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Hawks press Bush on Hong Kong security
law
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
An influential group closely tied to hardline hawks in
the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office is
calling on US President George W Bush to review Hong
Kong's special status if the territory approves proposed
national security laws.
The group, The Project
for the New American Century (PNAC), has advocated a
policy of confrontation with Beijing since it was
created in 1997, and its two co-founders, Weekly
Standard editors William Kristol and Robert Kagan, have
called for Washington to pursue a policy of "regime
change" in China.
Removal of Hong Kong's status
under the 1992 US-Hong Kong Policy Act, a law that gives
the former British colony preferential treatment
separate from the mainland on key matters, including
export controls and other trade and political issues,
would be devastating to its future, according to China
specialists here.
Even a formal review to
determine whether Hong Kong remains sufficiently
autonomous to warrant its special status under US law
risks a huge loss of confidence. "This is designed to
put pressure on the Hong Kong government," said Alan
Romberg, a retired State Department expert currently
with the Henry L Stimson Center.
"It represents
the Hong Kong government's worst scenario," said Mike
Jendrzejczyk, veteran China-watcher at Human Rights
Watch.
The group's recommendation to Bush is
laid out in a letter that was posted on its website on
November 25 and is signed by 42 other mostly well-known
figures, in addition to Kristol and Kagan. It was
co-sponsored by the US Committee on Hong Kong headed by
former US attorney general Dick Thornburgh, who also
signed it. (Click
here for the full text of the letter.)
Open
letters to the president are a favorite device of PNAC,
the latest in a long line of basically neo-conservative
front groups stretching back to the Committee on the
Present Danger, which fought tooth and nail against US
president Jimmy Carter's efforts to pursue detente with
the then Soviet Union in the late 1970s. Until the
latest on Hong Kong, it has published only four
presidential letters since it was founded, on Kosovo and
Iraq in 1998, and two on the war on terrorism, both of
which have anticipated to a striking degree changes in
the Bush administration's policy, particularly in the
Middle East.
In 1999, it also published a
statement on Taiwan, signed by many who are now senior
officials in the Bush administration, that urged then
president Bill Clinton to issue a forthright statement
that Washington would come to the aid of Taiwan in the
event of an attack by Beijing
Most of the
signers of the Hong Kong letter are prominent
neo-conservatives, many of them associated with the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the American Jewish
Committee's Commentary Magazine, and Freedom House, as
well as PNAC, which acts as a front group for mainly
neo-conservatives and more traditional right-wing
figures who favor the notion of a "unipolar" world
secured by US military power.
Charter members of
PNAC include top officials in the Bush administration,
including Cheney and his top national-security aide, I
Lewis Libby; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his
top civilian appointees, including Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary for Policy
Douglas Feith; and assistant secretary of defense for
international security affairs Peter Rodman.
Other
prominent PNAC alumni in the administration include top
National Security Council staff, such as Elliott Abrams
and Zalmay Khalilzad; and Undersecretary of State for
Arms Control and International Security John Bolton. The
president's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and the
head of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle,
whose office is based at AEI, are also active in the
group.
While a strong majority of signers of the
Hong Kong letter are neo-conservative or more
traditional Republican right-wingers like Cheney and
Rumsfeld, PNAC also recruited a number of individuals
considered at the center or left of the political
spectrum to sign the letter.
Among them were
Robert Edgar, the head of the National Council of
Churches of Christ; former Democratic congressman Sam
Gejdensen, the Clinton administration's top human-rights
official; Yale international-law Professor Harold Hongju
Koh, former assistant secretary of state for democracy,
human rights and labor; HRW founder Robert L Bernstein;
former Democratic senator Paul Simon; the head of the
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AFL-CIO) labor-union confederation, John
Sweeney; and Harvard China expert Merle Goldman.
The national-security legislation to which PNAC
the letter objects refers to the "Proposals to Implement
Article 23 of the Basic Law" released by the Hong Kong
government on September 25. After three months of public
discussion and consultation, the proposals are supposed
to be finalized for formal submission to the Legislative
Council (Legco). The Basic Law is Hong Kong's
mini-constitution.
The proposed legislation for
Article 23, which was put off for five years precisely
because of its political sensitivity, is supposed to
cover crimes of treason, secession, sedition and
subversion against the central government in Beijing
which treats it as a Special Administrative Region (SAR)
under the "one country, two systems" formula agreed on
by Britain and China.
As submitted in September,
the proposals have been assailed by human-rights groups,
labor unions, and democracy activists who have argued
that they go too far in restricting fundamental freedoms
and in surrendering control over key areas to Beijing.
Among the provisions that have provoked the most
concern are those that provide police with broad new
search powers, prohibit groups in Hong Kong from
supporting organizations proscribed under Chinese law
for "endangering state security", and criminalize as
state secrets (with a five-year prison term) the
exposure of information on relations between China and
Hong Kong.
The document also defines treason or
attempts to overthrow mainland China's system of
government not only in terms of acts of violence but
also of "other serious unlawful means" and applies it to
foreigners for their acts while in Hong Kong, according
to Jendrzejczyk.
