China has a problem. Okay, China has many problems, but China has a fundamental tension between its desire for wealth and its desire for stability. Nowhere is this fundamental tension, contradiction even, more evident than in the rising dissatisfaction people in Hong Kong face over their lack of freedom and autonomy and opportunity now that they are a part of China rather than the United Kingdom [1]. Hong Kong’s people are spirited enough to protest what they see as unacceptable behavior, which has destroyed the carefully planned dog and pony show that Beijing wanted to show a happy face to the whole world and pretend as if everything is okay in Hong Kong.

Everything is not okay. I will let people closer to the situation themselves discuss the situation in more detail as to how Hong Kong has suffered under Chinese rule. Evidence of corruption in the highest places is easy to find, as it is just about anywhere in the world these days. That said, I would like to discuss matters close to my own interests in politics and history, and dealing with the ethnogenesis of the people of Hong Kong. Why is there a problem in worldview between the people of Hong Kong and their Chinese overlords, and what does that mean as far as the fate of Hong Kong and other nations which share the same problems.

In a process that is not well explained in the histories I have read of China (and I am limited to English-language texts), at some point no later than the Southern Song dynasty, it appears that many freedom loving Chinese whose profit motive was greater than their militarism and patriotism scattered throughout East and Southeast Asia to find better lives for themselves under foreign rule, where they remained Chinese but were no longer closely connected to the political authorities of waxing and waning autocratic Chinese dynasties. The more military-minded core of Chinese power has generally been in the north of the country, in Beijing, which has long fought against ethnic minorities in the peripheries, whether that was Huns or Turks or Mongols or Muslims in Sinkiang or Tibetans or others. But the source of business and creativity of China has generally been in a rival core in the south, where China’s recent economic development has been centered, where Cantonese rather than Mandarin is spoken.

Into this existing cultural divide, the British seized what became Hong Kong during the First Opium War and used it as a key city in their 19th century imperial heyday. By adding British justice and principles of fairness and freedom (in place of the general corruption and authoritarianism of Chinese ways) to an existing culture of business-minded southern Chinese, Hong Kong became a city where anglicized Chinese became free and far more prosperous than their mainland cousins. When a godly culture is added to an existing desire for self-betterment and advantages of location, the results can be dramatic, and they were in Hong Kong.

But this is a problem for China. It is a problem for China for several reasons. One of the reasons is that China’s own legitimacy is dependent on economic growth. To some extent the rate of economic growth is probably overstated in China, but domestic tensions and rising expectations among the Chinese population for a better life require the reality of some economic growth to avoid internal political difficulties. These realities are one element of the constraints that would lead Beijing to tolerate a great deal of freedom in Hong Kong to the extent that this freedom (something which it does not appreciate on its own terms) serves its own selfish and narrow goals.

Unfortunately for the people of Hong Kong, that is not the only constraint working on the Chinese. The freedom and opportunities that the people of Hong Kong taken for granted as strangers grafted into the culture of Great Britain is itself inimical to the political stability the corrupt Chinese government considers most important. Freedom is a threat to any corrupt authoritarian system, and even though some freedom is required for well-being, when faced between threats to political survival and well-being, those corrupt elites who trust in their ability to ensure their well-being no matter the suffering of their people will choose the survival of their offices and position and power over the well-being of the people every time.

This is not only important for the people of Hong Kong, a city of seven million people that is under a bit of a dark cloud, but for others as well. We ought not to think that China is the only nation that struggles with this contradiction. Freedom all over the world is threatened by the twin threats of moral corruption (including social evils like declining opportunity and massive and rising inequality) and authoritarian governments that promise to do something about it but end up supporting their own corrupt elites, often the same corrupt elites who were responsible for the original problems in the first place. A firm commitment both to caring for people and providing them the freedom to be responsible for themselves and receive the benefits that result from taking responsibility for themselves is necessary in order for both freedom and justice to thrive. Such conditions appear in grave danger all over the world, so China is not the only nation in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Not by a long shot.

[1] http://asiancorrespondent.com/85179/hong-kong-holds-big-protest-as-new-leader-sworn-in/