There’s a vein of belief flowing strong in the head of any modern American liberal, fed by good liberal education in which the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, and I Have a Dream speech are major plot events in a world story unfolding towards perfection. A belief formed in our little liberal minds that all history is defined by the total score of freedom against unfreedom, where it’s simple to tell who the good guys and bad guys are.
Example: you’ve seen the students in windbreakers and maybe Uniqlo, colorful and loose, standing in some gray plaza with skyscrapers rising through the background. There’s tear gas blowing around and rows of black helmets and shiny plexiglass shields. This is our generic image of Hong Kong today, the New York Times and its extended family putting points on the freedom/unfreedom scoreboard.
But there’s a richness, a sort of dusty, golden, grand old library sort of vibe to the truth about China that isn’t so clear and clean. To perceive it you have to sit there with it, looking deeply into it, in the best case navigate through it with one of these tiny cameras people swallow so that 6th graders in science class can take a first person tour of a digestive tract. I got some of that living in China in a constant reading of books or watching my parents read books or watching movies or talking over dinner about Chinese history.
And when I did that, I saw British ships captained by really really red-faced men that you imagine have the most arch-pompous of high-pitched nasal accents looking for reasons to open cannon fire on a proud people without good guns, so that they could continue pumping them full of literally life-sapping drugs. And over time other white men seeing little features and pieces of China and saying, “heyy, that looks tasty,” and coming up with pretexts to ignore that last oblivious white guy who promised he was finished, and pull out a pirate pistol and say, “what, you’re not sporting?” while going for the ass grab. A century of perpetual harassment.
Then later, I saw a shattered map, run over by skinny strongmen on rural roads, fields, and ditches. I saw Japanese soldiers and mass rape and the removal of entrails, and wide rivers of peasants fleeing, some of whom are so starving that they smother their newborns. And later, different peasants, now in bland communal kitchens that have no food; and still later, I saw teenagers in red torturing monks, smashing Buddhas, and marching their pediatricians down the street in dunce caps.
And finally, I saw busy streets where nothing is really happening except people living their lives, buying stuff at the drugstore, hanging out at Starbucks, worrying about their kid getting into college. Enjoying – really, enjoying–all the colorful fruits of modern living that Americans are now sour on. And I realized that freedom scoreboard I’d been using to measure China and myself, leaves out pain, progress, imperialism, history, pride.
The Times family’s China story is often some version of, “more people in China can drive cars and eat in restaurants and go shopping, but look at all the people they are putting in prison” as if those things need to be intrinsically related, like the latter comments on the former. And it’s rich of us to engage with the world by marking a scoreboard that measures all of history and current events in terms of conformity to ideas that we think we invented, that are the spine of our story about ourselves.
I’d be in Shanghai, reading this story, tapping the vein in every liberal Americans’ head that now fuels their outrage over what’s happening in Hong Kong. And I would feel, defensive? Not of humorless and sensitive autocrats, but against the freedom scoreboard we use not to measure the truth of the world, but to feel good about ourselves. We should probably stop.
When people say “it’s complicated” when they talk about Morey’s tweet and the Hong Kong protests with all kinds of care and hesitation in their voices, they are trying to stop. But they do it like China is special, as if it’s some kind of fucking news, as if a lot of the other images of batons and tear gas we’ve used to mark our scoreboards don’t have just as much of a detailed landscape of pain and pride surrounding them. The only reason we’re admitting to complexity now is that China is too powerful for us to give ourselves our usual shower of outrage without costing ourselves a lot of money. Lebron says Morey was was “misinformed;” and that might mean that he didn’t know about the Opium Wars, and in that sense he probably was misinformed. But in that same sense we are all mostly misinformed all the time, because we don’t look to any history but the best version of our own when we go for another hit of indignation.
And yet.
There’s another vein of belief, filled by deep consideration of the genocide of indigenous Americans, or the colonization of Hawaii. A vein flowing in the heads of those who just had their first drink of the world’s complexity, and suddenly nothing matters. Suddenly everyone’s the same. Where Steve Kerr talks about AR-15s in the US in response to questions about China. Yeah, AR-15s are a problem. So is rounding up millions of people into camps for no reason.
And if you’ve traded the outrage shower for the equivalence bath, you should know: Hong Kong is a bright, special star. You can use escalators to get across town. It has the coolest skyline and lit up cyberpunk vibe. Someone told me once that anyone in the world can become a citizen of Hong Kong if they live there for seven years. By accident of its colonial past, it is like one independent system on the edge of the galaxy, an island of non-partisan commerce. A place existing outside the national anthems, drums and guns and weird military uniforms, history and the Olympics, or any other part of the grand charade of vanity that is nationalism and geopolitics.
And there is just something so enragingly demeaning about being told you can’t speak your mind, to be intimidated into shutting up. The PRC does that on an industrial scale, and it sucks. I feel for the people who have to live under it. It certainly wouldn’t work out well for me.
It would be a human tragedy for Hong Kong to be subsumed into China’s film reel of patriotic development – its own blooming sense of manifest destiny, its drive to become the center of known existence that it was for 2,000 years. To lose Hong Kong’s sense of separateness from so much that is tiresome and wrong with this world.
So Morey is right. Stand with Hong Kong. Stand with the protesters. But savor complexity, and fear any way of thinking about the world that results in you being better and others worse. You can both stand up for your values, while understanding they grow from a single perspective.