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 **

A nation's rise or fall hinges on the choices of its leaders. At critical junctures, a turn left or right can determine the entire fate of a country.

Twenty years ago, I had dinner with a pan-democratic Legislative Council member. He complained bitterly that Hong Kong's opposition had no chance to govern. In Eastern Europe, he noted, after the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1990, politicians of his own generation had already taken power — in places like the Czech Republic and Hungary, some had even completed their terms and stepped down.

His words left me in deep thinking. I wondered at the time whether Eastern Europe's wholesale embrace of Westernization was right or wrong — a question that could only be answered decades later.

The most dramatic figure in this story is Hungary's Viktor Orbán. He and that Hong Kong opposition politician were both born in 1963. Orbán graduated from the Faculty of Law at Eötvös Loránd University in 1987. On the eve of the Iron Curtain's collapse, during that era of great upheaval, he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1989 to 1990 to study politics. He then returned home to enter politics.

Hungary ended one-party rule in 1990. Shortly after returning, Orbán was elected to parliament. The Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz), which he founded, quickly rose to prominence. In the 1998 election, Fidesz became the largest party, and at 35, Orbán became Prime Minister for the first time.

After losing the 2002 election, Orbán stepped down. His party alternated between opposition and power in the years that followed. In 2018, Orbán was elected Prime Minister for the fourth time. This year, he lost the election and stepped down again.

The most striking shift in Orbán's political career is his transformation from a left-leaning liberal democrat — the same pro-American political persuasion as Hong Kong's opposition — into a right-wing nationalist. Today, the West labels him a "far-right politician."

That transformation laid bare the full extent of American and Western intervention in Eastern European politics. It can even be argued that U.S. forces drove color revolutions across the region, directly contributing to the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

It turns out that Orbán's political godfather was Hungarian-born American financier George Soros. Early in Orbán's career, Soros funded his political studies at Oxford — an arrangement that can just as readily be seen as political grooming by Western forces.

After Orbán returned to Hungary in 1990, his political rise was smooth, backed by Soros-linked Western networks. But when Orbán concluded that liberal democracy could not save Hungary and began shifting toward the center-right, his rift with Soros became impossible to ignore.

By 2017, Orbán's government moved to expel the Soros-backed Central European University from Budapest, arguing it was a hub for color revolutions in Hungary and across Eastern Europe. Soros escalated the fight to the European Parliament, triggering a fierce confrontation with Orbán.

Only then did many begin to grasp the depth of American influence behind Eastern Europe's revolutions — with financier George Soros as the most visible public face of that operation.

Politico even framed the episode as "Orbán's rebellion against paternal authority." Orbán, the report noted, had been strictly disciplined and even physically abused by his father in childhood, leaving him deeply resistant to any form of patriarchal control. Soros, as his political godfather, became precisely that kind of figure — and Orbán chose to oppose him just as fiercely, insisting instead on forging Hungary's own path.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, it fractured into 14 countries. Yugoslavia broke into seven, and Czechoslovakia split into two. Hungary, by contrast, remained unified under Orbán's right-wing nationalism and achieved relatively stable development.

The 1989 Tiananmen incident in China was, in this view, a derivative of the American-orchestrated wave of color revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe. Zhao Ziyang was China's Gorbachev.

Had that movement succeeded and Zhao consolidated power, China might have followed the Soviet path — fragmenting into many small, weak states. The United States could then have dominated the world without a rival. Fortunately, China had Deng Xiaoping at the helm, steering the country onto a path different from the Soviet Union's.

Lo Wing-hung