Opinion | Goddess of democracy or puberty puppet?

By Philip Yeung, university teacher

PKY480@gmail.com

Politics isn't a teenager's playground. And yet in Hong Kong, it had become precisely that.

Never in history has a political movement been driven by a cabal of wet-behind-the-ears teenagers. Famous among them is Agnes Chow Ting who has just fled into self-exile in Canada. She forms the terrible trio with two other teeny-boppers, Nathan Law, (on the run in the US), and Joshua Wong (now rotting in a Hong Kong jail where time hangs heavy). They comprise the hardcore of the now-disbanded political party, pretentiously and stupidly named Demosisto, whatever that means.

These young hot heads were put on the pedestal by the Western press, with Wong going for Time's Person of the Year nomination. Chow, otherwise known as the goddess of democracy or modern-day Mulan, made the BBC list of 100 women and another list of the 25 most influential women drawn up by the Financial Times, ironically unaware that Mulan was a celebrated female Chinese patriot. Agnes is no patriot. If anything, she qualifies as an out-and-out traitor who prefers learning Japanese to Mandarin, blissfully ignorant of the hideous truth that Japan had slaughtered 35 million Chinese and brutalized China during its invasion of the country. She is historically illiterate and culturally rootless.

These herd-minded fifteensomethings remind me of a popular Chinese saying that "When a village dog barks, other dogs start barking in unison, without knowing why." Their "noble" fight for freedom is but the antics of puberty-perplexed teenagers who opted for the excitement of the rough and tumble of politics forsaking skull-numbing schoolwork. Their political misadventure is, above all, a tragic educational failure.

Suddenly, these juvenile new political arrivals found themselves the center of world attention, intoxicated with a false sense of their own importance, absorbed in their own absolutism, but empty at the core. They prided themselves on blindly opposing anything remotely mainlandish. A farce has been cunningly twisted into a noble fight for freedom, despite Hong Kong drowning in freedom as the freest city in the world.

The Hong Kong unrest is the story of a beautiful city made ugly by political manipulators. This high-wattage movement is a political perversion indulged by kids too young to know their own minds or the ways of the world. Their activist high jinks have been mischaracterized as acts of political courage.

These lost young souls, besides being an educational failure, are the products of an act of sabotage by a Western press pushing them over the edge, turbocharged by a surge of manufactured social anger. It has all the sound and fury of a political movement, but utterly devoid of serious substance. They talked robotically and acted robotically as rebels without a real cause.

Nothing says Hong Kong freedom like the proliferation of political parties. At one point, no fewer than 17 political parties splintered its Legislature. This once apolitical city was swimming in a sea of politics, with an abundant display of copycat political behavior. New York had its Occupy Wall Street movement and we soon followed with our own Occupy Central. And when the Color Revolutions overseas faded they were reborn in Hong Kong as the yellow Umbrella movement. Our "revolution" consisted of mindless parroting that was a distorted, abused form of freedom. Of all places Hong Kong was the last to need an extra dose of freedom. The young were worshipping the wrong gods. We have no use for a goddess of democracy.

Thankfully, the pendulum has finally swung. With Agnes Chow in self-exile, the sorry saga is reaching its finale. Goodbye false goddess. Hello real Mulan.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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