When Democracy Hesitates, Autocracy Moves: An Action Agenda for East Asian Civil Society

Event

East Asia Democracy Forum

Location

Ikebukuro, Tokyo

Date

11 June 2025

English translation of remarks delivered in Japanese by Alric Lee, Executive Director of Lady Liberty Hong Kong, at the East Asia Democracy Forum — Ikebukuro, Tokyo, 11 June 2025.

This forum is, for me, a precious opportunity to pause, to look back on the road we have travelled, and to consider where we go from here. Its significance feels especially great now, when the voice of democracy is weakening across the region and the space for civil society grows ever more fragile.

Today I want to talk about how Hong Kong's freedom was lost — taken not only by force, but also by silence. And above all, I want to speak about what that loss taught us about resilience, and about what we can build together in East Asia.

1 — A Promise Broken Before It Was Ever Spoken

When people speak of the collapse of Hong Kong's freedoms, they often start in 2020 — the year the National Security Law was abruptly imposed and the whole of society changed overnight. Or they may think of 2019, the year the streets filled with umbrellas, tear gas, and cries for freedom.

But for me, the story began much earlier — in 1982, the year London and Beijing sat down to decide Hong Kong's fate after 1997. Yet no seat was set at that table for Hongkongers. Beijing insisted on our exclusion from the outset, and London, wishing to settle matters quietly, went along with it.

At the time, the University of Hong Kong conducted an opinion survey. It was never widely reported, but more than 85 percent of residents said they did not want to be handed over to China. That voice was ignored and the findings were shelved. Two governments decided our fate without so much as pretending to listen to the people whose lives were at stake.

And so the phrase "One Country, Two Systems" was born. It was meant to be a promise, a guarantee. But in truth it was not something we ourselves had written; it was a slogan handed to us from outside.

And here is what matters: when you shut people out of their own future, they do not forget. They remember. And they organize. That first exclusion — being told "you do not matter" — lit a fuse. The spark did not explode at once, but it smoldered on: from the half-million-strong march of 2003, to the Umbrella Movement of 2014, to the uprising of 2019 — all of it can be traced back to the silence at that negotiating table.

By rights, the story could have ended there. Disappointment might simply have curdled into indifference — for when you are locked out of your own future, giving up would be only natural.

But Hongkongers did not do that. Instead of losing hope, they turned their frustration into fuel. And over the following three decades, Hong Kong built one of the most vibrant and creative civil societies in Asia.

In 1989, when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, the streets of Hong Kong, too, overflowed with people. They were not mere spectators to history; they threw themselves into it.

A grassroots body — the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China — rose up, raised funds, organized public events, and even arranged charter flights to spirit Chinese activists to safety. They translated the voices of Beijing's students and broadcast them to the world.

Ironically, the first firm place Hongkongers won in the international community came not from speaking about themselves, but from supporting democracy on the mainland.

This spirit — of looking outward and building connections — never faded. From it, an entire ecosystem took shape.

Teachers' unions taught students how to question power; bar associations went to police stations in the dead of night to provide pro bono legal aid to those detained; social workers offered psychological support to the families of the arrested.

And every June 4, Victoria Park became a special space. It was not merely a memorial service but a kind of open-air civic square. Journalists, scholars, artists, and high-school students gathered under candlelight to talk about human rights. There, people asked hard questions, learned from one another, and felt themselves part of a larger community.

What we learned there was this: even a city without full democracy can still act democratically.

Hong Kong's civil society submitted petitions to UN Special Rapporteurs, prepared reports for the Universal Periodic Review, and lobbied overseas parliaments. Sometimes it translated legal documents overnight so that foreign journalists could follow what was happening on the ground.

On the surface, Hong Kong looked like a business hub. But beneath that surface, its citizens had decided that politics was too important to leave to politicians — and had become its authors themselves.

2 — The Blade Falls, and the World Yawns

As you know, this ecosystem did not last. When the National Security Law took effect in 2020, it was as if the blade of a guillotine had come down.

Organizations that had worked for decades — labor unions, advocacy groups, student networks — were forced to shut down one after another. People were arrested; some fled; others vanished from public life.

