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Monday, November 3, 2014 - Volume 5,
Number 9 © Copyright 2014,
The Ultrapolis Project. All Rights
Reserved. China to Hong Kong: Two Systems, One Master The Western Luxury No
Citizen of China Can Afford ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: ·
Ultrapolis Forecasts Grow on Twitter ·
Latest UForecasts Posted on Twitter ·
UWFR Reader
Panel Comments on UForecasts ·
Readers’
Comments: We Need a Woman, Democrat on Texas’ Top Post ·
Cartoon: The Wave to Fear, by Nate Beeler |
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Hong Kong Delusions of Liberty Moral Indignation Is
Not Enough Incongruent Past When the British surrendered Hong Kong back to China in 1997,
after the expiration of the 99-year ‘lease’ that had placed a time limit on
the British Empire’s control over this small part of the weak, decrepit, and
disintegrating Chinese Empire, this quasi-city-state’s already unusual
historical course was set on an even more politically incongruent path. By the time the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in
1984 formalizing the agreement and timetable to return the city-state to
communist China, Hong Kong was already an emerging metropolis of world stature. Nothing more than a collection of backward
fishing villages in a steamy jungle when the British first took possession in
1841, by 1997 the area was home to the world’s tallest and most dazzling
skyscrapers outside of New York City and Chicago, and to a population that
had grown almost 1,000-fold since 1841, to nearly six million people. (By the mid-20th century, before
the population explosion in Third World cities, Hong Kong was among the
world’s twenty largest urban centers).
In 1997, China was still a
very poor, if rapidly developing nation, while Hong Kong was an island of
capitalist prosperity with a per capita income ten times that of mainland
communist China. To understand the
scope of what it meant for city-state like Hong Kong to be handed over to a
nation like China, one might liken it to having New York City transferred to
control by a Mexico ten times its current size and under a communist a
dictatorship. Of course, the analogy
is not perfect, but most Americans do not understand how different was the
cultural and political memory of the people of Hong Kong, and their economic
system and prosperity, from those of the vast country that reclaimed them. The Context of Delusion The protesters have valiantly, and rather dutifully,
employed the proper peaceful, if disruptive, protest and demonstration
strategies and tactics that are a tradition in Western democracies. One can see that the people of this great
world city are well informed on the outside world, as they are aware of how
citizens in other countries expect their developed democratic governments to
behave in the face of open dissent.
They have seen how successful public pressure has been in changing
government policies, occasionally even toppling governments that fail to
respond to their people. Unfortunately
for them, while the Hong Kong protesters are under the same misunderstanding
that afflicts most Western liberal progressives regarding the source of
political rights, they do not inhabit a political order that allows them to
indulge that misunderstanding. Indignant speech
and vocal demands are not the foundation of political freedom; it is
power. Whether it be the power of
numbers or of military force, unless one lives in a society where liberal
democratic values are already well established in public institutions and
firmly ingrained in the cultural psyche of the people, only power can make a
ruling dictatorship yield. Western Progressive Luxury In the Western and
Westernized democracies, protesters in the minority often succeed in securing
change because in the societies in which they are fortunate to live they are
not subject to political imprisonment, censorship, torture, or
‘disappearances’, on any mass or systemic scale - the claims of the more
extreme leftists notwithstanding. Not
having lived in a real dictatorship, not having experienced real oppression
in any meaningful way, they do not comprehend the true cost of free
expression, nor the horrific risk any Chinese citizen takes when he or she
attempts to exercise it. One can see an
extreme (but spreading) version of this Western liberal-progressive failure
to appreciate this awful reality in just about any commentary by readers of
web publications, or in social
media, and even in pronouncements by prominent individuals in positions to
influence public policy. Peruse the
posts by readers of the Huffington Post
or Media Matters and one easily
finds insistent claims where declining to take someone’s gay wedding pictures
is likened to being taken to concentration camps. Listen to National Public Radio or the CBS
Morning News, and you will hear how uttering harsh words is equated with
violence and murder (as was recently done by Michelle Bernard, President and
CEO of the Bernard Center For Women, Politics & Public Policy, when she
appeared on the Diane Rehms show on NPR
on September 24). Those that live in
the Western liberal democracies have the luxury of such obvious
stupidity. The people of Hong Kong, no
differently than those of Beijing a generation before in Tiananmen Square, do
not. Hong Kong’s Fate The people of Hong
Kong will eventually have to come to terms with the reality of their
situation: They do not live in a liberal democracy. And, the country they
live in (or under) is far too large and powerful to have its political system
influenced by outside forces in any serious way, especially when the
for-profit motives in the Western democracies do their amoral cost/benefit
analysis to their bottom lines. The Chinese
government will attempt to handle the Hong Kong ‘problem’ as quietly as it
can. Most likely, it will simply wait
it out. But one way or the other, only
one outcome will be tolerated by that government. Unless the people
of Hong Kong find a way to infect the rest of China with the freedom bug, it
will eventually be eradicated in their own land.
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Main
Index of the Ultrapolis World Forecast & Review © Copyright 2014, The Ultrapolis Project – All Rights
Reserved.
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