I. On How to Properly Rebut Arguments
I read Lu Kewen’s “The Hong Kong Issue and the Truth About the World” again. Boiled down, it’s two parts: the first half claims Hong Kong hides behind democracy and freedom to demonize the mainland; the second half uses historical anecdotes to show the dangers of freedom and democracy.
I’ve read a lot of rebuttals. Many attack the factual accuracy of the historical examples he cites. I think that misses the point. Fact-checking history is just data cleaning. To refute someone’s model, you need a better model. Even if the author invented his history wholesale, readers would still get his argument.
No matter how much you tout democracy and freedom, the dangers of fragmentation and chaos are real. The real challenge is proposing a concrete, workable solution: how to maintain national unity and order while fairly redistributing power and resources. Without such a solution, arguments for democracy will fail to convince anyone.
II. The Problem with “The Truth About the World”
Lu Kewen’s model is simple and easy to grasp. Its only flaw is that it’s wrong.
But it’s also very hard to falsify. Because reality isn’t as simple as 0 and 1, black and white.
What we’re actually facing is far more complex—like an advanced calculus problem, not a simple true-false question.
You don’t just pick an ideology and have national prosperity fall from the sky.
Democracy and authoritarianism aren’t natural opposites. In fact, the optimal solution probably lies somewhere between them. But finding that optimal point is incredibly difficult. More importantly, designing an effective system of institutions that keeps governance close to that optimal point is no simple matter.
And when you consider all the other competing goals—national security, economic development, technological innovation, cultural preservation, education, public health, environmental protection—the challenge becomes exponentially harder. Coordinating all these requires mobilizing society’s entire energy and collective intelligence.
III. The Party Leads Everything? Does It Have What It Takes?
So when the Party shouts slogans like “The Party leads everything,” it must be opposed. Because the Party doesn’t have that capability.
I used to believe that if the Party broadly absorbed representatives from all social classes, internal Party democracy radiating outward could be a form of democracy. That most members were good people—that despite some blemishes, the core was sound.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Only the key people in critical positions actually count—they outweigh millions of Party members. All those good people are just tools, utterly worthless when facing real power.
This form of power structure is actually a waste of society’s intellectual resources.
For example:
When the government was beating war drums two years ago as Trump threatened tariffs, did they accurately assess the power imbalance between the two countries? Could they have anticipated the outcome—that tariffs would be imposed and China would have to make concessions?
When they petulantly refused to import American pork and turned to Russia instead, importing diseased pigs, what were the health and quarantine officials doing? Did they anticipate today’s result—no pork to eat?
Nothing stands up to scrutiny. One line from the top leader—”I’ll take full responsibility”—overrides all expert opinion.
So if the Party continues to strengthen its control over everything, that’s absolutely not good news for society as a whole.
In my view, the optimal form of organization is probably some version of weak central government + regional autonomy. Central and local governments would have clear power boundaries. For instance: national defense and foreign affairs go to the center; economy and people’s welfare stay local. Different regions vary wildly in development levels and even ideologies. Top-down unified control by the central government actually exceeds what the government can handle.
IV. Distributed Organization
No matter how disappointed you are with democracy, you can’t deny the rationality and necessity of the idea and system of separation of powers.
Increasingly complex social problems are far beyond what any single-core processor can handle. What we actually need is to plug more high-capacity, intelligent nodes into distributed cloud computing through some efficient organizational structure. What should happen is deeper decentralization—mobilizing society’s collective energy and brainpower to handle multiple tasks in parallel.
I mentioned in my last piece that the Party-state is working hard to atomize citizens. In practice, this means breaking up spontaneously organized clusters of people, scattering them, and plugging them all into one central mega-processor.
Sure, this architecture is simple and easy to manage, but it obviously stifles the full potential of our resources.
The glaring problem now is that this central processor clearly lacks the computing power to live up to its ambitions—the Confucian ideal of “governing a large country as carefully as one cooks a small fish.”
All the tasks that could run in parallel are now queued up, bottlenecked by the central processor’s capacity.
We could be doing so much more.
V. Where Is the Cure for Civilization?
I agree with Jeff Yang’s comment from the last piece: “Western values are not the cure for civilization.”
First, because values are only a small part of national development. Second, because the cure for civilization hasn’t appeared yet.
From a practical perspective:
National development is an incredibly complex function. Influencing factors include geopolitics, population (size/quality/structure/character), institutional policies, competitors, and more.
Values are just a small part of it.
For instance, what stopped the Nazi invasion of Britain wasn’t the British democratic system—it was the English Channel. Britain’s geographic protection gave Churchill time to secure American Lend-Lease support. Similarly, without geographic advantages, Stalin might not have survived Hitler’s invasion if Hitler could have focused all his forces against him.
China’s economic miracle, honestly, was mainly about getting in with the US and joining the global trade system, right? Without that, our economy would have grown, but nowhere near as fast.
I haven’t studied Taiwan’s development in depth, but I get the sense that geopolitics played a huge role there too.
Too many factors influence a nation’s fate more than values or ideology.
One key factor is whether the country can select talented, capable people to govern.
When I look at America, I can’t help but marvel. Those who think America will decline quickly must be blind. Here’s why: voters can reject establishment political elites when they underperform, and capable new thinkers emerge—people like Andrew Yang—who tackle future challenges while the rest of the world is still caught off guard by technological disruption.
It makes you wonder: is the political IQ of the populace part of national strength?
Look back at China: dragging its feet on political reform, even marching backward; slow to respond to population problems, wealth inequality, and all sorts of real issues; clueless about the visible future of automation… this kind of social organization can’t handle what’s coming or adapt to change.
Back to Hong Kong: while many mainlanders only see conflict, chaos, and violence, I see the power of civil society. Hong Kong has more organic vitality than the vast majority of mainland cities. Its civic responsibility, shared values, awareness, and organizational capacity far surpass mainland society. Sure, Weibo and WeChat claim 1.4 billion flag-wavers, but mobilizing and organizing as effectively as Hong Kong is no easy feat.
I don’t want to say much more about Hong Kong.
On right and wrong, I’ll just say one thing (told this to Brother Qiang three months ago): when I saw ordinary Hong Kong residents spontaneously shielding protesters from police, I knew immediately which side justice was on.
Isn’t this the most common story in movies and novels? If you still don’t get it, put yourself in the villain’s shoes and see how it feels.
From a spiritual perspective:
In The Next 100 Years, George Friedman argues that our current era will be seen as a dark period in human history. I think he’s right.
The old values date back hundreds of years, and the new era hasn’t shown its dawn. We may be born and die in this long night.
But let’s keep searching—we’ll just be fertilizer for the new age.