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How to Democratize Hong Kong

Hong Kong has never been a democracy and it is certainly not one now. It has, in fact, become decidedly less democratic in the last few years. And that is a reason for the friends of a democratic Hong Kong to feel down-hearted. But there is no need for despair. There is need rather for a strategic retreat and for tactical rethinking.

Democracy is, after all, more than a governmental system; it is, first of all, an ideal – one that is never fully realized but can only be approximated. It is the ideal of a group of people who together rule themselves. This is most easily pursued in a small group of mature, informed, and like-minded people. But states and, in particular, modern states are not like this. There are vast numbers of citizen of all ages in all kinds of condition, with degrees of knowledge or ignorance, who are anything but like-minded. The ideal of democracy thus becomes easily confused. And, worse, we lose sight of what lies behind it which is a conception of human nature as capable of a proud self-determination.

No political order, whatever its arrangements may be, can be considered genuinely democratic unless it is animated by this understanding of human nature and by the consequent ideal of shared self-rule. In order for a society to be democratic, the ideal of democracy must, in other words, be a live idea to its members. They must, moreover, be willing and able to relate to each other in terms of this ideal. They must be capable of a democratic practice not just at the level of government but in their daily interactions. Only in this way can a democratic politics be most fully realized.

There is today no democratic politics in Hong Kong. But it is still possible to foster the idea of human self-determination, to engage in democratic practices, and to nurture the ideal of democratic rule. To this end it is all important that there still exists in Hong Kong today the opportunity for association. The time for protest marches may be over; the electoral and legislative process has been stripped of its democratic elements; policy is no longer made by Hong Kongers themselves but by patriots in Beijing. There are, however, still ways to nurture the spirit of democracy and that has to be the task now for dedicated Hong Kong democrats. There are a number of ways this task can be pursued. Here are six thoughts on this topic.

Associate with others dedicated like you to the exploration of democratic ideals. Democracy is a social ideal built not only on the notion of self-rule but also that of mutual support. You can have democratic thoughts when you are alone. But you cannot be a democrat on your own.
You don’t need to fret all the time about Hong Kong or Chinese politics. Devote yourself, instead, to the study of other times and places: the development of democracy in ancient Greece; the French Revolution and its aftermath; the founding of the American Republic. There are important elements of democracy to be found even in early Chinese history. Look for them.
Study political philosophy. Reading Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics might be a starting point. Combine this with Aristotle account of the democratic constitution of Athens. Read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right together with Marx’s critical notes on that book. Read Hannah Arendt. They all open your eyes to other and broader ways of thinking about politics. Authoritarians want you to believe that there is no alternative to the status quo. It is important to see how wrong they are.
Learn from those who have lived under authoritarian regimes how to say things without exposing yourself to danger. One can write or speak about ancient Egypt and mean the here and now. Make the spaces between your words do the work. Be eloquent with your silences.
See your opponents not as oppressors, which they certainly are, but as victims of a narrow and demeaning view of themselves, of what it is to be human. Pity them, not for the constraints they impose on the liberty of others, but their own inner lack of freedom.
Above all, make sure that you and your group rule themselves in a democratic fashion. Be aware of the danger of being undemocratic in the pursuit of democracy. Practice democracy locally, in relation to those next to you. Make this the ferment that will eventually transform all of society.
Finally, remember that all this takes time (A generation? A century?). Be patient. In the drought my nasturtiums died in the garden. But now the rain has brought them back and we can suddenly hope to see them bloom again.

The Triumph of Institutional Nihilism: Hong Kong’s new M+ Museum

On the outside Hong Kong’s new M+ museum has all the charm of a cigarette box; inside it is as heart-warming as an oversized car garage. There is nothing intimate, personal, attractive, alive, or memorable about this building. Many years in the planning and fantastically expensive, it is a structure without recognizable architectural merit put into an anonymous development area, the work of an over-rated firm from Switzerland. Herzog & de Meuron is the current go-to place for the kind of people who commission new museums across the globe and it is responsible for a series of architectural disasters such as San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Hong Kong museum now joins that group. It is part of a new institutional genre representing the full marketizing of “art” and “culture” for the sake of governments and corporations who see a need to adorn themselves, for millionaire and billionaire “benefactors” who are trying to enhance their financial and reputational status, and for “art professionals” set on making a decent living from all this. M+, like its sister institutions, is in fact nothing but a monument to a cold institutional nihilism.

M+ is the dream project of Hong Kong bureaucrats with no special taste for art but determined to put Hong-Kong on the “artistic” map. According to the bloated promotional verbiage the new building is already “among Hong Kong’s most iconic landmarks, both monumental in its architectural form and radically open in its position in the urban landscape.” Iconic, certainly not; and does the phrase “both monumental … and radically open” mean anything? Anyone who has actually stumbled through the concrete wilderness of the area will equally wonder about the implausible claim that “the West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world.” The new museum is, in reality, meant to bolster Hong Kong’s increasingly dubious claim to being “Asia’s world city.” It is intended to draw tourists who have otherwise not much to look at in this city where so many traces of the past have been obliterated or ruined. It is also meant to confirm the city’s claim to being an international art market. And in this description, it is the words “international” and “market” that matter. What Hong Kong’s thoroughly parochial bureaucracy has produced has little to do with art. There is a real art scene in Hong Kong but it is far from this museum and not large enough to establish a local identity on which a living museum could be built. The M+ that Hong Kong has ended up with is, in effect, no more special than K 11 or IFC 1 or any other of its many shopping malls – the only difference being that it is unlikely to draw the same crowds.

How Hong Kong became a police state

September 19, 2021

The first round of a so-called “election” process under a new National Security Law has just taken place in Hong Kong. Out of a population of 7,5 million inhabitants, just 4,800 were qualified to be voters. The process has, in fact, more of the character of an appointment process than of an election. All the candidates have been carefully vetted. They were ultimately cleared as the result of a police investigation. It is evident then that the final controlling authority in Hong Kong is today the national security police. The most powerful figure in the city is a former policeman, John Lee, who now serves as the security minister. Carrie Lam, the official chief executive of Hong Kong, has been demoted to being the spokesperson for the new regime.

This transformation of Hong Kong is surprising since it has been brought about by the authorities in Beijing — and mainland China is not a police state. It is, rather, a Party state in which the Communist Party determines who represents the people and who rules. Beijing obviously decided not to remold Hong Kong at this moment in the image of the mainland. The goal was, rather, to preserve the “one country, two system” principle enshrined in the Basic Law, but in a profoundly altered fashion. Some kind of rudimentary election process was to be maintained. One might call it a veneer. But that still leaves the question who was likely to be deceived by it. Certainly not the democratic states around the world with their wide-open election systems. And it is difficult to imagine that the citizens of Hong Kong would be impressed by this “improvement” (as Carrie Lam has called it) of the democratic process. Being stripped of a right you have previously had is unlikely to be seen by anyone as an improvement.

The police state system in Hong Kong is, rather, the outcome of a twofold thought in the minds of the Beijing rulers. The first part of it is that some kind of electoral process may, indeed, serve a positive purpose. (But which one?) And that means that the Communist Party cannot officially be given a hegemonic status in the city. The second part of the thought is that Beijing must keep tight control over what happens in Hong Kong. The electoral process must thus be subjected to the most stringent controls. This requires the creation of a new controlling body, the national security police, which will, of course, have to be acting strictly on behalf of the Beijing authorities. The Hong Kong police state must be under the control of the Beijing party state. The result is the Byzantine mechanism now in place meant to make sure that that the “patriots” selected will serve the purposes of the central government.

It is difficult to imagine that this system will continue for long since it is so counter-intuitive. As Hong Kong is integrated more and more into China, as Beijing clearly intends to do, some kind of decision will have to be made. One possibility is the complete abandonment of Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the expansion of the party state into the city. The other is a reform of the political system of the mainland to include an electoral element under tight control – that is, the extension of the police state to all of China.

The Private and the Public. What we can learn from Wittgenstein

On a Canadian website devoted to the translation of writings by contemporary Chinese intellectuals, its creator, David Ownby of the University of Montréal, writes: “China is, if not totalitarian, surely authoritarian, and I readily admit that I do not fully understand the relationship between the Chinese state and the intellectuals I study. It is obvious that their published work is not a perfect reflection of their private thoughts, which surely means that many times they cannot say what they really think, but what trade-offs they make and how they make their calculations remain obscure. While I prefer to believe that what they publish is a fair if perhaps partial reflection of what they think, many people do not, and I admit that now and again I wonder if I’m being played.”[1]

Those living in repressive societies will be familiar with the distinction between what they feel able to say or write and what they must keep to themselves. And they will also know to distinguish between what is written or said and the private thoughts of its author. The distinction is, in fact, known to all of us even in so-called free societies. Considerations of prudence, politeness, propriety, shame or guilt make us refrain from giving expression to many things we think or feel or they get us, at least, to modify and tame our words. I may not tell my boss what exactly I think of him for reasons of prudence. I may not give voice to the pain I feel in order not to upset my companions. I may not comment aloud on a lecture in progress for reasons of propriety. I may not use the swear word that has come to my mind for reasons of politeness. But we also look at others and wonder whether any of those reasons have made them be silent about their inner feelings and thoughts or circumspect in expressing them. We describe the distinction that opens up in this way as one between the public and the private. Thoughts and feelings are private, we say, whereas words and actions are public.

I want to talk here about Wittgenstein’s remarks on privacy in his Philosophical Investigations but will do so in a roundabout manner. For his thoughts are narrowly focused on issues in the philosophy of mind and concern, so it seems, only what privacy is not. In his Blue Book Wittgenstein characterizes the proposition ‘A man’s sense data are private to himself’ as both metaphysical and misleading and he describes his own undertaking as an attempt to rid us “of the temptation to look for a particular act of thinking, independent of the act of expressing our thoughts, and stowed away in some peculiar medium.”[2] The formulation is awkward because it sounds, as if Wittgenstein meant to deny the distinction between thought and its expression. The Chinese intellectuals of whom Owenby speaks and, in fact, all those living in repressive societies will easily disabuse us of that idea. But Wittgenstein’s point is not to deny the existence of unexpressed thought; it is rather to deny their existence in a peculiar medium. His goal is, in other words, to dismantle Descartes’ metaphysics of mind and body. But as he focuses so sharply on this issue, he entirely bypasses the social and political aspects of the private-public distinction. I consider it useful to look first at the broader context in which that distinction occurs in order to situate Wittgenstein’s considerations in it and to ask only afterwards about the practical import of what he writes.

