Edward Snowden’s Cold War

The current revelations about American government surveillance and the escape of whistleblower Edward Snowden to Hong Kong has put the territory’s relationship to global security issues in high relief.  As queried by the select press representatives invited to interview him from his secret hotel room, “what does it mean that [Snowden] chose as his current site of refuge a sub-state of China… an enemy of the US?”

Let’s bracket for a moment the debatable assumptions that Hong Kong is China and China is “an enemy of the US.”  The subtle but important implications in Snowden’s decision to go public from Hong Kong highlights certain aspects of the territory’s history that Snowden’s actions both acknowledge and elide.  In the 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong was a hotbed of western and particularly American monitoring and intrigue during the Cold War fight against Communism.  This activity arose because of the territory’s proximity to China, and eventually made Hong Kong the most important site of surveillance and signal intelligence operations within the Pacific region.  The “CIA station just up the road… at the US consulate” that Snowden references in his interview is a direct legacy of this relationship.

This history of Hong Kong’s centrality in Cold War security is not widely known, but it infuses the conditions surrounding Snowden’s initial decision to hide in Hong Kong.  According to Snowden, his reasons for choosing Hong Kong is that the territory has a “strong tradition of free speech” and is “no more subject to internet monitoring and government intervention than other western countries.”  These qualities stem from the territory’s longstanding identification as a progressive, cosmopolitan, western-influenced, capitalist enclave, but the latter attributes also ensure Hong Kong’s current and historical reasons for maintaining good relations with both the US and China.  This accountability to former and current superpowers means that the territory cooperates with American rendition and that longstanding covert intelligence practices within the territory legitimate Snowden’s seemingly paranoid speculation that he could be “taken out by triads” (Chinese organized crime rings) or “abducted and smuggled into China.”

As a high-ranking employee in one of the US’s biggest security contractors, Snowden should be well aware of Hong Kong’s limitations as a space of political refuge, and despite his apparent praise for the territory it is qualifications and ambiguities surrounding Hong Kong that makes Snowden’s platform so significant.  The Cold War history in which Hong Kong was shaped is, by definition, a covert and symbolic conflict, equally as concerned with winning the war of hearts and minds as it was with military and political distinctions of friend vs. foe.  Snowden’s decision to speak from Hong Kong plays upon this vulnerability, resurrecting vestigial suspicions of Communist China while also downplaying the vast differences between current and previous circumstances in US-China relations.  This self-presentation as a heroic protector of freedom and privacy may trade in Orwellian warnings about government omnipotence, but it has little to do with real faith about Hong Kong’s capacity for political protection or Snowden’s ability to subvert and undermine the untrammeled government powers that he has helped expose.  (If his references to Hong Kong’s “spirited commitment to… political dissent” alludes to the territory’s role as a way station for the leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, Snowden is either glossing over or doesn’t know about subsequent allegations regarding China’s direct involvement in those activities.)

Instead, concerned citizens curious about Hong Kong’s significance in Snowden’s morality play might consider the quiet but nevertheless necessary circumstances of Snowden’s transmissions from Hong Kong hotels—comfortable, technologized locations offering the amenities necessary for his global media campaign, but also a telling indicator of his reliance upon First World conditions of living that resembles the original China watchers of the Cold War.  If Snowden really wanted to preserve his anonymity and liberty, he had the option of going off the grid.  By choosing instead to transmit from Hong Kong, Snowden’s revival of the territory’s Cold War history also highlights the very different nature of contemporary ideological conflict between the US and China.  Hong Kong matters not politically but economically—because capitalism fostered the vibrant commercial media that Snowden requires and because if China is an American foe it is no longer because that country is an obstacle to western market democracy but rather because it is its major competitor.