Unmasked

There were only two things Donald Trump said, back when he was campaigning for the presidency, that I agreed with.  A case of a blind squirrel finding a nut, perhaps, but it’s still true.  The two items were: NATO allies should be maintaining their 2% of GDP defense spending obligations (which none save, I believe, Estonia, has done for decades) and Chinese theft of American intellectual property combined with centrally-planned economic shenanigans required a serious set of conversations, negotiations, and – if it came to that – actions.

Trump has demonstrated his inadequacies but the underlying issues remain, and as far as the ongoing Chinese tariff war goes, I’ve been paying careful attention to Hong Kong.  My sympathies lie entirely with the protestors.  One country, two systems is not tenable, as David Webb among others had written about so articulately.  Watching the videos of the protestors continuing efforts to resist the machinations of Beijing and their stooge-appointee Carrie Lam feels to me like watching the whole balance of power in the Pacific Rim.  So it came as an unpleasant surprise this morning when the long-stalemated battle had an escalation as Carrie Lam announced she would use her emergency powers under a colonial-era law (a moniker that is strangely laden with antipathy towards the West, even as protestors would clearly prefer to keep their British legal structure) to ban the wearing of masks.

Anyone who has seen the news coverage knows that the Hong Kong protestors almost universally are wearing surgical masks (commonly used in Asia in public by those who may be sick in order to not pass on germs – so polite!), bandanas, or even gas masks and respirators to get them through the tear gas-laden encounters with the police.  While most of the headlines I saw viewed this as a tool that would make tear gas more effective, surely the more pressing issue here is facial recognition.  Already protestors had grown wary of police efforts to identify them via their phone – many people were disabling facial and fingerprint-based unlocking features so that, when arrested by the authorities, their phones (and subsequently their whole lives) could not be easily used accessed.  China’s surveillance state is far more sophisticated than that, however, and surely a law that bans the use of masks will allow the country’s deep and powerful surveillance state to go to work identifying the protestors.  It is critical to remember that the bill that so inflamed the passions of the people of Hong Kong and led to these months of protests was an extradition bill, allowing Hong Kongers to be taken to the mainland for trial.  This ups the stakes.  Those protesting the bill, if they were to give in to the threat of this new action, would be able to be taken to the mainland and prosecuted for their part in the protests based on the images of their past participation (assuming the bill was made into law, which Beijing no doubt still wants done.)

Putting myself in the protestors boots, this is quite frightening.  I can remain masked and violate the law, allowing them to arrest, prosecute, and jail or fine me – thereby discovering my identity – or I can take the mask off, allowing China’s surveillance state to take note and presumably penalize me via the horrifying social credit system, and potentially extradite me in the event the law is passed.  Rock and a hard place, indeed.

My outrage at this situation was immediately interrupted as I learned that anti-mask laws are quite common in the West, including the United States.  Such laws were the basis for arresting many of the Occupy Wall Street (remember them?) protestors, not my favorite group of people.  Then again, the same law was used to ban a march by the Ku Klux Klan or some related white supremacy group on the grounds that the cowards were to march in mask, as wonderful use of such an obscure law as can be.

And so I find myself in an unexpected spot as I root for the Hong Kong protestors but also see the rationale behind such a law.  The American law apparently dates to 1845, when tenant farmers of the New York patroons would don masks to attack the authorities in protest of their feudalistic subordination, which provides both a rough parallel of what we see today (in the people vs. law sense – Hong Kong protestors are not attacking police officers) but also an indication of how today’s surveillance technology is beyond the imagination of the lawmakers that drafted such laws originally.  The ideal scenario, in my mind, would have strong restrictions on how governments could collect and use images in order to defang this catch-22 – but of course, in China, there are no civil liberties, no rule of law, no arbiter other than Xi Jinping, and so this hope is stillborn.  If going masked is the only solution to the proliferation of imaging technology – be it in the hands of the government or the phone of the person next to you – what does that do to civil society?  While pseudonyms and anonymity have key roles to play (the Federalist papers, whistleblower protection) we also see that the anonymity of the digital world creates a morass of uncivil engagement and bad behavior.

Can the underlying justice of the cause be the guiding principle here?  Wearing a mask does not carry a death sentence.  If Hong Kong were to implement this law, I imagine there would be more offenders than the jails could hold.  Does it become a simple act of civil disobedience, a mild misdemeanor whose punishment is outweighed by the ongoing attention the act draws to the cause?  Will there be, in some horrible worst case scenario, a protestor who willingly puts their head in the lion’s jaws by being extradited to China to face down the penalty of their mask wearing, or their part in the protests if they decide to take the mask off?  All this points to a much longer road for the Hong Kong protestors as they battle to slow the erosion of their liberties and perhaps wait for China to rise to their own moral level, rather than be dragged down to that of the mainland.  My thoughts lie with them, and am fortunate that I feel no need to hide my support for them in their brave struggle.

(…though this blog’s anonymity perhaps diminishes the bravery of that last line!)