China syndrome.

Byline: Mahir Ali

A COMBINATION of the words 'Hong Kong' and 'flu' may ring a bell for older readers. A little more than 50 years ago, the phrase 'Hong Kong flu' briefly entered popular parlance internationally.

It was a matter-of-fact term, not associated, as far as I can recall from my childhood, with any great sense of panic. It's somewhat sobering to realise, then, that the H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus is believed to have claimed one to four million lives globally in 1968-69.

This included an estimated 100,000 deaths in the US, coincidentally close to the current official Covid-19 toll in that country. There was no concerted effort back then to heap the blame on Hong Kong, which was still a British colony.

As in the case of the Asian flu a decade earlier, which claimed a similar toll worldwide, no shutdowns, lockdowns or social distancing measures were decreed, even though they may well have saved some lives.

This time around, meanwhile, the association between a deadly virus and the now semi-autonomous Chinese territory resonates in a very different sense. Late last week, the delayed National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing was informed that the Communist Party of China (CPC), evidently emboldened by its successes against Covid-19, intends to promulgate 'security laws' designed to throttle the sporadic protests in Hong Kong in favour of greater democracy and even independence.

Beijing intends to add the security rules to the playbook.

Hong Kong was in disarray for much of 2019, with massive mobilisations against laws that would have made it possible for suspected offenders to face trial in mainland China. The territory's chief executive, Carrie Lam, eventually agreed to shelve the relevant bill.

The local Legislative Council has also failed to pass laws that would effectively outlaw any opposition to the Chinese party-state, invoking terms such as 'sedition', 'subversion', 'treason' and 'foreign' intervention. So Beijing now intends to bypass that inconvenient process and simply add the security rules to the playbook.

The usual suspects in the West have vented their fury, but are unlikely to venture beyond testy rhetoric. The US has threatened sanctions, but it can ill afford to completely antagonise Beijing given the extent of its economic reliance on China.

Besides, given the sheer absurdity of the terms in which Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, among various other prominent Americans, are framing...