[A-List] US imperialism: China hawks

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Hawks press Bush on Hong Kong security law
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, December 5 2002

WASHINGTON - An influential group closely tied to hardline hawks in the
Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office is calling on US President
George W Bush to review Hong Kong's special status if the territory approves
proposed national security laws.

The group, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), has advocated a
policy of confrontation with Beijing since it was created in 1997, and its
two co-founders, Weekly Standard editors William Kristol and Robert Kagan,
have called for Washington to pursue a policy of "regime change" in China.

Removal of Hong Kong's status under the 1992 US-Hong Kong Policy Act, a law
that gives the former British colony preferential treatment separate from
the mainland on key matters, including export controls and other trade and
political issues, would be devastating to its future, according to China
specialists here.

Even a formal review to determine whether Hong Kong remains sufficiently
autonomous to warrant its special status under US law risks a huge loss of
confidence. "This is designed to put pressure on the Hong Kong government,"
said Alan Romberg, a retired State Department expert currently with the
Henry L Stimson Center.

"It represents the Hong Kong government's worst scenario," said Mike
Jendrzejczyk, veteran China-watcher at Human Rights Watch.

The group's recommendation to Bush is laid out in a letter that was posted
on its website on November 25 and is signed by 42 other mostly well-known
figures, in addition to Kristol and Kagan. It was co-sponsored by the US
Committee on Hong Kong headed by former US attorney general Dick Thornburgh,
who also signed it. (Click here for the full text of the letter.)

Open letters to the president are a favorite device of PNAC, the latest in a
long line of basically neo-conservative front groups stretching back to the
Committee on the Present Danger, which fought tooth and nail against US
president Jimmy Carter's efforts to pursue detente with the then Soviet
Union in the late 1970s. Until the latest on Hong Kong, it has published
only four presidential letters since it was founded, on Kosovo and Iraq in
1998, and two on the war on terrorism, both of which have anticipated to a
striking degree changes in the Bush administration's policy, particularly in
the Middle East.

In 1999, it also published a statement on Taiwan, signed by many who are now
senior officials in the Bush administration, that urged then president Bill
Clinton to issue a forthright statement that Washington would come to the
aid of Taiwan in the event of an attack by Beijing

Most of the signers of the Hong Kong letter are prominent neo-conservatives,
many of them associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the
American Jewish Committee's Commentary Magazine, and Freedom House, as well
as PNAC, which acts as a front group for mainly neo-conservatives and more
traditional right-wing figures who favor the notion of a "unipolar" world
secured by US military power.

Charter members of PNAC include top officials in the Bush administration,
including Cheney and his top national-security aide, I Lewis Libby; Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top civilian appointees, including Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith;
and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs Peter
Rodman.
Other prominent PNAC alumni in the administration include top National
Security Council staff, such as Elliott Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad; and
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John
Bolton. The president's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and the head of
Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, whose office is based at
AEI, are also active in the group.

While a strong majority of signers of the Hong Kong letter are
neo-conservative or more traditional Republican right-wingers like Cheney
and Rumsfeld, PNAC also recruited a number of individuals considered at the
center or left of the political spectrum to sign the letter.

Among them were Robert Edgar, the head of the National Council of Churches
of Christ; former Democratic congressman Sam Gejdensen, the Clinton
administration's top human-rights official; Yale international-law Professor
Harold Hongju Koh, former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human
rights and labor; HRW founder Robert L Bernstein; former Democratic senator
Paul Simon; the head of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of
Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) labor-union confederation, John Sweeney;
and Harvard China expert Merle Goldman.

The national-security legislation to which PNAC the letter objects refers to
the "Proposals to Implement Article 23 of the Basic Law" released by the
Hong Kong government on September 25. After three months of public
discussion and consultation, the proposals are supposed to be finalized for
formal submission to the Legislative Council (Legco). The Basic Law is Hong
Kong's mini-constitution.

The proposed legislation for Article 23, which was put off for five years
precisely because of its political sensitivity, is supposed to cover crimes
of treason, secession, sedition and subversion against the central
government in Beijing which treats it as a Special Administrative Region
(SAR) under the "one country, two systems" formula agreed on by Britain and
China.

As submitted in September, the proposals have been assailed by human-rights
groups, labor unions, and democracy activists who have argued that they go
too far in restricting fundamental freedoms and in surrendering control over
key areas to Beijing.

Among the provisions that have provoked the most concern are those that
provide police with broad new search powers, prohibit groups in Hong Kong
from supporting organizations proscribed under Chinese law for "endangering
state security", and criminalize as state secrets (with a five-year prison
term) the exposure of information on relations between China and Hong Kong.

The document also defines treason or attempts to overthrow mainland China's
system of government not only in terms of acts of violence but also of
"other serious unlawful means" and applies it to foreigners for their acts
while in Hong Kong, according to Jendrzejczyk.

While some safeguards against abuse of these provisions are built into to
the proposals, HRW and other human-rights groups note Beijing's previous
interference with Hong Kong's judicial system and suggest that the same
could happen under Article 23. Britain and the United States have also
expressed concerns about the proposals, and Bush himself was reported to
have raised some of them in his October 25 meeting with Chinese President
Jiang Zemin.

