In early November, Wall Street’s big guns will head to Hong Kong for a global financial summit, dining at the Palace Museum (featuring Chinese imperial works on loan from Beijing) before meeting at the nearby Rosewood Hotel – one of the city’s swankiest.
There, the top brass from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and another 100 financial firms will enjoy delicious food and breathtaking views as Hong Kong’s leaders pitch them on the profits to be made in the former British colony.
The same day as the gala dinner, a very different type of gathering will take place in Hong Kong. The veteran political activist Chow Hang-tung will try to quash national security proceedings against her.
She is scheduled to stand trial in January, along with Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho, for their role in organising annual commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – an event that drew hundreds of thousands of people every June 4 until 2019. Chow and Lee have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and Ho is a well-known lawyer in Hong Kong.
They now face ten years in prison on subversion charges, simply for urging Hong Kongers to light candles in honour of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese protesters who were killed by their own government. These were the only public commemorations of the massacre held on Chinese soil, and for three decades, they were legal.
Chow, Lee, and Ho are just three of almost 800 political prisoners held in the once-free city. The most prominent is 77-year-old pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai. Having been held in solitary confinement for most of the past five years, he soon faces a verdict in his marathon national-security trial.
Six of his Apple Daily colleagues remain in custody, and although they have pleaded guilty, the courts have not yet sentenced them. The authorities prefer to hold them hostage pending the conclusion of proceedings against Lai.
Most Hong Kongers now feel the chill of Beijing’s long shadow. Charges still hang over many of the 10,000-plus people arrested during the massive protests of 2019-20, when as many as two million people flooded the streets demanding democracy.
It is telling that Hong Kong chief executive John Lee cannot even open a bank account at most of the banks whose leaders are attending the upcoming summit. Under US sanctions for his role in the crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators, he was even humiliatingly denied a visa to attend the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in San Francisco. Yet now, financiers who cannot bank Lee will shake his hand and listen to his remarks at the Rosewood.
The Hong Kong government wants to convince these bankers that everything is back to normal. Its representatives will insist that the market is strong, with the benchmark Hang Seng Index up more than 30% year-to-date, and that Hong Kong will likely be the world’s largest market for initial public offerings in 2025.
By attending, the masters of global finance are signalling that they do not care China broke its promise to the people of Hong Kong. They would prefer to forget that, under the treaty governing Hong Kong’s return to China after a century and a half of British rule, the Chinese government committed to maintaining the freedoms that Hong Kong had enjoyed.
It even doubled down, promulgating a mini-constitution that upholds free speech, a free press, freedom of worship, trial by jury, the right to choose one’s own lawyer, and the other guarantees of a free society. China has broken every promise.
One thing China does care about, of course, is profits. Hong Kong’s market has barely moved in the five years since China introduced its draconian National Security Law, which has been weaponised against Chow, Lee, Ho, and Lai.
Despite its strength this year, the Hang Seng remains around 3% above where it was when the National Security Law was introduced, whereas the S&P 500 has more than doubled.
This gap reflects the fact that if you have political prisoners, you cannot also be a global financial centre. Political prisoners exist only where a free press does not, but the free flow of information is a prerequisite for price discovery. Likewise, when courts are politicised, property rights cannot be protected, and many investors will stay away.
So, why are Western bankers showing up? The only conclusion is that they are chasing short-term profits, even if it means funding a repressive regime that’s made no secret of its animosity towards the West.
Chinese president Xi Jinping wants to upend the liberal world order, and he’s betting that American financiers will help him fund that effort. Lee and his Communist Party bosses know that Wall Street is the soft underbelly of American capitalism.
If Western bankers insist on going, they should use the occasion to speak up. Otherwise, they should stay home.
Mark L Clifford is president of the committee for freedom at the Hong Kong Foundation.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.