The first thing to note is that the term “private” has a wide range of uses and certainly a wider one than Wittgenstein acknowledges. We do, of course, speak of unexpressed thoughts and feelings as private. But we can also keep a private diary that records those thoughts and feelings and we can engage in a private conversation with close friends and associates. And there are other, broader uses of the term. My letter to the public media is considered my private opinion if I am not speaking in an official capacity. We have private phone numbers in addition to job related ones, and these may be listed as such in a public directory. The home is my private domain, but everyone in the family may also have their own private bedroom and we all treat the shared toilet as private. There are private membership clubs whose doors display the words “STRICTLY PRIVATE.” There are private collections of art that are shown in public. There are private businesses that operate as publicly registered companies. The private is, in these cases, what is unexpressed, what is personal, what is meant only for a few, what is of limited access, what is shameful, what is not official, what is owned by me, what is for my own use, what is a personal pursuit and not a business, and finally even what is a business but not traded on the stock market and not owned by the state. The private is, in other words, many different things and the boundary between the public and the private falls accordingly in different places. Note also that something can therefore be private in some sense and at the same time public and thus not private in another.

Wittgenstein wonders in his Philosophical Investigations what it is to say that sensations are private. An interlocutor insists that this means that “only I can know whether I am in pain; another person can only surmise it.” But Wittgenstein dismissively retorts: “In one sense this is false, and in another nonsense.”[3] In an adjoining passage, he considers the possibility of a private language which he describes as follows: “The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know – to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” (PI, 243) The two passages raise various questions about the notion of privacy. The “privacy” of our sensations and the “privacy” of the private language are obviously not the same thing, though they are related. The private sensation is assumed to be private by being “in the mind”; the private language is not in the mind, but it’s subject-matter is said to be private. The words “can” and “cannot” in the cited passages alerts us to further meanings of privacy. The private is that which another person cannot know. The private language is one which only the speaker can understand. Of what kind of “can” do these sentences speak? Are we to think of logical, physical, physiological, or psychological possibility? Think of these three examples: Chinese intellectuals cannot say everything they think. We cannot say who invented the wheel. I cannot adequately describe the sunset. In the first case, the “cannot” is due to a threat of sanctions; in the second to a lack of historical knowledge; in the third to the limitations of my vocabulary. Not only the word “private” but also the words “can” and “cannot” have multiple meanings and these introduce inflections into the meaning of privacy.

Speaking privately

We will find it easier to consider initially the idea of a private language and only then the privacy of thoughts and feelings. Can there be such a thing as a private language? In some sense of the word “private, the answer is: obviously yes. It is clearly not difficult to set up a language which only I understand, my own private code. Wittgenstein himself occasionally used a code to keep his thoughts hidden from prying eyes – though the code proves, in fact, easy enough to decipher. Criminal gangs, underground political parties, and anybody else who wants to keep a secret will often devise a code for their own private use. This may not be what Wittgenstein has in mind as a private language, but thinking about what it means to be able or not to be able to decipher a coded language throws light on the different ways in which we use the word “can” that Wittgenstein employs in his formulations.

If it is possible to decipher Wittgenstein’s code, in what sense can it be called private? The experts tell us that there is, in fact, only one unbreakable code and thus, only one inherently private language in the sense right now under consideration. Invented by Gilbert Vernam for use in the First World War, the code requires a key that can be used only once and must consists of a series of genuinely random numbers longer than the message to be encrypted. Those requirements make the code, however, practically useless. In encrypting messages for the internet, we use therefore codes that are in principle breakable but (hopefully) not in practice because the deciphering would take too long or we currently lack the computing power to do so. We are distinguishing thus two kinds of possibility and impossibility and thus two notions of privacy. There is what one can do or not do in principle and what we can or cannot do in practice. We may want to add here a further distinction between two kinds of practical possibility or impossibility. Something may be practically impossible for incidental reasons as when I can’t decipher a code because I am too sleepy. But the deciphering may also be impossible for reasons intrinsic to the code as that it would take five hundred years to break it. We can distinguish thus three kinds of potentiality (possibility/impossibility): potentiality in principle, practical incidental potentiality, and practical intrinsic potentiality. Only the Vernam code is in principle unbreakable. Wittgenstein’s own code is easily broken and only some incidental reason will stop s from breaking it. But the code that is meant to secure the internet is not only unbreakable in practice but hopefully so for intrinsic reasons. We can call this third type of code also in principle practically unbreakable. We will see in due course that this three-fold distinction is helpful when thinking about Wittgenstein’s reflections on privacy.

I have spoken so far of how we keep thoughts and feelings private by not expressing them or by expressing them in a secret code. We can also attain privacy of a sort by restricting access to the expression of thought or feeling. I can keep a diary and hide it away in a hole underneath the floor so that only I have access to it. I can reveal my thoughts and feelings only to a circle of close confidants. We call an expression of thought or feeling public in this context when it is left open to whom it is addressed. Much of our speaking and writing is not in fact public in this sense and is not meant to be. What I say at my kitchen table is likely to stay there and is, in any case, intended only for those immediately present. The note I pass to you under the desk is meant for your eyes only. Both my kitchen table remarks and the note I send you are private in intention and, hopefully, also in fact. Much of our speaking and reading is of this sort. Our expressions of thought or feeling are, as a matter of fact, not promulgated to everybody and are commonly meant only for those specifically addressed. The assumption that our words have for the most part only a specific range is, in fact, inherent in and even constitutive of our common linguistic practice. Politicians, preachers, novelists, actors, and others of that sort may aspire to speak to the broad public but even that public has a specific range in that it consists of citizen, the faithful, the literate, theatergoers, etc.. Only philosophers are tempted to think that they are addressing the universe.

Even when we speak privately, we may, of course, be overheard. An outsider may catch what I say in confidence to a friend. A curious bystander may try to listen in to my private conversation. We may or may not be concerned abut that possibility. I sometimes overhear people in the street discussing their private lives on their cell phones. Long gone is the time of the glazed-in telephone cell. The standards of privacy seem to have changed. But we may still hesitate to let outsiders know of very intimate or embarrassing things or matters; we don’t want them to hear something that would be to our detriment or not in our interest. We operate in a sphere of privacy, but that sphere can grow or diminish according to circumstances. This is part of the ordinary use of language and of other expressive means.

This should remind us of the fact that the idea of language as a medium of representation is a derivative and belated notion. The fundamental linguistic relation is not “A represents B” but “A communicates B to C.” The first question is never simply: what is said? But always: who is speaking to whom and who is heard by whom. That is a lesson Wittgenstein had to learn after he finished his Tractatus. It is as a result of this lesson Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations with Augustine’s account of the communicative use of language. It is, in any case, only by paying attention to this aspect of language that we will understand how considerations who is or is not addressed and thus considerations of privacy are integral to its use.

The deprivation of privacy

There are always those who want to know who spoke or wrote what to whom. This holds in particular of repressive governments which have two reasons for keeping tabs on their people. Having eliminated free expression, public media and debate, polls and elections, such governments find it difficult to judge their citizens’ mood and thinking. To overcome that handicap, they will take active measures to peer into the lives of their citizens. Spying and surveillance become their substitute for the public sphere they have destroyed. The surveillance is, of course, not a purely cognitive undertaking. It is designed, rather, to help the authorities to shape their policies, manipulate the public’s thinking, feeling, and acting, and to ferret out and crush potential opponents. The intervention includes thus a massive intrusion into the privacy sphere of the subjects of surveillance but extends also to their public existence. This does not mean, however, that the division between the private and the public has been obliterated. It has, instead, become relocated and redefined. The results of governmental spying on its own citizens are not generally publicized. The information gained is most often kept in secret files by the secret police and only used when needed. Even the fact of surveillance is often denied or downplayed. The result is a peculiar deformation of the entire domain of privacy. Boundaries of privacy remain in place between the subjects of surveillance but the government has now inserted itself as an intruder into every individual sphere of privacy and of all the information gained in this manner, it will publicize some and keep other bits private.

Governments are not the only parties keen to discover our private thoughts and feelings. These have also commercial value and the technology of the internet has made it increasingly easier to harvest what is useful and monetizable in them. Economic enterprises thus hack into the confidential data of their competitors. Criminal gangs snoop into private, corporate, and government accounts for purposes of theft and extortion. Companies operating on the internet accumulate information on the users of their services. In each case, the information used to be private in the sense that it was practically inaccessible (for incidental or intrinsic reasons) except to those specifically meant to have it. Technological advances have broken that barrier and have given the unauthorized access. And this naturally redraws the boundary between the public and the private. The private information gathered by economic enterprises, criminal gangs, and internet companies has not, of course, become public in the sense of being now publicly accessible. Like government spies, those harvesting that information have an interest in keeping the results of their fishing to themselves. The information they have gathered retains its commercial value often only as long as they can keep it secret. The internet provider who exploits our private data is thus genuinely concerned with defending our privacy from other intruders though, of course, not from themselves. And China’s extensive surveillance program is completely compatible with its recent adopted “Personal Information Protection Law” that seeks to assure the “legitimate rights” of individuals from “the use of new technologies such as user profiling and recommendation algorithms, the use of big data in setting [unfair] prices for frequent customers, and information harassment in the sale of products and services.”[4] Being free from governmental surveillance is, notably, not among those legitimate rights.

Shoshana Zuboff, who has studied the development of what she calls “surveillance capitalism” concludes that “the assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. This is a different kind of challenge now, one that threatens the existential and political canon of the modern liberal order defined by principles of self-determination.”[5] Zuboff draws in these remarks on Hannah Arendt who has argued that all our classical forms of politics are built on the duality of household or family on one side and city or state on the other.[6] But is the distinction between household and city the same as that between the private and the public? Were the households of ancient Greece or Rome private in the same sense as a modern home? Is there a distinction between the private and the public in simple tribal societies and their politics? A modern liberal political order certainly assumes the existence of a private domain to which the state has only limited access. Zuboff may be right in worrying that the foundations of this sort of society is threatened. That realization forces us to ask with what kind of politics we may be left, what kind of social order, and with what kind of distinction between the private and the public.

A recent report on China shows what is at stake.[7] Its two authors have studied procurement documents of local, provincial, and national authorities to determine how surveillance capacities and objectives are changing. They write: “The PRC’s leaders have always excelled at surveilling their countrymen, and [the] lack of a “countervailing price” has allowed them to do so in varied ways over the past 70 years. During the first few decades of the PRC’s existence, the state-controlled labor system tethered workers and their families to their places of employment… Work units served as the eyes of the state, maintaining their residents’ dossiers, compiling information about them at work, at mandatory Party meetings, and in their homes—information often supplied by neighbors and coworkers. Reporting on members of one’s own community reached frenzied heights during the Cultural Revolution, when people had to publicly accuse their acquaintances, friends, and even loved ones of real or imagined political transgressions in order to avoid becoming targets themselves.” The frenzy came to an end in the late 1970s with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. “For a few decades, Chinese citizens became accustomed to relatively more robust levels of personal privacy.” But the procurement documents reveal that China’s government is now acquiring new tools to help the authorities at every level to monitor large swathes of the population at a time. The authors of the report write that the characterization of China in 2020 as an Orwellian surveillance state “is inaccurate and silly, but it could be reality down the line.”

