“We will never allow anyone, any organization or political party to rip out any part of our territory at any time or in any form,” he said, standing under a giant portrait of Sun.
It is “our solemn commitment to history and the people,” Xi said in the 2016 speech, that China will never be torn apart again.
Concerns over separatism can be seen in the hardline policies adopted by Beijing in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, as well as an increasingly aggressive stance towards the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Xi has vowed to unify with the mainland — by force, if necessary.
Yet such policies can often backfire. In Hong Kong, in particular, resentment towards Beijing has grown in recent years. In the past 12 months, as anti-government unrest was met with heavy policing, chants such as “Hong Kong independence, the only hope
” were more commonly heard among parts of the protest movement.
Such talk is antithetical to China’s leaders and the need to stamp out separatism has been given as a key justification for a new national security law
. Advocating independence — perhaps even discussion of the topic — could soon become illegal.
Carrie Lam, the city’s chief executive, has said the law will ensure “the long-term prosperity and stability of Hong Kong.”
States and separatists
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, once argued
that “no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination,” and even the separatist Confederate States of America did not
include a provision in its constitution allowing any member to secede.
Anti-separatism is the norm worldwide, no matter the desires of many peoples around the world for a country of their own, or the oft-stated importance of “self-determination” as a principle of international law.
Indeed, the United Nations resolution
establishing that principle, passed in 1960 amid a wave of decolonization, also states that “any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
While Beijing and Moscow often blame Washington for supporting separatists in their own spheres of influence, US policy has often been equally pro-status quo. As Croatia held an independence referendum in 1991, the US State Department declared its commitment
to the “territorial integrity of Yugoslavia within its present borders.” That year, President George H.W. Bush warned Ukrainians
seeking to separate from the creaking Soviet Union to avoid “suicidal nationalism,” adding that “freedom is not the same as independence.”
In 1996, Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, said
Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya was based on “the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no State had a right to withdraw from our Union.” And in 2014, Barack Obama…
Read More: From the Qing Empire to the People’s Republic, China’s worries about separatism run