On June 30, a new national security law was enacted in Beijing and immediately enforced in Hong Kong. That was the day when the long-eroding fiction of “One country, two systems” finally disappeared in Hong Kong. Who lost Hong Kong in this old East Asian power game?
In Washington, it has been a journalistic tradition to ask “who lost” a specific country. For example, who lost Manchuria in the 1930s, who lost Vietnam in the 1970s, who lost Iran in the 1980s and who lost Iraq in the 2010s? How will future historians argue over who lost Hong Kong? My take is that it was not Trump but Xi who lost the city.
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