A city that once published more independent newspapers than exist in some entire countries now bans even children's picture books as "too political." The change was swift, deliberate, and devastating.

But what I want to stress is that the collapse did not happen because Hong Kong was weak. It happened because Hong Kong was isolated. When the crackdown began, there was no regional support mechanism, no network able to coordinate quickly.

From here, the story ceases to be only about Hong Kong. For when Beijing finally brought down the axe, the world noticed — but did almost nothing.

Governments issued statements. Phrases like "deep concern" and "grave regret" flew about at press conferences. The UN Human Rights Council and international NGOs put out statement after statement.

But none of it could move forward, because China and Russia blocked any effective action at every turn.

Behind the scenes, economic priorities quietly took precedence. Decades of globalization had bound democracies tightly to authoritarian markets. Corporations whispered, "Don't disrupt the supply chain," and lawmakers nodded.

As a result, Hong Kong's collapse became little more than a footnote to someone's trade agenda. The crisis was noticed once, analyzed, and then, for the most part, put back on the shelf.

3 — Democracy's Empty Chair, Authoritarianism's Speed

This is not Hong Kong's story alone. The same pattern repeats across the region.

Recall the Rohingya genocide and the military coup in Myanmar. Think of the rapidly shrinking civic space in Cambodia, or the ceaseless waves of disinformation and interference directed at Taiwan.

In every case, there is a common rhythm.

Democracy speaks. Authoritarianism acts.

Democracies release statements, hold press conferences, and open time-consuming investigations. Authoritarian states, by contrast, ram through sweeping laws in a single stroke, mobilize the police, and detain their critics within days.

And people sense the difference keenly. When their own community is under attack, what they want is not a perfect resolution. They want the answer to a single question: will someone act before it is too late?

But far too often, the answer feels like "no."

Of course, this hesitation has geographic as well as political causes. For those of us who live in East Asia, China is not an abstract diplomatic question; it is a neighbor, a trading partner, and an increasingly real security threat.

This proximity always breeds tension. Speak up, and you face retaliation. Stay silent, and your principles dissolve. Caught between the two, governments carry on a nervous diplomacy — even as authoritarian influence expands right next door.

Meanwhile, China moves with confidence and speed. It builds infrastructure in months, seizes control of information flows, and rewrites the rules of the game not only at home but across borders.

This contrast — cautious, slow democracy against decisive, rapid authoritarianism — gradually erodes people's faith in the democratic model.

And here lies the greatest danger. Once people stop believing that democracy delivers not only values but results, they begin to look for another road.

4 — When Despair Meets the Demagogue

Within this crisis of faith in democracy, another phenomenon arises — one we witnessed in Hong Kong society and elsewhere.

It is this: despair produces strange "heroes."

When people feel abandoned by the democratic world, they begin to look for anyone — anyone at all — who appears to be standing up to authoritarianism.

And so I saw many Hongkongers applaud America's tariffs on China and its hardline rhetoric. It was not that they endorsed everything about Trump. It was simply that, while other countries offered nothing but words of "condolence" and "concern," he at least appeared to be doing something.

But there is an inconvenient truth: some of those very policies were also harming the most vulnerable people in Asia.

In 2018, for example, dozens of health clinics serving Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh were closed after deep cuts to U.S. humanitarian aid.

In other words, while some in Hong Kong celebrated "toughness on China," somewhere else people were losing their medicine, their shelter, their food.

Here we must ask ourselves: is there any real meaning in a "justice" that can be achieved only at the expense of others — and of people even weaker than ourselves?

For this very impulse — "if I cannot win, at least let my enemy lose" — is the logic of zero-sum politics, and it is also the logic authoritarian regimes use to justify their repression.

Of course, everyone in this room will agree in principle. We believe in solidarity, in human dignity, in a justice that is inclusive rather than selective.

But at the same time, we cannot ignore the raw voices on the ground. People who have lost everything — friends, freedom, the future — do not necessarily speak the language of international diplomacy. They are angry, and they are hurt.

If civil society wishes to lead, it must listen to those voices — not only to policymakers and scholars, but to the raw emotions of ordinary people.

