May 18, 2016
Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, in Hong Kong on Tuesday.
Jerome Favre/European Pressphoto Agency
HONG KONG — A member of China’s governing Politburo Standing Committee arrived in Hong Kong to high security and protests on Tuesday, and he quickly provoked anger by praising the government’s “victory” over the 2003 SARS epidemic.
The official, Zhang Dejiang, is also chairman of the National People’s Congress. He is the highest-ranking member of the Chinese government to visit Hong Kong since pro-democracy demonstrations convulsed the semiautonomous city nearly two years ago.
At the start of his three-day visit, Mr. Zhang said he remembered “vividly” working, as party chief of Guangdong Province, with the Hong Kong authorities to contain SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. The disease first infected humans in the southern province of mainland China in 2002 and went on to claim 774 lives worldwide.
Mr. Zhang oversaw efforts to play down the viral outbreak that spread to Hong Kong. The disease eventually took 299 lives here, the highest death toll in any single city. As a result, some in Hong Kong reacted to his comments with shock.
“It’s really ironic for him to say that: Had he not covered up the outbreak, it wouldn’t have killed so many people here,” said Nathan Law, a protester whom police pressed to the ground when he tried to block Mr. Zhang’s motorcade as it arrived at his hotel in the Wan Chai neighborhood on Tuesday. “He has blood on his hands.”
The roughly 100 demonstrators were angry about more than the SARS outbreak. Mr. Law, who recently formed a political party, Demosisto, with a fellow activist, Joshua Wong, is one of a growing number of young people in Hong Kong who see the “high degree of autonomy” that Beijing had guaranteed to Hong Kong threatened by Communist Party pressure on its culture and civil liberties.
In a report last week, the State Department said that the recent disappearance of Hong Kong publishers of political books about mainland Chinese leaders “raised serious concerns” and represented “what appears to be the most significant breach of the ‘one country, two systems’ policy since 1997” — a reference to the governing principle that underpinned Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty that year.
Although Mr. Zhang vowed on Tuesday to listen to Hong Kong residents’ “suggestions and demands,” Mr. Law said he was not convinced.
“If he truly wanted to hear us, why are the protest zones set so far away that he couldn’t even see us?” he said.
Mr. Zhang is expected to meet on Wednesday with several Hong Kong lawmakers and to give a speech at a gathering called the Belt and Road Summit concerning China’s initiative to build closer trade relations with dozens of countries once connected by the ancient Silk Road.
In the days leading up to his visit, various arms of the Hong Kong government made strict preparations, including planning “counterterrorism” security measures.
Still, activists managed to drape a banner over a mountainside rock across the harbor that read, “I Want Genuine Universal Suffrage.” Another, at a construction site along the route taken by Mr. Zhang’s motorcade, said, “End One-Party Dictatorship.”
At least seven members of the League of Social Democrats party were arrested on Tuesday in connection with the banners, according to a statement posted on the party’s Facebook page.
“Zhang Dejiang owes Hong Kong 299 lives,” it added, referring to the death toll from SARS. “He should beg for Hong Kong people’s forgiveness.”
