Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday said Hong Kong was “in a new stage of transitioning from chaos to order” on a rare visit to the Special Administrative Region (SAR).
July 1, 2022 marked the 25th anniversary of the former British colony’s handover to China and also saw the swearing-in of new Chief Executive John Lee and his government.
Mr. Xi’s visit wasn’t certain until earlier this week, given Beijing’s concerns over the COVID-19 situation in Hong Kong, which has seen around 10,000 deaths this year and reported more than 2,000 cases on Friday. The Chinese mainland, by contrast, follows a strict “zero-COVID” policy and reported only a dozen cases on Friday. The capital Beijing, which reported no cases on Friday, like most Chinese cities requires all residents to undertake a PCR test every three days and continues to maintain strict restrictions on international travel.
Underlining this concern, Mr. Xi chose not to stay in Hong Kong having arrived there on Thursday, instead taking the bullet train back to Shenzhen on the mainland, and returning once again on Friday. The Hong Kong-mainland border, which was closed during his visit, is yet to open more than two years into the pandemic with a daily quota of only a few hundred travellers allowed every day, including with mandatory two weeks’ quarantine.
That Mr. Xi chose to leave the mainland for the first time in more than two years since the outbreak in Wuhan – his last visit abroad was in mid-January to Myanmar a few days before the lockdown of Wuhan – underlined the importance of the anniversary in signalling what Mr. Xi called “a new stage of transitioning from chaos to order”, apparently referring to the 2019 pro-democracy protests.
“Having gone through ups and downs, people have learned the hard way that Hong Kong must not be destabilised and cannot afford any chaos,” he said.
“Enforcing the central authorities’ overall jurisdiction and upholding the SAR’s high degree of autonomy are integral aspects of the same policy, and only by ensuring both can we run the SAR truly well,” he said, adding that Beijing would fully back the new Hong Kong leader, Mr. Lee and the “one country, two systems” model.
A former policeman, Mr. Lee was a strong proponent of the new national security law that listed sweeping crimes for sedition, and saw the disbanding of most of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy opposition parties. Beijing has also overhauled the electoral system and reduced the share of directly elected representatives in the legislature, with the majority now establishment appointees. Critics saw the changes as the most significant alterations to the “one country, two systems” model, under which China also committed to, at the time of the handover, a pathway to universal suffrage.
“Upholding national sovereignty, security and development interests is the paramount principle in the policy. On the basis of this prerequisite, Hong Kong and Macao maintain their capitalist system over the long run and enjoy a high degree of autonomy,” he said. Mr. Xi did acknowledge Hong Kong’s problems, with the economy reeling from two years of isolation and this year’s COVID-19 wave, and “stressed the need to help Hong Kong young people overcome difficulties in education, employment, business start-up, and home-buying”.
Mr. Xi earlier this week visited Wuhan on his way to Hong Kong and defended the country’s continuing zero-COVID policy. “If China had adopted the ‘herd immunity’ policy or a hands-off approach, given its large population, the country would have faced unimaginable consequences,” he said. “Even if there are some temporary impacts on the economy, we will not put people’s lives and health in harm’s way, and we must protect the elderly and the children in particular.”
