In an editorial “The Pope Doesn’t Understand China” published in the New York Times in October 2018, prominent former Hong Kong bishop Cardinal Joseph Zen (陳日君) wrote of the difficulties of Catholic priests in China following an agreement between the Vatican and Beijing in 2018. In one section, he directed his message to the underground bishops and priests of China, writing: “Please don’t start a revolution... Go home, and pray with your family. Till the soil. Wait for better times... Communism isn’t eternal.”
Zen, now 93, appeared at an appellate court in Hong Kong on Dec. 3 seeking justice after he was arrested in May 2022 on trumped up charges under the then-newly introduced Hong Kong National Security Law.
Zen would often visit Hong Kong pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai (黎智英) in jail. Lai, 78, a devout Catholic, had been held in custody for more than five years and, like Zen, charged under the National Security Law. Lai was found guilty on Monday on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of sedition. Zen was present in court to hear the verdict.
On Sunday, the day before Lai’s verdict was handed down, Hong Kong’s oldest pro-democracy party, the Democratic Party, founded in 1994 near the end of British colonial rule, held its final annual meeting. Democratic Party Chairman Lo Kin-hei (羅健熙) told a news conference that the party had formally decided to disband, unable to survive in the political climate ushered in by the National Security Law.
This month has been a trying time for democracy advocates in Hong Kong. It is tempting to say that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has cause to celebrate. It has taken on a 93-year-old priest and a 78-year-old journalist, and won. It has chased freedoms of speech, religion and democracy out of the territory. However, its methods speak less of power and more of fragility.
Religion, the media and democracies share certain aspects that autocratic systems fear, including the ability to appeal to a power beyond the political party. The CCP is powerful, but its power depends entirely on the maintenance of a rigid structure. In this rigidity lies a terrible fragility; any external challenge has the potential to bring the entire edifice crashing down.
The Mainland Affairs Council condemned the verdict against Lai, as did the British government. Canberra expressed regret, and organizations including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and the Hong Kong Journalists Association protested it.
However, it was Lai’s children who identified the fragility revealed in the ruling. Sebastien Lai (黎崇恩) said that it showed how the National Security Law “has been ... weaponized against someone who essentially said stuff that [the authorities] didn’t like.”
Claire Lai (黎采) said that “the authorities still fear our father ... for what he represents.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and the CCP cannot allow voices other than the party to be accorded any legitimacy or influence. This includes God, a rival political party or a media organization airing dissenting views. The power to control the messaging is weakened by the rigidity of the channels. On this page, contributor Liu Che-ting (劉哲廷) says it most eloquently, writing: “The so-called prosperity and stability are built upon the complete exclusion of uncertain expression.”
While the appeal to a higher power or the provision of dissenting voices are a clear danger for single party rule, religion, the democratic process and the media provide other mechanisms that could actually benefit the ruling party: a valve to release accumulated frustrations and a channel through which to understand what is happening among the people.
The Hong Kong Journalists Association, in protesting Jimmy Lai’s verdict, talked about its chilling effect on the media, creating a media climate of self-censorship and fear “to the point where even those in power cannot accurately assess public sentiment through news.”
That is, just because anti-party sentiment is not reported, it does not mean it is not there. So why should Xi and the CCP be so afraid of the big, bad Jimmy Lai?
The 2019 Hong Kong protests did pose a security threat to the CCP’s fragile authoritarian rule. Crucially, the frustrations that drove Hong Kongers did not appear out of nowhere. The authorities back then had been aware of what public sentiment was, but with pressure valves and communication channels blocked, banished or locked up, this would no longer be the case. To appropriate the visuals of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 classic, the Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Nor will its beginnings be reported.
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