What’s really going on in Hong Kong?

If you believe the American and British media, the people of Hong Kong have launched a democratic revolution and are being cruelly repressed. None of this is true, but let’s not let that get in the way of our principles.

Western liberals assume that disorder is revolutionary and democratic, and that it tends towards liberal and egalitarian outcomes. These touching assumptions reflect the fading memory of twentieth-century American and British politics, and not the plentiful evidence that democratic revolutions usually tend towards tyranny — which is what happened in Russia in 1917, in Germany shortly afterwards, in Egypt more recently, and, pertinently, in China after 1949.

Western liberals also assume that a liberal and egalitarian Hong Kong would be in our interest. They may well be right about this, but there is more wish than fact in their hope that the young people of Hong Kong will secure an interest that Western governments had failed to secure, despite their greater leverage.