Lately I’ve seen far too much nonsense—stuff that shouldn’t fool anyone—yet somehow hoodwinks far too many people, including those who are highly intelligent, well-educated, and experienced in practical affairs.
I’m writing this to set the record straight and inspire more discerning minds to engage in deeper thinking and discussion.
The Hong Kong situation is crystal clear: it’s about mainland China squeezing Hong Kong’s freedoms and rights.
Bringing up economic factors or mainland-Hong Kong tensions is missing the forest for the trees.
Hong Kong’s unique position rests on its status as a free port with an independent judiciary and a free business environment. Cross-border kidnappings—events the mainland refuses to report—would be major scandals with severe consequences in any society governed by the rule of law. Yet to this day, those who authorized these actions hide behind the scenes like cowardly turtles, acting as if nothing happened. No one has been held accountable or offered any explanation. They broke the rules but escaped punishment because of their power. This is what lawlessness looks like.
When people argue with me that China is a rule-of-law society, this is my most solid evidence to the contrary: law that cannot constrain power is not rule of law.
Pushing patriotic education (which is really Party loyalty education) and compressing Hong Kong’s freedom of expression is another major driver.
(Why does patriotism conflict with freedom? Because the Party-state weaponizes patriotism to suppress inconvenient speech and dissenting political views. Gossiping about leaders does no harm to the nation; exposing corruption actually serves the country’s interests.)
Why do mainlanders find it so hard to empathize?
Is it really so hard to imagine what it feels like to have freedoms you were promised suddenly stripped away?
In the end, it comes down to practical experience—whether you’ve actually owned two cows or not. Mainlanders remain indifferent to the erosion of free speech and academic freedom simply because most have never experienced such freedoms in the first place.
Why am I so sensitive to this? Because the commentators I follow—and I myself—get censored all the time. (And why do I always end up liking views that get banned? Because I’m smart, obviously. Smart within limits—I can’t conjure pork out of thin air, but I can at least smell it cooking.)
A thought struck me this morning: throughout all of Chinese history, the military has never belonged to the nation. And naturally, there’s been even less experience successfully constraining power through institutions.
So those who fear democracy and freedom have their reasons—such things have never existed here. No one can say with certainty what would happen if that day ever came.
After all, these are just frameworks. Whether they actually work depends entirely on the people operating within them.
Based on my limited understanding, I’d rank rule of law first, education second.
Education is actually the most important, because sophisticated, efficient forms of social organization go against our animal instincts—they need to be trained into us. But on reflection, I can only rank it second.
Why? Because I’ve seen with my own eyes how education becomes a tool for poisoning youth when the system itself is lawless, and how the Party deploys the full power of the state apparatus with sophisticated tactics to consolidate its rule.
The real educational crisis in China today isn’t that Hong Kong lacks patriotic education—it’s that the mainland desperately needs civic education. People need to learn how to actively shoulder social responsibility, express opinions constructively, analyze and debate issues critically, communicate and compromise to find solutions, and organize and collaborate effectively.
But the Party-state does the exact opposite: it restricts free speech, prevents spontaneous citizen organizing, dismantles all non-official social groups, and works tirelessly to build an atomized society.
Over the past ten-plus years, I’ve watched Chinese society firsthand. I’ve seen enormous amounts of material, financial, human, and intellectual resources sitting idle, churning uselessly, going to waste.
Back in middle school, our politics textbook attacked capitalist electoral systems, pointing to the chaos and resource waste of elections. But look at the reality today: when a Chinese leader takes power, they must first spend years purging political enemies and consolidating their grip. Compared to that massive social cost, the seamless transitions in Europe and America are basically free. Not to mention that Trump faced impeachment over a phone call to an ally, while our leaders can screw up at every turn and still barrel ahead unopposed.
There must be a more efficient way to organize society, and a real path to get there.
(Why am I so sure? Because you’d be hard-pressed to imagine anything more incompetent and pigheaded than what we’ve got now. Sure, reality can always surprise you—we’ll see. And yes, history has plenty of even stupider examples. But until you live through it yourself, it’s all just stories.)
I haven’t figured it out yet. So I’m certainly not going to run around shouting slogans.
I originally set out today to critique two pieces:
- Deutsche Welle journalist’s video interview with Shao Lan
- Lu Kewen’s “The Hong Kong Issue and the Truth About the World”
I’ve seen a few rebuttals of the second one, but they all miss the crucial points, and I’d look lazy just forwarding those. Haven’t seen anything on the first one yet. I meant to write my own critiques today, but just getting through this preamble has taken me to the late hours. I’ll leave the rest for next time.
(To be continued)