The surveillance regime is currently most intense in Xinjiang where it operates with frequent ID checks at police cordons, self-incrimination campaigns in re-education camps, and surveillance cameras with face recognition capacity at street corners, police checkpoints, the entrances to mosques, and sometimes in individual homes. Access to printed and digital resources is strictly controlled. The internet is searched to determine who goes to what website, who communicates with whom, and who writes or reads what. Surveillance is not as extensive in other parts of the country. The Xinjiang system of surveillance is a response, in the first instance, to some 200 terrorist attacks carried out by Uighur radicals in the 1990s. Their radicalism is linked to the Turkestan Islamic Party whose goal is to establish an independent East Turkestan Republic. The desire for political independence is, in turn, due to the Uighurs’ consciousness of a distinct cultural, religious, and historical identity. The prevention terrorist attacks, the identification of potential troublemakers, The suppression of the secessionist movement, and control of the cultural expression of the region are thus the motivating factors of the surveillance system. In China at large, the system of surveillance is also used, as it is in the West, to prevent and solve ordinary crime, and to regulate public services, and to improve civic planning. The technology is thus seen as essential to the functioning of mass society. But the Chinese authorities’ understanding of what a well-ordered society should look like is peculiarly constricted. There must be no questioning of the status of the Communist Party. The bureaucratic state must not be challenged. Certain topics cannot be publicly discussed. “Politically harmful information” must be policed.[8] Yet another purposes the surveillance system serves is as a source of information for an envisaged social credit system. The system is meant to punish or reward Chinese citizens for socially detrimental or socially beneficial behavior. Among the detrimental forms of behavior have been listed smoking violations, playing loud music, and eating on rapid transits, as well as jaywalking, failing to correctly sort personal waste, and even making reservations at restaurants or hotels without showing up, in addition, of course, to more serious matters such as fraudulent financial behavior and crime in general. Volunteering for community services, donating blood, and praising government efforts on social media have, on the other hand, been listed as deserving social credit rewards.[9] To gather relevant information the social credit system has to rely on mass surveillance systems, facial recognition software, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence. The envisaged system approximates the function, though not the layout and technology, of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and sis meant to establish a society that is both disciplinary and biopolitical in character, to use Michel Foucault’s language. In addition to mass surveillance for policy purposes and the individualized surveillance is support of system of social control, there is finally the sharply focused surveillance of suspected or potential dissidents. It is in this last form of surveillance that the intrusion into the target’s sphere of privacy is most pronounced. The agents of this sort of surveillance want to find out not only what their targets say or write or but wan to penetrate also into the inner space of their private thoughts and feelings.

What would the expansion of this technology that is suggested by the Chinese procurement documents mean? “Would there be any semblance of privacy left—the sort of going-about-one’s-business, blend-into-the-crowd privacy that many of us implicitly expect in public spaces—to people living in the PRC? What does it portend for public spaces beyond China’s borders? A number of democracies are already struggling with the implications of these technologies, which often pit a desire for public security against an expectation of privacy and consent. What happens as China normalizes, or sells, these technologies to places where public debate about them is quashed before it can occur? Will PRC surveillance tech strengthen the wave of authoritarian governance that seems to be rolling across the globe?”[10]

Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism do not form a single institutional whole. They are often even at odds with each other. Functionally they belong nonetheless together. We still tend to think about politics in terms of its institutions and distinguish between the public institutions of the state and private corporate institutions. But politics is perhaps better looked at as a process involving the organized exercise of power and institutions are better understood as being among the products and instruments of that process. Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism both exercise power with the help of newly developed technological means that to some extent obliterate, to some extent weaken, and to some extent relocate various distinctions between the public and the private. Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism produce in in this way comparable effects. We see in this development the emergence of a system of power relations that overrides the traditional distinction between public political and private economic enterprises .We can cll the emerging formation provisionally by the name of “the corporāte.”[11] The history of the modern state has been described as a process of emancipation of economics from politics which has reached ts epitome in the free-market system of modern capitalism. If this were true, the historical process would mark the triumph of the private over the public. But the endpoint of this process has proved to be not a neo-liberal nirvana of complete economic autonomy but (in different forms in China and the West) the convergence of state and corporate power – neither liberal nor socialist, neither public nor private, the amalgamation of the two into the functional syndrome of the corporāte.

Private sensations

Will there be any privacy left in the corporāte? I return at this point to Wittgenstein’s examination of privacy. It will be obvious to any careful reader that Wittgenstein doesn’t use the term “private language” to refer to an encoded language or one that is restricted in its use. The language whose possibility he considers is supposed to be private rather in the sense that its content is private. The words of this language, he says, are meant to refer to “immediate private sensations” and thus to something that “only the speaker can know.” We must turn then to the idea of the privacy of sensations and to the thought that these can only be known by the speaker, that is by the one who has the sensations and who says that he has them. If our inner states truly have that characteristic, it appears that there is a sphere of privacy that cannot be punctured by any kind of surveillance.

But Wittgenstein seeks to reject this idea of absolute privacy. And that raises the question whether anything stands in the way of the complete surveillance and control of our most private thoughts and feelings. Is there any possible escape from surveillance and any possibility of resistance to the power of the corporāte? Can there still be a sphere of privacy protected from the intrusions of the corporāte?

Wittgenstein dismisses the claim that only the person who says “I am in pain” can know what his words mean: “It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know that I’m in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain.” I am not sure that we want to agree with this line of thinking. Is it in principle impossible to have knowledge of one’s own pain and why would that be so? We can certainly say “I remember I was in terrible pain when I had that kidney stone some years ago” and that utterance appears to be in all respects an expression of knowledge. But what then prevents me from having knowledge also of my present pain? Wittgenstein is right, however, in saying that being in pain is not the same as knowing that one is. I don’t mean here that the pain might be unconscious, but that having a consciousness of pain is still different from knowing that one has that pain. Feeling pain is not a state of cognition and we can add that thinking is also not the same as knowing that one has thoughts. But isn’t it possible that I am in pain in the sense of feeling it and also know that I am in pain? Feeling drunk and realizing that one is drunk are not the same. Similarly, I may have a thought and recall at the same time that I have had that same thought before. But why does Wittgenstein even raise the question whether the person who feels pain or thinks can know that he does? The decisive point is, after all, the question whether another person can know this. And here Wittgenstein is obviously right when he says: “If we are using the word ‘know’ as it is normally used, … then other people very often know if I’m in pain.” The interlocutor who insists on the absolute privacy of sensations objects at this point that another person cannot have that knowledge “with the certainty with which I know it myself.” That may or may not be true. But it does not bolster the interlocutor’s claim. Knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Otherwise, there would be no empirical knowledge.

On the view that Wittgenstein’s interlocutor advances we cannot have real knowledge of another person’s feelings because these are located in a sphere which is in principle inaccessible to others. And this view may, in turn, be backed up by the Cartesian assumption of two different substances. But Cartesian dualism is not essential for the claim that what is in the mind is inaccessible to others. I don’t believe that Descartes himself actually assumed such an inaccessibiity. According to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor, however, the inaccessibility thesis means that the only thing others can know are verbal or behavioral expressions of private sensations. The interlocutor concludes that one can only make tenuous extrapolations about the other’s inner feelings from those expressions. But if we can in principle know nothing about the other’s inner states, our statement that the other is in pain can refer only to the other’s words and behavior. The interlocutor who wants to insist on the uniqueness of the inner life, is thus reduced to some kind of behaviorism. He seeks to avoid that behaviorism by concluding that if the other one says “I am in pain” he must be feeling what the interlocutor feels when he says “I am I pain.” But there seems to be no basis for that analogical inference. To avoid the behaviorist turn, we must, instead, follow Wittgenstein and argue that there is no absolute barrier between inner feelings and their external manifestation. The two belong together and we can therefore often know of the private sensations of others. That conclusion leaves many questions open. In particular the question of the exact nature of the link between the inner and the outer. It appears to be, however, the way we avoid the drift into behaviorism. That is ironic, in that Wittgenstein has been often accused of being a behaviorist, despite his claims to the contrary. To the question whether he will admit a difference between pain and pain behavior, Wittgenstein responds firmly in the Philosophical Investigations: “Admit it? What greater difference could there be.” (PI, 304) That there is such a difference does not mean, however, that there is not an inherent link between them. Sensations are not private in principle, though they are practically so in many situations.

Wittgenstein’s interlocutor will presumably want to make his case not only for sensations but also for thoughts. Thoughts, too, are, according to him, located in the private medium of the mind and must therefore be in principle inaccessible to others. All we have, accordingly to the interlocutor, are public expressions of thoughts. And from those, the interlocutor will say, we can tentatively derive conclusions about the inner thoughts. But it is once again difficult to see how the interlocutor can avoid a behaviorist turn. What reasons can he have for assuming that when the other utters the sentence “p” he must be thinking privately what the interlocutor thinks when he utters “p”? Wittgenstein’s rejection of an absolute division between the private thought and its public expression appears the only way to avoid the behaviorist turn.

Being in principle practically private

But let us assume for a moment that the interlocutor can maintain the absolute division between the private and the public which he is after. Can that give us comfort in the face of an expanding surveillance industry? The answer has to be no. The surveillance industry is after all, primarily interested in manipulating the behavior of the subjects of their surveillance and what they seek to survey are, the expressed feelings and thoughts of their subjects. If sensations and thoughts occur only in the absolutely separate sphere of the inner world, they will, presumably, be of small interest to the surveillance regimes. The inaccessible sensations and feelings would be like Wittgenstein’s imagined beetle in the inaccessible box. It would not matter whether they were there or not. The surveillance regime are interested in our thoughts and feelings only because they affect our speaking, writing, and doing. But as soon as we assume that there is such a link, we have abandoned the idea of an absolutely separate private sphere. Some neuroscientists have suggested that we might one day be able to trace and decipher brain activity and thus gain direct access to people’s sensations and thoughts. But we are are certainly not there as yet and it is not obvious that this can ever be done. In the meantime, the surveillance regimes are busy recording what we say, what we do, where we go, whom we meet, what websites we visit in the hope of being able to control and manipulate our actions.

