Anyone who loves the unique culture of Hong Kong can sympathize with the demonstrators who are protesting the latest step in a long process of Hong Kong being absorbed by mainland China. The subjugation of Hong Kong to the full weight of the PRC’s oppressive legal system is like watching a beautiful flower being crushed by a tank — although international media scrutiny has so far forced the Chinese Communist Party to do this gradually rather than with the dramatic violence employed against the Tiananmen Square protesters three decades ago.
Many commentators have likened recent developments in China’s relations with the West to the rise of a new Iron Curtain that is increasingly dividing one-fifth of the world’s population from the digitally interconnected populations of the free world. Nothing more clearly symbolizes this trend that the Chinese Communist Party’s fundamental commitment to their so-called Great Firewall, built to isolate the population of China from foreign internet companies not subject to Chinese government control. At the core of the recent Hong Kong protests is the ambition of many Hong Kong residents to remain outside that rising wall of division between China and the free world.
But most do not realize that many citizens of mainland China share that same ambition. For this reason, China continues to devote vast resources in an effort to control and censor its own netizens. Although not widely reported in the West, a struggle is now raging inside China as netizens strive to communicate their grievances against corruption and other abuses that are endemic in the Communist Party monopoly on power.
Perhaps the most telling confirmation of this reality inside China came in the wake of President Xi Jinping’s recent decision to abolish all limits on his terms of office. While state media praised Xi’s reversal of the post-Cultural Revolution constitutional provisions created to guard against the rise of another Mao Zedong, the online aftermath was a massive spike in searches by Chinese people for information about emigration. But, as in the case of the recent 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, all coverage and discussion of this revealing trend was suppressed by the Chinese censors, along with search terms such as “migration” and “emigration.”
Needless to say, such developments are the final ironic comment on the degree to which the purpose of the Great Firewall is the inverse of that of the original Great Wall of China. Whereas the Great Wall was intended to defend China from foreign invaders, the Great Firewall exists to defend the power and privilege of the Communist Party from the Chinese people. To the extent that this truth leaks through the firewall, it has the potential to make the existing cracks larger and harder to close.
Many people, both inside and outside of the Soviet Union, believed that the Berlin Wall — and all the oppression that it symbolized — would never fall. Indeed, there were many who argued that the free world should not press the Soviet Union on human rights issues precisely for this reason. But in reality, such walls tend to collapse of their own weight when those imprisoned by them no longer accept their fundamental legitimacy. This is why we must encourage those valiantly struggling against the new Iron Curtain in the East. Even if it may not come in time to save the unique culture of Hong Kong, we must still work for the day when future generations of Chinese people can celebrate their freedom in the rubble of the Great Firewall.
Matthew Daniels is the Chair of Law and Human Rights at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. and the author of the new book Human Liberty 2.0.
