Abacus | Beijing’s treatment of Cathay is just the start. Welcome to Hong Kong’s future of corporatism
- The philosophy that neither the state nor any other institution has any business dictating people’s political beliefs is reflexive in Hong Kong
- But China’s desire to supervise private enterprises, and their employees, paints an ominous picture of the city’s economic future
In 1558, at the very beginning of her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England famously declared that she had “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”.
What the 25-year-old monarch meant was that under her rule, people’s religious convictions would be a matter for their own conscience, and would be no business of the state, nor indeed of any corporate body.
Instead of launching an inquisition to root out those whose religious practices differed from her own, as her predecessor and half-sister Mary I had done, Elizabeth set up an established church which had compromise rituals all could live with.
And instead of burning dissidents alive, she simply fined them a shilling (roughly HK$100 in today’s money) should they fail to turn up for Sunday service.
No one would exactly call Good Queen Bess a political liberal. She had the heads of far too many potential rivals chopped off for that.
