liao Chengzhi (1908-1983), a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who kicked off the Sino-British negotiation to reclaim Hong Kong in 1982, was the descendant of a Taiping refugee who settled in the British colony and raised his family there.

In 1898, reformists tried to introduce constitutional reform to the ailing Qing Dynasty in what is known as the Hundred Days Reform. When it failed, the key leader, Kang Youwei, fled to Hong Kong, and continued his advocacy there.

From 1900, revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen and his followers took refuge in Hong Kong. The British colony became the base of Sun’s revolutionary activities against the Qing Dynasty. This tradition continued after the successful 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty.

From 1945 to 1949, there was a massive exodus of intellectuals fleeing the civil war in China. It is said that more than 300 scholars in various fields from all over China took refuge in Hong Kong. They brought with them unprecedented cultural prosperity to the erstwhile culturally barren British colony. The present-day Chinese University of Hong Kong has its roots dating back to that time.

After 1949, when the CCP took power, incessant political movements in China led to wave after wave of political refugees flocking to Hong Kong. In particular, after the 1989 Tiananmen incident, the city became an important exit point for political dissidents escaping the mainland.

This century-long tradition has nurtured a political culture in Hong Kong that is more tolerant and pluralistic than anywhere else in China. It has also developed in its people a defiant spirit and a tenacity for upholding political justice.

Since the Tiananmen crackdown, this tradition, which had existed subtly, has taken on a more visible form. The city impressed the world in 1989 by holding massive candlelight vigils involving hundreds of thousands of people to mark the tragedy. The annual candlelight vigil has taken place uninterruptedly for 24 years and has become an integral part of the local political culture.

When the former British colony became China’s special administrative region in 1997, people worried that this tradition of serving as a refuge for political dissidents might be compromised, as the CCP considered it subversive.

In 2003, at the first sign of a CCP attempt to curtail this tradition by enacting a national security bill, half a million people took to the streets to protest against it. Beijing was forced to shelve it.

It must be this special characteristic of the Hong Kongers that impressed Snowden so much that he is allowing his fate to be determined by them.

And the Hong Kongers have not let him down. Many local people, regardless of their political inclination, took to the streets last Saturday demanding protection for him. This is the true protection he can get, for no government can go against the unanimous wish of its own people.