If the interlocutor is, however, pushed into revising his view and to adopt a form of behaviorism that view will prove to be even more amenable to the surveillance regime. There would then be no reason for it to worry that the secret thoughts and feelings of its subjects might escape surveillance.

Does Wittgenstein’s account offer us a contrasting way of distinguishing between the private and the public that allows us to identify genuine limits to the technology of surveillance? Does it have a place for thinking that there may be space for the privacy of feelings and thoughts and thus for a potential freedom from the intrusiveness of the powers of surveillance and a potential even for resistance to the manipulative power of the corporāte? How could that be? Wittgenstein assumes that there are internal links between the inner phenomena and their outer expression. We can know of other people’s private sensations because there exist natural links between them and their expression. Wittgenstein asks in this spirit whether the statement “I noticed that he was out of his humor” is a report about a person’s behavior or his state of mind. He answers compellingly – I think – that the report is both: “Both, not side by side, however, but from the one through the other.” But note that the published translation says at this point, instead, that the statement is a report “about the one via the other.” (PI, p. 188) This would mean that the proposition is to be considered a report about a state of mind that has passed through a report on behavior whereas Wittgenstein’s German says more strongly that the proposition is a report on a state of mind by means of or even by reason of being a report on a behavior. Wittgenstein add at this point: “A doctor asks: ‘How is he feeling?’ The nurse says: ‘He is groaning.’ A report on his behavior. But need there be any question for the two of them whether the groaning is genuine and really the expression of something?” (PI, p. 188) And we can similarly speak of a natural link between thoughts and their expression. Does this mean that if there were no possibility of expressing thoughts or feelings they would, inevitably, dwindle away? We would certainly not be able to speak or to conceive of them in the way we do. Wittgenstein: “Look at the stone and imagine it having sensations – One says to oneself: How could one so much as have the idea of ascribing sensations to a thing? … And now look at a wriggling fly, and at once these difficulties vanish, and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to say, too smooth for it.” (P!, 284)

On Wittgenstein’s account then there is nothing in principle that stands in the way of recognizing another person’s thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and sensations are not hermetically sealed off in an inner world of which others can know nothing. And this is, indeed, essential to the ways we interact and to what kind of beings we are. We can co-operate efficiently with each other and come to each other’s assistance in the way we do only because we can recognize each other’s thoughts and feelings in expression and action. One might look for an evolutionary explanation of why this has to be so. But if this is so, there seem to be no limits to the potential powers of surveillance and our worst fears about the consequences of losing the distinction between the private and the public seem to be realistic.

But that recognition is always limited in reach. There is always the possibility of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, of deception, pretending, acting, and lying. There is always the possibility of keeping one’s thoughts and feelings to oneself. The link between inner thoughts and feelings and their expression is never smooth. Our interactions are for that reason always marked by a degree of uncertainty. We may know another person well and may have known him for years but still be surprised about something he says or does, thinks or feels. That, too, is characteristic of human sociality.

Your thoughts and feelings may not be in principle inaccessible to others. They are not absolutely private. But, in practice, they may not be freely accessible. Consider all the things that go through your mind in the course of a day. None of them may in principle be beyond the reach of being known by others. But that other person would have to be at your side all day long and pay constant attention to everything you do and say, to every frown, every sigh, and every word you whisper. Once we abandon the idea of mind and body as separate substances, it become plausible to think that our mental states will be in principle just as accessible to knowledge as the other states of our bodies. But this knowledge in principle does not come to a knowledge in practice. So, are thoughts and sensations in principle private in the sense of being in principle inaccessible to others? They are accessible in principle but not always practically. And they are practically inaccessible not only for incidental reasons, but intrinsically so. We can say then that they are in principle practically inaccessible. Whether they are or not will depend on the means we have available for following the other’s words and actions. In our normal, everyday interactions there are narrow limits to this. Individuals are thus left to a wide sphere of privacy. The size of that sphere varies, however, according to how close two human beings are. But even between those who are intimate, the sphere of privacy remains intact. And it is, moreover, essential, if the parties will have mutual trust in each other, that this sphere of privacy shrinks to the same degree in both.

Technological means of surveillance have, however, created new ways of following the words and actions of others. Here the penetration into the sphere of privacy becomes one-directional. The agents of surveillance resist being surveilled. The shrinkage of privacy occurs only for the subject surveilled. This must result in a shrinkage of trust since the surveilled subject has less reason to trust the surveillor. The defenders of governmental surveillance often reason that those who do nothing wrong, will have nothing to fear from surveillance. But that assumes that he surveilling government organs cannot or will not do wrong. Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism are thus likely to spawn a regime of deepening distrust. The technological means of surveillance are not likely to go away; the reality of increased surveillance is with us. The question must be how trust can be maintained in this situation. The simple answer is that there needs to be increasing transparency between the parties. Bu that will not be easy to attain. Repressive governments have an interest in opacity, so do exploitative commercial undertakings, so do criminal gangs. In an age of surveillance, citizens must insist on a form of government that fosters openness and responsiveness to its citizens, that constraints the economic exploitation of the means of surveillance, and that prevents the operation of criminal forms of surveillance. It is difficult to see how any but a genuinely free a democratic form of government could provide such services.

Hiding in plain view

I want to turn here at the end to a passage of the Philosophical Investigations that appears to me relevant to this discussion. Wittgenstein writes there that “we don’t have an overview of the use of our language.” His next sentence is in German: “Unserer Grammatik fehlt es an Übersichtlichkeit.“ Our published translation makes this: „Our grammar is deficient in surveyability.” I would make it: “Our grammar lacks surveyability.” The difference in wording is due to two different interpretations of the entire remark. The translators (and many other interpreters) take Wittgenstein’s words to be prescriptive. Our grammar is deficient. We must therefore devise a surveyable representation of it. The interpreters believe tat this is what Wittgenstein is after. I believe, by contrast, that Wittgenstein is speaking descriptively. I take him seriously when he writes: “Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language, so it can in the end only describe it.” (PI, 124) And when he adds: “We don’t want to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard of ways.” (PI, 133) I take Wittgenstein to have made an observation about the nature of our language when he speaks of the unsurveyability of our grammar and thereby implicitly also of the entire human form of life. That our grammar is unsurveyable is due to the malleability and openness of language. There are, after all, “countless kind of use of all the things we call ‘signs’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this diversity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we say, come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten.” (PI, 23) Our language is not one thing, built on a single ground plan. It is like “a maze of little street and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.” (PI, 18)[12]

I believe that these words tell us something about the limits of surveillance. Such a limit is not set by there being an unbreakable code, nor does it result from our ability to limit the circle of those to whom we speak, and it is also not due to our private sensations and thoughts being absolutely inaccessible to others. The limit of surveillance lies in our capacity to think and speak in new, unanticipated ways. This is not a merely speculative remark but one with immediate practical applications. Those who wo want to protect the privacy of their digital phones find it necessary to change them frequently to avoid an infection with malware. Those who need the privacy of their internet communications will regularly change their addresses and servers. Those who speak and write in public will find it necessary to change the words they use and the ways they express themselves. We can learn here something the Chinese intellectuals on the Canadian website. They are often able to write in a surprisingly open and critical manner about the political, social, and intellectual realities of contemporary China. But they know, of course that they are under observation and that they need to tread carefully. They need to reconcile a number of different motivation. They are, of course, motivated first of all to communicate their own thinking. But they will at the same time want to express their thoughts in ways that escape the censor and do not provoke prosecution. They will also be concerned to keep private what they fear may get them into trouble with the authorities. Though they may also want to give others hints of those unexpressed thoughts. They are forced to become like foxes, outrunning the slow-moving hedgehogs of surveillance and censorship that seek to keep track of us with their cumbersome algorithms and rigid rules.

To be private does not mean to be confined in an inaccessible space. Privacy can also be found in the open where it is least expected. It is there where the agents of control cannot discriminate it. It is where the wind keeps shifting directions and contours keep changing. “Where do you hide a grain of sand?” G.K. Chesterton once asked. The answer, he thought, was: “On the Beach.”

Notes

[1] David Ownby, “Am I Being Played?” Reading the China Dream, February 15, 2021, https://www.readingthechinadream.com/david-ownby-am-i-being-played.html

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Harper & Row, New York 1960, pp. 55 and 43.

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P. M’ S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2000, 246. All subsequent references to this text marked as “PI” with the appropriate section or page number.

[4] “China set to pass new law to protect ‘legitimate rights’ on personal data,” South China Morning Post, August 17, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3145390/china-set-pass-new-law-protect-legitimate-rights-personal-data

[5] Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 5, 2016.

[6] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago U. P., Chicago 1958, Part 2 “The Public and the Private Realm.”

[7] Jessica Battke and Mareike Ohlberg, “The State of Surveillance. Government Documents Reveal New Evidence on China’s Efforts to Monitor Its People,” China File, October 30, 2020, https://www.chinafile.com/state-surveillance-china.

[8] “From ‘rice bunny’ to ‘back up the car’: China’s year of censorship, The Guardian, Dec. 30, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/31/from-rice-bunny-to-back-up-the-car-chinas-year-of-censorship.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=The%20Social%20Credit%20System%20%28%20Chinese%3A%20%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E4%BF%A1%E7%94%A8%E4%BD%93%E7%B3%BB%3B%20pinyin%3A,Communist%20Party%20of%20China%20Xi%20Jinping%20%27s%20administration.

[10] Battke and Ohlberg, loc. cit.

[11] Hans Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 2014, chapter 8.

[12] Hans Sluga, “Our grammar lacks surveyability,” in Language and World. Part One. Essays on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ontos verlag, Frankfurt 2010.

“Benevolent Autocracy.” The case of Hong Kong

On January 4, 2021, 1,000 Hong Kong police went out to arrest fifty-three democratic lawmakers, politicians, and activists. The event was as much a demonstration of unrestrained police power as an actual police operation. The arrested were, moreover, charged with a strange crime, namely “trying to use strategic voting to secure a legislative majority, with an ultimate goal of shutting down the government.”[1] They had organized a primary election to produce a slate of democratic candidates for the then upcoming election to Hong Kong’s legislature. 600,000 Hong Kongers had cast their vote on that occasion. The democrats had also expressed hope that their united front might gain a majority of the seats in the new legislature. Benny Tai, one of the initiators of the event, had, moreover, suggested in a newspaper op-ed that such a majority might eventually be able to veto the city’s budget and, perhaps, even push its unloved Chief Executive to resign.

