The Congressional-Executive Commission on China was created by the U.S. Congress in 2000 "with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, and to submit an annual report to the President and the Congress. The Commission consists of nine Senators, nine Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President." (CECC About). The CECC FAQs provide useful information about the CECC. See CECC Frequently Asked Questions. They have developed positions on a number of issues.
CECC tends to serve as an excellent barometer of the thinking of political and academic elites in the United States about issues touching on China and the official American line developed in connection with those issues. As such it is an important source of information about the way official and academic sectors think about China. As one can imagine many of the positions of the CECC are critical of current Chinese policies and institutions (for some analysis see CECC).
For some time CECC has focused on events in Hng Kong (for CECC performance in this sector, see their webpage: Developments in Hong Kong and Macau). Most recently, the CECC chairs, newly installed in their roles with the change of the majority party in Congress, have opined about the recent report of the conviction of several highly prominent individuals who were driving forces in the pan-democratic movement in Hing Kong--a movement largely supported (to the extent such things are possible) by factions of officials in the United States. As reported by the New York Times:
A Hong Kong court on Friday sentenced Mr. Lai to 12 months in prison for his role in a peaceful demonstration in 2019 against Beijing’s encroachment over the semiautonomous territory. Three activists and a labor leader were given sentences of eight to 18 months for their role in the protest. . . The sentences fell short of the maximum of five years in prison the defendants had faced. Still, they sent an unmistakable message that activism carries severe risks for even the most internationally prominent opposition figures. Supporters of the defendants say the sentences are the latest sign of the fundamental transformation that Beijing has sought to impose on Hong Kong, once a bastion of free speech, to silence dissent.
The American Secretary of State, fresh from hi meeting with his high level Chinese counterparts expressed the obvious--at least from the American perspective, but little more. The Department of Stte public response was short and a repetition of prior positions without the need to signal that anything new will be done:
The United States condemns the sentencing of seven pro-democracy leaders on politically-motivated charges. Beijing and Hong Kong authorities are targeting Hong Kongers for doing nothing more than exercising protected rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech.
Today’s sentences are yet another example of how the PRC and Hong Kong authorities undermine protected rights and fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Basic Law and the Sino-British Joint Declaration in an effort to eliminate all forms of dissent. The seven pro-democracy leaders – Martin Lee, Jimmy Lai, Albert Ho, Margaret Ng, Cyd Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan, and Leung Kwok-hung – participated in a peaceful assembly attended by 1.7 million Hong Kongers. The sentences handed down are incompatible with the non-violent nature of their actions.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration, a binding international agreement, guarantees Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy, and people in Hong Kong are entitled to the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Joint Declaration and Basic Law. We will continue to stand with Hong Kongers as they respond to Beijing’s assault on these freedoms and autonomy, and we will not stop calling for the release of those detained or imprisoned for exercising their fundamental freedoms.
The CECC followed suit in a similarly worded Press Release that read its entirety as follows:
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Representative James P. McGovern (D-MA), the Chair and Cochair, respectively, of the bipartisan and bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), issued the following statement about the conviction and sentencing of multiple democracy advocates in Hong Kong for unauthorized assembly, including—Leung Kwok-hung (18 months), Jimmy Lai (12 months), Lee Cheuk-yan (12 months), Au Nok-hin (10 months), Cyd Ho (8 months), Albert Ho (12 months, suspended), Margaret Ng (12 months, suspended), Martin Lee (11 months, suspended), Yeung Sum (8 months, suspended), and Leung Yiu-chung (8 months, suspended).“The convictions should be condemned by all those committed to restoring Hong Kong’s autonomy and human rights. These are clearly political prosecutions. Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee, Lee Cheuk-yan, Margaret Ng and others were singled out and targeted by the Hong Kong law enforcement for participating in a peaceful march. Few predicted that there would one day be political prisoners in Hong Kong, and that is now sadly the case, with more to come under the draconian National Security Law. Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms, guaranteed by international treaty, continue to be under assault. Jimmy Lai also faces other charges relating to his operation of a pro-democracy newspaper, demonstrating that the freedom of the press is also fast fading. The signal sent today should have serious implications for relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. We stand ready to legislate for the people of Hong Kong and urge the Biden Administration and the international community to hold accountable those responsible for political prosecutions in Hong Kong.”
