US Congress to adopt sanctions against crackdown in Hong Kong
The US Congress could adopt a law Thursday to punish Chinese officials applying the repressive new security rules against Hong Kong, as well as the banks that finance them, an initiative that is already angering Beijing.
The Democrat-majority House of Representatives unanimously approved the text on Wednesday.
Since it is slightly different from the one already adopted, again unanimously, on June 25 in the Senate, it must be submitted to a new vote in the upper house, which could take place on Thursday.
The text will still have to be promulgated by President Donald Trump to take effect. The White House has not indicated whether it intends to do so or to veto it.
This bill has been promoted and supported by both Republicans and Democrats, eager to step up pressure on Beijing beyond measures already communicated by the United States government since China announced and then passed a law on Tuesday. on national security in the former British colony.
Beijing said Thursday “deplore and firmly oppose” the House vote.
“Hong Kong, including the national security law, is purely a matter of internal China, no country can get involved,” Chinese diplomacy spokesman Zhao Lijian reacted to the press.
The version approved by the House “includes minor technical changes to the text that Senator (Pat, Editor’s note) Toomey and I had adopted last week,” said Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen.
“Tomorrow, we will go to the hemicycle to ask the Senate to adopt the new version immediately,” he tweeted. Voting could take place around midday.
– Banks in the viewfinder –
Less than 24 hours after the entry into force of the state security law imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong, the police made their first arrests on Wednesday.
Promulgated on Tuesday by Chinese President Xi Jinping, this text makes the Hong Kong opposition fear an unprecedented decline in freedoms since the United Kingdom’s handover of the territory to China in 1997.
The text studied at the American Congress would allow Washington to punish any entity or person who contributes materially to the violation of the Chinese obligations concerning the autonomy of Hong Kong.
Its authors rightly cite the example of “leaders of the Chinese Communist Party responsible for imposing a national security law in Hong Kong”, or even police units involved in the suppression of Hong Kong demonstrators.
Above all, banks that carry out “significant transactions” with sanctioned persons or entities would in turn be targeted by punitive measures.
At the end of May, Washington had already struck hard by revoking the preferential trade status of Hong Kong.
On Monday, the United States and China had further intensified their cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals, with Washington announcing the end of arms exports to the former British colony after the introduction of visa restrictions by Beijing.
And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned on Wednesday that new American measures could not be excluded.
At the same time, Republican and Democrat parliamentarians introduced another bill this week in the House and in the Senate, the “Hong Kong Safe Harbor Act”, which would place Hong Kong residents in a priority category to claim the status of refugee, similar to that granted to the Cubans.
It also opens “a path to political asylum for activists on the front line, in immediate danger,” said one of the co-authors of the text in the House, the Republican John Curtis. The text also calls on the US Secretary of State to coordinate the reception of “Hong Kongers as refugees with other countries sharing the same position”.
This escalation comes as Donald Trump said Tuesday “more and more angry” against China for its management of the beginnings of the pandemic of Covid-19, which has already made more than 125,000 deaths in the United States and made plunge its economy.
Before the spread of the pandemic, the two leading economic powers in the world had managed to put a stop to their trade war with reciprocal punitive customs duties.
But in this context of extreme tensions, Donald Trump had once again ruled out suspending all relations, including economic ones, with Beijing on June 18.
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