A noble cause that can’t win

Are you rooting for the young Hong Kongers? Are you thrilling at their courage, urging them on from the sofa of indolence? If so, you’re not alone. Every time a surveillance camera comes down in Kowloon a cheer goes up in Lyttelton. And when the chief executive – what sort of title is that for a civic leader? – appeared on television to belatedly concede to one of their demands, ‘‘Don’t listen to her,’’ I bellowed, ‘‘it’s a sop. She’s a plant, a stooge. Soften now and you’ll lose.’’

I needn’t have bothered. They saw straight through her, ‘‘Go tell it to the noodle shops,’’ they said, ‘‘don’t waste our time. You’re a programmed automaton, a tool of Beijing. The fight goes on.’’

And that fight feels heroic. It’s against the odds. They face brutality, arrests and punitive sentences. To a battle with authoritarian might and its machines of oppression they bring only umbrellas and their wits.

It’s hard to see them winning. Hong Kong’s been signed over to China. Ostensibly it still operates under a separate system, but that arrangement expires in 2047 when Hong Kong becomes fully and indistinguishably Chinese. What chance then of universal suffrage, of an independent judiciary, of the freedom to speak ill of the government? None at all. So what chance of securing those things now? The same. It won’t happen.

The Chinese authorities are good at the long game. But they’re good at the short one too, if need be. They’re good at swift and remorseless violence. They may yet send in the People’s Liberation Army to do the opposite of liberating the people. They did just that, as you may recall, in 1989, and we still don’t know how many students died.

But we do know how we in the West punished China for that massacre. We went on a spending spree. We bought Chinese goods by the billion. We made the Chinese government pay for its brutality by giving it an unprecedented 30-year economic boom.

Look at the label on your underpants. Look where your phone and frying pans were made. Greed easily overrode any principles we might have thought we had. And it will do so again. Sorry, Hong Kong. Business is business.

At the weekend they marched on the US embassy. Who do they think’s in the White House? Every fibre of Trump’s being tends to the authoritarian. They’re on their own.

All they want is what we’ve got and are bored by. They want to be able to hold local elections like the ones we’re about to have in which a third of us bother to vote. They want the freedom to be apathetic like us. But they’re not going to get it. They’re going to continue to get a government that brooks no dissent, that imprisons its critics. And from us they’ll get only fine words.

What can I say to console them? Only that envy cuts both ways. For they have a cause and there is nothing more thrilling than a cause. Right now the young protesters are frightened, excited, insurgent. They are driven by a sense of justice. Their blood fizzes with fear and hope. They are a band, a unity of daring. Every day feels momentous.

And years from now, regardless of what happens, years from now when these same young people are hunched and grey and shuffling, years from now when the world feels stale and their joints ache, they will look back on these days of protest and they will realise they were never more alive, they were never more proud, and, in truth, they were never happier.

That’s the thing with old friends, they’ve seen so many seasons of your life, they just take you as you are.