What the Hong Kong Protests Are Really About

By Jimmy Lai

Riot police firing tear gas during clashes with protestors outside the Legislature in Hong Kong, on Monday.

When hundreds of thousands of my fellow Hong Kongers took to the streets to demonstrate last month, most of the world saw people protesting provocative legislation that would allow extraditions to mainland China.
But the Chinese government, which supported the extradition measure, had a much broader view of the protests. 

It recognized them as the first salvo in a new cold war, one in which the otherwise unarmed Hong Kong people wield the most powerful weapon in the fight against the Chinese Communist Party: moral force.
In much of the West, moral force is underestimated. 

Communists never make that mistake. 

There is a reason Beijing will never invite the pope or the Dalai Lama for a visit to China. 

The government knows that whenever its leaders must stand beside anyone with even the slightest moral legitimacy, they suffer by the comparison. 

Moral force makes Communists insecure.
And for good reason. 

As China was reminded this week, as riot police officers used pepper spray and batons on demonstrators in Hong Kong, the protests have been holding a mirror up to China. 

What rattles Beijing is that it sees in that mirror what the rest of the world sees: a monster.
Since his ascendancy to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has made no secret of his goal to purge the Western influences that he believes are contaminating China. 

In Hong Kong, he has been working to erode the limited political freedoms and rule of law that make Hong Kong the special region of China that it is — and that have long made Hong Kong economically valuable to China, ironically enough.
Nearly all us in Hong Kong are refugees or the descendants of refugees from China. 

We have no illusions about what happens to people when they come up short in the eyes of the Communist Party. 

Everyone in Hong Kong knows that introducing the possibility of imprisoning us in China, as the extradition treaty does, would signal the end of life in Hong Kong as we know it.
In Beijing’s view, of course, Hong Kong’s colonial past undermines its legitimacy as a Chinese society. 

Never mind that the system of limited freedoms that the British introduced to Hong Kong existed long before Communism was established on the mainland. (Communism is itself a Western import to China, by the way.)
The inconvenient truth is that people in Hong Kong (and in Taiwan) live better than any Chinese in Chinese history. 

This gives moral force to our way of life. 

It also shows the extraordinary things people can accomplish when given the freedom to do so.
Hong Kong’s moral force has also been economically good for China, since the moral force of our free society cannot be separated from its prosperity. 

It is not likely that Beijing agreed to have the government of Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, suspend consideration of the extradition bill just because a lot of people marched against it. 

No doubt Xi Jinping learned much about capital flight and jittery investors during those protests and saw how badly China still needs a prosperous and functioning Hong Kong.
This is Xi’s great weakness: If he crushes the soul of Hong Kong, he will lose the Hong Kong he needs to make China the global power he envisions.

It should be possible for the West and China to trade freely, while at the same time competing as opposing value systems.

People at protests against changing Hong Kong’s extradition law sat outside the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong, on June 21.

The values war is the real war. 

For the West to prevail, it must support the tiny little corner of China where its virtues now operate: Hong Kong. 

These values may be a legacy of Western rule, but for Hong Kongers who have grown up with them, they feel as natural as any part of our Chinese heritage.
Our struggle with Beijing, if successful, can help China’s leaders begin to accept the need for authority earned through the moral admiration of the world, not through the barrel of a gun. 

But if Beijing’s approach prevails, when China becomes the world’s biggest economy; the West will face a far greater monster.
The West’s moral authority is its most powerful weapon. 

Moral authority is where China is most vulnerable to humiliation, at home and abroad. 

Beijing has no weapons save for force, which gets harder to rely on, the more the world can see that for itself.