China Is Punishing Hong Kong For Its Freedom Protests and May Replace it with Southern Island Province of Hainan as China’s Financial Hub

Gateway Pundit ^ | 07/20/2020 | Joe Hoft

[SeekAndFind]

(Author Joe Hoft lived in Hong Kong for nearly a decade and provides this first hand perspective)

China took control of Hong Kong, the former British colony, in 1997. Ever since that time, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the small group that runs China, has attempted to control the tiny country. This has escalated over the past year.

The CCP agreed to a 50-year plan to take over the country of Hong Kong in 1997 after the takeover. However, this may never have been the CCP’s intent. Now after less than 25 years, the CCP is hammering Hong Kong into submission and some brave Honkers (Hong Kong residents) are fighting back.

Every year on the anniversary of the turnover, Honkers flooded Victoria Park and marched in the sun and in the rain towards the Central part of Hong Kong in remembrance of the day Britain handed over their sovereignty to the CCP.

Hong Kong was rated during the past decade as the financial center of the world, as the most free country in the world and as the country with the best tax regime.

Hong Kong had the easiest tax filing in the world for individuals and corporations and it has one of the lowest tax rates in the world at around 16%. Hong Kong has free medical for all its citizens, although many also have insurance to obtain faster and sometimes better care at private hospitals. With all this, Hong Kong every year ended with a budget surplus. This was supported by the country’s largest tax payer, the Hong Kong jockey club, a non-profit entity that provided services for its community with what wasn’t taxed. (The Hong Kong jockey club oversees horse racing and lotteries in Hong Kong). (For more information on these topics, see my book Falling Eagle – Rising Tigers written during the Obama Administration.)

Hong Kong was one of the safest places in the world and it flourished over the past few decades, but then the CCP began moving forward with its takeover. A few years ago China mandated that the Chief Executive Officer, the leader of the country elected by delegates, be approved by the CCP. In addition, the tiny country slowly lost its status as entities like Wikipedia began showing Hong Kong, not as a country, but as a special region designated by the CCP:

The CCP next proposed laws that the people resisted. Last year the CCP pushed for a law in Hong Kong that would allow the CCP to come into Hong Kong and remove individuals that they wanted to based on indictments made in China. This led to protests and for the first time in a decade, riots. The peaceful Umbrella protesters who stood up to the CCP in 2014 were replaced:

Last year things turned violent in China as protests became riots and roads and the super efficient Hong Kong subway system were shut down with graffiti written all over the city. This only ended with the advent of the coronavirus. The CCP was not happy. A couple of weeks ago the CCP instituted another law that took aim at protesters:

China on Tuesday approved a contentious national security law for Hong Kong that takes direct aim at some of the actions of anti-government protesters last year, in a move many see as Beijing’s boldest yet to erase the legal firewall between the semi-autonomous territory and the mainland’s authoritarian Communist Party system.

But this law isn’t the only way China is punishing Hong Kong. Since January Hong Kong has been in a virtual lock down due to the coronavirus despite having only four deaths recorded for months in the country of 8 million people. More people died from the flu in Hong Kong (113) than the coronavirus and China is no longer on a lock down and hasn’t been for months, but Hong Kong is kept in a lockdown. This punishment has destroyed the local economy and especially small businesses.

Now the CCP is proposing making the island province of Hainan the financial hub for China, and indirectly replacing Hong Kong as a result:

The plan says Hainan is to take the lead in implementing the policy of expanding the opening of the financial industry, by supporting the construction of international energy, shipping, property rights, equity, and other trading venues and speeding up the development of settlement centers.

In addition, Hainan will support qualified overseas securities fund and futures institutions to set up wholly-owned or joint venture financial institutions on the island.

It will also support financial institutions that innovate financial products and improve service quality and efficiency, based on the development needs of key provincial industries such as tourism, modern services, and high-tech industries.

Moreover, in an effort to boost foreign investment, China will implement a minimal approval process on investment by making special lists for relaxing barriers to market access for the Hainan free trade port and negative lists for foreign investment market access.

This move will also negatively impact the Hong Kong economy and will punish Hong Kong people for their efforts to maintain their freedom.

The model the CCP is using with Hong Kong is the same model it will use in the future if given the opportunity with other country takeovers. The protesters in Hong Kong know it. This is why Honkers fight for freedom.

[PGR88]

China has been doing this for 30 years - Building and advertising “special economic zones” to dupe Potential Foreign investors , but in fact the Customs and foreign exchange limits and controls still exist.