In a way the statement serves as a great barometer of the pathetic in the emerging forms of U.S. engagement--pathetic in its sense of qualities that arouses pity or sorrow from the original sense of feelings e of suffering or calamity. It ought to provide some comfort to the Chinese central authorities who might rightly read into statements such as these the lament of the defeated and the gestures of those who have abandoned the field but are still trying to preserve the semblance of face. It is the pathos of 29 April 1975 in Saigon. The wheel turns.
What follows are brief reflections on an unconventional reading of the text circulated by CECC in the shadow of the State Department response. The discursive trope is pathos calculated to raise emotions among those who enjoy that sort of performance but which require no additional response.
1. “The convictions should be condemned by all those committed to restoring Hong Kong’s autonomy and human rights." The statement strikes a chord of reactionary helplessness in the face of a power that cannot be countered. It speaks to condemnation by everyone, it seems, but the authors of the statement (contrast a statement that starts "we condemn". But neither of these individuals nor their organization appears to have found it necessary to use something other than the "amorphous" voice. Are they referring to states? to NGO's? To transnational enterprises with operations in the area? to religious organizations? Or perhaps only to the mass of individuals who have neither the power nor the means of doing much other than receiving and reacting to information about which they might expect their states or other engaged collective to engage. The "action word" --should be" suggests that it may not yet have happened. But the ambiguity is understandable--after all the statement itself suggests that this is a further condemnation of an act respecting a condition of governance that has already been lost. As such the condemnation appears to be a strategy--limpid in itself--that might contribute to a counter revolutionary effort to "restore", leaving vague of course who is, must, or ought to do the restoring.
2. "These are clearly political prosecutions. In the current political climate in the United States, it is possible to take the position that no act of government, including those of its police, prosecutors or courts, is not structurally political and in the service of contested though apparently identifiable fields of privilege. Given that position taken by influential factions of the American elites, including members of the federal legislature and staff of the executive, it is hard to understand on what basis this statement can possibly imply some sort of negative. Perhaps the implication is not so much that the prosecutions were political but that those who are doing the condemning find the politics incompatible with their own. Perhaps a little more clarity here and honesty might have made this stateent a bit more powerful and useful.
3. "Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee, Lee Cheuk-yan, Margaret Ng and others were
singled out and targeted by the Hong Kong law enforcement for
participating in a peaceful march." There is no doubt that these individuals were targeted. There is even less doubt that the arrests, prosecutions and sentencing were meant to convey a message. And there is not the slightest doubt that the object of this signalling was to preserve governmental resources--by cultivating fear among the masses it will be less expensive to police the new political behavior rules ushering in under the new era One Country within which two systems may be managed principles (See my book of essays on the evolution of the situation in Hing Kong and the construction of its new era governance HERE). But one is unaware of any state in which this sort of deliberate targeting is not undertaken for some sort of greater good and in the service of efficient use of government resources and the cultivation of fear or at least caution among those individuals otherwise tempted to act in ways objectionable to the authorities. Standing alone this tells us nothing other than that the implications to be drawn are meant to be negative in this case but in another--for example the prosecution of targeted companies that engage in economic activity with criminal or proscribed state elements--it would be hailed as a positive action.
4. "Few predicted that there would one day be political prisoners in Hong Kong, and that is now sadly the case, with more to come under the draconian National Security Law." This is almost embarrassing. It is not clear what sort of information and analysis free zone those who wrote this were inhabiting that made it possible to write this sentence in good faith. Surely it works well as propaganda of the lowest common denominator. But even the government itself had been warning of this very result for months before it actually occurred. This is not pathos--this is farce delivered as burlesque. There is little more than one can say in the face of the enormity that this sentence represents other than an expression of the hope that the people who wrote it cannot possibly have been in the position the sentence describes.
