by Fong Yuen

With the CCP trying to force the National Security Law (NSL) upon them, Hongkongers have no choice but to fight back. However, does the violent encroachment on Hong Kong provide the CCP a way out?

The difficulties faced by the CCP both internally and externally cannot be resolved by the NSL. Hongkongers will not be subdued, they would just change their way of protesting. The CCP can neither win the hearts of the Hongkongers, nor Hong Kong itself. The most it can do is to use suppression to maintain the peaceful illusion on the outside.

At the same time, the CCP also has to deal with full-fledged sanctions from the international societies. Such terrible external situation would not ease off over time; instead, it would be intensified by the chain reactions from the conflicts, until it gets to a point where an ultimate confrontation becomes inevitable.

Therefore, the NSL is not the right prescription to get the CCP out of plight, but is, in fact, the Party struggling to draw its last breath. The CCP has taken a huge political baggage in order to enforce NSL, and this baggage has exhausted the party and pushes it towards doomsday.

Hong Kong was initially only a regional problem for the CCP, which has somehow been elevated by both the CCP and the pro-CCP camp in Hong Kong to an Achilles’ heel. 7 millions Hongkongers, rational, gentle and educated, would have run happily with the fulfilment of the promise of self-governance under the Basic Law. CCP runs mainland China, Hongkongers runs Hong Kong - it could have been a positive interaction, a win-win situation.

But no, just because 500,000 people marched to oppose Article 23 of the Basic Law, the CCP came to a conclusion that Hongkongers are disobedient. It has, since then, repeatedly asserted suppression and interference into Hong Kong’s internal affair by through interpreting the Basic Law by the NPCSC, in an attempt to tame Hongkongers. The conflict between China and Hong Kong intensifies through the hands of past and present Chief Executives, which led to the current impass. In order to suppress Hongkongers, the CCP has paid a huge price by destroying the image it spent decades to construct, the legality of “One Country, Two Systems”, and an invitation into the global community. It has now become an international street rodent loathed by everyone.

The CCP’s waterloo of 2020 was, of course, not Hong Kong, but its deep-rooted authoritarianism, a fatal stab called expansionism. Hong Kong was a bump along the road, but one that must be smoothed over before the CCP could calm the country, let alone the world. The CCP has never once given up on its desire to expand. Deng Xiaoping’s “Hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead” was never about retreating, but to wait for the perfect moment to strike, to expand. This is why the previous “dynasties” of Zhao Ziyang-Hu Yaobang, Jiang Zemin-Zhu Rongji, and Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao have been relatively lowkey. The country, at that time, was constrained. The opening was a deception, while “recuperation” was the truth.

By the time Xi Jinping took over, the country was powerful, with a huge ambition to expand and has begun reaching its hands into corners where it could. Confucius Institutes seeped into culture, Belt and Road infiltrated the economy, cooptation controlled international organizations, incitement influenced politics of other countries. The disguise of benefits fooled no one. Western countries, determined to safeguard their own welfare, have not fallen into the trap. This led us to an epic turnaround that we witness today.

Preaching a Communism one doesn’t even believe in, labeling it “Chinese-style”, banking on the “Four Confidences”, building an audacious “community of human destiny”, brainwashing, violent governance...the CCP is trying to sell to the world an outdated playbook of reactionary rule. An idea that goes against the trend of the times may deceive for a while, but it will not guarantee long-term success. To this day, the Wolf Warrier’s ambitions have been thoroughly exposed, and enemies are gathering all around the lone fighter, but where is the way out? Even if Hong Kong is captured, that is if it ever can be, there is still no way out.

Originally, to lay low in face of internal and external difficulties would be the least a smart person would do to avoid irreversible consequences. Yet all the years of self-promotion, bragging, and misleading its own people, one could not longer show any sign of weakness to a country of citizens hypnotized by the lullaby of “Amazing China”. In this way, invading Hong Kong with the NSL is a helpless, psychological overcompensation, a reaction towards the setbacks from expansions and ambitions.

Enforce the NSL all you want, but this is no way out for the CCP. Xi Jinping comes from a generation that values winning above all, yet lacking political wisdom, and he has gone all in with the chips from several decades of accumulation of the “family wealth”. Retrospectively, Hong Kong’s NSL is, at best, a giant pit dug by Xi Jinping himself. Today, what else is left but a leap forward?

An unrestrained leader, an ideology that would sacrifice people for gains, a group of dignitaries whose eyesight is only on private interests, they are holding 1.4 billion Chinese people hostage against the world and marching towards a self-destructive dead end. Does this road lead anywhere? Of course it does, and time will tell.

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