{"id":1314600,"date":"2019-09-13T20:12:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-14T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/will-column-hong-kongs-summer-of-heroic-dissent\/"},"modified":"2019-09-13T20:12:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-14T02:12:00","slug":"will-column-hong-kongs-summer-of-heroic-dissent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/will-column-hong-kongs-summer-of-heroic-dissent\/","title":{"rendered":"Will column: Hong Kong\u2019s summer of heroic dissent"},"content":{"rendered":"
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HONG KONG \u2014 The masked men who recently tossed firebombs at Jimmy Lai\u2019s home targeted one of this city\u2019s foremost democracy advocates. Lai, a 71-year-old media billionaire, calls this summer\u2019s ongoing protest \u201ca martyrdom movement\u201d and \u201ca last-straw movement.\u201d It has an intensity and dynamic that bewilders the protesters\u2019 opponents in Beijing and in Hong Kong\u2019s Beijing-obedient city administration.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s mostly young protesters will be middle-aged in 2047, at the expiration of the 50-year agreement that ostensibly accords Hong Kong protected status as an island of freedom. Beijing attempted to whittle away that status with a proposed 2003 law against \u201csubversion.\u201d And by devaluing suffrage by the 2014 requirement that candidates for the chief-executive receive approval from a Beijing-loyal committee. And by this year\u2019s extradition bill that would have facilitated sweeping Hong Kongers into the maw of China\u2019s opaque criminal-justice system.<\/p>\n

Monday\u2019s New York Times carried a full-page ad paid for by \u201cthe Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People\u2019s Republic of China.\u201d Which means, effectively, by the Chinese Communist Party. The ad said: \u201cWe are resolutely committed to \u2018One Country, Two Systems\u2019 which provides the constitutional guarantee for Hong Kong\u2019s continued development and success as a free and open society.\u201d The ad pledged \u201cdialogue to talk through differences and look for common ground with no preconditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the \u201cone county, two systems\u201d formulation, agreed to in 1997, when British authority ended, as a 50-year framework for Hong Kong\u2019s relations with the PRC, is an inherently menacing precondition. And Beijing\u2019s consistently sinister behavior reveals a determination, as implacable as it is predictable, to incrementally nullify \u201cone nation, two systems\u201d by reducing Hong Kong to just another jurisdiction wholly subservient to China\u2019s deepening tyranny.<\/p>\n

For Leninists such as Xi Jinping wielding a party-state, nothing is more important than the party\u2019s unchallenged primacy. Another \u201cTiananmen Square\u201d \u2014 a Hong Kong massacre \u2014 would be calamitous for China\u2019s Leninists, but less so than weakening the Communist Party\u2019s primacy. The party is, Lai says, \u201cdetached from reality\u201d and \u201cwill always make the wrong decision\u201d as it tries to become \u201cthe most absolute dictatorship in human history.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1940, Winston Churchill warned against \u201ca new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.\u201d That is China\u2019s aspiration with \u201cdigital Leninism,\u201d an application of science through manipulative technologies that neither Churchill nor his contemporary, George Orwell, anticipated. With a steadily refined repression apparatus, aptly called \u201ccyber-totalitarianism,\u201d China\u2019s surveillance state is enmeshing everyone in a \u201csocial credit\u201d system. Individuals\u2019 cumulative commercial and social-media transactions give them a score that determines their access to education, housing, clinics, travel and more, even including pet ownership. Although China\u2019s published statistics are as untrustworthy as the regime itself, there are reasons to believe that in this decade China has spent more on \u201cstability maintenance\u201d than on its military. Hong Kong is watching this.<\/p>\n

And Hong Kong is reading Ma Jian\u2019s dystopian novel \u201cChina Dream,\u201d which is banned in mainland China but not here. The protagonist is Ma Daode, director of the fictional (so far) China Dream Bureau, which aspires to \u201creplace all private dreams\u201d with one communal dream. Ma Daode hopes to develop \u201ca neural implant,\u201d a device whereby \u201cjust one click of a button and government directives will be transferred wirelessly into the brains\u201d of the governed. This is not much more Orwellian than China\u2019s evolving reality.<\/p>\n

In her 1951 \u201cThe Origins of Totalitarianism,\u201d Hannah Arendt argued that a tyrannical regime, wielding bureaucracy and mass media, could achieve permanence by conscripting the citizenry\u2019s consciousness. This echoed Orwell\u2019s foreboding: \u201cImagine a boot stamping on a human face \u2014 forever.\u201d In 1956, Arendt thought her theory had been refuted by a fact \u2014 the Hungarian Revolution, which demonstrated that no state can interrupt \u201call channels of communication.\u201d Hong Kong sees Beijing using new technologies in the service of an evil permanence.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo see what is in front of one\u2019s nose,\u201d wrote Orwell, \u201cneeds a constant struggle.\u201d Belatedly, the world is seeing. The Economist recently editorialized: \u201cThe West\u2019s 25-year bet on China has failed.\u201d The wager was that \u201cmarket totalitarianism\u201d is an oxymoron. Embedding China in the global economy supposedly would open it to the softening effects of commerce, which would be solvents of authoritarianism. The West\u2019s tardy but welcome disenchantment is, as the Economist says, \u201cthe starkest reversal in modern geopolitics.\u201d If Hong Kong\u2019s heroic refusal to go gentle into Beijing\u2019s dark night is accelerating this disenchantment, the summer of dissent has been this decade\u2019s grandest and most important development.<\/p>\n

George Will\u2019s email address is georgewill@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HONG KONG \u2014 The masked men who recently tossed firebombs at Jimmy Lai\u2019s home targeted one of this city\u2019s foremost democracy advocates. Lai, a 71-year-old media billionaire, calls this summer\u2019s ongoing protest \u201ca martyrdom movement\u201d and \u201ca last-straw movement.\u201d It has an intensity and dynamic that bewilders the protesters\u2019 opponents in Beijing and in Hong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1314600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-27 10:30:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}