China’s National Security Law is about to be forced onto Hong Kong, ostensibly for the purposes of defending national unity and stability.

The central government and its enablers in Hong Kong love to talk about national unity and stability as if they are obvious and unambiguous virtues. The fact that the history of the Chinese Communist Party is a history of deploying pleasant sounding platitudes in the service of the most egregious crimes against humanity should however give one pause.

Who among us would dare to argue against national unity and stability? Yet from another perspective, with the National Security Law coming as soon as the end of this month, why not argue against national unity and stability, while one still can? In this week’s column, I will thus critique the idea of national unity, before proceeding to examine the ideology of stability in next week’s column.

When the Party-state talks about the importance of national unity, it invariably couches this topic in the “semi-colonization” of areas of the Chinese empire in the nineteenth and twentieth century, when foreign powers set up concessions and colonies in Tianjin, Shanghai, Qingdao, Macau, and of course Hong Kong. According to the official narrative, when the central state was weak, China was divided and its people were humiliated. This narrative tugs at one’s heartstrings by linking disunity and humiliation, evoking in even the most jaded of listeners a creeping sense of sympathy for national unity.

Yet if disunity means humiliation, does unity mean pride? In reality, the history of the empire’s achievement and maintenance of unity is not so heartwarming. In an often cruel process, the central state’s authority is established by exercising power over all under heaven: deviations from official dictates are punished in the cruelest of manners, while subjects’ personal accomplishments are re-appropriated as the state’s own. It is the unity of power, unity of thought: everything works toward further strengthening the state.

Yet if the history of the Chinese empire is the history of a continually expanding and endlessly self-congratulatory power eventually collapsing under its own weight only to be reinvented yet again, there is a corresponding subterranean counter-history of people seeking and achieving better lives by living beyond the central state’s control.

Hong Kong’s story is a lasting testament to this repressed truth: Hong Kong succeeded because its people proactively chose to leave behind unity and central control. As a result, they were fortunate to avoid the terror and destruction that the CCP unleashed on its people throughout the twentieth century. People of Sinitic descent, just like people anywhere else in the world, thrive when given a chance to simply live their lives and build their own economy, society, and culture free from the burdens of state control.

This is however the dirty little secret that the Chinese empire strives to repress. Deploying a pan-Chinese racial nationalism, the Party claims as its own the achievements of peoples of Sinitic descent in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and beyond who have prospered precisely by right of avoiding its misrule.

The Party now claims that these spaces, which proudly embody cultural dynamism, freedom, and exploration, are shameful blockages to realizing the “Chinese dream” of national unification, and thus need to submit in order to guarantee greatness. Yet the opposite is true: unification under the control of the central state has in fact been the greatest source of humiliation and repression for Sinitic people for millennia, a phenomenon that continues to this day.

The CCP, thriving on the power of this humiliation and repression disguised as liberation, simply cannot live with the thought of people living successful and happy lives beyond its control. Rather than improving its own system, the Party aspires instead to drag people down to its level in the name of national unity.

The National Security Law that the central government is currently forcing on Hong Kong is just one more step in the eternal return of the overreaching central state. Its compulsory unity will stifle the city’s vibrant political culture, damage the city’s attractiveness as a global destination for investment and entrepreneurship, shred standard political procedures and the common law system itself, and revoke the freedoms guaranteed in the Basic Law that the central government falsely claims to be upholding.

Will critique of the National Security Law still be legal under the new National Security Law? Unfortunately, even that question may be illegal. The Party knows that the easiest way to “win” an argument is to erase those who disagree: history shows us that this is simply what it does. Yet history also shows us that this is really no way to win an argument, and that some people will always find a way out and thereby carry forward the cause of freedom.

National unity, in sum, is not an inherent virtue. It is a massively overrated concept abused by the Party-state to further its power, and there is pride to be found in evading and even working against it for a better life. China’s decision to force this unity on Hong Kong via the National Security Law is nothing to celebrate: it threatens the very foundations of this city, which has allowed people to thrive precisely by living beyond this stifling unity.

(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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