According to the city’s Basic Law “Hong Kong residents shall have freedom of speech, of the press and of publication; freedom of association, of assembly, of procession and of demonstration, and to form and join trade unions, and to strike.” It also promised that “the freedom of the person of Hong Kong residents shall be inviolable. No Hong Kong resident shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful arrest, detention or imprisonment. Arbitrary or unlawful search of the body of any resident or deprivation or restriction of the freedom of the person shall be prohibited.”[2] So, how was it possible that residents were arrested for organizing a primary election, for making it their goal to gain a majority in the legislature, and for describing how such a majority might be used? In a normal democracy those activities would be considered unproblematic; How could they be illegal in Hong Kong? The answer is to be found in a National Security Law that had been impose on the city half a year earlier. Article 22 of that law declared, among other things, any person “who organises, plans, commits or participates in … seriously interfering in, disrupting, or undermining the performance of duties and functions in accordance with the law by … the body of power of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” to be guilty of an act of subversion punishable in the most serious case by life-imprisonment. The terms of the article are obviously slippery and wide enough to catch anyone trying to mount a serious opposition to those in power.

The January 4^th arrests occurred in the middle of coronavirus epidemic that occupied the attention of people both in Hong Kong and the rest of the world. It took place also as the world’s political attention was focused on the dramatic struggle of the presidential transition in the US. The arrests nevertheless evoked widespread condemnation. But broadside attacks on democratic activity had, in fact, had a long history in Hong Kong and went back to the very beginnings of the city.[3]

The accidental city

When the British took possession of Hong Kong Island in 1841, they chose it as a trading center and military outpost. They never envisaged that they were founding a city which would one day have millions of inhabitants with their manifold economic and administrative needs and their personal and political aspirations. At the time the island was only sparsely populated, mostly by the descendants of Ming dynasty loyalists who had fought a losing battle against the incoming Manchu Qing. Over time these people had turned into pirates making their living from the sea. In 1860, the British forced the Chinese into a treaty “in perpetuity” that awarded them Kowloon, an undeveloped strip of the mainland across from the island. Almost twenty years later, in 1879, the British got China to cede them an additional area of agricultural land, “the New Territories,” on a rent-free 99-year lease. Like the original island colony, these new possessions were only thinly populated. There were numerous villages but no towns or cities. In 1851, the size of the population in the entire British area was estimated at roughly 34,000 inhabitants. Fifty years later that number had increased tenfold to 370,000. By 1951 it had grown to two million and today the Special Administrative Region counts almost eight million inhabitants. In the 180 years since the British came to the island, Hong Kong had developed from an insignificant spot in the South China Sea into a global city with a teeming population and the densest collection of high rises on earth.

These circumstances have shaped the unique political destiny of the British colony. From the start it was located at the intersection of two great empires. It was not a city with a deep history, a long-settled population, with a clear perception of its identity and traditional institutions and practices. It was never planned or even conceived to be what it has become.

The British colonialists who took the territory had no idea of what they were getting into. From their point of view the new colony was a place from which they could trade their opium and other goods more safely than from the ancient Chinese city of Guangzhou upstream on the Pearl river. The deep harbor, sheltered from the southern Typhoons, also proved a suitable stopover for Britain’s globe-spanning navy. But there were no political institutions to take over, no city or state to govern.

If you went into India, you knew that you were dealing with a country, a people, with own rulers and ancient political institutions. None of this was true in Hong Kong. And so the British ruled their colony as a possession directly from London and continued to do so from 1841 to the moment of its return to China in 1997. None of their other colonies was treated in that way. Over time, the colonial rulers advanced a variety of reasons why they persisted in this manner, even as a city was coming into existence on their territory.

The crown colony

For the British colonialists “Hong Kong’s original status as an integral part of the Chinese empire could never be discounted because the Chinese themselves refused to do so, leaving uncertain the exact nature of its standing as a full-fledged British possession.” (p. 27) The task of the first governor was thus simply to create and maintain “‘an emporium for our trade and a place from which Her Majesty’s subjects in China may be alike protected and controlled.;” (p. 38) Hong Kong – “the Gibraltar of the east’ as the British came to call it – could for this reason be only a “crown colony” – forever ruled directly from the Colonial Office in London. The appropriate form of governing the place was a “benevolent autocracy.” (p. 19)

As more people settled in the colony this policy became, however, inevitably a point of contention. When local merchants in the 1880s called for some form of accountability for the taxes they were paying, the then Governor George Bowen insisted that elections were only “an inconvenience” and impractical at that because of Hong Kong’s heterogeneous population. Chinese views, habits, and customs on social and political questions were “widely different from those entertained in Europe,” he argued, and a local council “in which the Chinese element would be largely predominant” could not be trusted to deal with “arrangements necessary for the health, good order, and general administration” of the territory. (p. 51)

Over time the authorities in both London and Hong Kong came up with ever new reasons why there could be no politics in the colony, no political representation, no elections, and no democracy. Though there had been political agitation and organizing in the territory since the beginning, the British kept insisting that the Chinese were inherently apathetic and politically indifferent. “These claims persisted, incredibly, throughout the turbulent events of China’s 20^th-century history, all off which spilled over one way or another into Hong Kong.” (p. 66) The authorities also maintained that the Chinese inhabitants of the place were not really settled in Hong Kong, that they were rally only transients, and they pointed out that they were, in any case, not British subjects and hence could not be given political rights. Democracy and elections, they said, were, in fact, essentially Western and in conflict with the Confucian way of thinking. James Lockhart, the Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, in the 1890’s was to write: “The modern idea of ‘one man, one vote’ is one which the Chinaman can hardly comprehend, and if he does succeed in grasping its meaning, it is an idea which does not appeal to him, as it is opposed to the constitution of society and the theory of government of China.” While some Chinese might be attracted to the idea of democracy, as they showed by agitating for it, such people were “not representative of the Chinese view.” (p. 74)

This attitude did not change much over time. In 1965, Alexander Grantham, another governor of Hong Kong, maintained once again that the Chinese were “generally speaking, politically apathetic. They did not regard themselves as permanent citizen and felt little loyalty.” (p. 101) Two years later, yet another governor, David Trench, wrote: “We have hitherto always been cautious about explaining publicly the basic reason why Hong Kong cannot develop fully representative institutions.” Normal self-government was not possible in Hong Kong because of its “particular relationship with China.” (pp. 144-145)

Throughout the colonial period, there had nevertheless been continued political agitation by the inhabitants of the growing city. In response, the British authorities proposed and abandoned a series of plans for reform; they took steps forwards and back, they made this or that small political concession. But at the end there were still no elections, there was no representative legislature; there were still only the English officials appointed in Whitehall. Political protests were ignored, downplayed, or suppressed. In order to maintain their control over the colony, the British instituted a multiplicity of repressive measures during the 1950s. “A new Registration Ordinance required everyone to be photographed and fingerprinted. Deportation ordinances were strengthened … The old sedition law was updated, but definitions remained expansive, being applied both to speech and the printed word, including its publication, sale, distribution, possession, and reproduction. Seditious intent was equally expansive, meaning anything from encouraging ‘discontent or disaffection’ to inciting contempt for the government… All groups were required to apply for registration. Grounds for denial included affiliations of a political nature outside the colony, as well as purposes deemed inimical to its ‘peace, welfare or good order.’ A new labor law banned strikes for purposes other than work-related disputes.” The governor was given blanket powers “to make any regulation whatsoever” in case of danger or emergency. “In rapid succession hundreds of activists were deported to China. … Deportees found themselves arrested and escorted to the border, all within hours. Dozens of social groups were also denied registration, declared, illegal, and dissolved.” (pp. 111-112) And while these policies were meant in the first place to suppress communist agitation, they extended at the same time liberally to all other political activity.

When the Chinese introduced their own tough national security measures in Hong Kong in 2020 after months of civil unrest, they could gleefully refer to these British colonial policies as the precedent and justification for their own way of dealing with dissidents. It turned out that both London and Beijing were motivated by the same idea and that was not just to control dissent and to resist democratic reform, but to stop all political activism in its track.

Political agitation came from both communist and the democratic activists. Polls show that the communists had a core constituency of about 25% of the population but could draw at times on support from more than a third of the people. This support was particularly strong among working-class Hong Kongers. The strongest labor union was n fact, firmly on the communist side. The democrats who attracted more of the middle-class could, in turn, rely on a core constituency of 30% with broader support from up to 60% of Hong-Kongers. The disequilibrium was due to the fact that many of the city’s inhabitants had fled from the mainland at some time or other after the Communist victory in 1949. Both sides were nonetheless sufficiently strong and committed to cause trouble for the authorities, first the British and then the Chinese, and the two responded to that threat with comparable measures. While the two sides subscribed to very different ideologies, the technical means for controlling dissent proved essentially the same and thus ideologically neutral. Or to say it in another way: The means of social control and political suppression are not political in that they are readily available to any political system.

An experiment in democracy

Political change had been slow in the crown colony from the time of Queen Victoria to the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. But things began to change in the 1970’s when China made clear to the British that they were demanding the return of the entire colony with the expiration of the 99-year lease of the New Territories. The British, who were keen on expanding their economic opportunities in China at the time saw no other option than to prepare for that event. They now set belatedly new policies into motion such as a public housing program and a public education and health care system all of which had been limited and in private hands until then. They also began to negotiate with Beijing the conditions of the return of Honk Kong to Chinese sovereignty.

The outcome of that negotiation was a joint declaration concerning the future of Hong Kong signed on September 26, 1984. The document declared that “the current social and economic systems in Hong Kong will remain unchanged, and so will the life-style. Rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of travel, of movement, of correspondence, of strike, of choice of occupation, of academic research and of religious belief will be ensured by law… Private property, ownership of enterprises, legitimate right of inheritance and foreign investment will be protected by law.” The document was less specific about the future political arrangements. It declared that the government of the new Special Administrative Region (SAR) “will be composed of local inhabitants” including Chinese, British, and other foreign nationals. It also specified that the new chief executive would be “appointed by the Central People’s Government” though “on the basis of the results of elections or consultations to be held locally.” And a new Basic Law for the SAR was to be drafted by a working committee chosen by Beijing. But the joint declaration made no other promises concerning the political freedom of the people of Hong Kong.

