With pro-democracy candidates making significant gains in the district council elections, Hong Kong continues to face its most serious political turmoil in decades.

As the chaos entered its sixth month, the US Senate and House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act on November 19 and 20. In response, Yang Guang, spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, said that the biggest risk facing Hong Kong is violence, not issues of human rights and democracy.

Of course, violence is the most pressing risk at this moment. However, dismissing human rights and democracy altogether exposes the Chinese government’s lack of political courage to get to the heart of the matter.

If leaders in Beijing want to resolve the political crisis in Hong Kong, how do they propose to address the issues raised by Hongkongers who are increasingly asserting an identity separate from the mainland?

Following the 1911 revolution and the May Fourth Movement of 1919, it was the founders of the Communist Party of China, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who introduced the country to Western values – announcing the end of more than 2,000 years of Confucian ideology and holding high the banner of democracy and science.



Thus, the Western knowledge system and the values driving it were gradually integrated into the daily life and subconscious of all Chinese people.

However, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the government declared the country would adhere to the “Chinese road” of party leadership, and never follow the Western model of multiparty competition and universal suffrage. In other words, it has vowed to develop a different value system from the West.

Briefly, a system of values should comprise five elements: the values themselves; a core concept expressing the values; a political system based on the core concept; terminology for opposing values and political systems; and finally, the use of “values versus opposing values” as an analytical framework for describing the political systems of the world. The Western democratic values system meets these five criteria.

In practice, this means that if the Chinese government insists on resolutely following the Chinese road for governing all Chinese, including Hongkongers, it must come up with a comprehensive Chinese values system that is comparable to the Western system.

President Xi Jinping has attached great importance to this matter. In 2015, he said China had faced three problems for a long time: falling behind and “getting beaten”; “going hungry”, and; “getting scolded”.

At present, the first two problems have basically been solved, but not the third, he stated. That is, China is still being shamed by the West for keeping to the Chinese road of party leadership and rejecting the Western path of democracy.



So how is Beijing to follow its own path, yet also fend off criticism for not taking the other road?

To this end, a National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences has been established to strengthen China’s “discourse power” and tasked with constructing a system to articulate Chinese values. It represents a significant commitment by Xi to solve the problem of “getting scolded”

Sadly, however, the office has so far failed to come up with such a system. In the first place, does China have its own unique Chinese values? Of course – they have been clearly, vividly and accurately expressed in the Chinese classics, have been in use for thousands of years, and are still in use today.

But in the absence of a comprehensively articulated system of Chinese values representing a unique Chinese identity that is comparable to the Western system, is it any wonder that Hongkongers are seeking to define their own separate identity?

Let’s hope Beijing will soon refine and articulate China’s unique values system for all of China, and the rest of the world. Then it may find a peaceful solution to the Hong Kong situation, and make Hongkongers proud again to be Chinese.