China

The new episode of Holy Smoke is about the persecution of Christians. That's a familiar concept, even if we don't read much about it in the media. But here's what it means in 2019: The rape, murder and dismemberment of pregnant Christian women in Nigeria by Islamist thugs. The use of face-recognition technology by the Chinese government to monitor, control and, where it deems necessary, eradicate Christian worship by demolishing thousands of churches The evisceration of ancient Christian communities in the lands of the Bible. The relentless torture of Christians in North Korea. The burning of Christian villages by Hindu nationalists in India, and vicious attacks on Christians in Sri Lanka and Burma by Buddhists, egged on by bloodthirsty monks.

Nicola Sturgeon fancies herself as something of an international stateswoman, jetting off to the United States to boost her profile and touring the capitals of Europe in search of allies against Brexit. She is fond, too, of tweeting her commentary on global affairs, in the hope that others may learn from her example so that, one day, they too can lead a country with a £12.6bn deficit that can’t teach its children how to read. A network of de facto embassies has been steadily assembled, nominally to promote trade ties (which the UK Government already does) but in reality to promote Scotland externally as a separate state.

We seem to be building up to a second Tiananmen Square, 30 years after the first. This time the venue is Hong Kong. As then, the Chinese government longs to kill protestors, but it hesitates because it fears global reaction. It therefore matters greatly that the ‘rules-based international order’ strongly assert that breaking the 1984 Sino-British Agreement would put China beyond the pale. No international discussion of Brexit is complete without a reverent invocation of the Good Friday Agreement (which in fact has almost nothing to do with EU membership). The Hong Kong Agreement should command such reverence, and its pledge of ‘One country: two systems’ should be the test of whether China is a law-abiding international partner.

August 11th 2019 may go down as Hong Kong’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ as police officers bludgeoned and bruised protesters who had taken to the streets. A young woman was hit in the eye by a rubber bullet. A man was pinned to the ground by police, pleading for mercy as his bloodied face was pushed into the concrete. A policeman shot pepper balls at youngsters from point blank range. Another officer pushed protesters off escalators. Videos also emerged of police officers disguised as protesters making arrests. And there were reports of triad gangsters left free to roam the city, beating up unsuspecting demonstrators. Hong Kong’s protests started as protests about a single issue, amendments to the city’s extradition law.

What do you call a global hub without an airport? Hong Kong. No other city can lay claim to this impossible status, for no global hub can exist without an airport. The closure of Hong Kong’s airport again today indicates how far the crisis in Hong Kong has gone, and how close one of the world’s greatest cities now is to a one-way ticket. For the fifth successive day, the world’s biggest flash mob has overrun one of the world’s busiest airports. The protesters have been peaceful – much more peaceful than anywhere else in the territory, where they have done their best to provoke the police as well as their fellow citizens. The police have also been more restrained than elsewhere, and haven’t (as yet) used tear gas or batons.

The world is watching Beijing as it watches Hong Kong. There are nervous expectations that troops will be deployed in the region, as they were in Tiananmen Square thirty years ago. Were this to happen, it would be seen as proof that an era of malign Chinese enforcement had begun. Xi Jinping and his colleagues know that if they take drastic action, a new narrative will take hold about China’s draconian instincts. So instead, the Chinese government is deliberately holding back. It helps to understand the philosophy behind this approach. In Daoist tradition, the term ‘wu wei’ translates as ‘inaction’ – the art of simply doing nothing.