After Xu Zhifeng went into exile, his family’s bank accounts in Hong Kong were quickly blocked, causing widespread concern not only in the Chinese world, but also in the financial community. Although some of the accounts have now been unblocked, the incident raises some significant questions. The basic question is whether Xi Jinping’s ongoing efforts to stifle the will to resist and systematically remove the institutional and social underpinnings of Hong Kong’s freedom in order to promote authoritarian rule will lead to another form of “shooting off the boil,” such as a full-blown currency war, even though the United States and the Chinese Communist Party did not want to go that far.
Now the news is that HSBC and other banks blocked the accounts of Xu Zhifeng’s entire family without any formal legal documents from the judiciary, after receiving verbal notification from the police. In fact, this kind of practice impacts the bottom line of the free world basic order, that is, the United States and the West cannot tolerate this kind of behavior, therefore, there is every reason to impose severe punishment on HSBC and other related banks. Such punishment, in turn, could have a sudden and unbearable impact on China’s economic order, causing the CCP to rapidly escalate its confrontation with the U.S. and the West to the point of a full-blown showdown.
Judging from the fact that HSBC quickly reinstated Xu Zhifeng’s family accounts, while denying that it had ever shut them down, it is likely that this incident was not the result of a Beijing plan, but rather the result of the Hong Kong police’s inability to see it through. Even so, it is impossible to deny the general trend that Beijing is promoting a politics of terror in Hong Kong, and that all institutions and individuals in Hong Kong are in a climate of fear and anxiety. In this atmosphere, the police are unscrupulous, the people are cautious, and everyone is forced to face a dramatic turn of events in which the liberal order dies and the new order provides no security. Beijing’s determination to end the “one country, two systems” approach is based on the assumption that the United States and the West can do nothing about the Communist Party’s cruelty, and that the worst that can be done is to leave the island untouched, as Castro did, and drive out those who cannot accept the Communist dictatorship. The Beijing authorities also believed that this process of leaving no one behind would not only be manageable, but would not even shake Hong Kong’s status as an international financial center.
Now it seems that the process initiated by the Beijing authorities to end Hong Kong’s freedom is not as controllable as they had hoped, but poses great risks to both the Chinese economy and the entire world order, especially the financial order. The free world has opened the door for Hong Kong people who do not want to be enslaved to emigrate on a scale beyond Beijing’s expectation, which means that if a large number of professionals leave Hong Kong, Hong Kong’s international financial center will be lost, and emigrants will collectively withdraw their savings and investments over the years, jeopardizing the peg between the Hong Kong dollar and the U.S. dollar and thus China’s sources of foreign exchange and the size of its reserves. Would such a development trend be like the suicidal strategic decision of Japan in the face of the lack of oil resources? This has been a question that many people have had to think about.
The choice of Xu Zhifeng’s family to go into exile should not have come as a great surprise to either his comrades or his enemies, but what did come as a surprise was the strong and hasty reaction of the Hong Kong authorities to his exile. This strong reaction shows that the authorities in Beijing and the SAR are genuinely afraid of a massive withdrawal of funds from Hong Kong, and that their backtracking is a reflection of their anxiety and fear. This will not only fail to serve as a warning to others and intimidate the people of Hong Kong, but will also provide a strong incentive for Hong Kong to accelerate its emigration. In other words, the end of the global epidemic will mean the arrival of a full-scale crisis of control in Hong Kong. Since the outbreak of the Korean War, Hong Kong has been playing an important role in the global order in which China and the outside world coexist in a way that is conducive to world peace. Then, the complete fall of free Hong Kong and the outbreak of the regulatory crisis, will definitely not be a local crisis, but means the reconstruction of the geopolitical balance in East Asia, which will not only certainly impact the stability of the mainland and Taiwan, but also directly stimulate the turmoil of the global financial order.
Recent Comments