Because if we ignore that pain, someone else will surely weaponize it.

Our task is to transform this indignation into something constructive — neither revenge nor silence, but a shared resistance rooted in empathy. And it must extend not only to our own people, but to others suffering alike across this region.

5 — Three Tasks for East Asian Civil Society

So what is the alternative? I propose three tasks that anyone in civil society can take up — achievable regardless of budget, field, or nationality.

First, reawaken citizens' ownership of democracy.

Voting alone cannot save us. In Hong Kong, the annual June 4 candlelight vigil turned a park into Asia's largest open-air civic town hall. Teenagers debated history with professors; food-stall vendors raised bail money selling takoyaki; grandmothers signed petitions side by side with gamers.

That ritual reminded us that politics is not something to watch through a screen, but something to take part in, in person.

We need to create new "candlelight classrooms" everywhere: monthly local forums, citizens' juries deliberating on budgets, pop-up fact-checking booths outside train stations. At little cost, these send the message that public space belongs to the public.

In Tokyo, Meiji Gakuin University's Refugee Law Clinic connects law students with asylum seekers. Projects like these turn abstract rights into living practice, reminding citizens that the state is not a distant landlord but an address they partly own.

Second, weave collaboration across movements.

Lawyers defend rights. But telling the story requires journalists; healing trauma requires psychologists; and showing that livelihood and liberty can coexist requires farming cooperatives.

Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hongkongers, Taiwanese, Japanese, Koreans — we each face different circumstances, yet we are all repressed according to the same authoritarian playbook.

Rather than treating one another's struggles as footnotes, we should treat them as chapters of a shared regional story — and we must reach out actively to different sectors in each country to tell it.

Third, democratize civil society itself.

This means engaging a broader public, beyond conferences and campaigns. It means advancing democratic values not by preaching down from above, but through empathetic, approachable dialogue rooted in everyday concerns.

What matters is not broadcasting ideals one-way from a stage, but building two-way dialogue — valuing listening as much as speaking, and learning what people are truly anxious about.

For civil society to remain resilient, it must feel close, personal, and emotionally resonant even to those who do not think of themselves as "activists" — yet who nonetheless live, every day, under the influence of authoritarianism.

6 — The Materials We Need Are Already Here

The good news is that we do not have to start from scratch.

The tools and the people already exist in this region: citizen groups that map disinformation, networks that train advocates, organizations that coordinate legal aid, and activists who keep recording history from places of exile.

From Taiwan to Korea, from Southeast Asia to Japan's universities — the foundations for a resilient civic network are already in place.

All we need to do is connect them.

7 — From Shelter to Structure

Having studied architecture, I sometimes think about social movements not only in terms of energy and passion, but also in terms of structure and usability.

Good system design is not merely functional; it is adaptable, reusable, and responsive to different contexts.

Looking back at Hong Kong's civil society, I recall how many efforts were built on reusable formats: exhibitions in shopping malls, bilingual press releases, student-led memorial gatherings, legal-aid hotlines staffed on a shared rotation.

These were not isolated actions but templates — shaped through experience and designed to be scaled and reused.

I believe there is value in organizing this experience into modular resources — simple, flexible guides that others can use. For example:

• a short manual for organizing a low-risk assembly;
• a framework for launching a visual advocacy campaign;
• sample letters for lobbying legislators in different countries;
• a basic checklist for standing up a local support team.

These tools already exist in some form. But they are scattered, informal, or hard to access across differences of language and context.

By gathering them into an open, modular toolkit, civil society across the region could respond to the challenges it faces more quickly and more effectively.

Working with partners across the region, we hope to co-create a shareable, practical repository — one that reflects our collective knowledge, can be applied across borders, and supports civic action.

8 — Freedom Collapses in Isolation

Authoritarianism spreads fastest when people feel alone. Freedom collapses in isolation.

If we can link the islands of resistance — rekindling the flame, weaving collaboration, and protecting one another — then no activist, refugee, or citizen journalist anywhere in East Asia need ever wonder who will stand up for them.

Because the answer will already be there: all of us.