It was at this point that the British decided to implement a series of political reforms to be put in place before the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. In London, Margaret Thatcher had been replaced by the more liberal John Major who was determined to advance this cause and in Hong Kong Chris Patten, the new and last British governor, eagerly pursued the issue. Suddenly, political parties were permitted and elections were to be held for district councils and the legislature. A new openness was practiced in the actions of government. This belated move provoked, however, heated protests from Beijing. The British were not acting in line with the Joint Declaration, the Chinese complained and they had a point. Beijing’s campaign “focused its venom on London’s duplicity, on its determination to retain influence in Hong Kong beyond 1997, and on the old idea of a Western conspiracy updated for 1990’s use: Hong Kong was to become a bridgehead for democratizing China.” (p. 246) The popular Chinese press denounced Governor Patten as the “demagogue of democracy” and “sinner of the millennium.” (p. 246)

The last-minute changes in the governance of Hong Kong, in fact, brought together a curious coalition of opponents. The pro-Beijing leftists in Hong Kong concurred, of course, with the rhetoric coming from the mainland. But they gained surprising support from the conservative Hong Kong business sector. “Politically ‘conservative’ pro- and anti-communists were now discovering they actually had more in common with each other than with what they regarded as the ‘radical’ reformers in their midst.” (p. 233) And if this was not enough, a third front of opposition was opened up by conservatives outside Hong Kong.

In the Hong Kong business community the anti-democratic were strong. Hong Kong conservatives were taking their inspiration from Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and feared above all that an electoral system would lead inevitably to welfare economics. To combat that development, the electronic manufacturer and conservative politician Allen Lee founded a pro-business party in 1993, misleadingly called the “Liberal Party,” which from the start took a strong a pro-Beijing stance. His successor as leader of that party was James Tien, chairman of the General Chamber of Commerce who “went on the offensive in 1996, targeting Legco’s new grassroots representation.” (p. 289) Tien deplored, in particular, the attempt of the new legislators to push towards “severance pay, maternity leave, gender discrimination, and disability allowances.” He looked forward, instead, to the handover and a new administration that would seek to recreate “Hong-Kong’s business-friendly environment.” (p. 289)

Such arguments were taken by others looking at Hong Kong from the outside. Murray Maclehose, a former governor, complained bitterly about the belated democratic reforms. The fact that there were different political parties with their opposing agendas was threatening Hong Kong’s stability, he maintained, and investor confidence. Lee Kuan Yew came specially to the city to warn against democracy. “He commended instead the formula he had perfected for Singapore: concentrate on economics, learn better English, and leave politics to your leaders.” (p. 250)

The economic city

The formula on which all these parties came to agree was that of Hong Kong as an “economic” city, not a political one. With this idea both the anti-democratic left and the anti-democratic conservatives could be happy. Beijing went on to accuse the British of turning Hong Kong into political city with their belated democratic reforms and announced its determination all such measures with the handover. “Colonial Hong Kong’s mix of capitalism and autocratic rule was just the sort of combination Beijing aimed to achieve nationwide, even as the West saw in Hong Kong’s economic rights and social freedoms the thin edge of a wedge, that anticipated Chinese communism’s demise.” (p. 9)

The Chinese resistance to the political city was encoded in the new Basic Law for the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong which had been worked out by a carefully selected working committee in Beijing. The Basic Law promised elections at some time in the future as the ultimate outcome of a slow, step-by-step process. “The most feared elements of mainland-style dictatorship were kept in check, but so too were local aspirations for a faster pace of democratic reform.” (p. 297) The political system was to be one of “executive-led government” not of the people or the legislature. The legislature was to have only a limited powers and an essentially consultative function. This was, in effect, the original British conception of “benevolent autocracy” all over again. What this meant became quickly clear from the figures Beijing appointed to govern the autonomous region.

The first chief executive was to be Tung Chee-hwa, a wealthy Hong Kong tycoon without previous political experience or interest. Forbes magazine estimated the wealth of the family as being at 3 billion US dollars in 2008. The son of a shipping magnate, Tung had spent several years in England and the United States. He had not been affiliated with any political before the handover, but his thinking about the city ran in perfect parallel to Beijing’s. For Tung there was an ongoing struggle between Western and Confucian values. And he perceived his task for that reason to be that of containing the dangers of Western permissiveness and politics, Hong Kong needed for this reason to tighten its rules governing civil liberties and elections. “The image his staff spun out was one of a paternalistic executive toiling from dawn to dusk and beyond on Hong Kong’s behalf.” (p. 325)

Other prominent Hong Kong tycoons found themselves in agreement with these sentiments. Ronnie Chan, the billionaire property magnate came to insist that Western style liberal democracy was imperfect, contrary to human nature, and bad for business. (p. 339) Peter Woo, like Chan a major real estate holder, argued that there was link between electoral politics and government deficits, and Gordon Woo, a Princeton alumnus and chairman of Hopewell Holdings, maintained that democracy would spell disaster because democrats knew nothing about economics. Tung Chee-hwa was, in turn, to come back to this point later on, in 2016, when he “hailed the Chinese model of democracy, while warning that competitive elections could lead to political instability and separatism.” The Hong Kong Free Press reported him at the time as saying: “We are not denying the importance of democracy, but we are definitely wrong if we consider competitive elections to be a main – or the only – component of democracy.”[4]

Capitalism vs. democracy

It has been said again and again that there exists a natural affinity between capitalism and democracy and perhaps even a necessary relation that economic and political liberty go together. The argument for this claim has always been murky. If I want to be free to do one thing and you want to be free to do another, what we both want is, in one sense the same. But our shared pursuit of freedom may nonetheless lead us into conflict. If I want to be free to engage in an unhampered pursuit of economic gain and you want to be free to organize politically to regulate and constrain my actions, then it is evident that your economic freedom and my political freedom conflict. The story of Hong Kong teaches us, in any case, that capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go together. In the 150 years of the crown colony, autocracy and capitalism always found it easy to coexist and, indeed, to profit from each other. And when change finally came, the Hong capitalists had compelling reasons for resisting democratic reform. They have found it convenient ever since to align themselves with the anti-democratic policies of the Beijing authorities.

Hong Kong’s Basic Law was, in fact, an unstable compromise and this ensured that the conflict over democracy would continue after the handover. On the one hand the Basic Law was meant to reverse the democratic reforms that the British had finally put into place, but it also made some concessions to the demand for democracy and promised more for later. In its preamble, the Basic Law invoked the slogan of “one country, two systems” slogan and declared that under this principle “the socialist system and policies will not be practised in Hong Kong.” For Beijing this meant the coexistence of two kinds of economic system, not that of two political systems. The final version of the Basic Law had been approved in February 1990 only nine months after the bloody evens in Tiananmen Square. “Tiananmen and its aftermath may have shocked Hong Kong into an unprecedented level of agreement with liberal demands, but the shoe was no on the other foot as Beijing adopted London’s old logic about democracy’s disruptive potential.” (p. 222)

Beijing made sure for that reason that it kept complete control over the choice of the chief executive. Article 45 of the Basic Law specified that “the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed by the Central People’s Government.” But it went on to say that “the method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” An appendix to the Basic law then specified the composition of an election committee which permanently restricted democratic representatives to an ineffective minority. And while article 45 also envisaged that the ultimate aim was the election of the chief executive by universal suffrage, it didn’t say when this moment would come. Beijing, in other words, reserved for itself the right to control the he appointment of the Chief Executive.

Another sticking point was article 23 of the Basic Law which said: “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government.” But when the administration of Chief Executive Tung set out to implement such a law article 23, it provoked strong public protest which culminated in a devastating mass demonstration on July 1, 2003. The outcome was an indefinite postponement of the bill. This turned out to be deadly blow to Tung’s administration and after a series of further missteps Tung resigned prematurely in early 2005 to be followed the former finance secretary, Donald Tsang.

If this was not enough, the Basic Law also reserved for Beijing the right to “interpret” and “amend” it. (Articles 158 and 159). When it became clear after the July 2003 demonstrations, that the democrats might actually win a legislative majority in the next election, Beijing decided to step in and make use of its power of interpretation. “Beijing’s Hong Kong policy was driven thereafter by two aims: denying the goal of full democracy in 2008-2008, and preventing ad democratic Legco majority in September 2004.” (p. 370) Beijing decided to intervene in the upcoming election by denouncing the democratic leaders as “unpatriotic.” In the end, the democrats won only 25 out of sixty seats. And Beijing also ruled out any political reform for 2007-2008. Election by universal suffrage for the chief executive and the legislature were definitely ruled out.

In the years that followed, the Beijing authorities and their Hong Kong followers continued to hack away at the freedoms the Basic Law guaranteed the city’s residents. In 2019 unrest erupted over an extradition law that the administration of Carrie Lam sought to implement. The turmoil lasted for months and ended with Beijing’s imposition of a National Security Law on the city. This was in clear breach of the Basic Law which specified that it was up to Hong Kong to implement such legislation. But by that time, it was clear that the mainland authorities were set to override the Basic Law wherever they saw fit. The Chinese Foreign Ministry had had already, in 2017, dismissed the original Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong as a “historical document that no longer has any realistic meaning” The Declaration, so the Ministry had said, “does not have any binding power on how the Chinese central government administers Hong Kong. Britain has no sovereignty, no governing power and no supervising power over Hong Kong.”[5] It was, of course, on this Declaration that the “rights and freedoms” of the people in Hong Kong, their freedom “of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association” was ultimately based. With the national security law of 2020, that initial guarantee of autonomy for fifty years and the promise that the Hong Kong citizens could maintain their freedom and life style in this period had lost their validity. Hong was now to be integrated into the mainland and its political culture. All the while, Beijing was insisting that the “one country, two systems” policy would be continued. But it was clear that this meant only the continuation of the capitalist market system in Hong Kong not that of its previous political structure. The upcoming elections for the legislature in which the democrats might have triumphed were postponed for at least year – due, it was said, to the coronavirus pandemic – Meanwhile Beijing was pondering a drastic overhaul of the election rules to make sure once and for all the democrats would have retain no practical influence on the selection of the next chief executive and prove unable to take control of the legislature. “As part of sweeping proposals that sources said were meant to disempower the district councillors – many of whom were protesters and activists who won their seats riding on a wave of public discontent in last year’s elections – the city’s pro-establishment members were also lobbying Beijing to get rid of five so-called super seats from the local electoral map. Again, the intent was to erode the relevance of the opposition councillors.”[6]

The implementation of the national security law initiated a series of measures evidently designed to silence political activity. They ranged from serious to small-minded. A sample will have to suffice to indicate their nature.

Hong Kong, it was clear, was to be an economic city and not a political one. After Beijing expelled four democratic lawmakers from the legislature for being insufficiently patriotic and the remaining democratic legislators resigned, Carrie Lam, the chief executive, expressed her satisfaction. A legislature without opposition was so much “more rational” she said. “Now… with the security law, law and order has been restored. Chaos has been replaced by peacefulness.”[7]

Conclusion

For almost two centuries, Hong Kong has played a pivotal role in the West’s relation with China. Much can be learned from this story about British and Western colonialism and imperialism and about China’s struggle with these outside forces. But equally important lessons can be derived from it concerning the general themes of autocracy and democracy, of capitalism and communism, and of the meaning of politics itself.