There’s no way they can create another Hong Kong unless they allow the freedoms which Hong Kong had - and with the communist party, that will NEVER happen.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: There’s no way they can create another Hong Kong unless they allow the freedoms which Hong Kong had -

They can build all the nice infrastructure and advertise all they want ... but it will be ALL STYLE, no substance.

We've seen this movie before. Anybody heard of the old term: POTEMKIN VILLAGE ?

[sauropod]

Important article. Thanks for posting it.

[MurrietaMadman]

A ten year old plot thickener from...

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/24/science/rockefeller-foundation-starts-ecology-effort.html

The Rockefeller Foundation is undertaking a $50 million global environmental program with the ambitious aim of curbing ecologically damaging practices of industrial and poor countries.

As an initial step, the five-year program will assist hundreds of young scientists and policy makers in developing countries to create a worldwide network of trained environmental leaders, who will meet regularly at workshops, sharing information and discussing strategy.

Through the international network, the foundation wants to encourage efforts to build environmental protection into governments' long-range economic planning. Other major elements would promote the drafting of international treaties to deal with forest, land and water preservation, and hazardous waste disposal.

Dr. Kenneth Prewitt, senior vice president, who will direct the undertaking, said, ''Ways must be found to accelerate the development of poorer countries without adding further to the global environmental damage caused by three centuries of industrial and agricultural practices of the richer nations.'' He said the foundation was exploring possibilities for collaborative activities with the Pew Charitable Trusts and the MacArthur foundation, both major contributors in the environment field.

Several environmentalists said they welcomed the Rockefeller program as a major development in a neglected field. Among them was Dr. James W. MacNeill, a director at the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Ottawa, who said, ''Potentially this new initiative could be even more significant than the Green Revolution.''

The Rockefeller program's first application was its support for an international conference last March on China's offshore island of Hainan. The conference brought together environmentalists, economists and government leaders. It resulted in the formation of an advisory council to balance development and conservation of the area's rich ecology. Dr. Prewitt said that the Chinese Government had expressed interest in holding a similar conference in October that would bring together 15 to 20 international experts to discuss environmental concerns.

''Hainan is an environmental frontier, like our own West in the 1800's,'' Dr. Prewitt said.

Rockefeller's $50 million program, in choosing to make its global impact through the proposed network, is seeking key individuals who ''can be architects of future policy in development and the environment,'' said Dr. Prewitt.

In the first year, 10 such leaders will be identified in each of eight of the most populous countries - China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Those identified will be helped to establish links to others involved in environmental issues through exchange visits, participation in conferences and by computer technology. The foundation will furnish the equipment.

Some of those identified have narrow specialties like marine ecology and the network experience is intended to broaden members' outlook. The foundation also expects to include Eastern Europeans at a later stage and to reach about 1,000 participants within five years.

The Green Revolution

[Shark24]

So let’s take a look at the world: Hong Kong is neutralized and falling under CCP rule; Europe has gone mostly progressive, Brexit notwithstanding and has lost its Christian heritage; The Catholic Church is now under the control of a Socialist/Progressive Pope, the US is in the fight of its life to defend its core beliefs and a global pandemic is able to allow petty bureaucrats to create new laws unilaterally. Not good.

[aimhigh]

The Catholic Church is now under the control of a Socialist/Progressive Pope, the US is in the fight of its life to defend its core beliefs and a global pandemic is able to allow petty bureaucrats to create new laws unilaterally. Not good.

It gets real bad before the Tribulation period. The world will become so evil, it will earn the judgment to come.

[MurrietaMadman]

Imagine, all that taking place less than one hundred years after the Rockefeller foundation directors discovered the power of social sciences...

From https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c57/97f1651dd6e3a2de4696f3cf184317cb5e7b.pdf

...Influential figures such as the lawyer Raymond B. Fosdick, soon to become the foundation president, be- lieved that scientific analysis and tested fact should be made available for social purposes, to the point that he could speak almost mystically of "the possibilities of ultimate social intelligence...

...henceforth "the possibilities of social experimentation were to be kept constantly in mind." A few years later a foundation officer stated more bluntly that policy would aim at "the advance of knowledge, with the idea of social control as a general guiding line."

Now they salivate over the phony covid menu they are projecting into the world's future https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/five-covid-19-reflections-from-a-food-system-perspective-and-how-we-could-take-action/

Only they know how much they stand to gain on their covid gambit. All they have to do at this point is maintain the intimidation by keeping the pressure on mask usage. Crowds of masked strangers keep the smirk on Fauci's face; it's his measure of their control on US, the unwashed, as their lab monkeys struggle to reach the still elusive launch date of vaccination armageddon.

People really should print out, read and carry with them their governors EO's while the gangster's barks are still much less than their bite.