“If they can induce fear in you, that’s the cheapest way to control you and the most effective way,” the newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai told the BBC in 2020, just before he was jailed in Hong Kong for participating in “unlawful assembly”. In 2014, Xi Jinping had reassured the world that it had nothing to fear when “the sleeping lion” finally woke. But, in truth, Xi and his Communist Party henchmen have always governed through fear, drawing on autocratic precedents and mobilising new technology to build a vast surveillance apparatus that monitors citizens’ behaviour for “trustworthiness”. A cult of personality has arisen reminiscent of Mao’s, replete with “little red books” that promote “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Special Characteristics for a New Era”—and that, in 2017, were written into the constitution.
I saw how fear worked first-hand in Hong Kong. In 2019, pro-democracy protestors, many of them students, were terrorised by the police who had no compunction about using tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons indiscriminately, along with arbitrary detention. It was an atmosphere encapsulated by a “Freedom from Fear” graffiti that appeared overnight on one of the city’s bus shelters. When he’d declaimed his freedom-from-fear credo in 1941, President Roosevelt can’t have imagined that this is where it would land.
Then came Covid-19, a gift for the authorities who quickly turned health fears into a game-changing political tool, using stringent lockdown mandates to crush any opposition. With the world preoccupied by the pandemic and the WHO busy extolling China’s public health response, a national security law was brought in at the end of June 2020, bypassing Hong Kong’s legislature and making a mockery of the city’s autonomy under the principle of “one country, two systems”. Amnesty International warned that the new law “must not become a weapon of fear”, but less than a year and a half later that organisation had pulled out of the city over safety concerns.
Fear was deployed in other ways, too. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s then chief executive, disingenuously claimed that the protesters were intimidating law-abiding citizens. “There is an increasing national security threat in Hong Kong,” she declared. “Residents are living in fear. Some ask whether Hong Kong is still a city with the rule of law, or whether it is rule of fear.” The fear that Lam had so assiduously stoked was now pinned on those who were afraid, and then used as an alibi for the imposition of ever more punitive measures.
Fear percolated through the student and faculty ranks at the University of Hong Kong, or HKU as it’s known, where I was head of the Department of History. Students worried that there were informers in the classrooms monitoring the content of lessons, and that Zoom discussions were being eavesdropped upon. In the last course I taught during the pandemic, some of my Chinese students would vanish with an ominous ping whenever the conversation turned remotely political. Hong Kong may have been on the front line, but, as the Hong Kong-born political scientist Steve Tsang recently told the UK’s parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, fear has become pervasive among Chinese students in the UK, with covert pressure exerted on them by the Chinese embassy and the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA).
For years, institutions of higher education in Hong Kong had been denounced by pro-Beijing officials as covert incubators of dissent, but in 2020 a crackdown felt imminent. It had long been coming. In 2011, the 14-year-old Joshua Wong and his school friend Ivan Lam Long-yin had founded Scholarism, an activist group that challenged the introduction of mandatory “patriotic education” in schools. When I’d last seen him in May 2016, Wong had been handing out leaflets on the street, a diminutive figure chatting to pedestrians and smiling at curious motorists—hardly the dangerous, diehard subversive officials made him out to be.
But while schools had been the chief target of the government’s curriculum “reforms”, this changed during the protests. After students clashed with police at the Chinese University, and especially following the violent two-week siege of the Polytechnic University, the writing was on the wall. By the end of 2020, shortly after the introduction of the national security law, Carrie Lam was vowing to go after the “black sheep” who “bring politics into the classroom”. She would inaugurate a new era of “patriotic education”. Although Wong’s arrest for “unlawful protest” in December 2020 came as no surprise, it was nonetheless a shocking moment because it marked Hong Kong’s descent into a new form of uninhibited autocracy, even as Lam—a HKU and Cambridge University alumna—kept to her mantra that it was business as usual, there was nothing to fear.
Soon the clampdown began in earnest. By the time I resigned from my professorship at HKU in the summer of 2021, news agencies were being silenced and critics of the government rounded up under the provisions of the new security law. Student unions disbanded. And, in July 2022, the city’s public-funded universities informed students that they would be required to pass an online national education course before graduation. The title of a report on Hong Kong’s civil society produced in October 2022 by the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China aptly summed up the transformation: “From an Open City to a City of Fear”.
Meanwhile, in China, which saw a resurgence of Covid-19, people were fearful of falling ill, of vaccines, of further restrictions on their freedom, of an uncertain future. Even the detested officials charged with enforcing draconian lockdowns, quarantines and intrusive health checks lived in fear of losing their jobs if they didn’t follow orders. And last month a sweeping but vaguely worded new espionage law came into effect, which has tightened censorship and vested Beijing with new powers to track down those considered a threat to “national security”. Life has got far more dangerous for many Chinese friends and former students.
Coercive fear can’t last forever, though. History shows that a tipping point arrives when too much fear produces resistance. Or when one fear trips up another and, in the domino effect that follows, the system unravels to expose the backstage mechanics that drive tyranny: Xi Jinping and his Communist Party subordinates pulling the strings behind the curtains to project a ghostly image of power to the world. This is the scenario that Xi and his apparatchiks must fear above all else, the unmasking of their rule of fear.
When, at the end of 2022, a Chinese friend forwarded me a video clip of residents in a housing complex in Guangzhou belting out “Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies”, a ballad by the Hong Kong rock band Beyond, originally released in 1993, it was clear that something was up. The song, with its passionate injunction to keep faithful to “hope and ideal”, has long been an anthem of freedom, periodically erupting in mainland China and Hong Kong during anti-government, pro-democracy demonstrations. As the lockdown protests demonstrated in China, along with the government’s U-turn on its zero-Covid policy, fear has its limits. If it’s overstretched, it might well snap. Fear may destroy communities, but it can also serve as a catalytic force for building new ones.
Xi and the Communist Party have been masterful in the way they have played off different fears against each other. In China, it is fear of foreign interventions, economic instability, pandemic disease—and the authorities. As the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei observed after he was detained by Chinese authorities on trumped-up charges of tax evasion in 2012, “it is such a tragedy if you live your life in fear. That’s worse than actually losing your freedom.” Ai, whose artistic oeuvre can be read as a sustained reflection on the insidious nature of fear, is surely right. It’s when fear is overwhelmed by an angry recognition of forsaken freedoms that the moment may come, and power finally shifts.
During the Hong Kong protests, the actor and martial artist Bruce Lee emerged as an unlikely symbol of resistance, with his catchphrase “Be water, my friend” adopted by pro-democracy demonstrators. At times, the struggle against the government’s machinery of fear resembled the scene from the film Enter the Dragon, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary, where the Lee character follows the villain into a room of mirrors. In the end, he triumphs when he smashes the glass that gives his opponent the advantage. “Now, you must remember, the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives,” the abbot of the Shaolin Temple has earlier advised Lee. “Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.”
In Hong Kong, democracy may have been crushed, but in mainland China, where state-promoted fear has created a world of super-mirrors, it could be that fear itself is the force that shatters the glass.
