It says everything about the Communist Chinese regime that it finds a mortal threat in the written word.
I note this in light of the Hong Kong police action on Monday to arrest Jimmy Lai on suspicion of “collusion with a foreign country, uttering seditious words and conspiracy to defraud.” The police also raided the offices of Apple Daily, a city newspaper that Lai owns, removing some items. (For full disclosure, I write a weekly column for the Apple Daily.)
Lai’s detention, along with arrests of other activists on Monday, provides yet more proof of the underlying truth of China’s new Hong Kong security law. Acting under direction from China’s Ministry of State Security intelligence service, Hong Kong police are no longer a civilian law enforcement agency. They are an adjunct agent of a tyrannical regime. In the same vein, Lai’s arrest shows the law is not, as China claims, about preventing terrorism or secession. It is about subjugating Hong Kong under the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party.
What Beijing fears in Lai is the incompatibility of his activities with Xi Jinping’s vision for China’s future. Where Lai believes in free thinking and individual rights, Xi believes in structured thinking in service of the Communist Party flag. Asking whether Hong Kong and China can truly have “one country, two systems,” where the rights of speech and debate are inherently restricted in both, Lai is seen to represent a mortal intellectual threat. Xi is no longer willing to tolerate Lai’s voice. We should not differentiate, here, between how Lai is being treated and how his counterparts on the mainland are dealt with.
Take the example of Ren Zhiqiang. An amusing writer and bon vivant, Ren has now been disappeared by Xi’s goons. Where Lai’s crime was to ask questions, Ren’s final offense was his referring to the dear leader as a clown. It’s just more proof that Xi isn’t simply incapable of tolerating dissent, he’s incapable of tolerating independent thought.
At once paranoid and immensely powerful, Xi believes that only he and the Standing Committee can set China’s course. Those who offer dissenting or even unconventional thought must necessarily be threats. What Xi fears most of all is a political epidemic in which ideas of freedom and representative government percolate through his urban middle class and the impoverished rural class. And like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and any good Communist, Xi believes the best and only way to confront the threat of freedom is to purge it out of existence.
Lai might be a prominent victim of this Chinese Communist evil. But he won’t be the last. We should all pay heed to these happenings. The regime in Beijing is not one that seeks mutually beneficial coexistence.
