What China Thinks of Hong Kong’s Protests

Why are Hong Kong’s citizens on the streets? What are they protesting now? Why don’t they want to be part of China? These are questions that confound Chinese who know about the massive protests that have been dogging Hong Kong since June.

Hong Kongers are marching against proposed amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance Bill put before the Hong Kong legislature (Legco). The changes, which would allow fugitives to be sent to mainland China, were widely viewed as potential tools for Beijing to demand the extradition to China of political dissidents, or of anyone not in favor with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Hong Kong government has since suspended the measure, but protesters want more: the full withdrawal of the legislation, apologies for alleged police brutality against marchers, and even the resignation of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam.

The essence of Hong Kong, the influence on social and political norms that Britain left, and the freedom that generations of Hong Kong citizens have had to criticize as well as consort with their colonial masters, made Hong Kong something over and above a home for Chinese people who didn’t live in China. China’s inability to respond or react in any meaningful way to the fears and anger expressed in both peaceful and violent demonstrations in Hong Kong illustrates a disconnect of ideologies between China and its “special administrative region” that is likely to be unbridgeable.

Propaganda works, and when sole-source, single-perspective media targets growing minds over the course of an entire young life, it becomes almost impossible to counteract the impact. Such is the case in mainland China. Unlike their Hong Kong brethren, who have a myriad of media from which to choose, Chinese from their earliest years can functionally tune into only one channel. That channel’s editorial board is the Chinese Communist Party.

Confronted with a challenge to that orthodox world view, the single-voice script is the only tool that most Party members, and many in everyday society, have to cope. The script, in this case, is that Hong Kong is an incontrovertible part of China (just like Taiwan), and that the Hong Kong people should be grateful, indeed overjoyed, to have been brought back into the fold.

And if they aren’t, they will still, eventually, do what China says.

Thus, the yearnings of a substantial number of Hong Kong’s population to remain independent – of both the political as well as the thought control of the Chinese Communist Party – has created a situation in which neither side can truly understand the other. Even the depth and power of a shared Chinese culture cannot bridge the gap.

The view from within China is massaged by the constant messaging of the CCP-controlled media. It also reflects a certain truth that has at least something to do with the influence of traditional Chinese culture, which has made a resurgence in the lives of ordinary people over the last 20 years or so.

That truth is that individual freedoms must always come second to the collective good. Stability of the nation is a higher good than the needs of a minority to be free to think, believe, or act in ways that could cause dissonance in society, and therefore chaos.

The tone-deaf response in China to the fight against Communist Party encroachment into the civil lives of the people of Hong Kong is therefore a curious blend of the mixed influences of not only Chinese communism, but the teachings of Chinese culture as well. That culture teaches that chaos, at all costs, must be avoided.

Mainland journalism reflects this. Chinese newspapers, including the English-language China Daily, are a hybrid of infomercials about the joys of living in China and the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party on the one hand, and indignant criticism sessions of intolerant Western voices who audaciously harp on about human rights in China on the other.

The “party line” is underscored by this single mindset, and fuels Chinese bewilderment, anger, and misunderstanding of the protesters in Hong Kong and the original beef that set off the demonstrations this year.

But perhaps the demographic makeup of the CCP itself is even more profoundly feeding the dissonance between the two sides.

As China Daily reports, over 61 percent of CCP members have only been Party members since 2012. This means that a significant majority of members are new acolytes, largely inspired, it would seem, by the early rise and popularity of Xi Jinping. Whatever the motivations and inspirations of individual members within that majority, they likely have little tolerance for challenging or opposing the Chinese state, the Chinese Communist Party, and certainly not Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong.

Again according to China Daily, another 20 percent of members joined the Party before 1949. Even if those early recruits were only 20 years old at the time (and many were), they were born no later than 1929, meaning that they are 90 now. These members are the base. They were the revolutionaries once, tearing up a society and remaking it in the vision of a set of ideas that seemed better than the status quo of their day.

Revolutionaries rarely take kindly to upstarts who want to defy the ideals for which they fought and undo the structures of the new world they formed. This group, then, may be elderly, but these older CCP members, forming as they do the original generation that transformed China, are revered in the country. Newer, younger, and still freshly zealous members take their cues from these heroes of the revolution, in some ways more than they do from the middle-aged generation of CCP members who are seen to have compromised their ideals.

Thus, within the Party, there is going to be little support for or understanding of the perspective and purpose of the million-person protests by Hong Kong citizens.

And, as the CCP goes, the nation goes, at least for now.

The world should not expect China to ever understand Hong Kong; the two places are now fundamentally different. And if recent events are any indication of future ones, the resistance in Hong Kong to any Chinese restriction of the Hong Kong people’s rights and liberties will continue to resurface and resound, not only throughout the region, but throughout the world.