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Illustration: Stephen Case
Opinion
Phil C. W. Chan and Nicola de Jager
Phil C. W. Chan and Nicola de Jager

From Hong Kong to Canada, ‘do as I tell you’ governments risk trapping us in Covid Groundhog Day

  • Instead of blanket travel bans, and mask, quarantine and vaccine mandates, a focused protection approach better serves our societies and well-being
  • It is high time political leaders, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, listened to their people

Just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Francis Fukuyama pronounced humanity to have reached “the end of history”, with Western liberal democracy triumphant as “the final form of human government”.

In the years since, leading scholars such as the late Thomas Franck, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Georg Nolte (now a judge of the International Court of Justice) argued that there was an emerging right in international law to democratic governance, that liberal internationalism was universally applicable to states, and that states which did not subscribe to liberal democracy should have their membership in international organisations revoked.

Opinions of non-Western scholars were frequently dismissed or denigrated as subversive, dangerous, biased, apologist, distorted, irrational or uninformed, while those of their Western counterparts were “universally” lauded as sound, objective and authentic.

Fast forward 30 years, democracy in Hong Kong has been quashed. Ukraine, an aspiring democracy suffering rampant corruption (vividly portrayed in comedian-turned-war-hero President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People), is in ruins for turning West instead of East. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has put his nuclear arsenal on “higher alert”. End of history, or end of humanity?

06:21

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Amid talk of nuclear Armageddon, there is a “war” raging in Western liberal democracies and places a little bit less liberal or democratic alike. And it is in this war where lines between a Western liberal democracy and an Eastern non-liberal non-democracy become blurred.

This war, of course, is against the coronavirus, with battalions headed by Delta, Alpha, Omicron, etc. A core symptom of infection is its assault on our smell and taste. However, unelected (and unaccountable) public health experts have missed another symptom in the battle – its assault on our reason.

Hong Kong to hand out Covid-19 protection kits to 3 million households

Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, Hong Kong’s chief executive and self-proclaimed commander-in-chief, was adamant earlier this month that she and her officials would fight on “until the city wins the battle” against the fifth Covid-19 wave – after disappearing for a fortnight as patients, many in their 70s and 80s, languished in hospital car parks, and after more than two years of stringent mask, quarantine and vaccine controls.
Within two months, Hong Kong transformed from having single-digit daily infection rates to the world’s highest mortality rate, with some public health experts estimating that half of its 7.4 million population were already infected.

Hongkongers were reportedly being smuggled into the mainland to escape this fifth wave. Meanwhile, mainland medical personnel were drafted in to help – a success of the “one country, two systems” model, Lam declared.

Lam is in good company. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers last month to arrest protesters against a vaccine mandate for truck drivers and to freeze their assets. Their maple-leaf-flag-waving sympathisers in New Zealand were described by its world-beloved Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as “imported”, when even Kiwis could not penetrate New Zealand’s Covid-19 fortress.

But for Trudeau and Ardern, one would have thought emergency powers, asset-freezing and imported foreign-flag-waving protesters existed only in Hong Kong.

In South Africa, where Omicron was first detected last November, and which is celebrating its annual Human Rights Month to honour those lost in decades of apartheid, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his ruling party have been governing without parliamentary oversight for over two years, imposing prohibitions on the sale of tobacco, alcohol, short-sleeved shirts and flip-flops, and closing beaches and nature reserves.
South Africa’s economy, already fragile after nine years of “state capture” by former president Jacob Zuma, contracted by 7 per cent in 2020 and unemployment rose to almost 47 per cent under the expanded definition.
On Monday, Hong Kong’s commander-in-chief Lam changed her “wartime” strategy and adapted China’s dynamic zero-Covid approach, easing travel bans, quarantine and social distancing measures, and halting plans for compulsory citywide testing.

03:30

Covid-19: Hong Kong to open schools, lift flight ban, cut quarantine time and suspend mass testing

Covid-19: Hong Kong to open schools, lift flight ban, cut quarantine time and suspend mass testing
Still, the damage to Hong Kong’s reputation, vibrancy and viability as an international finance hub had been done, with net emigration touching a record high of nearly 1 per cent last month.

The near all-time low public trust in Hong Kong’s regime and elderly vaccination rates among the world’s lowest have contributed to disturbingly high infection and mortality rates in “Asia’s world city”.

The “do as I tell you” approach, without community consultation or consensus, under which public trust in supposedly liberal democratic governments has similarly been waning, threatens to lock us in a Groundhog Day.

Living with the coronavirus no more threatens national security than living with HIV. Just as HIV does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, the coronavirus does not differentiate between political ideologies; it is a reality with which all of us must contend.

The time has come for a change in how Hong Kong deals with Covid-19

Instead of blanket travel bans and mask, quarantine and vaccine mandates, a focused protection approach, advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration by public health scientists from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford universities, better serves our societies and well-being as we rebuild our lives.
It is high time political leaders, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, listened to their people – be they billionaire investors, truck drivers or people in care homes – and their needs. Lam, Trudeau, Ardern and Ramaphosa might think they know what is best. As one of us wrote in January, though, we could all be a little humbler. They are, after all, servants of the people.

Phil C.W. Chan is a legal scholar and recipient of the 25th Human Rights Press Awards (Merit, 2021) for Commentary Writing for his three-part series in the Post in 2020 on Hong Kong society in the era of China’s national security law for Hong Kong

Nicola de Jager is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science, Stellenbosch University, and co-editor of the journal Commonwealth and Comparative Politics



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