While recently quizzed by Deutusche Welle whether she believes communist China will treat Hong Kong differently from the mainland, Ip Lau Suk Yee, a pro-establishment lawmaker of the city, replied, “Of course, our mother country has only goodwill upon the people of Hong Kong.” The interviewer followed up and asked, “So why has China never applied such goodwill to its people in the mainland, such as the Uyghurs who are suffering in re-education camps?” Ip’s answer was “Please don’t deliberately confuse things with accusations against mainland China. This is irrelevant to the issue of “one country, two systems’”.

Ip’s reply comes to be “political incorrectness” in two aspects. First of all, while the pro-establishment camp keeps emphasizing that the framework of “two systems” is valid only when there is “one country”, how come their situations are irrelevant to each other? Even Zhang Xiao-ming, the Deputy Director of Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of China, stated that communist China’s comprehensive jurisdiction applies to all places within the country, including the two special administrative regions. So, it makes perfect sense for the international community to draw reference of the situations in the mainland to that of Hong Kong. Secondly, Ip’s answer suggests that in practice, there is a lack of goodwill in China’s policies in the Mainland, just that it will not happen in Hong Kong. As mentioned by Geng Shuang, the spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “The vocational education and training organizations in Xinjiang serve as preventive measures catering for the needs for anti-terrorist struggle.” Thus, these are done to facilitate the harmony of the various ethnic groups, and should rather be taken as a “goodwill” in disguise.

Goodwill is always a controversial topic in politics. In his masterpiece “The Road to Serfdom”, Hayek, the great British economist and political philosopher, warned:
“The way to hell is paved with good intentions.” He went on to predict that an attempt to self-righteously plan a society basing on a seemingly goodwill, at the expense of liberty, is fated to lead human beings to a disaster. In fact, the opening up and reform of China, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European regimes in the late 1980s signify the choice of the respective peoples to go against the so-called “goodwill” of the totalitarian states and return to proper paths from their “roads to serfdom”. Viewing this from the perspective of freedom and democracy, totalitarianism is not only against the political goodness of the idea of people’s sovereignty, but also contradicting to the economic virtues of market competition and orientation of efficiency.

Brzezinski, former assistant to president Carter for national security affairs, has summarized six characteristics of a totalitarian system, which includes a guiding ideology, centralized and planned economy, one-party dictatorship, state-monopolized army, state-manipulated mass media as well as state terrorism realized by violence and secret police.

With the decline of the ideology and planned economy, China has now entered into a stage of post-totalitarian society. Li Shen-zhi, former Deputy Dean of China Academy of Social Sciences, has a precise description on the scenario: “Post-totalitarianism is a period when the original momentum of totalitarianism became exhausted and the “core spring” of revolution got loosened. The ones currently in power are short of their predecessors’ originality and sternness. Nevertheless, as the state system remains unchanged, it is running by mere inertia. And the ruling is left sustaining with the same old basics: fear and lies.”

The decaying originality of totalitarianism leads to the bankruptcy of its discourse, which is tangibly reflected in the continuous deterioration of the quality of the leaders. In front of the challenges of the international community, leaders of communist China have found it increasingly hard to justify themselves. In 2000, when interviewed by Wallace from the CBS, Jiang Ze-min could still barely made it through. Nowadays, Xi tends to respond to foreign media with scripted statements, otherwise questions are mostly irrelevantly answered.
When the “goodwill” of a state is all about arousing fear and prohibiting freedom of discussion among its people, it will never survive the test of the international community. And to comment on someone like Ip who chooses to turn a blind eye to China’s poor human rights record and high-handed oppression against Hong Kong, I will try to refrain from jumping to the conclusion by accusing her of “sucking up to the communists”. Instead, with my “goodwill”, I would say she is a bit too much indulged in the romanticism of politics.

(Sham Chau, political commentator)

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