On Thursday, the New York Times published a piece by a Regina Ip, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative and executive councils, that argued in favor of the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover of Hong Kong.
“Like it or not, Hong Kong is part of China,” the title of the piece read.
According to the Washington Examiner:
The politician has previously expressed her support for China’s national security law for the city, which criminalizes acts of secession, subversion, collusion with foreign forces, and terrorism and allows such crimes to be punishable by up to life in a Chinese prison. Because of the vagueness of the law, the government has been given ample ability to crack down on dissidents.
Ip, however, dismissed such criticisms.
“To some, the new national security law is especially chilling because it seems simultaneously vague and very severe,” she wrote. “But many laws are vague, constructively so. And this one only seems severe precisely because it fills longstanding loopholes — about subversion, secession, local terrorism, collusion with external forces. One person’s ‘severe’ is someone else’s intended effect.”
The Examiner continues:
Ip said that the idea that Hong Kong’s freedoms are being eroded is simply a myth.
“No amount of outcry, condemnation or sanctions over the Chinese government’s purported encroachment in Hong Kong’s affairs will alter the fact that Hong Kong is part of China and that its destiny is intertwined with the mainland’s,” she wrote.
“What’s more, Beijing isn’t actually encroaching on Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy by taking measures to proscribe subversive activities in the city,” she added. “Bear in mind that back in the late 1970s, China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, put forward the ‘one country, two systems’ formula with a view to bringing Hong Kong, Macau and eventually Taiwan back into the fold. National unity has always been the ultimate objective.”
When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, it was under the pretext that the city’s “high degree of autonomy” from China would remain unchanged for 50 years, Ip said.
Most of those arrested under the law so far appear to have been arrested for doing something other nations might consider within the realm of free speech. But Ip said it’s not appropriate to apply a Western lens to this issue.
“Foreign governments should not benchmark what happens in Hong Kong against standards that prevail in Western countries,” she said.
This is the same publication that apologized for publishing a piece by conservative Senator Tom Cotton in June for writing that he would like to see the military respond to riots occurring throughout cities nationwide, leading to an addition of a long editor’s note saying that the “tone of the essay” was “needlessly harsh” and that it fell short “of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate,” the Examiner notes.
Meanwhile, Ip’s op-ed has nothing of the sort, which comes to show us how loathsome and hypocritical the media truly is.
Senator Cotton, and the people of Hong Kong, are the ones who truly deserve an apology.
