How can the HongKongers defeat the Chinese Communists (hereinafter termed ChiComs), and preserve their HongKonger way of life approximately as it now is? In the short run, they probably can’t. During the next few months, the ChiCom repression in Hong Kong will surely get ever nastier, and the bigger plan, to just gobble it up and digest it into ChiCom China will surely bash onwards.
But then again, I thought that these Hong Kong demonstrations would all be snuffed out months ago. So what the hell do I know? I thought they’d just send in the tanks, and to hell with “world opinion”. But the ChiComs, it turned out, didn’t want to just kill everyone who dared to disobey, plus anyone else who happened to be standing about nearby. That would not be a good look for them. What are they? Russians? Far too unsophisticated. Instead the plan has been to divide and conquer, and it presumably still is. By putting violent agent provovateurs in among the demonstrators, and by ramping up the violence simultaneously perpetrated by the police, the plan was, and is, to turn the peaceful and hugely well attended demonstrations into far smaller, far more violent street battles of the sort that would disgust regular people. Who would then turn around and support law and order, increased spending on public housing, blah blah. So far, this has not worked.
And for as long as any ChiCom plan for Hong Kong continues not to work, “world opinion” has that much more time to shake itself free from the sneer quotes and get itself organised, to try to help Hong Kong to stay semi-free.
Those district rat-catcher (or whatever) elections last Sunday came at just the wrong time for the ChiComs, because they gave peaceful HongKongers the chance to make their opinions known, about creatures of a far more significant sort than rats, and at just the time when the ChiCom plan should have started seriously shutting the HongKongers up. These elections were a landslide.
The ChiComs are very keen to exude indifference to world opinion, but they clearly do care about it, because if they truly didn’t care about it, those tanks would have gone in months ago, just as I had assumed they would. So, since world opinion clearly has some effect, the first thing the rest of us can do to help the HongKongers is to keep our eyeballs on Hong Kong.
As I say, I continue to be pessimistic about the medium-term future in Hong Kong. But in the longer run, if the HongKongers can’t have a local victory, they can set about getting their revenge. And all of the rest of us who care can join in and help them.
We, the HongKongers and all their supporters around the world, can start talking seriously about toppling the ChiComs, not just by continuing to contest Hong Kong, but also by talking about China as a whole.
If the ChiComs won’t let Hong Kong be, then the HongKongers have a perfect right to start talking about China as a whole, since that’s what is now trying to swallow them up. If they aren’t allowed the distinct and distinctly better system that they were promised, then the only system they are allowed becomes fair game for their complaints and for their recommendations. That’s a claim that will make sense to anyone able to think for themselves. It won’t persuade the ChiComs, but persuading everyone else in the world with a clutch of honest brain cells to rub together is a fine start.
What needs to happen is some re-framing.
At present, the question the rest of us ask about China is: How can we get along with China, as it is? How do we defend ourselves against the ChiComs, as they are? That needs to change to: How does China become the sort of place we can much more easily get along with?
Strategically, and politically, China now resembles Germany during the early twentieth century. Economically, China now, like Germany then, had been on the up-and-up.
Chinese grand strategy, like Germany’s then, is, from where we sit, confused. Are the ChiComs trying to spread the ChiCom model to the entire planet? Or do they merely want us to refrain from interfering in their version of China? (By the way, and to anticipate potential commenters, I have always believed that the impression you convey to the world, in world affairs, is at least as important as whatever you are “really” planning and plotting, in secret, to do. A strategy is massively more potent if it can be persuasively proclaimed and explained in public.)
Trouble is, ChiCom despotism in China and the rest of us not criticising, already feels like the ChiComs being on the offensive. It includes, for instance, any important personage outside China who makes any loud noises against ChiCom rule of China being told by the ChiComs to shut up and stop meddling, even if he has never set foot in China. It involves all kinds of creepy propaganda offensives in universities outside China, telling any students or academics inclined to complain about the ChiComs also to zip it. It means non-Chinese business enterprises having to be fronted by ChiCom-tolerant stooges, if they want to do any business with China.
And as for Chinese people temporarily or even permanently living outside China, nothing but loyalty to the ChiComs is expected of them, which again points up the similarity between early twentieth century Germany and China now. Are the rest of us supposed to do nothing, while Chinese people outside China are terrorised into becoming a fifth column in our midst, right in front of our noses, by ChiCom spooks and gangsters? Even if the ChiCom line is that they are only defending themselves against the imperialists, blah blah, such “defence” can only end when we imperialists are utterly defeated. Utterly imperialised.