The distinction between economics and politics which both the British colonial authorities and the post-colonial Chinese and Hong Kong powers have evoked deserves our particular attention. It denies, of course, that mainstay of capitalist theorizing according to which there is an integral link between capitalism and democracy. But it is of even greater interest for the light it throws on the implied understanding of politics. The understanding is that the organization, administration, government, and maintenance of a city (or a state) is a technical and economic matter and as such apolitical. Politics, on the other hand, is a matter of giving those who are administered in the city a voice in how they are governed. As such it is inherently democratic. But as democratic it also involves debate, argument, disagreement, partisanship, opposition, and even conflict. These activities are a mere hindrance to the technical task of administering.

That there is such a distinction has been made plausible by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. In a more common usage, we tend to think of politics as embracing everything that has to do with government and the state. That formula goes back to Plato and Aristotle who characterized politics as the rule of the polis. Arendt may be right in saying that Plato and Aristotle have made us think about politics above all as establishing and maintaining order, and therefore also as crucially concerned with the making and applying of law. On Arendt’s view this has opened the possibility of a totalitarian politics committed to establishing a single, all-embracing order in the state. On this view, the most totalitarian state is also the most political one. But once we focus on the other side of politics, its participatory character, we will conclude that the totalitarian state is, in fact, the least political. The conception of a merely economic city approximates the totalitarian understanding of politics.

Notes

[1] “Hong Kong police say 53 were arrested for trying to use strategic voting to win election, veto budget & shut down gov’t”, Hong Kong Free Press, January 5, 2021

[2] Basic Law, articles 27 and 28.

[3] The following account draws substantially on Suzanne Pepper’s Keeping Democracy at Bay. Hong Kong and the Challenge of Chinese Political Reform, Rowman & Littlefield, London 2008. All further references are to that book.

[4] HKFP, Dec. 20, 2016

[5] “Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong ‘no longer has any realistic meaning’, Chinese Foreign Ministry says,” South China Morning Post, June 30, 2017

[6] “Beijing mulling drastic overhaul of Election Committee deciding Hong Kong’s chief executive and Legislative Council to curb opposition’s influence,” SCMP, Dec. 22, 2020

[7] KHFP, Nov. 24, 2020

The Transfer of Power. The model of Hong Kong

We commonly distinguish regimes by how they are ruled – or, rather, by the way we say they are ruled. Thus, a democracy is a regime in which, as we say, the people rule. In reality, “the people,” of course, never rule. It would be more correct to say that in democracies someone rules with the approval of the people. But even that is usually only a euphemism since the people get only ever so often a chance to express their approval or disapproval. Of monarchy we say similarly that it is a system in which a monarch rules when it may be in reality a powerful minister who does the ruling while the monarch provides a pleasing façade.

It is more helpful to distinguish regimes by the way power is transferred. We can then say that democracies are regimes in which power is transferred on someone by the approval of the people. A transfer of power can, of course, take a variety of forms. In democracies, for instance, it may be brought about through regularly scheduled elections. In a monarchy that transfer may, on the other hand, be regulated through a system of inheritance. If the king does the actual ruling, this may involve the transfer of power to his oldest son. If the king’s minister did the ruling, the transfer may be still be effected through the system of inheritance but in an indirect fashion. Power is transferred from one minister to another through the system of inheritance that elevates the oldest son of the king. There is, of course, also the possibility that no actual transfer of power occurs, if the old king’s minister stays on with the new one.

The transfer of power takes on a particularly interesting form when it involves a change of regimes not only one that exchanges those operating within a regime. A transfer of power from one political party to another in a democratic election is one thing, the transfer of power – e.g., from a monarchical system to a democratic one – is something quite different. We then often speak of a “revolution.” The event may even involve some violence. But not always and the regime-transformation is not necessarily a revolutionary one. Regimes also change though processes of slow attrition. A democratic regime may thus turn by stages into an autocracy; elected leaders may slowly become a ruling family. The façade of the earlier form of regime may hold up for a while, even as the system of power behind it and the way power is transferred is changing.

I have been particularly interested in recent years in the hybrid political system of Hong Kong adopted in the handover of the British colony to China in 1997. The agreement struck between two countries was supposed to guarantee political autonomy to Hong Kong for the next fifty years under the formula “One country, two systems.” One weakness of the agreement was, from the start, that it never specified the exact nature of the distinctive Hong Kong “system.” The other one was that the agreement had nothing to say about what would happen at the end of the fifty-year period. For the British government the hope was, probably, that in those years China would adopt a more democratic system and that there would be eventually an easy merger of the Hong Kong and Chinese political systems. But China has, in fact, remained firmly in the control of its Communist Party. And so we are left with the question of how the transfer of power in Hong Kong is to be reconciled with the Chinese one. In mainland China that transfer is not effected by the will of “the people” but by secretive maneuverings in the higher echelons of the party. That has left the question of the ultimate relation of Hong Kong to China at the end of the “one country, two systems” period wide open. Would the political autonomy of Hong Kong be re-affirmed at that point by the Beijing rulers, as some have hoped? Would the People’s Liberation Army one day march into Hong Kong and overthrow its political system?

The National Security Legislation that has recently been imposed on Hong Kong by the Beijing authorities provides some answers. The first thing to note is that this legislation may not have the support of the citizens of Hong Kong, but it has definitely been accepted and even hailed by the supposed rulers of Hong Kong. That class, which had never been elected in a genuinely democratic fashion, had obviously already been coopted by Beijing. We can only speculate on their motivations. Had they always been silently adherents of Chinese Communism? Had they cynically calculated that Beijing would, in any case, eventually take over and that it was in their own best interest to go along with this? Did they see themselves perhaps as being no more than helpless driftwood on the stream of historical inevitability? Or were they calculating that Hong Kong could maintain and perhaps even increase its economic wealth by politically giving in to China?

For all its political limitations, Hong Kong has until now had many of the trappings of a liberal democracy: the right of people to express their views freely, a colorful, free press, the right to demonstrate, a variety of political parties. The puzzling question (certainly for the powers in Beijing) was always: how do you integrate such a system into the one-party, heavily controlled system of China? The new National Security Law is meant to provide tools for achieving that end. By means of threatened and actual punishments it is meant to limit the expression of public and democratic opinion. Certain things can no longer be said; certain political candidates may no longer be active; certain rebellious individuals are to be silenced. Changes in the education curriculum are to produce a more pliant generation. Plans for the integration of Hong Kong into a new Southern Chinese Economic zone (“The Greater Bay Area”) and the resulting promise of increased wealth are supposed to sweeten the bitter political pill.

Will these maneuvers succeed in merging Hong Kong smoothly into the Chinese political system? Or will Beijing eventually be forced to use stricter measures as in Tibet and Xinjiang? It is clear, in any case, that the policies the Chinese authorities are pursuing in Hong Kong are not uniquely tied to the Communist system. They are just as available elsewhere. We have seen democracies overthrown by a variety of means: by military take-overs, by invasion, by violence in the street, even by democratic elections. China is now trying something else, a new kind of transfer of power from one kind of regime to another brought about through a co-option of the established elite, the step-by-step reduction of political liberties, the re-education of a new generation, and the promise of economic development. These tools are available also elsewhere and one can see them, in fact, being used by interested parties in a number of Western democracies. The transfer of power within democracies is always in danger of becoming a transfer of power from democracy into another kind of regime.

What hope is there?

Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis is a tightly argued new book by Ci Jiwei that sets itself the dual task of analyzing China’s democracy deficit while doing so in a genuinely philosophical manner. Such an exercise in a “diagnostic” style of political philosophy is greatly more challenging than the usual abstract and normative theorizing of our political philosophers. It faces the twofold challenge of having to give a plausible account of the political reality that serves as its material and to produce substantive new philosophical insights on that basis. Ci manages both tasks with great assurance. His book is bound to become essential reading for anyone concerned with China’s political prospects but it will also prove to be of interest to anyone who wants to think realistically about politics and political philosophy.

Ci’s major thesis is that China must undergo a process of democratization in the next few decades or face potentially disastrous instability. Ci seeks to make his case for Chinese democracy in “prudential” rather than purely “normative” terms – a “case for democracy without falling under its spell,” as he puts it, aligning himself with John Dunn’s “realistic” view of democracy. (p. 17) In agreement once again with Dunn, Ci holds, furthermore, that political philosophy must proceed in a diagnostic and prognostic manner rather than in abstractly theorizing terms. He quotes Dunn as saying: “History, if anything, can tell us how we have come hither; moral philosophy, perhaps, what to make of the fact that this is where we now are. But political theory has no choice but to tell us how to act, given that this is indeed where we now are.” (p. 385)

Ci, one of the leading Chinese philosophers today and a professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, is the author also of Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (1994) and Moral China in the Age of Reform (2014). I have for long been an admirer of these volumes and particularly of the first with its penetrating analysis of China’s drift from Maoist utopianism to an always already implicit hedonism and its original take on philosophical ideas from Confucianism to Nietzsche.

Conjoined to these two earlier works, Democracy in China can be seen to make up the concluding volume of a trilogy that aims at a sweeping, philosophically imbued picture of China and Chinese politics from 1949 through the coming decades. The entire work situates itself at the intersection of philosophy, history, and politics – not an easy place to occupy as we can see from the few philosophers who have done so successfully. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault come, first and foremost, to mind. Ci’s book is a remarkable new contribution to this genre.

While Democracy in China may be read as a continuation of the two earlier volumes, it also treads critically different ground. With their focus on China’s recent past and immediate present, the two earlier books could draw on confirmable historical circumstances. In seeking to ground philosophical reflection on historical realities, they could thus adopt a strictly diagnostic tone of voice. The new book, with its view to the future, is inevitably forced to follow another, prognostic procedure – one that is inevitably haunted by greater uncertainty than the diagnostic one. But in what other way can a historically oriented form of political philosophy become practical and prescriptive? Neither the past nor the future are completely knowable, but we can still acquire at least a skeleton knowledge of it. With respect to the future, hesitant conjecture is, however, the closest we can come to real knowledge. Thus, we know who the successors of Mao were and more or less what they did, but we cannot know who Xi Jinping’s successor will be or what he will stand for. Ci is fully aware of this asymmetry and acknowledges it again and again in the course of his book, but it certainly makes for a more tentative agenda than his earlier writings. History has ways of diverting its course in unexpected directions and we cannot ignore that possibility when it comes to the future of China. So, what grounds do we have for assuming that Ci’s carefully reasoned scenario will actually play out?

