Hong Kong Protests can Win only When it is a Battle about Values, with Mainland Chinese General Public on Its Side

The Chinese Communist Party is found of using the statement, "hurting the feelings of Chinese people" when speaking about actions and words of foreign governments that it finds distasteful. The phrase has often been mocked outside the country as nothing but a propagandistic tool. The mockery stems from the belief that unelected government cannot speak for the "feelings" of a citizenry that did not elect it, and that the Chinese elite, secluded in their own world away from the general public, neither have a clue nor any interest in finding out whether the majority of the populace really see eye-to-eye with government officials on the foreign "offenses."

No doubt measuring how the average person in mainland China feels about political matters is not easy. With a history of political dissidents punished through jail terms, disappearances, or even just personal career prospects shattered, active political dissidents cannot find a voice, and those who want to speak out learn to self-censor. While political discussions undoubtedly happen in the private sphere, for government agencies and media outlets, especially foreign ones, to listen in those honest discussions are next to impossible. Many, as such, have to speculate, based on their often incomplete set of information on China, about what the general public in China really thinks of certain issues.

The conclusions from such speculations are often off the mark. The ongoing reaction of the general public on the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong protests against the extradition bill and now the national security bill serves as a good example. Many foreign media outlets covering China have operated on the assumption that the "silent majority" of the general public in China is indeed supportive of the protestors, noting that the freedoms and values that Hong Kong protestors are fighting to defend are those that mainland Chinese are secretly striving for, even as the Tiananmen Square crackdowns and various arrests of prominent dissidents made it a public taboo.

Hence, the argument goes, even if the mainland Chinese do not openly speak out in support of the Hong Kong protests, it is with the protestors their ultimate sympathy lies. Such an assumption made the protests a battle between the Hong Kong protestors and the heavy-handed Chinese state and government, while the mainland Chinese public is at best a passive, sympathetic bystander, powerless to do anything to openly rein in their government or do anything actively to support the protestors. The lack of agency on the part of the Chinese general public makes them not worth considering as a player in the ongoing developments.

Yet, it is wise to revisit the assumption that even a significant part of the Chinese public is both powerless and silently sympathetic to the protestors' cause. It is difficult to imagine that the sheer brazenness with which the Chinese government sought to bypass the Hong Kong government in implementing the national security law now could have been undertaken without the confidence that the vast majority of the general public on the mainland would even secretly object. Even if the Chinese general public really sympathized with the values of freedom in Hong Kong, this act would attract at least some veiled objections that would leak out to the outside world.

Strangely, however, even foreign press that is constantly looking for new voices of dissidence on the mainland have had a hard time finding significant signs of opposition to the latest move of the Chinese government in Hong Kong. Instead, they found increasing characterizations of mainlanders characterizing Hong Kongers as ungrateful traitors of the Chinese nation, whose sense of economic and ideological superiority has only been boosted by foreign interventions. As more protestors waved the flags of the US and the UK, and the two countries considered accepting migrants from the city, mainland Chinese have simply called for those who wish to leave to leave.

The inability of the Hong Kong protestors to truly get the mainland Chinese public on their side will prove to be fatal for the movement as Beijing continues to tighten the political and legal screws. Any popular voices on the mainland that see Hong Kong as unpatriotic can be easily amplified by the Party and transmitted throughout the country, serving as an effective unifier and distractor of a citizenry that is and will be economically battered by the coronavirus-related recession and rise in unemployment. Hong Kong protestors and their supporters everywhere, in the process, are steadily losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the mainland Chinese and strengthening the public support for Beijing's heavyhandedness.

To get the mainland Chinese back on the protestors' side, it is important to first drop the pretense of moral superiority that protestors and their backers have. While they are fighting for noble values like freedom, many mainland Chinese instead see it as a fight to split a Chinese nation, against righting a historical wrong that led to the creation of Hong Kong in the first place. Those that dismiss the mainland Chinese as brainwashed nationalists with no understanding of human rights will only drive public opinion on the mainland in favor of strong government action. By driving the Chinese general public and the government to the same side of the battle, the prospect of success in Hong Kong have become so much dimmer.