Ugh: The Trump administration last week quietly weakened one of Washington’s toughest tools for holding the oppressors of Hong Kong to account.
These are men and women who carried out Beijing’s orders to crush the liberties that China had agreed to when it regained control of the island city in 1997; now Washington’s decided to let them escape consequences for those despicable actions.
The Treasury Department called the decision a “technical modernization,” but it adds up to letting heightened sanctions against dozens of Hong Kong officials lapse, when they’d been renewed by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden ever since Trump imposed them back in 2020.
The move restores full access to US trade and transactions for nine individuals — including five active “security” officials.
And it downgrades another 39 (including Carrie Lam, the politician in charging of crushing Hong Kong’s freedoms) to a secondary list, giving them significant access to the global economy — a decision that China’s Commerce Ministry is already celebrating as a major US trade concession.
This decision is a slap in the face to political prisoners in China, like pro-democracy newspaperman Jimmy Lai, a man grown old and ill in captivity and recently sentenced to 20 years for “conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign forces” for running a newspaper.
The damage is reversible: The State Department can update its Hong Kong Autonomy Act Section report to include the nine delisted officials and keep sanctions in place; the Office of Foreign Assets Control could put the other 39 back on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list and issue warnings to international banks.
Congress can also codify these sanctions into federal law so they can’t again be allowed to just lapse.
With Team Trump increasingly aware of China’s meddling in US politics and elections and its assistance in letting Iran target our troops, it’s a mystery why it let these sanctions drop.
The administration should explain this move, or reverse it.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
