Why Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks he can afford to take risks with Hong Kong now

Why Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks he can afford to take risks with Hong Kong now
In episode 483 of #CutTheClutter, Shekhar Gupta explains why China decided to choose this moment to go ahead with the national security laws for Hong Kong.
FATIMA KHAN 31 May, 2020 9:43 am IST

 President of China, Xi Jinping | Yorgos Karahalis | Bloomberg
File photo | China's Xi Jinping | Yorgos Karahalis/Bloomberg
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New Delhi: Xi Jinping’s controversial move allowing Beijing to draft the national security laws for Hong Kong, despite withdrawing from it last year, shows that the Chinese president was only buying himself time and preparing for another opportunity.

 China’s Parliament on Thursday passed a new legislation for Hong Kong, that will for the first time empower Beijing to draft national security laws for the Special Administrative Region (SAR). It is over this bill that Hong Kong erupted in massive protests for several months last year. There was a widespread feeling that the Chinese were going to send in troops and there was going to be a Tiananmen Square-type situation in Hong Kong. But the Chinese withdrew the bill, and the whole world from outside might have seen it as a capitulation by the Chinese authorities and a big victory for Hong Kong’s democracy agitators.
But those who knew the Chinese better, knew that they had decided to cut their losses at that point and to wait for another opportunity, Shekhar Gupta said in episode 483 of Cut The Clutter.

 Xi Jinping seems to think that his opportunity has come now.

 An educated guesswork, would be that this is happening now because America is just about 150 days from the national elections. Because it is in election mode, like any other democracy, its ability to do something really decisive vis-a-vis Hong Kong is very limited.
Second, American power is at its weakest in a very long time. Donald Trump has gone around threatening to undermine everybody else’s power, but in a sense, he has ended up undermining America’s power and its allies’ power.
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 Finally, back in 1997, Hong Kong was like the engine that was driving China. But 23 years since then, now China is the engine driving the world’s economy. So that equation is completely changed, Gupta said.

 Hong Kong’s GDP is about 380 billion dollars currently. While this isn’t a small number, it pales in comparison to China’s GDP which is 14.1 trillion dollars. So China thinks it can afford to take a few risks with Hong Kong now.

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