While acknowledging that the Hong Kong government has taken to heart some of
these concerns in part by crafting language to ensure that international
human-rights standards will remain in force, the State Department said on
November 21 that a number of specific provisions should be clarified or
reviewed. It specified the lack of appropriate oversight in the exercise of
emergency powers; uncertainty about the parameters of "unlawful disclosure"
of state secrets; new restrictions on foreign political organizations in
Hong Kong; and the proposed extension of subversion-related offenses to
permanent residents, whether inside or outside Hong Kong without regard to
their nationality.

"We believe there should be an opportunity for the fullest possible
consultation on the draft legislation; effective consultation and public
confidence requires the early release of the actual language for public
deliberation," the State Department said.

That position was echoed in an op-ed in Tuesday's Financial Times by the
former chief secretary of the Hong Kong civil service, Anson Chan, who
commended the government both for its "valiant attempt" to explain its
proposals and engage concerned groups, although she stressed that these
efforts had "failed to allay public concern".

She noted with sympathy the difficulty of the government's job "in
reconciling the fundamental social, political and legal differences between
Hong Kong and the mainland while at the same time protecting the legitimate
rights of any country to national security and sovereignty".

"We need clear and unambiguous laws, tightly drawn and capable of
withstanding any challenge in our courts," wrote Chan, who is also know as
the "Conscience of Hong Kong".

The PNAC letter, however, suggests that just about any laws in Hong Kong
regarding treason, subversion and sedition against Beijing would represent
an unacceptable threat to Hong Kong's freedoms and autonomy.

"This danger exists even if these laws are narrowly drawn because of the
broader political context in which they will operate," the letter states in
apparent opposition to Chan's views. "Hong Kong's legislature is not fully
democratic, its chief executive is chosen by Beijing, and the independence
of its courts is limited.

"In brief, these new laws will be enforced in an environment in which the
appropriate political and legal checks and balances do not exist, and under
the influence of a regime with a record of using national security laws to
punish advocates of political and religious freedom," the letter states.

The letter then turns to the US-Hong Kong Policy Act under which the
president is "empowered to determine whether Hong Kong is sufficient
autonomous to merit ... privileged treatment".

"With the enactment of the proposed national-security laws, it would be
impossible to credibly maintain that Hong Kong enjoys the high degree of
autonomy and the rights and freedoms it was promised on its reversion to
China," the letter states, adding that Washington should "make clear that
the adoption of restrictive laws would trigger a review of Hong Kong's
special status under the US-Hong Kong Policy Act".

The letter was drafted mainly by Ellen Bork, a PNAC fellow and its main
consultant on China and Hong Kong. Bork worked for longtime Beijing foe
Jesse Helms on the staff of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from
1996-98 and then served as counsel to Martin Lee, chairman of the Hong Kong
Democratic Party.

Like a number of other signers, Bork is considered a member of the so-called
"Blue Team", an informal group of China specialists in Washington who
believe that a US confrontation with Beijing is inevitable and strongly
favor policies and legislation intended to weaken its power and reduce its
reach.

Other signers who generally share Blue Team views are Kristol, Christian
Right leader Gary Bauer, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Max Boot,
Kagan, PNAC executive director Gary Schmitt, and Arthur Waldron and Tom
Donnelly at AEI.

Kristol and Kagan, for example, accused the Bush administration of
practicing "appeasement" in last year's spy-plane crisis and have since
called for Washington to adopt a policy of "regime change" in China.

"These guys grab at every opportunity to stick a finger in China's eye,"
said John Gershman, a China specialist at New York University. "But it seems
pretty disingenuous for them to protest anti-terrorist legislation when
these are the same people who are pushing for the global extension of the
'war on terror'. Why is Hong Kong the issue and not Indonesia or India?"

AEI was particularly heavily represented among the signers. AEI associates
included Nicholas Eberstadt, Hillel Fradkin and Danielle Pletka, as well as
Waldron and Donnelly. PNAC, whose own signers included Kristol, Bork, and
Schmitt, occupies the fifth floor in AEI's building in downtown Washington.
Until three months ago, Donnelly worked as Schmitt's deputy at PNAC.

Many of the other signers are associated with other right-wing think-tanks,
including Freedom House, the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover
Institution in California.

Goldman, who has long campaigned on behalf of human rights in China, said
she signed the letter based on the statement rather than the sponsoring
group. "I am very concerned about the situation in Hong Kong and agree with
the statement, but I wasn't really aware of the make-up of the group," she
said.

Phil Fishman, a senior Asia specialist at the AFL-CIO, said Sweeney's
signature represented serious concern about the fate of independent labor
unions in Hong Kong if the draft proposals take effect. The proposed laws
could be used, for example, to outlaw independent trade unions in Hong Kong,
a concern also reflected in a statement last week by the Brussels-based
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

He said Sweeney conditioned his signing of the letter on its including a
substantial number of other signers from the center and center-left side of
the US political spectrum.

But Gershman, who stressed that there were legitimate grounds for concern
about the future of democracy and human rights in Hong Kong, questioned the
political wisdom of having PNAC sponsor such a letter.

"It's entirely unclear to me why people who have a strong record of
commitment in support of human rights and democracy would choose to ally
themselves with some of the most retrograde and anti-Chinese members of the
foreign-policy establishment," he said. "An alliance like this seems
destined to accomplish the exact opposite of what they intend."