Word: kong
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...delicate balance, one that pro-democracy advocates worry is tipping toward Beijing. Last year the Chinese government postponed direct elections in the territory, bumping the date from 2012 to 2017 for the chief executive and to 2020 for the legislature. The move outraged veteran campaigners like Martin Lee, Hong Kong's "Father of Democracy." Lee, recently the target of a foiled assassination plot, says Beijing is buying time, stacking the democratic deck. "They have postponed and postponed," he says. "Hong Kong will not have democracy until Beijing knows they have people...
...fear shared by many here. Pro-democracy groups see Beijing's not-so-invisible hand tightening its grip on the city. In the run-up to the anniversary, two Tiananmen-era dissidents, Xiang Xiaoji and Yang Jianli, were turned away at Hong Kong's airport. The city won't comment, but it denied charges that it kept an immigration blacklist at the behest of Beijing. The incident sparked outrage nonetheless, with critics accusing Hong Kong officials of kowtowing to mainland authorities ahead of the politically sensitive anniversary. (See pictures of Hong Kong...
...Many, including prominent Hong Kong legislator Emily Lau, worry that Beijing is stifling Hong Kong's notoriously raucous press. She points to a new report by Freedom House, an American NGO that tracks freedom-of-the-press issues, which labeled Hong Kong's press corps "free" in 2008, but downgraded it to "partly free" in 2009. The problem, Lau says, is not outright repression but self-censorship. "People are getting too scared to speak...
...speak up they do - as pro-Beijing commentators are quick to point out. "Where is the threat?" asks Lau Nai-keung, a Hong Kong journalist with ties to Beijing. "People here can express their feelings." Indeed, when the city's chief executive, Donald Tsang, recently downplayed the anniversary to legislators during a legislative council debate, he was met with fierce opposition and forced to apologize. When Ayo Chan, a student leader at Hong Kong University, suggested pro-democracy protesters were to blame for the 1989 crackdown, angry students moved to vote him out of office. And, unlike the uprising...
...Asian miracle, of course, is not just limited to the two north-east Asian giants. It extends to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, all of whom have been able to give their people high levels of prosperity, health care, and education. None of those societies had easy births. In the 1950s, Singapore was a backwater of the British Empire. Taiwan was deeply divided, in the years after the Communist party took control on the Chinese mainland, between exiles and locals. The spectacular growth of Hong Kong between 1950 and 1980 (Arab states would do well to remember) was fueled...