For the past several weeks, the Chinese government has been brutally suppressing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The protesters consist mostly of students, who are objecting to the Chinese government’s regulation requiring candidates for public office to be pre-approved by the Chinese government.
Ever since Great Britain’s transfer of jurisdiction over Hong Kong to China, the Chinese government has slowly but surely been tightening its grip over Hong Kong. That shouldn’t surprise anyone given that China is governed by a communist regime, one that brutally suppresses dissent and criticism of governmental policies through a system of arbitrary arrest, torture, incarceration, and forced “reeducation” with the aim of maintaining an iron grip over China’s governmental system and Chinese society.
The question is: Why does the Chinese government feel the need to shut down criticism about the government and its policies?
After all, the Chinese communist party has a monopoly over the entire political system. No one is permitted to become a governmental official — and thereby share in the political plunder and loot — without the approval of the ruling regime. The control that the Chinese Communist Party has over the political system and the governmental bureaucracies is 100 percent.
Moreover, the government’s powers over the citizenry are omnipotent. The government wields the authority to pick up any citizen for any reason at all or no reason at all, seize all his assets, incarcerate him for the rest of his life, subject him to harsh interrogation techniques (i.e., torture), and even execute him after some sort of kangaroo tribunal. There is no habeas corpus, due process of law, right to counsel, right to confront witnesses, right to trial by jury, and other important procedural guarantees.
So, why not simply leave people free to criticize and dissent? Given that the Chinese communist government is one of the most powerful totalitarian regimes in history, what difference would it make if people were openly criticizing the government and dissenting against its policies? How would that adversely affect the monopolistic, totalitarian control wielded by Chinese governmental officials?
After all, don’t forget that China has a very strict system of gun control, thereby making it virtually impossible for people to resist the communist tyranny under which they suffer by violently overthrowing the government.
So, what’s the Chinese government afraid of?
I’ll tell you what those communists are afraid of: They are afraid of ideas on liberty! They understand what we here at The Future of Freedom Foundation understand: that ideas on liberty are so dangerous that they can sweep across a society, inflame the hearts and minds of tens of millions of people, and change the course of society, in the process bringing down powerful totalitarian regimes or evil or immoral governmental agencies and apparatuses.
As big and powerful as the Chinese government is, the number of people in the ruling elite is comparatively tiny compared to the populace at large. The ruling elite know that if hundreds of millions of people were suddenly to descend on Beijing demanding change, it would be extremely difficult for the ruling elite to order its army to put them down. It’s much easier to do that when the number of protestors is relatively small.
That’s why it’s critically important for the authorities to contain public protests and suppress criticism and dissent. The last thing they want is for more Chinese to be reading or hearing the truth about the Chinese communist regime. They suppress the dissent in order to prevent the number of dissenters from growing.
That should give American libertarians hope. Because that principle regarding the power of ideas on liberty applies universally. Ideas on liberty have the same potential power here in the United States as they do in China. If a critical mass of Americans reaches the conclusion that libertarianism is the solution to the morass in which America finds itself, the socialistic, imperialistic welfare-warfare state apparatus that statists have attached to our governmental system will come crashing down, thereby restoring a peaceful, prosperous, harmonious, and free society to our land.
Recall the progressive movement in the United States in the late 1800s. Lots of people thought they were tilting at windmills. After all, they were living in a society in which there was no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, corporate bailouts, income taxation, drug laws, immigration controls, gun control, public schooling, standing army, foreign empire, foreign military bases, foreign aid, CIA, Pentagon, torture, indefinite detention, and most of the other aspects of America’s modern-day welfare-warfare state.
Imagine the daunting task that progressives faced in convincing a critical mass of American citizens to change the direction of the United States in a revolutionary way—away from individual liberty, free markets, and limited government to the purported security offered by the welfare-warfare state way of life.
Yet, they did it. And they accomplished that revolutionary change in a relatively brief period of time.
How did they do it? Through the power of ideas! Yes, bad ideas can be as powerful as good ideas. The progressives showed how an entire society and its governmental system can be transformed through the dissemination of ideas. That type of revolutionary change is precisely what the Chinese communist regime fears.
It might be tempting for libertarians today to grow despondent over the bad direction that the U.S. government continues to take our nation. Libertarians should resist that temptation. The worse things get, the more people begin thinking and seeking and engaging in serious soul-searching.
That’s where the dissemination of ideas on liberty comes into play. We libertarians need to continue injecting libertarian ideas and principles in the marketplace of ideas, with the aim of bringing about a revolutionary transformation of American society—one in which the deadly and destructive welfare-warfare state apparatus is dismantled and replaced by a society based on individual liberty, free markets, and a limited-government constitutional republic.