“The Hong Kong-Tiananmen Square connection suggests Hong Kong is a continuation of the 20th century’s great battle between imperial tyrannies —monarchies, Reichskanzlers, Politburos — and political systems that protect essential individual freedoms such as free expression and assembly. “
The dictatorship has one thing on its side - the deep cultural remnants of the imperial age of China, with the majority of the people’s acquiesence in respecting the rule and control by the center of power in China. That culture has long convinced the sheeple that as long as the center held China would survive - and the corallary that China would not survive if the center of power did not survive.
Then the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s saw the possible flowering of democracy with the boxer rebellion, followed by Sun Yat Sen and the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the last emperor and established the first Republic of China. But that led to a compromise with the last military strongman of the emperor, and eventually warlords, and instablity followed by the chaos of both the rise of the Communists and the war with Japan. So the beginning of possible democracy is colored with great division, chaos and civil war. What is the mantle Mao held? It was that he restored the center, holding China together. In essence he assumed the same mantle as the emperors of old.
And in many ways the dictatorship is, culturally, a continuation of many aspects of the old imperial order; including its present foreign policies.
It is not politics alone in China that has to change, the culture has to change and that cannot be done by politics alone. Some kind of great awakening in China has to occur.
RE: It is not politics alone in China that has to change, the culture has to change and that cannot be done by politics alone. Some kind of great awakening in China has to occur.
I can understand your description as it applies to the Mainland.
The problem is the people of Hong Kong *AND* Taiwan are now politically so used to more freedom and democracy that any attempt to impose an imperial system on them will be resisted.
To defuse this situation, It would be better for the folks at ZhongNanHai to assure HK, that they will maintain the One China, Two Systems way beyond 2047. I believe that would go a long way towards cooling things down.
Let’s use the USA and our imperialistic control over the Philippines after we defeated Spain for example.
The Filipinos thought then that we were going to give them independence after Spain ceded their country to us.
Instead, we made them a colony resulting in a rebellion that killed hundreds of thousands.
It was not until we made them a Commonwealth with their own President ( Manuel L. Quezon ) and eventually independence ( which could have been given sooner had World War II not began ) that things cooled down.
Today, the USA is popular with over 90% of Filipinos.
China could take a page from history when dealing with Hong Kong and Taiwan.
FORCE is not going to lead to a happy ending.