HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of East Asia went into print on Thursday, 22 August 2019. The three banks, pillars of the territory’s financial establishment, bought full-page newspaper advertisements calling for the “preservation of law and order” and condemning violence, as pro-democracy protests across Hong Kong entered a third month.
The messages were not identical. Standard Chartered said in its ad that it supported the Hong Kong government’s efforts to uphold social order and would “guard the status of Hong Kong as an international financial centre”. HSBC kept to a single demand: all parties must “resolve disagreement through communication rather than violence”. Short, and to the point. Bank of East Asia had spoken a day earlier. On the Wednesday it warned that continuing protests could deepen the damage being done to the city’s economy.
The timing carried its own weight. The ads ran the morning after another stand-off between demonstrators and police on the Wednesday evening. The location was pointed: a subway station that had seen protesters attacked the month before by a crowd of men dressed in white. The spot had become a flashpoint.
The commercial backdrop was already grim. Sky News, which reported the ads, said the unrest was weighing on the Chinese territory’s economy and its tourism trade, with the Asian financial hub “on the verge of its first recession in a decade”. Further demonstrations were planned for the weeks ahead. The lenders, whose business rests on the city’s standing as a financial centre, had their own reasons to raise their voices.
The crisis had narrower beginnings. It erupted in June over a “now-suspended bill” that would have sent criminal suspects from Hong Kong to the mainland for trial. Extradition, in plain terms. The bill would have applied to criminal suspects arrested in the territory. It was later suspended, but the protests outgrew it.
From that seed it grew into the largest popular challenge Xi Jinping had faced since becoming Chinese president in 2012. Some marches drew more than a million people. Protesters stormed the Hong Kong legislature in the stretch before the banks spoke, and the airport saw major disruption and violence in the same period.
Beijing supplied the harder news of the day. Also on the Thursday, China confirmed that a Chinese employee of Britain’s Hong Kong consulate had been detained in Shenzhen, the city that connects Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland. The confirmation landed in the same day’s news as the banks’ appeal for calm.
Sources
Sources
- Hong Kong banks take out newspaper ads to call for order | Sky News
- 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests – Wikipedia
