Some weddings have a nightmare guest who casts a shadow over the celebrations.
And since the coronation is a kind of wedding ceremony between King Charles and his people in the eyes of God, it is no surprise that it has just such a figure – his name is Han Zheng.
Communist China’s decision to send the man most responsible for cracking down on pro-democracy campaigners and press freedom in Hong Kong seems like a calculated disapproval of Charles III and this country.
And Lord (Chris) Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, is quite right not to join the establishment’s conspiracy to keep quiet about Beijing’s choice of the head of its delegation to the coronation celebrations.
After all, it was Patten who oversaw the transfer of Britain’s former colony to Beijing in 1997 on the principle of ‘one country, two systems’, a system negotiated and designed by Margaret Thatcher 13 years earlier to protect the democratic rights of his country. Residents.
In the photo: Han Zheng (file photo). Some weddings have a nightmare guest who casts a shadow over the celebrations. And since the coronation is a kind of wedding ceremony between King Charles and his people in the eyes of God, it is no surprise that it has just such a figure – his name is Han Zheng
In the quarter of a century since then, those rights have been completely destroyed and the architect of this policy was Han.
In the five years since his appointment as chairman of the Central Coordination Group on Hong Kong and Macau Affairs in 2018, the bespectacled, 69-year-old apparatchik led a brutal crackdown that saw no fewer than 150,000 Hong Kong citizens seek asylum in the country.
Within a year of taking up residence in a villa in Shenzhen, a sprawling metropolis on China’s border with Hong Kong, Han had proposed an extradition bill that could have allowed Hong Kong suspects to be sent to China for trial. democratic protests.
In June 2019, more than a million people took to the streets and authorities responded by detaining more than 10,000 protesters, many of them students, while 15 protesters were killed and thousands injured.
In the wake of this unrest, China passed a national security law that undermined Hong Kong’s autonomy and made it easier to prosecute demonstrators. And if Carrie Lam, then-CEO of Hong Kong, was the public face of the crackdown, Han was the puppeteer behind the scenes.
“This type of extremely violent, destructive activity would not be tolerated or accepted in any country or society in the world today,” Han said during a meeting with Ms Lam, who had been instructed to refer all decisions related to the protests to his office . .
As the man who served as mayor of Shanghai, China’s most important foreign trade center, for nine years, Han has mastered the art of muzzling rather than killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. That is the strategy he initiated in Hong Kong after taking charge of Beijing’s policy there. And while his actions received widespread international condemnation, many Western companies remained silent.
In the photo: Han Zheng (file photo). Communist China’s decision to send to the coronation the man most responsible for the crackdown on pro-democracy campaigners and press freedom in Hong Kong seems like a calculated disapproval of Charles III and this country
The behavior of banks such as HSBC has been particularly embarrassing.
At Beijing’s behest, it has frozen the accounts of activists and human rights groups, allowed the establishment of Chinese Communist Party teams at its headquarters, and even held hostage the pension assets of 96,000 Hong Kong citizens who moved to the UK. according to the Wall Street Journal.
Apologists for Han present him as an elder statesman, moved sideways from the Politburo last October to the largely ceremonial role of vice president.
But the idea that he’s playing a benign role on the international stage, like a Chinese version of Princess Anne, couldn’t be further from the truth. Indeed, some say that he is the eighth most powerful man in the country.
And China’s status as the West’s most menacing rival superpower should be no reason to kowtow when its imperious ruler, Xi Jinping, sends as his representative to the coronation the living embodiment of one determined to reject the freedoms that our monarch swears to uphold.
In this context, Han’s coronation invitation tells Beijing that we are too captivated by his economic power to confront it. And that will send shivers down the spines of freedom-loving people everywhere.
Mark Almond is Director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford