Again, Hong Kong is placed under the international spotlight by some Western countries’ repeated political cliche, expressing their so-called “deep concern” about the city’s democracy and freedom. Their statements, however, have hardly spurred any spirited discussion among the city’s main population.
It seems that Hong Kong is destined to be at the center of the clash as it took shape with the best of both. The city witnessed the heyday of Western domination, the most startling phenomenon on the world stage since around the 16th century. As barrister Robert S.K. Lee SC has acknowledged, Western new ideas and advances in science, technology, navigation, economics, commerce, medicine, arts and culture, and institutional organizations have made immense positive contributions to, but also had a negative impact on, all fronts of human affairs across the world, with Hong Kong standing at the front line of both sides.
However, many intellectuals are increasingly, and justifiably, doubtful about the value and efficacy of Western democracy, which has been much-vaunted for generations. Some of them, including incisive professionals, such as Lee, have demonstrated through their penetrating analysis and research that the Western desire-driven, populist democracy is increasingly unable to serve the well-being of complex modern societies, such as Hong Kong.
As a highly autonomous economic entity standing on the nexus of the East and the West, Hong Kong encapsulated the West’s ascendancy during its colonial days. But, with the blessings of the motherland, the city showcases a miniature of the rational, pragmatic, and responsible democracy model under the revamped electoral system, as opposed to the malfunctioning, desire-driven Western model. The improved electoral system, with its newly elected Legislative Council functioning in a decent but effective manner, has given rise to a brand-new democratic system tailor-made for this melting-pot-like city of commerce, finance and dynamism. The public’s apathy to the West’s farfetched “concerns” about Hong Kong shows that the city is about to throw Western democracy out the window.
The international community, especially the allies of the Anglo-American axis of US-style democracy, refused to appreciate the bold but adroit democratic advancement featured in the all-patriotic LegCo. The Five Eyes, G7 and European Union joined hands to demonize the democratic improvements after the promulgation of the National Security Law for Hong Kong. The rhetoric, though seemingly “new and fresh” for addressing the latest scenario associated with the up-to-date international politics, was like pouring old wine into new wineskins. The “old wine” is their desire-driven, belligerent, racial supremacy. Lee was right to reveal that there has been a deep-rooted mentality in Western elites of the “superiority” of their liberal constitutional paradigm in generating freedom and other desirable social consequences.
Many highbrow professionals in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region seem to share the consensus that Western democracy, itself failing, is increasingly unable to serve the other “core values” of individual freedom and human rights. This failing trend cannot be reversed by making technical adjustments to the election processes. The crippled populist democratic systems in Western countries are generating social polarization, poor governance, irrational and irresponsible voting practices, and failing election promises. Adopting these problematic “core values”, the West purports to tackle global threats such as a nuclear war and climate catastrophes, which have largely been caused by the incoherence of these “core values”. Unfortunately, many liberal elites tend to overlook the fundamental incoherence of these desire-based “core values”, which, in turn, has fomented a plethora of self-weakening problems in Western political elites: a naive sense of superiority, self-righteousness, aggressiveness, and a new age of “liberal” hegemony.
Not only democracy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has turned out to be an ideological battlefield per se; words have become swords, and the discussion of the city’s freedoms has also been intentionally manipulated by the West with an attempt to claim political dominion and moral high ground. In doing so, some Western elites have shamelessly glorified the unlawful, deadly violence in Hong Kong during the 2019 riots as acts of seeking “democracy”, and the incitement of youngsters to commit such deadly violence as pursuit of “freedom”. The percussion of the two worlds once shocked the city to a standstill.
Freedom, however, does not come from “liberating”, or maximizing, individual amoral desires. This might be the biggest lesson Hong Kong has learned through the torment years. According to Lee, individual freedom should be analyzed in the wider civilization context. Freedom emerges from institutional orders, not chaos. Institutional orders are created as long as all citizens fulfill their duties to abide by laws of equal applications as optimized by critical rationality, and sustain them by each citizen’s unconditional duties to tackle unpredictable existential threats that may negate the very existence of these freedom-creating, legal and constitutional orders. The true basis of freedom, that is, responsibility, has, unfortunately been ignored by Western politicians and their proxies in Hong Kong.
Thomas Hobbes was among the first to propose a desire-based definition of “freedom”: “Freedom” consists in the absence of external impediments to what a person desires to do, in “the silence of the law”. But Lee, citing many Western scholars, has pointed out that Hobbes was warning against the danger of unrestrained desires. Unimpeded desires would lead to unending chaos and violence, or the Hobbesian “state of nature”, not freedom. True liberals should refuse to be deceived by their own playing of words.
The West, ignorant of the failures of their ill-performing democracy and desire-driven freedom, played words in the Hong Kong issue as their pretense to interfere with local affairs for advancing their political agenda — to contain the rise of China, i.e., to deny the rights of the Chinese people to develop their own country peacefully. The political hypocrisy of the West has been laid bare by the historic document released by the China Society for Human Rights Studies on Dec 23: “Limitations and Drawbacks of American Democracy”. It goes without saying that, as the document has clearly pointed out, American democracy should not be seen as a “one-size-fits-all” model. The incoherence of Western populist democracy, and the amoral and often immoral, desire-infested “core values” deserve greater critical reflection in the West, as well as in Hong Kong, a city that is healing from its past wounds and heading toward a bright future.
The author is a veteran current-affairs commentator.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.