China says Taiwan can be just like Hong Kong

China has published its first white paper on Taiwan in more than two decades, offering as a blueprint for unification the “one country, two systems” model that it used to recover Hong Kong a quarter of a century ago. The proposal should make chilling reading for those on the self-ruled democratic island.
The Hong Kong formula has never held much appeal for the Taiwanese, who even in the early years after the 1997 handover were skeptical of the city’s autonomy and saw little incentive to exchange their de facto independence for domination by an authoritarian China. By now, though, “one country, two systems” is a much-diminished brand.
After Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests in 2019, Beijing undertook a comprehensive political rectification project that has erased or severely curtailed many of the freedoms it promised to preserve. Were Taiwan to join the Chinese fold on the same terms, few can doubt that it would be subjected to a similar program.
The white paper addresses the Hong Kong situation. “For a time, Hong Kong faced a period of damaging social unrest caused by anti-China agitators both inside and outside the region,” it says. The Communist Party and Chinese government “made some appropriate improvements, and took a series of measures that addressed both the symptoms and root causes of the unrest.
Order was restored and prosperity returned to Hong Kong. This has laid a solid foundation for the law-based governance of Hong Kong and Macau and the long-term continuation of One Country, Two Systems.”
For an alternative view, we might turn to the independent experts of the United Nations. The UN’s human-rights committee completed a review of Hong Kong’s compliance with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, with its concluding observations published last month.
It’s difficult to overstate just how damning an assessment the UN’s experts delivered. The committee said it was “deeply concerned about the overly broad interpretation of and arbitrary application” of the national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in mid-2020.
The report’s remarkable centerpiece was its call for Hong Kong to repeal the security law and, in the meantime, to refrain from applying it — a step that went beyond even some of the critical submissions it received during the review process.
On topic after topic, the UN experts expressed concern and criticism, in what amounted to a near-blanket condemnation of authorities’ conduct in suppressing dissent since the protests. The committee criticised the use of colonial-era sedition laws to constrict freedom of speech and called for these to be repealed.
Other issues included: excessive use of force by police; the closure of media outlets; censorship of libraries; the use of Covid regulations to prevent peaceful assembly; and the sharp scaling-back of democratic participation.
The Hong Kong government professed itself “completely dismayed” but had little substantive response to the committee’s conclusions, which were supported by meticulously detailed evidence in the submissions from civil society organisations. To take one example, the UN experts expressed concern that “China has labeled entire assemblies as violent because of isolated cases of use of violence by some protesters, and consequently responding to protesters as rioters.”
In its 4,300-word response, the government, without addressing the UN team’s point, twice referred to “rioters” and didn’t use the word protesters or demonstrators.
Should Taiwan care about the white paper? Perhaps. Much of it might be considered bombast directed at a domestic audience; the timing, published in the wake of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island, underscores saber-rattling aimed at the US and its allies. But it is nevertheless a signal of intentions, and serves as a marker of the Communist Party’s sense of the evolving balance of strength across the Taiwan Strait. The tone has shifted significantly since Beijing issued the previous white paper in 2000. Then, the stance was notably more flexible and less assertive. The government acknowledged differences between Taiwan and Hong Kong and was “prepared to apply a looser form” of “one country, two systems” in the island, it said.

—Bloomberg

Matthew Brooker is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance and politics in Asia. A former editor and bureau chief for Bloomberg News and deputy business editor for the South China Morning Post, he is a CFA charterholder