Philip Bowring

Opinion | Why a German court’s challenge to the EU is more disturbing than Trump’s outrage or China’s tantrums

Even without Covid-19, there is no shortage of disturbing news, from the Hong Kong police’s crackdown on protesters to Chinese bullying in the South China Sea and Beijing’s beef with Canberra

But a German court’s decision to challenge a central tenet of European unity is perhaps the biggest worry

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European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde at the European parliament in Strasbourg, France, on February 11. A German court ruling essential seeks to upend the principle that EU decisions override national ones. Photo: Reuters

Philip Bowring

Published: 3:00am, 17 May 2020Updated: 3:15am, 17 May 2020

It has been a dismal period for news, even setting aside Covid-19 and US President Donald Trump. Indeed, the coronavirus may be a cover for some of the nastiness.

Here in Hong Kong, we have the spectacle of police seemingly wanting to punish dissent by attacking and pepper spraying chanters of slogans they find disagreeable. It is hard not to feel that, as after the 1967 riots and until the Independent Commission Against Corruption was formed, loyalty to the government gives officers carte blanche (in those days, mostly for syndicated corruption).

I am reminded of former head of the Central Policy Unit Leo Goodstadt, who died last month. He described police corruption as like a bus. Officers could jump on board, run alongside knowing what was happening but not participating, or stand in front and be run over.

One person who seems to fear being run over by Beijing's political bus is Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor who evidently cares more about what it thinks of her than what Hongkongers think. As for the Chinese flag and national anthem, they are as much symbols of the Communist Party as of the nation, let alone of Chinese civilisation.

02:19

Some pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong are calling for foreign support. That is unwise, as it is too easily classed as being unpatriotic. But it should be remembered, not least by its apparatchiks, that in its early days in the 1920s, China’s Communist Party was financed and to some extent directed by Moscow’s Comintern (Communist International) via its agents Henk Sneevliet and Mikhail Borodin.

Big bully tactics may come naturally to the unchallenged rulers of a great country but they have cancelled out any kudos China may have earned from its successes against Covid-19 and the daily propaganda gifts handed out by Trump.