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My Take | In Hong Kong, Xi has completed where Deng left off

  • The city’s destiny was always about unification and integration, not democratisation or meeting Western expectations

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President Xi Jinping meets with Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) John Lee in Beijing in December 2023. Photo: ISD
Alex Loin Toronto

It’s the 120th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s birth, and people are, again, arguing whether Xi Jinping has betrayed the legacy of the great reformer (mostly the Western narrative) or is really his true heir (the official Chinese version).

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Let me add my two cents about the two paramount leaders with respect to the political development of Hong Kong up till now.

To save you from the suspense, let me lay my cards on the table. I think Deng inadvertently created the democratic opposition movement in Hong Kong, which was not necessarily a good thing in the long run, and which Xi has now neutralised, which is not necessarily a bad thing, also in the long run.

Consider this statement from the first of a series of articles in this newspaper.

Referring to Deng, it said, “The ‘chief architect’ of the greatest economic liberation programme in history was also the man who demanded that the Communist Party ‘unwaveringly uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat’, nipping the country’s democracy movement in its bud.”

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That’s true as far as it goes.

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