Simon Leys, the late Belgian-Australian Sinologist, wrote in depth some years ago about how Chinese people carry the essence of their civilization in their minds and within their families. China is home to striking, important structures, including the Great Wall, but these edifices did not impose themselves on the culture in the way that the “cathedral-ethos” dominated Western civilization for centuries, Leys observed.

The British author Martin Jacques — best known for writing When China Rules the World — has aptly noted how China is “a civilization state”.  Leys and Jacques were not politically close on China, but they essentially agreed on this subject.

Jimmy Lai Chee-ying has just been sentenced to 20 years in prison after his very long trial on serious national security charges. I have thought about how Lai apparently views China and how those menacing perceptions have surely shaped his destiny.

In 2012, an intensely intimidating aspect of Lai’s persona became evident. In February that year, the BBC highlighted how Lai’s newspaper, Apple Daily, had published a vividly illustrated, full-page advertisement labeling Chinese mainland residents as “locusts” unfit to visit Hong Kong. This imagery was phenomenally polarizing. It looked and read like a morbid vision from one of Sax Rohmer’s popular, notoriously racist, Dr Fu Manchu novels from the early 20th century, highlighting the Chinese “yellow peril” threat faced by the Western world. Its maliciousness eclipsed the worst sort of race-based negative-advocacy (frequently directed against Chinese) propagated by white-localism advocates in Australia, for example.

This was an advertisement — not an Apple Daily editorial — but the paper did not hesitate to publish it. Why, though, would this paper offer itself as a willing partner in the promotion of this brazenly divisive ideology some 15 years after China resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997?

One clear reason suggested itself: This contemptible advertisement meshed remarkably well with that paper’s intensifying, hostile position on the Communist Party of China and Beijing’s and the SAR’s governance.

Yet, Lai was born of Chinese parents, in Guangzhou, in 1947, and he has remained a Chinese citizen to this day, while holding concurrent British citizenship.

Presumably, the intensity of his loathing of the CPC and the nation — and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region —is to some significant degree grounded in adverse childhood experiences, doing business in the mainland, and his own extended observations of life in the country.

Yet bearing all that in mind, a pivotal matter remains most puzzling.

One American commentator observed around 20 years ago that China had plainly “achieved escape velocity”.  Since then, China’s rise has continued to deliver an overall, unequaled, escalating positive experience. And it is beyond question that this conspicuous rise has been hugely beneficial for Hong Kong.

Around eight years ago, I wrote: “Between 1978 and 2018, total GDP in China rose around 45-fold from $218 billion to over $10 trillion.” According to the International Monetary Fund, China’s GDP is expected to exceed $20 trillion in 2026.  Meanwhile, China has lifted some 850 million people out of extreme poverty since 1981, according to the World Bank.  China alone accounted for 75 percent of the world's poverty reduction during  1981 to 2010.  In 2020, the Brookings Institution in the US predicted that China’s middle class would exceed 1  billion by 2027.

This astounding growth — the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history — has generated many positive consequences for China and the world. China has been the single largest contributor to world economic growth for a sustained, multidecade period. And it is still “contributing most to global growth”, according to Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum.

Finally, consider this measure: In 1993, the mainland economy was, in terms of basic GDP, less than four times the size of the Hong Kong economy, while today it is around 45 times larger.

Yet when we look at Lai’s unrelieved negative responses as this transformative uplift has gathered pace, it seems almost like these exceptionally constructive achievements have never happened or, at most, are considered to be of marginal importance.

Then there is the fact that Lai enjoyed considerable commercial success in China for a substantial period, until his persistent hostility made him unwelcome. His resulting substantial gains seem to have been taken for granted and banked — never mind making room for any gratitude.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this intense, enduring Sino-hostility is far more grounded in an acquired, uncompromising negative creed than in a measured assessment of a remarkable, shifting geopolitical reality. That creed, in turn, appears deeply wedded to an unbounded reverence for the centrality of the “end of history” version of Western human rights and democracy doctrines, never mind how selectively these doctrines are applied — and ignored, as needs be. Here we encounter a worldview that advocates an unbending, nonnegotiable, idealized version of “Western democracy” virtually regardless of operational realities.

The dangerously manic extremes of this perspective were confirmed in July 2019, when Lai was interviewed in Washington by Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The well-financed FDD is widely regarded as a pro-Israel institution. It also runs a program focused on China’s “threat” to US national security.

The interview took place just as the 2019 black-clad insurrection in Hong Kong was gathering terrible momentum. The FDD headlined the discussion: Protests, Crack Downs and the Future of Hong Kong. Toward the end of the interview, Lai stressed that he and his cohorts were “fighting your war in your enemy camp” prior to adding some staggeringly wicked advice on how to intimidate China: “You have the nuclear weapon. You can finish them all in a minute.”

Guided by one of the most prominent figures of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (“Trust only him who doubts”), I remain watchful, of course. However, over the last 20 years, I have found that my own substantive view of China has been reconfirmed, regularly, especially as one beholds how Western civilization, reacting above all to the rise of China, has increasingly reached back into its regularly barbaric, warlike past, as it re-molds its current profile.

From all I have read, I know that Lai would adamantly reject the appraisal of China that I have forged over several decades. Naturally, I think this is a great pity. What might he have achieved had he not been so monstrously drawn toward violently fevered opposition, almost for its own sake? Looking back, especially at the strife of 2019-20, I believe a significant and growing majority of people in Hong Kong share this view, some more quietly than others.

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.