For many Hong Kong protesters during last year’s unrest, the political leanings and values of many foreigners co-opting their cause would have created some confusion.

While the crowds chanted for democracy, the politicians joining the chorus from afar were mostly from the right, with America’s Republicans and its leader President Donald Trump notable among them.

The same Trump intent on steamrolling democracy at home with attacks on the judicial system, the press (who he labelled ‘the enemy of the people’) and freedom of assembly, but praising protesters as they fight for the same freedoms on the streets of Hong Kong. The same Trump who slaps sanctions on China for treatment of Uyghur Muslims, but whose first act as president was to sign a “Muslim travel ban” executive order. The same Trump who spews racist rhetoric and empowers white supremacists with hate speech, giving rise to dangerous right wing militia, but supports ethnic minorities on the mainland and ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong. The President who is “tough on China” but calls President Xi Jinping “a good man”.

This incomplete list of Trump’s hypocrisy is not meant as an attempt of “what-about-ism” – it is simply to question Trump’s motives and credibility when he speaks on human rights. It is also to ask if Hong Kongers have their eyes wide open when they look to Trump as a potential savior?

It must also be asked why the loudest voices condemning China’s human rights atrocities are not from the international left, given it is the liberal values it holds most dear that are under threat in Hong Kong.

Through the haze of tear gas and under fire from rubber bullets, as Hong Kong devolved into a police state late last year, those behind the barricades couldn’t be fussy about where international support came from. A common refrain when lamenting some of the Republican Party support – or when various alt-right parasites sought to co-opt Hong Kong’s cause – was “an enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

This may be true, sometimes, and would we expect a drowning man to reject a life raft on principle? They were, and these are, desperate times for those living under the threat of tyrannical rule, but given the principles Hong Kong is fighting for – autonomy, freedom of speech, press and public assembly among them – isn’t it the left that the protesters should find solidarity with and not those on the right seeking to crush those same principles in the west?

Some leftists talk of striking a “balance” with China, bemoaning Trump for his anti-China rhetoric, but seemingly ignoring Xi’s military parades, bold proclamations and threats to Taiwan, not to mention aggressive expansionist actions in Hong Kong, Tibet, East Turkestan and the South China Sea. Trump isn’t alone in his hypocrisy, as the CCP sympathisers on the western left call for racial equality and women’s rights at home but fail to call out China for its forced sterilisations of Uyghur women.

What is it about China that has lulled many of the left to sleep? Surely they don’t find some sort of socialist solidarity in Xi’s “communism with Chinese characteristics” – a euphemism for a capitalist surveillance-state characterised by control and all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism.

If you didn’t know anything about the two leaders and read their respective speeches to the United Nations last week, you would think Trump was the dictatorial ruler with no term limit and Xi the calm-mannered liberal concerned with saving the planet and a champion of ethnic diversity.

While Trump used his time in the spotlight to shift blame of his own mismanagement and talked of the “China plague” – more meaningless rhetoric that hurts the efforts to bring accountability to the CCP’s handling of the early stages of the outbreak – Xi came off sounding like a smooth-talking democrat candidate by comparison.

Xi called on the world to “join hands to uphold the values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom shared by all of us” and appealed to progressives when he pledged China – the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses – would be “carbon neutral” by 2060.

Are the so-called progressives who defend Beijing simply applying that same “enemy of my enemy” principle to Xi’s China? Do the current social problems of the west create some fantasy of an egalitarian and racially tolerant China? Maybe some leftists imagine something other than the reality: a corrupt, elitist and ultimately neo-fascist state with rapidly growing wealth inequality.

As the cancer of fascism and authoritarianism grows across the globe – whether it be America, Belarus or Brazil – and freedoms are threatened, the left can’t ignore the advanced manifestation of fascism and totalitarian rule right now in China.

An enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend and perhaps Hong Kong’s brave protesters should step cautiously with Trump and seek – as well as show – solidarity with those seeking to defy authoritarianism in whatever guise it takes.

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