Published on November 11, 2019. From Kadota Ryusho’s essay “What Kind of State Guest Says He Will ‘Crush Bones to Pieces’?” published in the monthly magazine Hanada. The article discusses the crackdown on the Hong Kong protests, police shootings of minors, the despair and anger of Hong Kong’s youth, President Xi Jinping’s statement that separatists would have their “bodies smashed” and “bones crushed to pieces,” and criticizes the Japanese government’s plan to invite such a figure as a state guest.

November 11, 2019.
What is happening in Hong Kong now?
What envelops Hong Kong, in a word, is “despair and sorrow.”
The following is from an essay by Kadota Ryusho titled “What Kind of State Guest Says He Will ‘Crush Bones to Pieces’?” published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Hanada.
＊～＊ indicates my own note.
The crackdown on Hong Kong is becoming severe.
Taking the occasion of National Day（October 1）, when China celebrated the 70th anniversary of its founding, China launched even more merciless attacks on citizens than before.
The police, whose standards for firing guns had been relaxed the previous day, immediately shot an 18-year-old high school student in the chest on National Day itself, seriously wounding him.
The high school student who was taken to the hospital was charged with assaulting a police officer.
Three days later, a plainclothes police officer who had been surrounded and attacked by demonstrators fired his gun.
A 14-year-old boy was shot in the thigh and seriously wounded.
The situation in which two minors were shot by police bullets within a matter of days aroused shock and anger among the demonstrators.
Since the beginning of October, the number of arrests has only continued to increase, quickly exceeding 1,000, and an abnormal situation has developed in which many of them are teenagers.
Why are there so many teenagers?
When one thinks about that, one’s heart tightens.
What is happening in Hong Kong now?
What envelops Hong Kong, in a word, is “despair and sorrow.”
In Hong Kong, where people have despaired of the future, those with connections are increasingly abandoning Hong Kong and going to Singapore, America, Canada, and Britain as time passes.
It is no wonder.
After a 50-year transition period, Hong Kong will be completely returned to China in 2047.
At the time of the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, the people of Hong Kong thought that, fifty years later, China itself would have democratized and would become a world in which people enjoyed a certain degree of freedom as an economic power.
But that optimistic prediction was completely betrayed.
Far from liberalizing and democratizing, the dictatorship became stronger and stronger, and the oppression of human rights grew more severe.
Beginning with the opposition movement against the extradition bill, the people of Hong Kong rose up also from the lessons of the defeat of the Umbrella Movement five years earlier.
The protest actions against the Beijing government expanded, including the one-million-person demonstration on June 9 and the two-million-person demonstration on June 16.
However, as the number of people emigrating abroad, in other words leaving Hong Kong, increases, classmates “transfer schools” as if teeth were falling out of a comb.
Please imagine that scene.
A classroom where close childhood friends disappear, while “new immigrants” from China increase.
One side must unwillingly leave its hometown, Hong Kong, and the other side is oneself, seeing them off.
Every human being understands the sorrow of having to abandon the land where one was born and raised.
Sensitive teenagers are throwing that sorrow at the demonstrations as anger toward the Hong Kong government and the Beijing government.
Twenty-eight years later, when they are in their thirties and forties, Hong Kong will become a place completely without human rights or freedom.
The adults do not even try to prevent that.
The anger of teenagers is directed at the adults.
＊The 16-year-old Swedish high school student Greta should be speaking at the United Nations precisely about the feelings of the young people of Hong Kong.
But everyone knowledgeable knows that she, or Sweden, will never criticize China.
Those who do not know this, or do not try to know it, are only the very pseudo-moralists who have abandoned from the start the act of being journalists.＊
Among the demonstrators, the young people fighting on the front line are called the “brave martial faction,” and they are distinct from the majority of demonstrators called the “peaceful, rational, nonviolent faction,” who uphold peace, reason, and nonviolence.
That is probably due to a difference in purity toward their sorrow and anger.
Article 18 of the Hong Kong Basic Law stipulates that, if the Beijing government judges there to be “uncontrollable turmoil,” Chinese law can be implemented in Hong Kong, and it is also possible for the People’s Liberation Army to be deployed based on a request from the Hong Kong government.
From mid-September onward, acts by people on the authorities’ side pretending to be members of the public and throwing Molotov cocktails, in order to stage the “violent outrages” of the demonstrators, became conspicuous, and their number and scale have gradually increased.
Because the chief executive invoked an emergency ordinance from the period of British rule and enacted the “anti-mask law” without going through the legislature, hatred between the two sides intensified further.
Why do the adults want to crush Hong Kong to such an extent?
The anger of the young people has reached its peak.
In the midst of this, on October 13, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made an extremely noteworthy announcement.
It revealed to domestic and foreign reporters remarks made by President Xi Jinping during his visit to Nepal.
“Anyone who attempts to split any region from China will have their bodies smashed and their bones crushed to pieces and will die.”
“Any external force that supports the division of China will be seen by the Chinese people only as indulging in delusion.”
Their bodies will be “smashed,” their bones “crushed to pieces,” and they will “die”…。
How did the young people of Hong Kong hear these words?
It is a declaration that, as long as the Chinese Communist Party continues, you will never gain freedom or human rights.
Xi Jinping thrust upon the citizens of Hong Kong the fact that there is no longer any point of compromise.
As of October 15, Japan has issued no comment whatsoever regarding Hong Kong.
And next spring, it will invite as a state guest the person who says he will “smash the bodies and crush the bones to pieces” of the citizens of Hong Kong.
Will Mr. Xi really appear at the Imperial Palace banquet where Their Majesties will welcome him?
How will the international community view Japan when it witnesses the sight of smiling toasts?
Stand firm, Japan!