Why the Hong Kong Protests Will Probably End Badly
I admire the bravery of the Hong Kong people to stand up for their eroding rights, as the western tradition established by the British breaks down. They’ve stood in the rain and lighting, protected by nothing but umbrellas, safety goggles and plastic bags tied around their eyes, as police hammered them with tear gas and pepper spray. And they’re still there, even as the noose of authority starts to tighten around them. This year the Hong Kong people saw an unprecedented crack down on their way of life. Freedom of the press disappeared as outspoken journalists got fired, jailed or viciously attacked by armed thugs in public. Instead of a real election Beijing moved to make sure that only people they approve will come to power, establishing a board to approve all candidates and sparking the people to take to the streets in an “umbrella revolution.” The real, everyday “people” not the sham, ersatz platitude “people” of communist propagandists don’t want a fake leader, someone chosen by ancient gerontocrats huddled in the power corridors of Beijing. I hope they get it. It’s just that the history of China doesn’t hold out much hope that they will. Their drama is depressingly familiar, a pattern played out over and over and over in history both recent and distant.
The men who rule with an iron fist in mainland China can’t stand by and let this happen. There’s too much at stake. They can’t appear to look weak or lose face. No matter how they strangle the internet with the Great Firewall of China, information always finds a way to sneak through, whether through Tor, mesh networks, VPNs or people traveling to Hong Kong from the mainland and returning with stories. And worse, it just might give the mainland Chinese ideas, something they can’t allow. Already they’re drawing up plans to crush the protestors by any means necessary. Today we saw a report in Reuters that a sophisticated state created malware program is working its way through protestor’s smart phones, stealing usernames, passwords and emails. Quartz translated a comparison between an edict just issued to the Hong Kong protestors as well as the one issued right before the Tienanmen Square massacre and they look eerily similar. In other words, the PRC is making a list and they’re checking it twice. The Chinese leaders see society as a whole, a unified organism. Individuals are nothing but a disease to destroy or a healthy part of the whole, aka a compliant citizen, who won’t make waves. Anything that disrupts harmony gets eliminated and they don’t care about public relations. In the northern Mongolian dessert they’ve had a number of terrorist attacks and a full blown separatists movement that’s caused the PRC to respond with a brutal campaign of suppression. Last week they jailed a prominent activist and scholar for life. He’s known as a moderate, who supported Chinese rule, but in the looking glass reality of totalitarian governments, even moderates are cancers that needs to get burned out.
Chairman Mao once said “the people want freedom but we want socialism.” Mao was a master strategist, general and politician of the most ruthless type. He often used dialectics to make it hard to know where he stood and to give him plausible deniability. If someone accused him later of saying something he could always say they misinterpreted his words. But his statement about the desires of the people versus the needs of the powerful was one of his most unequivocal of his life. In essence he said “we don’t care what everyone wants, this is what we want.” In this one little sentence he proved that the communists, who’d come to power on the backs of “the people,” were exactly that same as all the other ruthless men who’d ruled China for three thousand years. The dynasties and warlords never left China, they just transformed. One of Mao’s generals said that the communist revolution cost 40 million lives and that it would require nothing less than that to take it from them. There is little doubt that the engines of power in Beijing churn as we speak, looking for a way to break the backs of the people. It’s just a little more complicated this time, because Hong Kong represents a vital economic engine, essential to the whole, so they’re moving carefully, like a deadly serpent in the long grass.
The good news is the PRC has less options at their disposal on the island. On the mainland they have total control of the media, the police and the army. Hong Kong’s police used tear gas, but they haven’t shown themselves willing to open up with assault rifles. They spent their whole lives in a system built on rule of law, checks and balances, and restraints to their authority, a vastly different prospect then the absolute authority of communist China’s People’s Armed Police. If the people won’t go, the central government will find it hard to force those cops to gun down unarmed civilians. They’ll need the army to do that, which means they’ll have to come across the water and people will know they’re coming. The protestors have vowed not to back down. Something has to give.
Like all totalitarian governments, the people in power only want one thing: power. They don’t care about anyone but themselves. They don’t care about anything but hanging on to their fleeting rule, by any means necessary. Anything that questions them, insults them, or lampoons them causes them to strike fast and strike hard.
The protestors have a major disadvantage. They have no weapons. Unlike the Communists rising up against the Nationalists they can’t turn to armed struggled to get their way. Like it or not, Mao was right: “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” The history of the world is almost universally of a small group of violent people exerting control on the rest of humanity. If you put one hundred people in a room, who gets their way? The people willing to use violence. One guy gathers up a few other monsters and enforces his will on the rest of the group. Once the bullets start flying the protestors will either disperse or get mowed down but they’ll have no way to fight back. Hong Kong inherited its gun control laws from British colonial fears of an armed populace and mainland China restricted guns almost as soon as they came to power, according to the Library of Congress, which keeps track of such things. They didn’t want a counterrevolutionary movement. If the protestors can’t get what they want by peaceful means, and there is little reason to think that they will, considering China’s history, then they have no other avenues to freedom. Most people in the western world know all about the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989, but not as many people know much about Falun Gung, a religious movement suppressed by the PRC. It’s estimated that more than half of the people incarcerated in the Laogai “reform through labor” system, a brutal prison system notorious for its vicious torture, are Falun Gung political prisoners. Most people think its because the communists fear superstition and religion but the main reason the PRC moved against the movement’s practitioners is because they held a massive protest for human rights. Not long after, the government established the secretive 610 office to oversee their extermination.
My wife calls me a pessimist. I admit it. But behind every cynic is an optimist. I watched the Arab Spring turn into the Arab Winter. I’ve looked back through the history books and wondered how we in America got so lucky, with a group of brilliant men who seized power through violence and then let it go. The rarest personality on Earth is the man of violence who also believes in higher principals, who is willing to step back and let the people rule once they take control. Almost every revolution in the history of man ended up with autocrats in power. Mao promised democratic reform and rule of the people. But when he got control he stripped his people of the very thing he promised, as is so often the case. I really hope I am wrong this time and the Chinese people get what they want after so many thousands of years living under the knife.
The people of Hong Kong are standing up in the face of a coming whirlwind. They’ll need more than umbrellas.
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