A Hundred-Year Struggle for Freedom — and Hong Kong's Lessons
- Event
- Centennial of the Inner Mongolian People's Party
- Host
- Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center
- Location
- House of Councillors, Tokyo
- Date
- 1 October 2025
Remarks by Alric Lee, Executive Director of Lady Liberty Hong Kong, at the centennial of the Inner Mongolian People's Party, hosted by the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center — House of Councillors, Tokyo, 1 October 2025.
Honorable members of parliament, distinguished delegates, and dear friends from around the world — my name is Alric Lee, co-founder of the Tokyo-based advocacy group Lady Liberty Hong Kong. Thank you, Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, for the opportunity to speak at this important commemoration of the South Mongolian resistance movement. Our struggles are connected: when a state seeks to erase language, memory, or the right to speak, it targets not only a people but the very conditions of democracy.
This week marked the eleventh anniversary of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement — born on September 28, 2014, when a generation stood up for dignity and the right to choose its future. Eleven years on, the city has been transformed by Beijing's 2020 National Security Law: civic liberties upended, speech criminalized, protest banned, and elections engineered rather than free. Most democratic leaders are now behind bars or in exile; independent NGOs, unions, media outlets, and opposition parties have been dismantled. The world has watched Hong Kong's rapid absorption into China's authoritarian system with condemnation. And while the UK, Canada, and Australia have offered generous pathways and protections to Hong Kong political refugees, the West has proved largely powerless to change the facts on the ground.
To understand how we arrived here, we must also recall a broader bet the world made. For decades, the West believed that integrating China into the global economy would inevitably lead to political liberalization. We know how that expectation turned out. It is easy for leaders to point to the Chinese Communist Party's extraordinary repression as the reason — because that is real. Yet if we look through the eyes of an ordinary Chinese citizen, a different story is also true: hundreds of millions lifted from poverty; social stability after decades of upheaval; visible growth and national revival. But this prosperity came at a grave price — paid in human rights, in the destruction of the environment, and borne most heavily by ethnic minorities, including Southern Mongolia, East Turkistan, and Tibet.
At the same time, as globalization supercharged the profits of multinational corporations, many Chinese watched Western democracies struggle with inequality, fraying social mobility, and cycles of violence and conflict. Acknowledging Western failures is not to equate them with authoritarian repression; it is to remove the alibi that our own house needs no repair. The implicit message was corrosive: if democracies cannot secure fairness at home, why should anyone trust their promises abroad?
Across continents, the resentment we witness is less nihilism than grief. We longed for a better world — more just, more free — and when institutions failed to deliver, hope curdled into grievance. This is why rebuilding trust cannot be only about policy design; it must also be about repairing the moral imagination that first taught us to hope.
Today, battlefields are not only at distant front lines; they are inside our societies. Abroad, Gaza's devastation has torn at consciences and communities; Russia's war on Ukraine has shattered Europe's security; in Southeast Asia, Myanmar's civil war and tensions in the South China Sea deepen peril. At home, these shocks reverberate — amplifying polarization, testing social trust, and tempting us to see neighbors as enemies rather than fellow citizens. We are losing the habit — the civic muscle — of living together.
Democracy is a virtue, but it can only be as good as its people. Freedom is a gift, but it also assigns obligations. Modern politics has reduced our duty to a ballot cast every few years, as if citizenship begins and ends in the voting booth. It does not. Our responsibility extends to one another — and, most importantly, to the selves we are shaping every day.
When democracies falter, it is not the idea that has failed; it is a mirror held up to us. The cracks we see are a symptom of our own condition: a society that has drifted from moral anchors and first principles. Values without moral formation are empty slogans. Principles without living values harden into doctrinaire creeds. We recite the right words but neglect the right habits.
Many blame neoliberalism and globalization for hollowing out communities and identities. There is truth in that critique. But if we had not surrendered our capacity to feel, to think, and to judge for ourselves, those forces could not have exploited our insecurities, our greed, and our pride. We were not merely victims of a system; too often, we were its accomplices.
When we let power define our worth, when we allow fear to give shape to anxieties we cannot name, we become two-dimensional beings — political caricatures instead of full human persons. We forget how to understand and speak to each other as human beings first. Politics must serve humanity, not the other way around.
This is why the reflex to "solve" every problem with more power is so dangerous. Power is not strength. Power without character is the theater of weakness — an attempt to coerce from the outside what we have failed to cultivate on the inside. Abuse of power breeds only more fearful, desperate individuals and more brittle, frightened states.
So yes: we face political problems, social problems, and economic problems. But beneath them all is a humanity problem. Until we face that, our solutions will be clever but shallow, energetic but empty.
Restoring confidence in democracy therefore begins with restoring hope in humanity. True humanity is universal: it does not stop at borders or break along religious, ethnic, or partisan lines. The fact that crises are erupting in so many places — Gaza, Ukraine, and far beyond — proves that the fantasy of being "prosperous and peaceful alone" is over. Hatred and greed do not need passports.
Yet our energy is finite. If we try to fix everything everywhere, we will meet only frustration. The work must begin where we actually live — within our communities and within ourselves.
Look inward before you project outward. Each day, examine your thoughts, your words, your actions: Will this choice bring hope to another person — and, just as importantly, will it make me a better soul today? Pay attention to your emotions; do not be ruled by them. Trust your sound instincts; do not mistake impulse for insight. The answer to how we live together is not distant — it is already seeded in each of us.
To look inward is not retreat; it is to reclaim the ordering of our lives:
Let compassion precede division;
morality precede ideology;
humanity precede politics;
and future precede history.
When we do, power returns to its proper place — as a servant of human dignity, not its master. If we can do this — if we can become stronger together as humans — authoritarianism will lose the nutrients on which it feeds: fear, hatred, and despair. A healthy democratic society does not merely resist tyranny; it starves it. And when democracy grows strong in character as well as in institutions, it sends a signal to those living under dictatorship: there is another way to live. A better life is possible without sacrificing human rights and human dignity.
The Umbrella Movement reminded the world that freedom's first work is interior: the decision, one person at a time, to stand upright. That decision is contagious. It builds communities of courage. It renews institutions from the roots up. It turns ballots into more than paper and laws into more than text.
So let us begin where we are. Let us rebuild trust where we live. Let us choose the habits that make freedom durable: truth over convenience, responsibility over resentment, courage over cynicism, and the human person over the lust for power.
Democracy fails when citizens lose moral agency; it renews when we practice it. If we do that — patiently, stubbornly, together — then democracy will not only survive. It will deserve to. And the hope we kindle here will be seen by those who are still waiting for dawn.