For the first time in 32 years, there was no candlelight at Victoria Park on the anniversary of the June Fourth Incident. Darkness descended upon Hong Kong in full view of the entire world. A picture by the news media is worth more than a thousand words by Carrie Lam, who still deceitfully insists that Hong Kong has returned to normal. The Fourth of June in 2021 was even darker than the same day in 2020. Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho Chun-yan, the backbone of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, remained in prison that day. Citizens walked on the streets holding candles, and police demanded that they blow out the flames.

Why has the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued to suppress Hong Kong at all costs, even though it has already forced stability into the city and has gained the upper hand over it? From the perspective of rational decision-making, this is quite an unwise move by the CCP, and one can only understand it in the broader context of the history of a string of “left-wing disasters” caused by the CCP. Since the CCP’s establishment 100 years ago, its history has been intertwined with an endless stream of “left-wing disasters”. The flawed policies of the CCP itself have killed many times more people than the Kuomintang or the civil war. The CCP is a party characterized not only by perpetual internecine struggles, but also by its use of internecine struggles to create enemies so as to maintain the authority of its leadership and cow the opposition within the party into submission. When a need for internal struggles arises, the CCP blows the disagreements within the party out of all proportion to make it easy to launch internecine struggles. This is the very antithesis of modern, civilized governance, which emphasizes rationality and tolerance. Back in the era of collectivization, farmers living in People’s Communes would be labelled a counterrevolutionary who had reembraced capitalism simply by keeping a chicken.

In Hong Kong, since the CCP came up with the slogan of “stopping violence and chaos” in 2019, it had been thinking that it understood the public sentiment here. After the emergency enactment of the Prohibition on Face Covering Regulation and the sieges on the Chinese University and the Polytechnic University, it was convinced that Hong Kong people would abhor chaos and instability and would change their stance, so the slogan of “stopping violence and chaos” would be in line with the mainstream opinion. What happened then? The pro-establishment camp suffered its greatest defeat ever in the District Council elections in November 2019. The CCP put even more pressure on Hong Kong. It imposed the National Security Law on the city, trying to use the draconian law to intimidate citizens into submission. It arrested Jimmy Lai. It treated a primary election within the pro-democracy camp as a criminal case involving national security and arrested all prominent figures in the pro-democracy camp in one fell swoop. Having deprived the legislature of its ability to monitor the government, the CCP thought that Hong Kong people would be deterred. But Hong Kong has remained steadfast in its stance and belief. Hong Kong people continue to buy from shops from the “yellow” (pro-democracy) economic circle. They support pop music groups such as Mirror and Error and boycott TVB, a TV station seen as pro-China. They have built their beliefs into their daily practice. Yes, the CCP will step up its suppression again, for every attempt, it has made to intimate Hong Kong people has failed to achieve the desired results but has caused its conflicts with Hong Kongers to spill over from politics into people’s daily lives. In the next stage, the CCP will target the media and the education sector. In every political movement it launches, new “enemies” are created. The CCP’s “left-wing disasters” are a string of self-fulfilling prophecies. The CCP keeps playing up the internal differences, creates more and more enemies, and takes harsher and harsher action against them. Such a vicious cycle does not stop until it results in a great disaster.

In 1979, Deng Xiaoping sealed in the “Left-wing Devil” of the CCP with three ground rules. First, cults of personality were banned. Term limits to the country’s top job were created to prevent one man’s errors from harming the entire country. Second, the Cultural Revolution was completely rejected. The CCP would no longer engage in political struggles, and would concentrate on economic development instead. Third, demarcation between the CCP and the government was proposed to limit the power of the CCP, so that it could not expand without limit. In the era of Xi Jinping, these three rules were discarded, and another “left-wing disaster” was created. On the diplomatic front, the CCP under Xi mindlessly challenged the West, causing its relationship with the European Union to deteriorate sharply despite the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. Its aimless suppression of Hong Kong is a challenge to the core values of the West that does not benefit the CCP at all. On the domestic front, it has pursued a policy of “private companies giving way to state enterprises”, which has strangled innovation and pushed China towards the middle-income trap. These left-wing policies have been pursued precisely because a cult of personality has been built around Xi, the same mistake that happened in Mao Zedong’s era. The self-correction mechanism of the CCP’s collective leadership has become defective; it has failed to reverse the decisions of Xi Jinping. To avoid trouble, China’s bureaucrats find it better to err on the side of being “overly left-wing” so that they will not be behind the times.

The survival of the CCP hinges on how far this new “left-wing disaster” will go. At a time when the West is pointing an accusing finger at a laboratory for leaking the COVID-19 virus, a containment policy against China has already taken shape, and Hong Kong will be one of the unwilling victims of the CCP’s “left-wing disaster”.

(Lau Sai-leung, political commentator)

This article is translated from Chinese by Apple Daily.

Click here for Chinese version

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