Can a Street Performance Bring the Chinese People a "Year of Peace"?

History holds a mirror to the rise and fall of civilizations. I recently finished watching a Chinese Mainland historical drama called Swords Into Plowshares (太平年), and it left a deep impression on me.

Swords Into Plowshares covers 53 years of history across the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period that followed the Tang Dynasty. The story opens during the Later Jin Dynasty under Shi Jingtang, when a warlord named Zhang Yanze — facing a shortage of military rations — ordered his men to treat civilians as "two-legged sheep," grinding them in stone mortars to be consumed as flesh and blood. His adopted son stepped forward to plead for mercy, unable to bear the horror. Zhang Yanze slit the boy's throat on the spot and had him thrown into a cooking pot. In an age of chaos, cannibalism was simply a matter of course. The opening scene of Swords Into Plowshares is nothing short of harrowing.

The series vividly portrays the unrelenting warfare and mass starvation of the Five Dynasties era. Among its rulers were ruthless opportunists who seized power by force — but also a handful of idealistic sovereigns who genuinely wished to accomplish something meaningful. They wanted to offer their people the promise of a peaceful year and an end to the age of human carnage. 

Having watched the full series, I was left with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for living in peaceful times. It is almost impossible to imagine that not only did such horrors exist in the past, but that even today, in some corners of the world, conditions remain more chaotic than anything seen during the Five Dynasties.

That reflection brought to mind the events surrounding the recent June Fourth anniversary.

The Performance in Causeway Bay

Around the June Fourth anniversary, a number of people took to Causeway Bay to stage various forms of "performance art" and "covert protests." Some carried balloons; others stretched red threads across the street — all in the name of symbolic commemoration, urging people to "never forget June Fourth." If we were truly to remember June Fourth, we must not overlook similar protest movements over the past 37 years — both in Hong Kong and abroad — that ended in disaster. Those lessons are indeed worth remembering.

The Same Old Story

These political struggles, dressed up as social movements, tend to follow an identical playbook. 

Step one begins with subtle art or satire. When the government moves to stop it, organizers accuse the authorities of being petty. Step two escalates into open, fierce criticism. When the government intervenes, they cry that free speech is under attack. Step three becomes mass assemblies — lawful or otherwise. When authorities step in, they charge that democracy is being strangled. Step four is violence. Peaceful gatherings alone cannot bring down a government, so organizers inject force into the mix, spreading disruption in all directions and paralyzing normal economic and social life. When the government acts, it is condemned as unjust. Step five — the final move — is an outright attempt to topple the regime.

Let us be honest: were those who led the chants of "end one-party rule" not trying to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party? Were they not hoping China would experience something like the collapse of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe in 1991, or the Arab Spring of 2011? Has any such movement ever known when to stop?

Cast your mind back to 1989, when Wu'er Kaixi showed up in his pyjamas to meet Premier Li Peng. Are we really to believe he had no time to change into decent clothing — no opportunity for a peaceful exit? Then in 2016, during discussions on Hong Kong's political reform, Zhang Dejiang — the Politburo Standing Committee member responsible for Hong Kong affairs — made a special visit to the city for a historic meeting with the pan-democratic camp, hoping they would accept the central government's compromise proposal. Instead, they berated him for two hours. Was there truly no room for them to win concessions toward universal suffrage? In the 2019 Black Riots, the SAR government announced as early as June that it would suspend the Extradition Bill. Was there no space for the opposition to make a graceful exit?

In movement after movement, regardless of the slogans raised or the democracy and freedom invoked, the real driving force was simply to oppose for opposition's sake. The ultimate and most fundamental goal was always the same: to bring down the CCP. Those involved had every opportunity to stop while they were ahead — but they never did, because they had other agendas. This story repeats itself endlessly. 

What Happens After the Overthrow?

Both the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 and Hong Kong's Black Riots of 2019 were ultimately brought to an end by firm action from Beijing. The opposition never succeeded in toppling the CCP. Yet the hidden hands of the West achieved decisive victories elsewhere — dismantling the Soviet Communist Party in 1991, and toppling numerous Middle Eastern regimes in 2011. 

The post-Soviet states fared somewhat better. Even as the USSR fractured into 14 countries, Russia emerged as the dominant successor state. Because Russia retained its nuclear arsenal, even as a weakened power, the United States could do little to further constrain it. 

The fate of smaller nations was far more tragic. Take Libya as an example. Under the strongman rule of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya had quietly reconciled with the United States and agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Then the Arab Spring erupted in 2011. Driven by foreign interference, Gaddafi's regime was overthrown, and he died in a roadside ditch. Fifteen years on, has Libya become a democracy — free, prosperous, and happy?

Libya's collapse has gone largely unreported in Western media. Today, Libya is mired in a situation far more wretched than China's Five Dynasties period. Two rival factions — the Libyan National Army and the Government of National Unity — face off against each other, each controlling vast swathes of territory. 

