Postcards from the past

I remember that during the 2008 financial crisis, there was a financial professor that told the audience to write about what they were seeing and feeling because this would be vital for future historians. I've been writing a lot recently, because there is this huge gap between August 2019 and January 2021. A lot of the reason for the gap was that things were so traumatic and uncertain that I couldn't write. Once things calmed down, it took a few months for things to settle down so that I felt comfortable in writing. If you look at my posts on Quora, I went from "these protests will blow over" to "things aren't that bad" to "oh my God, I can't write anymore." Part of the reason it took me a while to start writing is that it took a few months for things to settle down in Hong Kong.

People kind of assume that anyone that has anything good to say about the Chinese government is a brainwashed idiot that believes everything that they read. In fact when the National Security Law was passed, there were a lot of reassurances in the pro-Beijing press that things wouldn't be too bad. So rather than say "Great!!! I believe everything Beijing says" it was more like "let's wait a few months and see how things turn out." So things have calmed down, but I've changed.

So this evening I took a walk and because it was a holiday weekend, the streets are crowded. But there was part of me that felt like suffocating, because there was this unease that any moment the crowd would turn ugly and start smashing shops and start beating me up. It's not disabling, but it's there. There is this sense of unease that wasn't there before the riots, and it will be a while before all this gets processed. Part of the unease has to do with the fact that the world seems crazy. When the Cold War ended, there was the idea that we'd turned over a new page in history. With the internet and the millenium, we were going to enter a new golden age. Yet things have turned to crap. That wasn't supposed to happen.

The problem with keeping records is that you look back at what you wrote and you say "whoops," and a lot of the reason I've been talking a lot about politics and strategy is that a lot of how I believed history would work turned out to be wrong.

So the pattern of history that I believed would happen in the 1990's, was something I can call liberal determinism. So you look at how authoritarian regimes in Spain and Greece fell in the 1970's, the People Power revolt in the Philippines in 1986, and the democratization of Taiwan and South Korea in the early 1990's. So that was the direction of history, and so Hong Kong would gradually move to more universal suffrage, and eventually Mainland China would continue the path to democracy that was cut off at Tiananmen.

So when Beijing put restrictions on election of the chief executive, I thought this was a bad thing, and in the 2010's I was pushing for more popular elections to get rid of the tycoons. But one reason that I've done a political back flip is that Beijing in 2014 and 2019 were concerned with several issues, and they were right all along.

The proposal in 2014 was to have the electoral committee choose two candidates which would then be voted on by popular election. Beijing's worry is that in a crisis, that the Chief Executive and the opposition parties if given power might do something crazy like give into demands for an independence referendum. At this point, Beijing would have to introduce martial law. In 2014, I had some beliefs that turned out later to be wrong. One was that something like secession was impossible so you didn't have to worry about it. Having Hong Kong try to secede would be like Britain leaving the European Union. Impossible!!!! Whoops!!!!

The second assumption was that the moderate pan-democratic parties would tame the radicals, and in a crisis they would ultimately be loyal to China and they were middle class people. They wouldn't be the type of people to attack the police and lead a revolution. Whoops. One thing that made me go "wow, I was an idiot" was to see politicians that I respect, give in to the mob. At that point, I was thinking to myself, thank God, you never got any real power.

Also once "impossible things" start happening, then you start thinking about sovereignty. So you can dismiss secession if only crazy people support it, but what if support for Hong Kong independence was 10%? 20%? 50%? 80%? At that point you have to invoke sovereignty. Hong Kong is not Scotland. China is forever indivisible, and it doesn't matter of 100% of people in Hong Kong want to secede. The answer is no.

The other thing that happened was right at the start of the protests, when they were still peaceful. The HK government gave in to most of the demands, and I was thinking to myself "Great!!! The government gives in, and this will be like 2003 or 2014. People will go home and then once things cool down, we'll have more talks." But you had hard liners that said that it was a mistake not to ram through the legislation. The argument was that the protesters would not be satisfied, and in the end if you ram through the legislation, you will have chaos, but things will calm down, once people saw things were done.

There was also another factor. It turns out that the pro-Beijing people were furious at the government, because they had been spending months trying to sell a very unpopular piece of legislation, and you had them saying how great the legislation was, and then you rip the carpet from under them.

It turns out that they were right. However, we still needed to go down this path. If they had taken a hard line, then things would have still exploded, and me being a softee would have said "well things are hell with a hard line, you should have been soft." The good thing about this time line, is we tried soft. It didn't work.

One thing about the arguments at the time and the reaction of the pro-Beijing crowd is that something happened that made me go "oh crap!!!" When the government backed down, you had a ton of pro-Beijing people that were absolutely furious at Carrie Lam. You had us put our necks in the noose, and now you are *backing down*. Screw you. At that point I thought about the five demands.

So what was happening was that you were getting the police to do things that were really difficult and which they didn't want to do. If the government then didn't back the police, they'd turn against the government and dissolve and we'd be in martial law territory.

And also over time, I realized something about the Chinese government. They have a conscience. Over the course of several months, I was watching the Chinese government trying to get a handle on the situation. And then there was the ghost of Tiananmen. No one likes to talk about Tiananmen, but everyone remembers it, and the message that I was getting from Beijing was "we remember, and we don't want to repeat it." Meanwhile, I got the sense that there were some foreign forces that were trying as much as they could to provoke Beijing, and that someone somewhere, wanted nothing better to see Hong Kong's streets run red with blood.

It would have been very easy for the Chinese government to direct anger at the rioters, but the message from the government was "these are just kids that have been fooled by foreign forces."

One final thing that surprised me was how quickly the kids gave up. It made me realize that they were kids after all. The thing about Chinese nationalism is that it has hundreds of years of history on top of a nation with thousands of years of history. All that history is like a tree with deep but hidden roots (or to use a Biblical metaphor a house on a rock). The lesson was "we've been through hardship before, and this is just one more thing to add to the history books." But the kids were lied to. They were promised a quick and easy victory, and the moment it became obvious that it was going to be difficult, the reaction was "hey, I just wanted a job and lower rent, no one told me that I was going to spend the next several decades of my life in the revolution"

The fact that the organizations the kids set up immediately fell apart, and that they really had no idea what they were fighting for told me that they were being organized by external forces. And once that became obvious to me that someone on the outside was stirring the pot, the expression "even paranoid people have enemies" came to mind.