Pro-democracy Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai is currently standing trial for conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious materials. Amid mass protests in the city in 2019, Lai did travel to Washington to win support for the protesters’ cause from U.S. political figures including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and several senior senators. In his defense, Lai has said he stopped any such activities after the enactment of the 2020 security law on which the collusion charges are based. (The sedition charges come under an older, colonial-era law.)
Although Lai has admitted urging American officials to speak out in support of the protests and to sanction Hong Kong officials, some pro-PRC commenters on both sides of the Great Firewall have leveled a more dramatic accusation: that Lai encouraged the U.S. to use nuclear weapons against China. When evidence is supplied, it typically takes the form of a brief video clip of Lai onstage in Washington, with the key phrase repeated and slowed down for emphasis: "You have the nuclear weapon. You can finish them in a minute."
The fundamental implausibility of the suggestion and its omission from formal charges aside, even the truncated clip includes hints that Lai was speaking figuratively. The full context, from a 2019 event for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, makes it very clear that Lai was referring to American "moral authority" as a potent "weapon" in a "war of values":
SCHANZER: […] What are these conversations? I mean, what happens in these conversations? Are you getting a sense that America is ready to commit to supporting Hong Kong? Is this a work in progress?
LAI: Well, I think they all agree that Hong Kong is fighting a war of the same values as you. It means that we’re fighting your war in your enemy camp. We need your support. Without the support, we won’t have the wherewithal morally and materially to really persist this resistance. You know, your support is very important. That’s why I asked Mr. Pompeo and Vice President. I said, “Look, say something to encourage the Hong Kong people, especially young people.”
It’s like when Kennedy went to Berlin, he said that “I’m a Berliner”. How much confidence and hope he gave to the Berliner to face the threat of Soviet Union at the time. We need the same thing. We need the support. We need the confidence. We need the hope. We need to know that America is behind us. By backing us, the America also sowing to the will of their moral authority because we are the only place in China, a tiny island in China, which is sharing your values, which is fighting the same war you have with China.
If we think that we’re starting a cold war with China today, a cold war that’s a war of competing values, and we’re on your side sacrificing our life, our freedom, everything we have, fighting this war in the frontier for you, should you support us? This is something that America has to know, not only supporting us, but use your moral authority in this cold war to win this war in the beginning because they have nothing. It’s like they are going to the battle without any weapon, and you have the nuclear weapon. You can finish them in a minute. [Source]
In itself, the misrepresentation of Lai’s remarks is an unremarkable piece of viral political misinformation. It bears a marked resemblance, though, to the campaign to discredit the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, based on a comment from an interview with Emancipation Monthly editor Jin Zhong on November 27, 1988. Liu is often said to have "advocated" or "prescribed" three centuries under foreign colonization to transform China along the same lines as Hong Kong. In both cases, a punchy quote is taken out of context and used to paint the target as a national traitor willing to see his countrymen enslaved or vaporized by the hostile West.
In their 2023 biography "I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo," Wu Dazhi and Perry Link (who discussed the book with CDT earlier this year) noted the effectiveness of the quote’s use to discredit Liu: "The Chinese government has repeatedly taken that ‘three hundred years of colonization’ line out of context and used it to stoke Chinese nationalism and to tag Xiaobo as a traitor. Many people in mainland China have known nothing about Liu Xiaobo except for that one sentence. The Deng regime had come to realize in the 1980s that patriotism was the only ideological card left to it to play." The authors devote several pages to the quote and its context, including a transcript of the conversation from which it was taken. In that context, Liu explicitly states that the "300 years" scenario is hypothetical, not a practical suggestion:
Jz: Can China today remold itself fundamentally?
Xb: No. Even if one or two rulers were to resolve sincerely to do this, it wouldn’t work. The conditions aren’t ripe yet.
Jz: Then what conditions would allow a true historic transformation in China?
Xb: Three hundred years of colonization. Hong Kong took a hundred years of colonizing to get where it is today, so the mainland, huge as it is, would need three hundred to reach Hong Kong’s level. I don’t even know if three hundred would be enough.
