Rewriting History

Here is an example of the level of integrity of the men reigning over the People’s Republic of China.

Thirty years ago, a man stood in front of a column of tanks, halting their hulking passage from Tiananmen Square a day after the bloodshed of June 4.

“Tank man” images are ruthlessly excised from Chinese social media, according to monitoring services.

Now the Chinese government is seeking to exert the same sort of control over how China’s history is seen in the rest of the world.

President Xi Jinping and his henchmen are increasingly restricting access by foreigners to PRC—even academic—databases of the nation’s history (such as it’s allowed to exist) along with actively purging them to control domestic consumption.

Nor is just this relatively passive censorship.  Here’s Glenn Tiffert, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution:

The way to think about the PRC on the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen is that it isn’t just trying to bury a set of inconvenient truths and facts, but is trying to construct a new narrative.

Xi and his men aren’t lying about their nation in a fit of self-delusion, nor is this an attempt simply to keep such knowledge from circling back to the citizenry from outside; Xi and his men are lying in a conscious effort to delude us.

Such men cannot be trusted in any venue.

“Freedom” in Hong Kong

Natasha Khan had a piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal concerning the implications of the People’s Republic of China’s 30 years ago Tiananmen Square bloody crackdown on today’s Hong Kong, especially in light of the PRC’s increasing and increasingly direct control over Hong Kong.  In the course of that piece, Khan asked about the implications of tightening freedoms on Hong Kong’s position as an international finance center.

To which I answer:

The implications of the PRC’s “tightening” of freedoms in Hong Kong are obvious and universal. The “tightening” is not that, it’s a direct attack on those freedoms with a view to converting them from actual freedoms to freedom to do as the PRC and its ruling Communist Party of China require.

Such an attack can only result in the destruction of freedom, and from that, the destruction of a people’s ability to prosper physically and morally.

The proximate impact will be the destruction of free market business in Hong Kong, followed by the departure of foreign businesses from Hong Kong, taking with them their economic activity and their jobs. That will lead to the impoverishment of the Hong Kong people.

There’s an upside, though. It’ll provide a clear, empirically done object lesson of the differences in outcomes between free markets and freedom on the one hand and a centrally controlled economy and freedom to do whatever the men running the Communist Party of China will allow from time to time on the other hand.