Fleeting freedom and propaganda lessons in Hong Kong

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On Sunday, Hong Kong will hold an “election” for its top post. Only one candidate is approved by Beijing to run, and ordinary Hong Kong citizens do not get to vote.

Contrast this with the Hong Kong of 1923. On a brisk morning, Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China who led the overthrow of the country’s last dynasty in 1911, revisited the University of Hong Kong, his alma mater. Surrounded by students curious about where his revolutionary ideas originated, he said he felt as though he had returned home because Hong Kong and the university were his intellectual birthplace. It was the young British colony that taught him the ideas of liberty and good government.

If Sun were still alive, his intellectual home would be unrecognizable. Over only the past week, a student was sentenced by a Hong Kong court to five years of imprisonment for what he said on Telegram. The city’s ranking in the Reporters without Borders’ press freedom index nosedived to 148th among 180 in the world.

Like Sun and many others, I also attended the university and call Hong Kong my intellectual birthplace. When I arrived in 2006, barely a decade after the handover from the United Kingdom, much of the city still felt foreign to someone like me who had never left mainland China. One of the first things I saw on campus was a bloody-red sculpture of piled-up dead bodies with disturbing facial expressions. Curious what that “eyesore” was about, I read the inscription underneath: “The Tiananmen Massacre.” I wondered, “What massacre is it talking about? Nobody died in the Tiananmen Square protests.” Or so I was told growing up.

The truth was quickly laid bare by shelves of library books about the crackdown on the 1989 protests. Watching documentaries and listening to gunshots directed at students on the square, 17 years after the fact, the pain was excruciating. More shocking still was how well Chinese propaganda largely kept the truth away from the people; I thought I was smart and educated. Years later, I traveled to North Korea and saw students at its prestigious Kim Il-sung University walk with their heads held high, as if they owned the world. I recognized the same bliss of ignorance their puppeteer gifted them.

Hong Kong taught me the value of analyzing propaganda, not because it’s truthful but because it’s not. The Chinese Communist Party spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on information control. It’s foolish not to think about what those words tell us about Beijing. My research project, the Policy Change Index, was born of this idea. As I have written in this space and elsewhere, one can often find traces of moves in China’s economic and foreign policies months ahead of time in its state media. In the propaganda puppet show, the real draw is the puppeteer, not the puppets.

The Hong Kong I know is no longer. Last year, the bloody-red sculpture was removed by authorities, and people were arrested after distributing picture books that portray sheep being targeted by wolves — life imitating art.

But just as unfortunate is the fact that reading the tea leaves in Chinese propaganda remains undervalued. There’s no question that the rise of China’s global influence mounts a tough challenge to the free world, but the first step toward a solution is to understand Beijing’s decision-making better. Next-generation Hong Kongers should not have to learn about the Tiananmen massacre after leaving that formerly freer city.

Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.

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