Listening to our government’s weaselly evasions on the protests in Hong Kong makes me wish America had an Aaron Neville Doctrine. Neville is the New Orleans crooner whose soul classic, “Tell It Like It Is,” topped the charts in 1966 and has been covered more than a dozen times since.
White House and State Department officials seem unfamiliar with the concept.
Hong Kong’s students and thousands of others have taken to the streets to protest the Chinese government’s plan to curtail their democratic rights. It began more than a week ago with class boycotts. By this Wednesday, the 65th anniversary of Communist rule in China, more than 100,000 people flooded the city, many of them toting now-symbolic umbrellas.
What they want is simple and universal: the right to genuine self-determination.
Beijing says it is perfectly willing to let Hong Kong residents continue to vote to choose their own leaders — but only for its pre-approved slate of candidates. That’s a blatant violation of the 1984 agreement between China and Britain under which the British colony would revert to Beijing’s control when its 100-year lease expired in 1997.
For its part, China agreed to permit “universal suffrage” in Hong Kong under a new policy of “one country, two systems.” The United States stood as a guarantor of that agreement, which preserved Hong Kong as a little island of political freedom within a vast communist monolith.
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