On Thursday, Xi Jinping advanced his war on free thought, seizing exhibits from the shuttered Tiananmen Square memorial museum in Hong Kong, which commemorated the People’s Liberation Army’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of unarmed protesters in Beijing.
The four activists responsible for the museum were arrested on Wednesday and charged with breaching the city’s national security law. Introduced last year, the Chinese Communist Party claims that the law is necessary to prevent terrorism and Hong Kong’s forcible secession from Beijing. Thursday’s action reminds us that this excuse is a lie.
In reality, the national security law is designed to trammel any criticism of a regime due much of it.
There is a ludicrously pathetic quality to this seizure of museum exhibits. Like the Nazi book-burning festivals or Soviet political gulags, this action evinces a regime that is at once outrageously immoral and utterly paranoid. The Communists fear what will happen if young Hongkongers learn history. They fear what will happen if the loving Party is known to love massacring its own citizens. They fear that such knowledge might, just might, not incline young Hongkongers to pursue Xi’s dream plan for their futures. Which is to say, the dream of their subservience to Xi’s whims.
But while the communists can purge this once-great city’s museums and libraries, close its independent newspapers, and imprison its thinkers, their task remains great.
As with Western investment and the Uyghur genocide, businesses such as Coca-Cola, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Merck, and Pepsi Cola face hard questions as to whether their much-vaunted corporate values align with Xi’s Hong Kong dystopia.
The communists have another problem.
Consider also the great efforts that Xi’s minions are now applying to censorship on the Chinese mainland. Taking advantage of their newfound wealth, more Chinese are choosing to embrace Western-style celebrity fan crazes. This has Xi upset. Big Brother wants 1.4 billion Chinese to worship him rather than revel with the pop stars. In turn, Xi is cracking down on the free choices his citizens have dared to make.
But while repression may work for a time, as more Chinese learn how good the rest of the world has it and how tedious Communist propaganda truly is, Big Brother will have a big problem.