There is another striking uncertainty in this book and that concerns its intentions. Who are meant to be its readers? One might think that its most important readers, the ones who will have most to learn from the book and the only ones who can make practical use of its lessons, will be members of the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. But what likelihood is there that they will come across a book written in English by a Hong Kong philosopher and published by Harvard University Press in America? And if they were to become familiar with the book, would they be ready for its lessons?

These considerations are not meant to disparage Ci’s work, but they make me think that the book’s significance should not be measured by whether it will contribute to the rise of democracy in China, that Ci’s is after all a work of philosophical reflection and that its importance will lie in how it contributes to a deepened understanding of our political and historical reality. I am inclined at this point to invoke Machiavelli’s Prince. That book, too, was intended as a guide for political rulers; but it lives on now as an account of the working of political rule.

We can say, in any case, that Ci’s book has two dimensions: one political and the other philosophical. The political dimension concerns the future of China – a matter surely of the greatest significance. Whatever China’s future may be will have an impact on the global political order. If China should eventually become a full-fledged democracy, it will be the largest democracy the world has ever seen. To manage a democratic system of that size will, no doubt, be extremely challenging. The ancient Greeks believed that democracy could truly function only in small city states. We now have mass democracies but at the price of deviating radically from the model of the original. A Chinese democracy will have to be a political system of an entirely new and as yet unforeseeable form of democracy. But whatever form it will have, a Chinese democracy will also give a boost and a new direction to democracy around the world. If China should, on the other hand become unstable, that too will have global repercussions. Ci’s reflections on the future of China certainly make clear what is at stake.

But the significance of his work is not exhausted by this. The other dimension of his book is the philosophical one. From his thoughts about China, Ci extracts many new philosophical insights concerning, not least, our very understanding of democracy. His work serves thus also as an exemplary exposition of the diagnostic mode of political philosophy.

Ci Jiwei, Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis, Harvard University Press 2019

A short trip to China

A month ago I attended the fourth International Wittgenstein Symposium in Xi’an. I gave a lecture on the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations and a talk at Northwest University on “Wittgenstein and the Decline of the West.”

Almost everyone in Berkeley said: “Xi’an. Where is that?” It tells you how ignorant we are about the country. It is a city of some 7 million people (and perhaps unofficially even of 10 million). The first capital of China lone before Beijing and as such full of antiquities. It was also the end of the Silk Road, the place where Buddhism entered China and it has, till today, a thriving Muslim quarter. A modern city but one with a history.

The Wild Goose Pagoda where the Buddhist scriptures were kept after they had first been brought to China

The Famen Temple outside Xi’an where one of the Buddha’s finger bones is preserved

Local struggles in a global city

A few weeks ago, I met up with a number of local activists in Hong Kong. I wanted to know how much support they still had from the general public and what their chances were for asserting any political influence, given that their leaders were under attack and their elected representatives had been disbarred. At the time, the HK administration was barreling ahead with its controversial extradition bill and nothing seemed to be able to stop it. But now, in the last two weeks, we have seen the answer to my question. A million people protested and they had come together not as members of an organized opposition but through a spontaneous grassroots movement making use of the power of the social media. Popular democracy, so it seems, has triumphed and the administration has now suspended – for the time being – the process of pushing the extradition bill through the otherwise pliable legislature. An important battle seems to have been won.

But the war is not over. The bill may be resurrected at any time later and the fears of the Hong Kong protestors are hardly assuaged, as I have found out. The year 2047 is still looming, when Hong Kong is scheduled to become an integral part of China with the end of the “one country, two systems” arrangement. That arrangement has already been under increasing pressure for some time and the proposed extradition bill was only to be one more nail in its coffin. When I asked my localist friends a few weeks ago how they pictured Hong Kong in 2047, unsurprisingly they had no clear answer for me. Will Hong Kong simply melt away into the cauldron of greater China and become just another Chinese city?

I tried to convince my localist friends that this was unlikely, that because of its history Hong Kong would retain its distinctive character whatever happened to it politically. The struggle of the localist advocates is certainly more than a political one. They want to maintain also their distinctive history and their Cantonese language. The use of Cantonese extends, moreover, beyond Hong Kong and the cause of he localists is thus also one over the cultural identity of Southern China as against the Mandarin speaking North. Hong Kong has, strictly speaking, been never a Chinese city. It was a British creation, grew up as a colonial stronghold, became a refuge for people dislodged from Communist China, and it has in recent years, since the British left, part of that web of megacities that now span the globe. No wonder that many Hong Kongers do not consider themselves Chinese. This cultural consciousness will not disappear for the foreseeable future, whatever happens to Hong Kong. It is thus plausible to think that Hong Kong will remain a thorn in the flesh of China – just as Taiwan is, though for somewhat different reasons. Whether the distinctive identity of Hong Kong will persist, depends, of course, also on the vitality and creativity of its people. A cultural distinctness cannot be defined only in terms of Hong Kong as a global financial center.

Hong Kong in turmoil

When I arrived in Hong Kong a month ago it was already clear that a political crisis was brewing. The HK administration had tabled a new extradition law and opposition to it was growing by the day. Now the issue has come to a boil. On Sunday, a million Hong Kongers braved sweltering heat to demonstrate against the law. The next day, Carrie Lam, the chief executive announced that she was going ahead with it any way and that he legislature would vote on the law this Wednesday. More confrontations are inevitable.

The British left Hong Kong with an incomplete democracy when they handed the territory back to China under the “one country, two systems” agreement. Till today only part of the legislature is elected by the public and the choice of the chief executive is controlled by Beijing. No wonder that the relation of the Hong Kongers to the administration is fraught with tension. Few people mourn the departure of the last chief executive, C. Y. Leung who seemed to be set only on pleasing Beijing. His successor, Carrie Lam, came into office promising to do better but now she has changed course (or been forced to do so). Her new motto is: The public be damned. There is no doubt that her hardline tactics on the extradition bill has lost her the good will of a large part of the Hong Kong population. She is not likely to get that back. Her next few years in office promise to be rough.

The extradition bill is a further blow to the already shaky democracy of Hong Kong. It will allow the extradition of HK residents to the mainland, if they are accused there of serious crime. The expectation is that Beijing will use the law to stifle political opposition. The existence of the law will, in fact, be enough to make critics of Beijing speak more circumspectly. And the way the law is being funneled through the legislature is another insult to democracy. Normal legislative procedures have been abandoned to push it through. The result will be a much hated law pushed by an unpopular and unrepresentative administration on an unwilling population. No wonder that people in Hong Kong are speaking of the end of democracy.

And here are two headlines from today’s South China Morning Post:

Tensions in Hong Kong on rise as city’s leader Carrie Lam gets death threats and more protests loom over extradition bill

Strikes, class boycotts and ‘picnics’: how ordinary people across Hong Kong are mobilising to take action against extradition bill

The End of Eternity

A week ago, I saw Bi Gan’s movie The End of Eternity (《地球最后的夜晚》)– called In English Long Day’s Journey into the Night — on a Cathay Pacific flight. I came away thinking that this must be one of the great movies of all times. The next day I discovered that it was also playing at a neighboring movie house and so went to see it again. I couldn’t sleep after that as the images, words, and sounds of the movie were hauntingly coming back to me again and again in the middle of the night. Dark, mysterious, and melancholy, Bi Gan’s work is, in fact, a piece of the most sublime Chinese poetry and utterly captivating as this poetry can be.

Its story may be simple and even banal: a man looking for a woman he had known many years before. But it is developed captivatingly in a series of magical scenes that move back and forth in time and place in an unexplained fashion. Its logic is that of a dream, of free poetic associations in which images, words, and sounds repeat themselves in a disorienting fashion. The effect is heightened by the way the movie is constructed in two separate halves, the first shot in standard format, the second in 3D. While the first half is replete with images of water, the second is preoccupied with images of stone. The movie begins with the protagonist washing his face under a faucet; then he stands in a basement where water is pouring through the ceiling and accumulating on the floor. Later he arises suddenly out of a deep pond apparently in the same place, but when his companion steps into it that same water it appears to be only ankle-deep. In the second half, the hero finds himself suddenly in an abandoned mine; he drifts on a small gondola into a town in which everything is made of stone; he follows a torch-bearing woman up mysterious stone staircase but then, returning to the market-place, walks up once more on those same rocky stairs.

While the movie’s present-day story is set in the year 2000, it shows us nothing of the world of modern China. There are no high rises here, no motorways, no shopping malls, no huge teeming masses, and certainly no signs of China’s economic and military might. We are in a forgotten, claustrophobic corner of China. The signs of an outside world are few and far between. In the first few, passing shots we see some construction machinery and an old metal girder being cut down; we are told of the hero’s friend, a young small-scale crook, whose body is one day found in a mineshaft; there is the image of a cobra suddenly striking the wall of its cage; a disturbing upside-down scene of the hero aiming his gun at another man sitting in front of him in a movie theater; a house burned down by a jealous woman. But these moments of violence are never allowed to dominate the movie; they are embedded in it, rather, like sudden, fearful intrusions into a more languorous dream.

The movie begins with the hero’s return to his hometown after his father’s death. The father, he hears, has spent his final days looking at a dead clock on the wall. When our protagonist opens the clock he finds in its back a photograph of the woman he has once known. At the end of the movie our hero gives a watch to a woman he has just met and who may or may not be the one he has been looking for all the time. She notes that the watch is not working and tells him that a watch is a symbol of eternity. He, in turn, draws her attention to a pair of sparklers she has lit on her make-up table and tells her that they are symbols of the transitory. We are left to contemplate their kiss with these words in mind.

Doing prison time in Hong Kong

On my current visit to Hong Kong I am once again trying to talk to some of the activists in order to get a better understanding of the shifting political territory. When I contacted Joshua Wong, one of the most dedicated pro-democracy campaigners, he wrote back to me: “I might not able to meet you since my court case sentencing is scheduled on Thursday afternoon. I need to prepare before being locked up in prison.” This will be the third time he is sent there for his political engagement.

In 2017, he was jailed for his role in the occupation of Civic Square three years earlier. Last year, he was in prison for failing to comply with a court order concerning a protest in Mong Kok in 2014. Meanwhile, the organizers of the Occupy Central demonstrations of 2014 have also recently been sent to jail.

The Hong Kong authorities are using a heavy hand in dealing with those activists. In other jurisdictions such cases might have been dealt with more leniently and in a spirit of reconciliation. But here in Hong Kong the opposition is tolerated only as long as it accepts that it is and will always be only a minority and submits meekly to the edicts of the ruling system.

One begins to understand why the ancient Greek democrats thought of majority rule as a form of tyranny.