Beyond these two blocs, more than 300 armed militias compete for turf across the country. Factional strife is rampant. The entire nation has plunged into a terrifying maelstrom of ethnic, tribal, and foreign-power conflict. Most ironically, even the capital Tripoli has been carved up into controlled zones — just last May, two militia groups fought fierce battles in the heart of the city, sending civilians fleeing in all directions.

Had the forces backed by the West succeeded in toppling the CCP in China, China would almost certainly not have become another Russia. It would far more likely have become another Libya.

Over the past 37 years, China has risen as a great power, joined the ranks of the world's strongest nations, and stands as an equal to the United States. Ordinary people live in peace. Today, China faces a once-in-a-century transformation. Its economy is on the verge of surpassing America's in total output. Washington has responded with fierce resolve to contain China across every front. China's national leadership is steering this great ship forward through a raging sea.

Those who stretch red threads across Causeway Bay — what do they understand of how empires rise and fall, how great powers win and lose? Can they offer the Chinese people a "Swords Into Plowshares" moment of true peace? As the Chinese saying goes: you cannot speak of ice to a summer insect.

  

Lo Wing-hung

Bastille Commentary

** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **

Two national security cases have recently wrapped up in quick succession.

On Thursday (10 September), two members of the "Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union" were sentenced to three years, and three years and two months in prison respectively. Both had pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit secession" under the Hong Kong National Security Law.

Then today (11 September), sentence was passed in the "incitement to subversion" case against the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (the Alliance). Albert Ho Chun-yan, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for five years and two months.

The two defendants who pleaded not guilty, Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, were jailed for seven years and seven years and three months respectively. 

The judge made it clear in sentencing why the Alliance case fell into the "serious circumstances" category. The case did not involve violence or any concrete method put forward by the defendants for "ending one-party rule."

But society was in turmoil at the time of the offence.

The defendants' activities continued for a full 14 months after the National Security Law came into force. Those activities were citywide in scope and attracted widespread attention.

The defendants believed that what they advocated might be unlawful, yet persisted regardless. The offending was premeditated.

The trials and tribulations Hong Kong has weathered since the handover amount to one giant political experiment. Every kind of political proposition has been put to the test, and we have seen the results.

Had these cases arisen in the early days after the handover, the verdicts might have read very differently to some.

Two young men aged 25 to 27, jailed for more than three years over a "nation-building union" that looked doomed to fail, might have seemed like the court making a mountain out of a molehill.

The same goes for the Alliance. Had its standing committee members been prosecuted in those early days, some might have felt they were merely chanting slogans to promote democracy. Perfectly harmless, undeserving of arrest and imprisonment.

But after more than two decades of development, we can now see with total clarity what these incendiary political activities can achieve. 

From the mass march against Article 23 legislation in 2003, to the illegal Occupy Central movement in 2014, to the all-out riots of 2019, unlawful activities escalated step by step until violent protests spun completely out of control.

The breaking point came on 11 November 2019 with the Ma On Shan incident, in which a man was set on fire. An utterly depraved manifestation of violent lawbreaking. 

The perpetrators believed they held the truth in their hands. They doused an unarmed civilian in flammable liquid and set him alight, intending to burn him to death. His only fault was trying to stop rioters vandalizing the MTR station.

Political violence had reached a point of no return, spiraling beyond control.

At the core of the Alliance stood the so-called traditional pan-democrats. They claimed to be promoting democracy in Hong Kong and the country. Yet they turned a blind eye to the street violence they themselves had incited, at times even tacitly condoning it. 

One need only look at what was exposed during the trial of Jimmy Lai to see this plainly. 

Back then, Lai instructed the senior management of Apple Daily to uphold "no distinction between the peaceful and the valiant".

In other words, they were not to draw a line between themselves and the valiant faction advocating violent struggle. That alone showed that the movement's descent into violence had the backing of big bosses behind the scenes. 

And behind these local opposition bosses stood the political forces of the United States and the West. 

Take Lee Cheuk-yan, a central figure in the Alliance case.

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), to which he belonged, relied for years on funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Beginning in 1994, the HKCTU applied every year for grants from the NED-affiliated American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The cumulative total came to HK$13 million. 

Here was an organization directly funded by a foreign government, running labor and social movements in Hong Kong. Who could believe it thinks independently?

Piece the whole picture together and the through-line becomes complete. Beginning in the late 1980s, in the closing stages of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the CIA set out to overthrow the entire socialist camp led by the Soviet Union. 

China's "June Fourth incident" also occurred against this backdrop.

While China and the United States had not yet fallen out completely, such activities proceeded in the shadows. After the rupture, and especially after Washington launched its trade war against China in 2018, the United States embarked on subversion against China without scruple. 

These were not activities to promote the development of democracy in China. They were subversive operations aimed at toppling state power. 

Consider this: the CIA today openly recruits spies targeting China. That tells you how grave the situation is.

With the Alliance case tried and sentenced, the legal boundary for such acts of subversion has now been clearly drawn. Do not imagine that chanting a few incendiary slogans or setting up some reactionary organizations is harmless. A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Drawing the legal red line is precisely about nipping these subversive activities in the bud.

Lo Wing-hung