From ballad of hope to anthem for doomed youth, the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” means many different things to many different people. It may now be a subtle gauge for the West’s geopolitical strategy.
If you haven’t heard it yet, you’re going to hear it soon: De-risking is the new decoupling. The U.S. and European Union cannot detach themselves from the Chinese economy, but they can supposedly isolate those fields of trade that are in their national interests from those that are not.
During his recent trip to Beijing, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken even underlined that human rights are a factor in such interests and that the U.S. will not allow the transfer to China of technology that can be used for repressive purposes.
These are reassuring words that balance economic realities with tough rhetoric, but one piece is yet to fully slot into the puzzle: buy-in from the business community. If companies from democratic countries do not follow a similar de-risking strategy, the most tech-enabled tyranny in history will only grow in power.
This latter scenario plays out variously: American universities that offer first refusal on intellectual property to entities tied with the Chinese state; companies who plunge dangerous tools into opaque reseller networks that serve police and security clients; and biotech operators who sell the right kit to absolutely the wrong people.
De-risking policy experiences further hiccups when tech that can enable the state to track, disinform and disempower citizens has already been broadly transferred through the population, and the stock price of the megacorporations that sustain it are intrinsically dependent on access to the Chinese market.
Step forward, Apple: An iPhone might not seem so directly repressive as facial recognition tech targeted at minority groups, but the company certainly enters a gray area when it switches off apps that protect people against systematic violence, places data within reach of the Chinese Communist Party, features suicide hotspots in its low-rights supply chain and walls citizens up inside the information ecosystem of their oppressors.
Naturally, CEO Tim Cook holds that the company is following local laws, and, while a triple-trillion-dollar entity might be expected to elaborate a more protective policy for countries where it knows that innocent people will be targeted for disappearance, detention and torture, Apple is not and should not be in a position to write the rules for Chinese society.
The matter does not end there, however: In Hong Kong, a court injunction is steadily proceeding that aims to punch way beyond its jurisdiction. The injunction is seeking to ban a song that became emblematic of the movement to establish true democracy in the city: “Glory to Hong Kong.” It will wipe the song out across platforms from iTunes to Google to Twitter to Spotify. And it expects to do so globally.
If successful in practice, the injunction will become a significant marker in a procession of takedowns, all aimed at dispiriting people who demand basic rights, limiting communication between them and maintaining the facade that China is not a criminal state. Future weaponization of the legal system will almost certainly be vaguer and broader. Over time, one can imagine what the internet will begin to look like and who will be shut out from it. Risks are therefore anything but low.
Twenty-four human and digital rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, have signed an open letter to the CEOs of the above-mentioned tech giants and others, calling on them to collectively oppose the injunction in official responses summoned by Hong Kong authorities by July 21.
Whether the CEOs will answer the call remains to be seen, but it is indisputably not in the national interests of democracies to have their information curated by dictators outside their borders. Indeed, it is a feature of such societies that the people themselves define national interest, a vision that would not typically foresee Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu (李家超) deciding what content is and is not appropriate for them.
So a naked de-risking test case is emerging: On the one hand, companies want to make money from Hong Kong and China. On the other, they are being expected to slim down the global portrait of reality to the Chinese Communist Party’s miniaturized version of it. Democratic governments cannot tell streaming and social media platforms what to facilitate. They have to make a decision for themselves.
Hong Kong protesters have always emphasized the worldwide implications of their struggle. It is fitting that their anthem has become emblematic of the global scope.
Image: Studio Incendo, CC BY 2.0
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