To use another historical analogy, Abraham Lincoln famously said that the United States of America couldn’t remain united unless it either allowed slavery in all its states, or else in none of them. Now, the technology of modern communication being what it is and what it is becoming, something similar applies to the entire world. The question is not: Will the world become more united? The question is: How will the world become more united? Even the Anglo-German fight to the death of the early twentieth century was a sort of global ideological civil war. Ditto the Cold War that saw off the USSR. Ditto this new Cold War.
I am absolutely not recommending another hot war, such as the one Abraham Lincoln presided over, and such as Germany got itself into, twice. No, the model is the Cold War that followed the defeat of Germany. Cold, and never hotting up too disastrously. And, come the endgame: We Win, They Lose.
By which I do not mean that China loses. China wins, along with the rest of us. The ChiComs lose. They lose their grip on China. They lose the future.
That’s the key. You start toppling tyrants by taking the future out of their hands. Which you do by simply talking about a different and better future, without them and their tyrannical assumptions. A different and better future even for most of them, all but the very top dogs.
If the HongKongers want to have a world-changing revenge on their current tormentors and probable tyrannical rulers in the nearish future, this is the conversation they must grab hold of and amplify, in addition to the defensive one they are having now.
There is mountains more that could be said about all this. Just as a for-instance, there is the way that Chinese people outside Communist China need to be turned, from being a fifth column inside the freer world, into a conduit for anti ChiCom propaganda into China. That should happen. The crown princes of Chinese Communism, now soaking up the joys of life beyond China, should be named and shamed.
But that’s mere tactics. At the heart of the operation stands the grand strategic device, of talking about democracy not just in Hong Kong (keeping it), but in China as a whole (unleashing it). Crank up that conversation, within the Chinese ex-pat world (where I presume it is already happening (in the various versions of Chinese)) but also in every other language of the world and especially in the new Latin of the world, English. Every time the ChiCom thugs do something seriously evil, which they now seem determined to keep on doing, they will turn up the volume of this discussion and draw more people into it. ChiCom crown princes will even join in, and it almost doesn’t matter on which side because either would be a great help. They will either self-identify as public friends of freedomandemocracy, which is good, or as public enemies of it, ditto.
The Chinese Communists need to have the future of China taken out of their hands, to the point where even most of them start thinking that this alternative future that everyone’s talking about would be better for them than the one they are supposed still to be worshipping.
Likewise major non-Chinese politicians need to be prodded into taking sides. Yes, this may cost them Chinese business, when the ChiComs threaten them with their own version of economic sanctions, but the ChiComs can’t cut the whole world off from the Chinese economy without inflicting economic sanctions upon themselves, for they now rely heavily on foreign business. And if the ChiComs don’t punish heavyweight non-Chinese criticism, good again, because that will encourage it.
Here is a story about a big non-Chinese personage who is already having a go at the ChiComs. Lech Walesa, no less. Remember him? I certainly do. If the ChiComs have a go at him back, that will be news. If they don’t, that will also encourage more to join in.
Wouldn’t it be great if the world got itself a big new dose of virtue signalling, virtue signalling that actually is virtuous?
So, let’s see. What fake elections now held in China could be turned into real ones? Should they make a start by having regular national elections to choose their head of state, to replace their current bastard-in-chief? Or would it be better to start locally, with elections not unlike the recent ones in Hong Kong? What rules about what you have to think before you can stand for election could be relaxed? What is the true state of public opinion in China, insofar as such a thing can even be said to exist? In plainer English, what issues could be stirred up, of the sort that will cause maximum embarrassment to the ChiCom thugocracy, and flag up the attraction of having elections, so that Chinese people can say what they think about whatever issues most concern them, and replace the ChiCom thugs with nicer people, who allow their voters to speak their minds and who listen more politely to them?
I could go on about this at vastly greater length, and have every intention of doing so in the months and years to come, but not now. I have a meeting on this very topic of Hong Kong at my home tomorrow evening (brian @ brianmicklethwait dot com if you want to come but haven’t yet been invited), which will be addressed by a young woman who lives and works in London now, having studied here, but who was raised in Hong Kong. I wanted to bash out something on all this stuff now, before that meeting, rather than do the perfect posting about all this, in who the hell knows how many months or years time.
I know, I know. I’m a libertarian and I’m not supposed to use a phrase like “freedomandemocracy” approvingly. But in Hong Kong I think freedomandemocracy is a real thing. Expanding on that whole liberty versus democracy angle is one of many related topics I hope to get around to writing about, any year now.
Meanwhile I will welcome comments, from grumpy libertarian purists, and from those pointing out grammatical errors caused by the haste with which this was all written. (I hereby award myself the right to do the necessary correcting in the hours and days that follow.) However, I will especially welcome comments from people who are already saying and doing what I have here merely got around to recommending.