Oceanic crowd in the street ad Hong Kong and protests that have been going on for almost three months now, 30 years after the Tiennamen Square uprising which led to a military intervention with more than 300 dead. An indelible stain that remains inextricably linked to the political career of Deng Xiao Ping, who at the time was head of the Military Commission, and remains the undisputed proponent of the Open Door Policy relaunched in 1978 and which made the fortune of a new model of socialism “Chinese-style” liberal. A real revolution for the Chinese economic system based (ironically, in the light of recent events), on a liberalization of foreign trade and on a set of measures aimed at strengthening economic growth and per capita income with a long-term project aimed at making China an economic power over the next 20 years: a goal later ratified by its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2000.
A five years since the Umbrella Revolution of 2014, which lasted 79 days, which asked universal suffrage, 22 years after the transfer of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China, protests have strengthened in the Special Administrative Region led by Governor Carrie Lam, linked this time to the anti-extradition law which since March and in several waves has brought the citizens of Hong Kong to protest. In a crescendo that since last June has favored the decay of the law proposal last July 9th.
But the anger does not cease and Governor Lam he can no longer handle the power, not taking the resignation into consideration at all and launching empty appeals in the darkest moment for the "special province of China". In these days the extreme measure of theoccupation of Hong Kong airport resulting in total cancellation of flights, police raids and assault of airline banks as well as insurance companies for tourists and passengers in transit at the international airport, a crucial five-star center, among the most expensive in the world, of the world's tourist aviation for travelers to East Asia and a crucial economic source for Hong Kong. A Governor who did not hesitate for a moment to bring an amendment to the existing Fugitive Offenders Act, Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation, to make the legal link between China and the regions even more closely felt by using a news case for a murder that took place in Taipei, where the main suspect seems to have taken refuge, according to rather hasty investigations, precisely in Hong Kong.
Why does the protest continue? It is evident that suffragist issues of five years ago now dominate the square and are fought relentlessly for a pipe dream of autonomy which puts a stop to the demonization of a financial center of primary importance which is singled out by the Chinese establishment as lax and corrupt, therefore accused of aiding and abetting money laundering and welcoming corrupt people and criminals fleeing the motherland, which instead for the ordinary citizens are mostly political dissidents. There are many who fear now a crackdown with a new “digital” surveillance imposition similar to the one used, in the western region of Xinjiang, for a population of similar size to Hong Kong, however not rapidly implemented.
The truth of the reciprocal legal accusations lies in the middle because if on the one hand the criminals should be subject to extradition, it is also true that Hong Kong has always played on the permeability of borders to favor accounting systems from the underground economy or from tax evasion fiscal despite continued Chinese interventions to dismantle imaginative billing systems. An intervention to impose a legislative compromise which, together with a repression of the protests, will restore calm also to the financial markets remains probable.
undoubtedly the Lam administration has tried to deal a definitive blow to the last bastions of independence of the judicial system from that of China mainland, which together with the banking/financial one of the Central Bank represent the pillar of Hong Kong's consolidated international credit. But the patience of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president who two years ago had guaranteed his support for the tolerance policy of "one country, two systems", has come to an end, because with the worsening of the war on tariffs, and several activities of local companies moving to Vietnam to circumvent the difficulties created by the increase in tariffs on Chinese products, the peg of the Hong Kong dollar that links it to the US dollar is a further incentive to resist to the bitter end for a monetary system independent of that of a "oriented" renminbi yuan to a speculative devaluation and to a nine-year low. But there are no less than 450 billion dollars of international reserves that safeguard a financial system whose safe is the Hong Kong Monetary Authority Investment Portfolio, a sovereign wealth fund managed directly by the central bank of the city state. Established in 1935, it thus allows the stability and integrity of the monetary system to be maintained and is currently in fifth place in the ranking of sovereign wealth funds and invests in bonds and shares of OECD countries, outside the control of the Central Bank in China ... In fact, in the ranking of the 10 global sovereign wealth funds, in eighth place, there is also the investment vehicle Safe: created in 1997, it is the Hong Kong branch of the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange, with an amount of assets of 400 billion, obviously managed from the PBOC. This is joined by another Chinese sovereign wealth fund: the China Investment Corporation (Cic), created in 2007, in second place in the world ranking after the Norwegian one, with assets under management of over 940 billion dollars, with investments that are also very risky and volatiles such as the holding in Deutsche Bank or shares in London's Heathrow Airport.
Asian stock exchanges as a result they correct the protests in the former British protectorate because it is clear that the mother country will not let it go. If there is one thing that is not tolerated in China, it is political mingling: it is the single governing party which has the prerogative for politics in the country. And Hong Kong is now like a thorn in the side, with the contours and shadow of the US dollar in the background, of a trade war fully escalated to the "DEFCON 2" level of currency warfare.