5. "Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms, guaranteed by international treaty, continue to be under assault." Beyond its naivete the sentence reads like it an effort to drama from the incongruous. It is true enough that the sentence roughly approximates the position developed by the international community from early on in the life of the protests that began in June 2019, and reflects a position earlier utilized in a different form, during the course of the protests leading to the Umbrella Movement activities of 2014. Beyond that, the statement requires substantial unpacking. First, the sentence underlines what I have called the internationalist position on the status of Hong Kong; but that status has evolved from a dependence on the Sino-British Joint Declaration to an effort to source it in rights of self-determination. In effect, the object has been to detach the international guarantees of Hing Kong status from the 2047 end date of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and ground it instead on notions of fractured sovereignty that simultaneously recognized Chinese territorial sovereignty over Hing Kong bt Hong Kong sovereign rights with respect to its own self governance within China (a sovereign authority grounded in international law). The problem, of course, is that the United States has come to this idea reluctantly , if at all. And its own sovereign arrangements (for example with its indigenous populations) would suggest that the embrace of such a concept would not serve the interests of the United States.
6. "Jimmy Lai also faces other charges relating to his operation of a pro-democracy newspaper, demonstrating that the freedom of the press is also fast fading." It is here that the prior sentence acquires greater sense--in the reflection that Mr. Lai remains an object that Chinese authorities find convenient as a vessel through which to make a point. The point about freedom of the press only serves to underline the fundamental rift between liberal democratic and Marxist Leninist approaches to notions of press freedom. But that is an old story. It certainly follows that if the Chinese central authorities have now made it clear that its political-economic order is the basis on which Hing Kong's autonomy is to be measured, then it stands to reason that what is understood as press freedom in liberal democratic orders is unlikely to survive. Yet that is not the point made here. The reason is simple and quite clever--here the idea--brought over from the prior sentence is to embed the notion of the universality of interpretation fo the meaning and importance of press freedom, which can be expressed only in one idealized form. The implication is that derogation from that ideal is not just wrong but serves as a basis for questioning the legitimacy of a political system committed to those "errors."
7. "The signal sent today should have serious implications for relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. " And thus the object of this exercise--to send a signal. But wait. The statement earlier condemned the authorities for using the law to signal to the detriment of individuals. And yet, that is precisely what the authors of this statement now seek to do for the greater glory of their own political agenda. So the "game" here is to signal--and the pieces on and through which such signalling is undertaken on both sides appears to be the bodies of those who are selected for that purpose.
8. "We stand ready to legislate for the people of Hong Kong and urge the Biden Administration and the international community to hold accountable those responsible for political prosecutions in Hong Kong." At last one comes to the heart of the matter--the discursive point to which the prior sentences were intended to build: here is a declaration, the pledge, of these individuals to serve the political interest of the Unite States through the generation of the only product they are empowered to create--legislation. And yet here is where the pathos assumes its most intense form. The action contemplated is limited to holding accountable (apparently without notice ot rial or other guarantees of due process before punishment is exacted in accordance with the core liberal democratic values whose advance is the object of this exercise int he first place) individuals who are responsible--not for these convictions, but more generally for political prosecutions in Hing Kong. One assumes that means prosecutions under both the National Security and the National Anthem and Flag laws. But these individuals appear to be aware only of the first of these ordinances, the aggregation of which lends the new legislative ecology is new era character. And so here at least one comes to the discursive climax of this statement--from pathos to bathos. This legislate effort is about the easiest and most painless gesture that this organization can advocate. It changes nothing and avoids targeting what one would have thought was the objective that motivated all this effort--an objective stated at the start of the statement--the "restoration of Hong Kong's autonomy and human rights."
________
The foregoing analysis might be read as harshly critical. And so it is. The criticism does not arise from either the motives or the objectives of the central authorities of the United States represented by the people responsible for this effort. Quite the contrary, the criticism goes to the quality of the effort and more importantly to the quite frightening emptiness of its content. If, indeed, the United States finds it in its interest to declare and seek to meet these objectives, then it can certainly do much better than this. For many, the result is likely more dangerous to the interest of the UNited States than had these individuals remained silent. It might tept those who read it to find in its language the expression of a weakness that can be exploited without great cost--in Hng Kong, and perhaps Taiwan.
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