This past week, tens of thousands of students in Hong Kong took to the streets to claim their fundamental right to suffrage. They were met with tear gas and billy clubs, as well as the passive assent of parts of the international community — including institutions like Brown — that benefit from investments in China. As China prepares to take broader control over governance of Hong Kong in 2017, it has shown its unwillingness to compromise with the city’s culture of democratic and liberal traditions, a violation of its obligations under Hong Kong Basic Law. As long as we, as a school, continue to invest in the regime in Beijing, we share responsibility for the further collapse of free institutions in Hong Kong. But with no prospects for democratic reform forthcoming, we demand that Brown divest itself of all investments benefiting the government of China. The students of the United States must refuse to play realpolitik with the lives and freedoms of a people demanding democratic self-determination.
Since the opening of China to direct Western investment in the 1970s, academic institutions within the United States have agreed to abide by a policy of appeasement and cooperation with the Communist Party leadership. This exchange has brought tangible benefits to both countries, but it has also come at the expense of a willingness among politicians and students to challenge the conditions the Communist Party imposes on its citizens. We should not be content with a policy that promises a dim light at the end of what could be a century-long tunnel, during which time more than a billion people must live without basic freedoms, like access to the international community. After all, the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong is intimately linked to the decades of democratic agitation on the mainland.
We must not accept the Communist Party’s narrative, expressed famously in the 1993 Bangkok Declaration, that an individual’s civil and political rights — in particular its right to economic development — must be balanced against a country’s sovereignty. The idea that such balance is needed affirms conservatives’ struggle against collective bargaining rights and a livable minimum wage. We must always reexamine what conditions people are being told to endure for the sake of national power and prestige. In the case of China, we are participating in a system that jails thousands of dissidents every year, and shrouds a billion more in a ‘Great Firewall’ designed to keep people in and information out. One of the world’s most repressive countries acts with impunity, and still nobody on our campuses or in our elected bodies is listening as students on the street shout, “They cannot kill us all.”
The goal of divestment is to pressure the Chinese government socially, economically and politically to reform its proposal for the election of Hong Kong’s leaders. We must ensure that China honors its promise enshrined in Hong Kong Basic Law — the foundational code of the current relationship between the mainland and Hong Kong — that the people of Hong Kong be able to exercise universal suffrage to select a leader from a group of candidates nominated by a committee that is “broadly representative” of the city at large. As it stands, only candidates approved by the 1,200-person Election Committee, many of whom report directly to Beijing, will be able to stand for election. This system is a farce designed to limit the expression of dissent. As long as China is able to flout its obligations to the people of Hong Kong, there is no hope for reform on the mainland. We must use divestment to remind the Chinese leadership that we will not be silent just because our political leadership has decided on appeasement over confrontation. As long as there are tens and hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets of Hong Kong, and millions more huddled in dormitories and chat rooms in China, we must stand in solidarity, as a university and as citizens of the world.
The people of Hong Kong deserve suffrage. If Brown were to condition its investment in China on this basic premise — that citizens of Hong Kong be able to elect a city leader — it would be a resounding and influential endorsement of today’s protesters and their long-term goals. Anything less would be a ratification of the status quo. Last week marked 25 years since Americans and people all over the world watched as the Chinese government massacred nearly 1,000 students in Tiananmen Square and around the country. Without a serious international movement that can rally the necessary political and social leaders to decry this kind of bloodshed, the future for political dissidents in China, as well as in Hong Kong, appears bleak. Many Americans identify with the symbol of the Tank Man but forget that those tanks will return: to Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai or anywhere in China where state power is threatened. To doubt this threat is to ignore history and gamble on the fate of Hong Kong.
Divestment from a country as massive and integrated into the global economy as China would certainly prove technically difficult for an institution like Brown. Do we divest only state-run or state-affiliated companies? Those companies that work intimately with the state? Or any organization based or operated in China? These are complicated questions, with significant resonance for how we approach other authoritarian countries around the world, but that does not mean we cannot or should not answer them. We believe that if Brown tackles these issues with its conscience, it will be impossible to avoid doing what is right. Divestment crippled a racist regime in South Africa, and now we must remind the Communist Party that in today’s world, oppression will only lead to isolation.
We must not commit ourselves to participate in a system that we find abhorrent. We should never compromise our most basic values for a short-term pay-off. The people of Hong Kong are speaking, and we must echo their voices until they are loud enough to silence tyranny.
Brown University Friends of Hong Kong is drafting a petition. Email bufohk@gmail.com to respond or get involved.
ADVERTISEMENT
