Hong Kong's Illusionist

We almost sympathize with Paul Chan Mo-po, who writes a letter to the editor nearby. The Hong Kong Financial Secretary is upset that the Heritage Foundation has dropped Hong Kong from its annual Index of Economic Freedom after years at the top of the list.

Mr. Chan has the impossible task of denying what everyone can plainly see: China’s Communist Party is remaking Hong Kong in its own Mainland image. That was the point of Heritage’s Ed Feulner in his explanation on these pages last week. Until Singapore took the top spot on the index, Hong Kong had reigned as No. 1 for 25 years. As the preface to the 2019 Index noted, “The Hong Kong government has taken out full-page ads to tout its number-one ranking.” But China’s aggressive assimilation of Hong Kong, Mr. Feulner wrote, is turning it into merely one more Chinese city.

Mr. Chan disagrees, invoking “the principle of One Country, Two Systems.” This was the promise of autonomy for Hong Kong embodied in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration that set out the terms of the former British colony’s return to China. What Mr. Chan does not say is that Beijing has made clear the Joint Declaration is a dead letter.

In 2017 Lu Kang, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, called the Joint Declaration “a historical document that no longer has any realistic meaning.” Hong Kongers have every reason to believe him after watching China ram through an unpopular national-security law whose provisions include allowing Beijing to take some Hong Kong cases to China for trial.

Mr. Chan wants readers to believe that economic freedom continues no matter the political repression. But China is not Singapore. In China dissenters simply disappear. Foreign businessmen can be arrested and held as diplomatic hostages, as two innocent Canadians now are to pressure Ottawa not to extradite a Huawei executive to the U.S.