17th January 2026 – (Hong Kong) There is a pleasing neatness to the language now circulating on Capitol Hill as senators push a bipartisan crackdown on Hong Kong’s Economic and Trade Offices in the United States. Autonomy. Freedoms. Basic human rights. Three words, each weighty on its own, which together imply a moral hierarchy: Washington is the judge, Hong Kong the defendant, and Beijing the unseen hand moving the pieces.
Yet politics has a way of turning good words into bad habits. The trouble is not that autonomy, freedoms and human rights are unimportant. The trouble is that American lawmakers increasingly deploy them as if they were export controls – applied to rivals, waived for allies, and ignored when inconvenient at home. If the proposed remedy is to strip HKETOs of privileges or shutter them entirely, Washington should first decide whether it is defending principles or merely polishing a narrative.
Start with autonomy. The American case rests on the claim that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous and therefore should no longer enjoy the practical benefits of being treated as such, including the privileges extended to its overseas offices. In this telling, HKETOs are less trade and cultural outposts than proxies for Beijing, and the United States should withdraw immunities and exemptions accordingly.
Hong Kong’s official response is predictable, but not trivial. The city maintains that “one country, two systems” remains in place, that its overseas economic and trade offices are lawfully established, and that Washington’s proposed approach would be self-harming given deep commercial ties. It also points to the tangible reality of interdependence – a longstanding American trade surplus with Hong Kong and the large footprint of U.S. companies operating there.
The uncomfortable question Washington rarely answers is what end-state it actually seeks. If autonomy is the grievance, why target the channels of trade representation, the mechanisms that keep commercial life boring and functional, rather than the policies and actors allegedly responsible for autonomy’s erosion? Closing offices makes a gesture. It does not, by itself, restore autonomy.
The mirror matters, because American rhetoric on autonomy can sound opportunistic when Washington flirts with other people’s autonomy elsewhere. The renewed talk of taking over Greenland, a self-governing territory within the Danish realm, has been framed as strategically necessary, as if the autonomy of a small population were a detail to be negotiated away under the banner of national security. The same broader posture appears in the swaggering language around Venezuela, where the idea of “running” another country is treated less as a scandal than as a spectacle. If autonomy is a principle, it cannot mean autonomy for others only when it costs America nothing.
Move to freedoms. Lawmakers cite freedoms as what Hong Kong has allegedly lost and what the United States must defend. That is a serious charge. But it is difficult to sustain a lecture on freedoms when domestic American scenes increasingly suggest a country normalising force and friction in civic life.
Consider the climate created by large-scale immigration enforcement deployments. In Minneapolis and Saint Paul, federal immigration officers have been met by residents organising to track operations, confront vehicles in residential streets, and block departures. Community anger has escalated into a politics of suspicion, with whistle networks, shouting matches, and long stand-offs in winter streets. At the same time, civil liberties lawyers have brought claims alleging racial profiling, warrantless stops and unlawful detention. Even before courts weigh the merits, the picture is of a democracy testing the limits of its own restraint.
Then there is the separate, deeply consequential question of whether Americans can still access information freely and whether journalists can do their work without fear or favour. A prominent international press freedom organisation has compiled a timeline of actions it says have chilled the media environment – stripping government information from public view, weakening or dismantling public broadcasters, wielding regulatory and administrative power against unfriendly outlets, tightening control over press access, and rolling back safeguards designed to protect reporters from intrusive state searches. When a country’s own watchdogs describe a sustained pressure campaign on the press, the word “freedoms” becomes harder to use as a cudgel abroad without inviting scrutiny at home.
Finally, basic human rights. This is the heaviest moral claim, and it is invoked to justify ending “business as usual.” No open society should treat rights as a negotiable footnote. However rights language becomes brittle when it is used selectively, as a tactic rather than a standard.
It is easy in Washington to assert that Hong Kong officials abroad do Beijing’s bidding, spread propaganda, or oppose human rights, and therefore their offices should be closed. Yet the principle is rarely spelt out. If the rule is that any state-linked presence advancing an official line is inherently suspect, then many public diplomacy and trade bodies around the world would suddenly look like targets. If the rule is narrower, focused on specific misconduct such as covert influence or intelligence activity, then the sensible approach is to enforce against conduct, not to stage a symbolic closure that also harms legitimate exchange.
Reciprocity complicates the picture as well. Hong Kong hosts influential American business and civic networks without treating them as hostile foreign missions. The American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong is not a minor social club; it functions as a major platform for advocacy, policy engagement and commercial networking, presenting itself as a bridge between markets and governments, and championing open economy principles. Whether one agrees with its positions is beside the point. It is a prominent American-adjacent institutional presence that operates openly in Hong Kong’s public space.
So what is Washington advancing in practice? A one-way doctrine – your official representation is a threat; ours is civil society. That may be politically useful, but it is not a credible moral posture.
Nor does the United States escape human rights scrutiny simply because it is the United States. Allegations of warrantless seizures, racial profiling and heavy-handed enforcement do not vanish under patriotic branding. The same is true when press access is narrowed, information is pulled from public view, and legal pressure is used to punish dissenting media. One does not need to claim America is worse than Hong Kong to see the hazard. It is enough to recognise that rights rhetoric cannot survive obvious double standards.
A coherent policy would start by separating two issues Washington keeps collapsing into one. The first is a judgment about Hong Kong’s political condition – how far autonomy has narrowed, and what that means for international treatment. The second is a question of instruments – whether shutting HKETOs improves anything beyond the satisfaction of making a point.
If the objective is to limit covert influence or intelligence activity, the United States already has sharper tools i.e. counterintelligence enforcement, transparency requirements, targeted sanctions, and criminal law aimed at specific behaviour. Closing trade offices is a blunt instrument that risks punishing ordinary commerce and cultural exchange more than any alleged wrongdoing. If the objective is simply signalling disapproval, it should be described honestly as signalling, with an acceptance of the cost – less dialogue, less facilitation of business ties, and a greater likelihood of tit-for-tat escalation that leaves American firms and workers paying part of the bill.
And if the objective is truly to defend autonomy, freedoms and basic human rights, Washington must do something more demanding than shutting an office. It must apply the same vocabulary inward as well as outward. That means defending due process in immigration enforcement, resisting intimidation of the press, and treating other people’s autonomy, Greenland included, as something more than a bargaining chip in a televised performance of strength.
The oldest mistake in foreign policy is to believe that moral words absolve moral inconsistency. Autonomy, freedoms and basic human rights are not decorations for press releases; they are standards that demand discipline. If Washington tightens the terms under which HKETOs operate, it should do so as a strategy rather than a sermon, mindful that hypocrisy travels faster than any trade mission ever could.
