Sunday’s district council elections in Hong Kong are an “early chapter” of a longer push for freedom and democracy among the city’s people against China’s Communist Party, said Steve Mosher, president of the the Population Research Institute, author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order, in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
“This was about electing representatives to the 18 districts in Hong Kong that control local services, sort of like [how] counties in the United States control local services for their people,” explained Mosher. “But it was really a referendum on the last five months of failed leadership by the Hong Kong leader, but more than that … it was a referendum on Xi Jinping and the hard-line Chinese Communist Party that has been trying to squelch, stamp out, [and] eliminate democracy and human rights all over the world, starting in Hong Kong.”
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Mosher continued, “The silent majority came out, 70 percent of the voting-age population actually came out, which is the highest turnout in Hong Kong’s history, and they almost all voted against Carrie Lam, and by extension, the Chinese Communist Party. Winning 17 or 18 district councils is like [when] Reagan defeated Mondale in 1984 when he carried 49 states and Mondale carried his own state of Minnesota. It’s an absolute wipeout.”
“The leading apologist for Beijing was wiped out, Junius Ho, who has stood up and praised the police for putting down the demonstrations,” noted Mosher. “He’s out of office, now, and the leading pro-democracy candidates have all been elected, so it’s just a complete disaster for Beijing, a disaster they weren’t expecting.”
Mosher estimated, “This can only encourage the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong because now they know that they may only be 10,000 or 100,000 young people out in the streets, but they’ve got the backing of millions upon millions of people in Hong Kong, so this is not the closing chapter of the demonstrations. This is one of the early chapters. This is going to continue. The people of Hong Kong will demand democracy. They will demand that the legislative council in Hong Kong — the highest governing body — be totally democratically elected. That was supposed to happen in 2017 under the old agreement between China and Great Britain.”
The push for democratic governance within Hong Kong against totalitarian communism may extend to China, speculated Mosher. “What will that do to the people in China, who so far have been pretty quiet? They’re going to want democracy, too.”
Mansour asked what Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement will do with its representation in Hong Kong’s district councils.
“I think we’ll see the local district councils pass resolutions condemning the actions of the police, for example,” responded Mosher, “repeating the five demands that have been made by the protesters in the last six months, not just the withdrawal of the extradition bill, but the resignation of Carrie Lam. There will be a constant drumbeat coming out of these democratic council meetings of opposition to the current rulers in Hong Kong, and I think that will only mobilize the people further against Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong. This is going to get a lot worse for China before it gets better.”
Mosher added, “Xi Jinping thought he could bully the people of Hong Kong into falling in line, and he’s used to doing that successfully in China, but he’s failed to do it Hong Kong. Who knows? His political position in China, now, may be a little bit wobbly, because his job is to maintain good relations to control America’s relations to China, to manage the barbarians, like Jiang Zemin was able to manage Clinton and manage, to a certain extent, Obama and Bush. Now we’ve got Donald Trump in office, and Xi Jinping has miserably failed to manage that particular barbarian, quote-unquote, and he’s going to be held to account for that.”
Mosher remarked, “[The Chinese Communist Party] thought that because the protests had damaged Hong Kong’s tourism industry [and] caused the Hong Kong stock market to take a nosedive [and] had interfered in general business in Hong Kong for the last few months, that the people of Hong Kong would by now be fed up because [the protests] were affecting the bottom line. This was affecting household incomes. This was leading to people being fired from their jobs, which has happened. Instead, the people of Hong Kong decided that freedom was more important than maybe getting a raise at work. The Hong Kong people voted in favor of freedom and human rights, and they’re willing to take a certain amount of economic pain in return for keeping their liberty, and God bless them for that.”
Mosher concluded with an assessment of China’s procurement of political interest and public relations within America.
“China has always thought that it had at least half of the Senate and at least half of the House of Representatives in its pocket,” stated Mosher. “It had thought that among China-watchers — like myself — it has a lot of friends, people who’ve gone to China on fully-paid junkets [and who] have been paid generous stipends for lecturing and writing and so forth, and it turns out that the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act … was unanimously approved by the House of Representatives. Every Republican [and] every Democrat voted for it. It was approved by the same margin in the Senate. So what happened t all of China’s friends in American democratic circles? They all disappeared.”
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