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by LastNevadan
824 days ago
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If you were, say, the President of the United States, during critical points in the transition, what would you have done differently? China held the cards. No amount of jawboning by western democracies would have stopped China. Taking economic steps (like banning China from SWIFT or imposing sanctions like we are doing with Russia now) would have been ineffective and costly. Military action would have been absurd. There was no solution to the problem other than to let China do what it wanted with HK. |
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But that's to be acted upon in cooperation at the international level. Surely the US had enough sway at the time to result in more action than the sternly written letters and an executive order to 'retaliate' by giving China exactly what it wanted -- US officially acceding to the fact that HK has lost its autonomy 30 years earlier than agreed and scheduled.
At home, I'd have started by opening up immigration from Hong Kong quite a bit more than we did. We eventually broadened eligibility for people from Hong Kong, but only made the visas valid until February 2023, which was a year and a few months from when we got around to it under the next president.
And that wasn't enough. People leaving under such a visa would only place targets on their back for their eventual return. We should have made much such visas longer with a path towards permanent citizenship attached.
Beyond that we should put a lot more effort into fighting transnational repression. Not just limited to things like the bounty placed on a US resident by the new HK leadership, but across the board. If you want a list of examples, China features quite heavily on the list of example incidents from the FBI:
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/transnat...