Putting the heat on Hong Kong 'traitors'

PAUL LIN

TAIPEI, Taiwan, Nov. 15

While the movie "Lust, Caution" was being shown in theaters in late September in Hong Kong, the topic of Chinese traitors suddenly become hot in the city. A second "traitor heat wave" followed soon after. The former was about a traitor in history while the latter was about Martin Lee, a political leader in modern Hong Kong. Even some Western media reported the incident, which occurred in late October.

This "traitor" incident resulted from an article written by Martin Lee, a legislator and founding chairman of Hong Kong's Democratic Party. The article titled "China's Olympic Opportunity" was published in The Wall Street Journal in mid-October, while Lee was attending a conference in the United States.

In Lee's article, he appealed to U.S. President George W. Bush and other international leaders "to take a broader vision of the possibilities for the Beijing Games," saying they "should press for a significant improvement of basic human rights in my country, including press, assembly and religious freedoms."

Lee voiced disagreement with those who would boycott the Beijing Olympic Games, however. "As a Chinese person, I would encourage backers of these efforts to consider the positive effects Olympic exposure could still have in China," he wrote. He said he hoped "the Games could have a catalytic effect on the domestic and foreign policies of the Chinese government."

Many pro-Beijing political figures and media in Hong Kong responded to the article with furious attacks on Lee, calling him a traitor, while he was still out of the city.

After Lee's return, the attacks gained momentum. Pro-Beijing newspapers, including Hong Kong's best-selling Oriental Daily, Ming Pao and Singtao Daily, simultaneously published articles on their front pages criticizing Lee. Even the largest local English newspaper, the South China Morning Post, harshly commented that Lee's words would intensify Beijing's worries that Hong Kong is being used as a base for foreign countries to interfere with China's domestic affairs.

Apart from the media, the former and the present chairmen of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party's proxy political organization, both rushed into this battle. Tsang Hin-Chi, who represents Hong Kong as a Standing Committee member of the National People's Congress of China, strongly denounced Lee, saying, "Lee doesn't have the blood of a Chinese person; he is extremely crazy and hopeless, which is very deplorable." TV shows joined the attack, and even the sports sector held a campaign to "accuse traitor Lee."

Hong Kong government officials did not stay out of the fray. As a matter of fact, a short time before all this transpired, Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang was forced to apologize for his careless remark that democracy could lead to chaos like China's Cultural Revolution. Now it appears that the real Cultural Revolution style of politics has hit Hong Kong. Of course in reality the Cultural Revolution had nothing to do with democracy; this style of speech is simply the way dictators manipulate their people.

In Chinese President Hu Jintao's speech at the 17th Party Congress, he gave instructions for Party members to firmly oppose foreign powers' interference in the affairs of Hong Kong and Macau. Thus Lee has become a living target of this effort.

If the Chinese government promises foreign countries that it will respect human rights ahead of the Olympic Games, it is not colluding with foreign powers. But if a civilian makes such a request, he or she is treated as a traitor.

While Lee's Democratic Party felt dizzy from the attacks, its allies, Hong Kong's other small political parties, remained clear-minded. For example, The Frontier led by Emily Lau and the League of Social Democrats led by Raymond Wong and Leung Kwok-hung both came out to support Lee. Actually, in the past, when Emily Lau said that the Taiwanese people's freedom of choice should be respected with regard to their own future, she was also branded a "traitor" for a few months.

This is to say that the so-called "traitors" are Hong Kong's determined group of democrats, whereas the "patriots" are supporters of dictatorship and opportunists who unreasonably oppose democracy with nationalism.

The Wall Street Journal later commented that the attacks on the democrats were widely reported in Taiwan, which would further weaken Taiwanese people's confidence in "one country two systems" -- and lead to disappointment for Beijing. In other words, in order to protect Taiwan's democratic freedoms, the Taiwanese people should vote for those who pursue Taiwan's independence -- the "traitors" in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party.

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(Paul Lin is a well-known commentator on politics and an expert on Chinese Communist Party history. He is a former editor whose columns have appeared in major newspapers in the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. This article is translated and edited from the Chinese by UPI Asia Online; the original can be found at www.ncn.org. ©Copyright Paul Lin.)

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