Jz: That’s pretty thick "treason," isn’t it?
Xb: Let me quote Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto: "The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got." I’m not thinking in terms of "loving" or "betraying" any particular country. If you want to call me a traitor, go ahead! I’m digging up the tombs of the ancestors? Fine! I’m proud of it!
Jz: You’re saying China should follow Hong Kong’s example?
Xb: History can’t give China that option. The colonial age is gone. There’s no one now ready to take up the burden of transforming China. [Source]
Picking up Liu’s own thread, Wu and Link compare Marx’s writing on colonialism with Liu’s own. They conclude: "In short, Marx on India and Xiaobo on China are not very far apart … the similarity creates a stark dilemma for the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department: Is Marx also wrong? Or Xiaobo not wrong after all?"
Liu later, in 2007, referred to the quote as "an ill-considered line that I tossed out in an interview in order to get people to think." Nevertheless, he refused to retract what he described as "nothing but an extreme version of a view that I continue to hold today: China’s modernization will require an extended process of Westernization before it can be realized."
Liu’s Westernization is not simply the total, slavish imitation and cultural erasure of which he is often accused. Wu and Link note that on that same first visit to Hong Kong during which he gave the fateful interview, Liu was overwhelmed with excitement at finding "that Hong Kong was a Chinese place but with a very different way to be Chinese," and "enchanted" by its popular culture. He was frequently scathing in his comments on Chinese society and culture (and on much else, including himself), but his then recently completed PhD dissertation was described by an examiner as "respectful and sincere" in its treatment of Chinese tradition. His book "Contemporary Chinese Politics and Chinese Intellectuals," published the following March, expressed his thoughts on how China needed to learn from the West, but was released with a hastily appended afterword explaining how he had changed his mind about this. The afterword is included in "No Enemies, No Hatred," a 2013 collection of Liu’s essays and poems in translation edited by Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia. In its opening paragraph, Liu Xiaobo summarizes the book’s original premise:
Western culture can serve as a comparison that helps to illuminate the contours, including the many flaws, of Chinese culture, as a critical tool with which to attack China’s obsolescence, and as a source of wisdom that can bring new lifeblood to China. [Source]
In the very next paragraph, however, he dismisses his own book as "cultural detritus." He continues, pointedly quoting one of China’s own great philosophers:
My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws in Western culture-or, even if I see them, to set them aside intentionally. I have not, therefore, been able to stand apart from Western culture, take a critical view of it, and perhaps get a better view of human frailty more generally. I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits, and at the same time exaggerating my own merits. I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity. Moreover I have used this delusional idealism to assign myself the role of savior. In the past I have always despised "saviors" —at least when they were other people. But wittingly or unwittingly, I myself could not help slipping into this role, with all its attendant complacency and grandiosity. I now realize that Western civilization, while it can be useful in reforming China in its present stage, cannot save humanity in an overall sense. If we stand back from Western civilization for a moment, we can see that it possesses all the flaws of humanity in general. I am reminded of what Zhuangzi (369-286 BCE) said in "The Floods of Autumn":
> However great the river, it is nothing compared to the ocean; however vast the ocean, it still is not the cosmos.
[…] No matter how strongly modern Western intellectuals may critique Western rationalism, and no matter how harshly they may denounce the West’s colonial expansion and the premise of white superiority, they still maintain deep-rooted feelings of superiority toward non-Western peoples. They feel proud of the courage and sincerity with which they do self-criticisms. They easily offer criticisms that they make of themselves, but have trouble listening to criticisms that originate from outside the West.
If I, as a person who has lived under China’s autocratic system for more than thirty years, want to reflect on the fate of humanity or on how to be an authentic person, I have no choice but to carry out two critiques simultaneously. I must:
- Use Western civilization as a tool to critique China.
- Use my own creativity to critique the West.
Neither of these kinds of critique can substitute for the other. […] [Source]
