China’s President Xi Jinping held a virtual call with Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam and vowed to assist the city during its fight with COVID-19 but insisted it is important that the city is controlled by “patriots.”
“Hong Kong’s significant change from chaos to peace again showed an important rule: we must insist on patriots governing Hong Kong, so as to ensure the stable and long-term implementation of ‘one country, two systems,’” he said, according to the South China Morning Post. He continued, “The motherland will always firmly back Hong Kong, and the difficulties at hand can surely be overcome.”
Getting Out
In effect, when China passed a strict national security law last summer, as made clear by Xi’s statement, it abrogated the 1997 agreement when the U.K. returned Hong Kong to China, which it had colonized following its Opium Wars in 1842.
Under the agreement, Hong Kong was to be a special administrative region, maintaining governing and economic systems that were independent from those of Beijing.
Now, with China in full control of Hong Kong, as reported by ABC yesterday, thousands of Hong Kong citizens have left and moved to the U.K. after Beijing imposed the security law. The British government estimates that over 300,000 people will take up the offer of extended residency rights in the next five years.
TRENDPOST: As Gerald Celente forecast when the virus first broke out in China last January, Beijing would use COVID to achieve what they were unable to accomplish before the virus struck Wuhan: lock down Hong Kong to stop the protests.
Beyond Hong Kong – from India to South Africa, from Chile to Algeria – as noted in the Trends Journal, nations across the globe that were in the grips of social unrest before COVID have been locked down, and the protests that were threatening ruling governments have been prohibited.