While some safeguards against
abuse of these provisions are built into to the
proposals, HRW and other human-rights groups note
Beijing's previous interference with Hong Kong's
judicial system and suggest that the same could happen
under Article 23. Britain and the United States have
also expressed concerns about the proposals, and Bush
himself was reported to have raised some of them in his
October 25 meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
While acknowledging that the Hong Kong
government has taken to heart some of these concerns in
part by crafting language to ensure that international
human-rights standards will remain in force, the State
Department said on November 21 that a number of specific
provisions should be clarified or reviewed. It specified
the lack of appropriate oversight in the exercise of
emergency powers; uncertainty about the parameters of
"unlawful disclosure" of state secrets; new restrictions
on foreign political organizations in Hong Kong; and the
proposed extension of subversion-related offenses to
permanent residents, whether inside or outside Hong Kong
without regard to their nationality.
"We believe
there should be an opportunity for the fullest possible
consultation on the draft legislation; effective
consultation and public confidence requires the early
release of the actual language for public deliberation,"
the State Department said.
That position was
echoed in an op-ed in Tuesday's Financial Times by the
former chief secretary of the Hong Kong civil service,
Anson Chan, who commended the government both for its
"valiant attempt" to explain its proposals and engage
concerned groups, although she stressed that these
efforts had "failed to allay public concern".
She noted with sympathy the difficulty of the
government's job "in reconciling the fundamental social,
political and legal differences between Hong Kong and
the mainland while at the same time protecting the
legitimate rights of any country to national security
and sovereignty".
"We need clear and unambiguous
laws, tightly drawn and capable of withstanding any
challenge in our courts," wrote Chan, who is also know
as the "Conscience of Hong Kong".
The PNAC
letter, however, suggests that just about any laws in
Hong Kong regarding treason, subversion and sedition
against Beijing would represent an unacceptable threat
to Hong Kong's freedoms and autonomy.
"This
danger exists even if these laws are narrowly drawn
because of the broader political context in which they
will operate," the letter states in apparent opposition
to Chan's views. "Hong Kong's legislature is not fully
democratic, its chief executive is chosen by Beijing,
and the independence of its courts is limited.
"In brief, these new laws will be enforced in an
environment in which the appropriate political and legal
checks and balances do not exist, and under the
influence of a regime with a record of using national
security laws to punish advocates of political and
religious freedom," the letter states.
The
letter then turns to the US-Hong Kong Policy Act under
which the president is "empowered to determine whether
Hong Kong is sufficient autonomous to merit ...
privileged treatment".
"With the enactment of
the proposed national-security laws, it would be
impossible to credibly maintain that Hong Kong enjoys
the high degree of autonomy and the rights and freedoms
it was promised on its reversion to China," the letter
states, adding that Washington should "make clear that
the adoption of restrictive laws would trigger a review
of Hong Kong's special status under the US-Hong Kong
Policy Act".
The letter was drafted mainly by
Ellen Bork, a PNAC fellow and its main consultant on
China and Hong Kong. Bork worked for longtime Beijing
foe Jesse Helms on the staff of the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations from 1996-98 and then served as
counsel to Martin Lee, chairman of the Hong Kong
Democratic Party.
Like a number of other
signers, Bork is considered a member of the so-called
"Blue Team", an informal group of China specialists in
Washington who believe that a US confrontation with
Beijing is inevitable and strongly favor policies and
legislation intended to weaken its power and reduce its
reach.
Other signers who generally share Blue
Team views are Kristol, Christian Right leader Gary
Bauer, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Max Boot,
Kagan, PNAC executive director Gary Schmitt, and Arthur
Waldron and Tom Donnelly at AEI.
Kristol and
Kagan, for example, accused the Bush administration of
practicing "appeasement" in last year's spy-plane crisis
and have since called for Washington to adopt a policy
of "regime change" in China.
"These guys grab at
every opportunity to stick a finger in China's eye,"
said John Gershman, a China specialist at New York
University. "But it seems pretty disingenuous for them
to protest anti-terrorist legislation when these are the
same people who are pushing for the global extension of
the 'war on terror'. Why is Hong Kong the issue and not
Indonesia or India?"
AEI was particularly
heavily represented among the signers. AEI associates
included Nicholas Eberstadt, Hillel Fradkin and Danielle
Pletka, as well as Waldron and Donnelly. PNAC, whose own
signers included Kristol, Bork, and Schmitt, occupies
the fifth floor in AEI's building in downtown
Washington. Until three months ago, Donnelly worked as
Schmitt's deputy at PNAC.
Many of the other
signers are associated with other right-wing
think-tanks, including Freedom House, the right-wing
Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution in
California.
Goldman, who has long campaigned on
behalf of human rights in China, said she signed the
letter based on the statement rather than the sponsoring
group. "I am very concerned about the situation in Hong
Kong and agree with the statement, but I wasn't really
aware of the make-up of the group," she said.
Phil Fishman, a senior Asia specialist at the
AFL-CIO, said Sweeney's signature represented serious
concern about the fate of independent labor unions in
Hong Kong if the draft proposals take effect. The
proposed laws could be used, for example, to outlaw
independent trade unions in Hong Kong, a concern also
reflected in a statement last week by the Brussels-based
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
(ICFTU).
He said Sweeney conditioned his signing
of the letter on its including a substantial number of
other signers from the center and center-left side of
the US political spectrum.
But Gershman, who
stressed that there were legitimate grounds for concern
about the future of democracy and human rights in Hong
Kong, questioned the political wisdom of having PNAC
sponsor such a letter.
"It's entirely unclear to
me why people who have a strong record of commitment in
support of human rights and democracy would choose to
ally themselves with some of the most retrograde and
anti-Chinese members of the foreign-policy
establishment," he said. "An alliance like this seems
destined to accomplish the exact opposite of what they
intend."
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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