Don’t let China’s climate sins cloak its crushing of Hong Kong

China’s failure to bring anything new to COP26 surprised no one. The world’s worst carbon emitter offered no advance on President Xi Jinping’s earlier promise to reduce coal use after 2025 and bring overall emissions to a peak in 2030 — thereby negating for at least a decade much of the rest of the world’s efforts to clean up the planet. But spotlighting China as a climate sinner should not be allowed to cloak its other villainhood, as an abuser of human rights: so let’s not forget Hong Kong.

The fate of the once-British enclave and its future as an international business centre have been much on my mind lately. At an Oxford garden party, the former governor Chris Patten recalled my 1995 interview with him for The Spectator: ‘I told you so’ would be a fair summary of his view on China’s imposition of its ‘national security law’, crushing protest and local democracy today. At London’s Caledonian Club, the former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind lectured eloquently on the legacy of Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong’s laissez-faire 1960s financial secretary and the father of the economic miracle bequeathed by the colonial regime — even if Patten’s limited democratic reforms came too late to change political destiny ahead of the 1997 handover.

And over a seafood supper in London (at Parsons in Endell Street, since you ask) the former South China Morning Post editor–in-chief Mark Clifford, now president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, updated me on the plight of the jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai, whose company Next Digital and tabloid Apple Daily have been forced out of business. As a non-executive director of Next Digital, Clifford might have joined his ex-colleagues behind bars if he had not left for the US.

Finally, a source still in situ, who’d better remain nameless, tells me he suspects Beijing’s aim is to reduce Hong Kong to a trouble-free financial hub for south China rather than an international entrepôt; the recent launch of a single investment regime for Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong is a move in that direction, while the security law plus harsh Covid quarantine rules are achieving the same objective by deterring expatriates and prompting Hong Kongers who hold other passports to leave.