readers of The Presswhom I thank, suggest adding the fear of losing our freedoms to the three great fears of globalized humanity – health, climate and nuclear – which I spoke about two weeks ago.
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
If the danger is very real with regard to individual and democratic values which are at the heart of who we are, it is clear that this fear is not as universal as the other three. Indeed, freedom is not valued in many societies while democracy appears to be in decline all over the world.
Development without democracy
We are no longer at the time when Westerners were convinced that they constituted the vanguard of a humanity in the process of modernization in their image, thanks to an economic development inseparable from democracy.
It was in Singapore in the 1980s that we were first told by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew that we could pack up our beautiful democratic values. We now know that a country can develop economically without becoming a democracy.
It is China that now sets the tone in several areas, which could well see its position strengthened following the war in Ukraine. However, the beginning of the phenomenal Chinese development of the last 30 years corresponded almost exactly with the suppression of the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, which the majority of Chinese have never heard of.
Mao Zedong embodied an authoritarian Chinese society, but archaic and cut off from the rest of the world. President Xi Jinping is more dangerous, he who leads a society that is just as authoritarian and draconian, but taking advantage of the prestige and powers associated with digital modernity, with ambitions now spanning the planet.
cries of despair
We hoped to have witnessed a one-time aberration at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when the Chinese regime used digital technologies in unprecedented ways to brutally lock up the 11 million inhabitants of Wuhan at home.
But is it not that, to implement his insane “zero COVID” strategy, Xi Jinping is doing it again for the worse with regard to the prestigious and rebellious Shanghai. Its 24 million inhabitants have been totally prevented from leaving their homes for weeks. Malnourished, like human cattle that have been put in a cage, they are watched by drones and robot dogs roaming the streets, hammering out the instructions to follow on pain of arrest.
How not to have been upset two weeks ago by the cries of despair launched at the same time by these thousands of our brothers and our sisters suffocating in Shanghai?
The futuristic city centers of Chinese megalopolises are the make-up of a society with unlimited liberticidal potential. The regime is not just imposing inhumane measures on the Uyghur people, it is attacking its own people.
What is happening in Shanghai is somewhere more worrying for the future of the world than the war in Ukraine, barring a nuclear slippage, of course. Indeed, despite its terrible character, confirming that all wars are crimes against humanity, this European conflict says more about the past than the future, with the archaic army of a declining Russia on the defensive.
Tellingly, the war in Ukraine, which is fundamentally about the freedom of peoples and individuals, is seen in the rest of the world as something that primarily concerns Westerners.
Hong Kong, Korea, Japan
How far will China continue to progress without showing any interest in freedom and democracy?
Think of Hong Kong, brought to heel by a superpower reneging on its commitments to this former British colony now a megalopolis among dozens of others in China.
Should we see a sign of the future in the fact that the democratic transplant had taken root in this Chinese territory which became English in 1841, under conditions that were nonetheless odious, after an opium war waged against the Chinese Empire for the punish for not consenting to the trade in a drug degrading its population?
Against all expectations, will a demand for more democracy emerge one day within Chinese society, despite the total control for the time being of a government fearing excesses and divisions similar to those that the country has often known in the past?
The history of humanity having always been marked by interfertilizations of all kinds, let us hope that certain aspects of the individualism and the freedom which we enjoy have a future in China. Aren’t neighboring Asian countries like Japan, South Korea or Taiwan authentic democracies?
The question to be asked, basically, is the following: to what extent do all human beings aspire to freedom?