Yahoo Finance Matthew Lau: Sunshine may follow 2023’s storms
“There’s an east wind coming all the same,” said Sherlock Holmes in His Last Bow, set in August 1914, “such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” It was a statement of hopeful optimism in the face of fast-approaching widespread suffering.
In 2022, too, the world saw its share of withering blasts. Putin’s horrific attack on Ukraine was one. China’s lunatic policies in the name of achieving zero-COVID were another. Hong Kong’s continued slide into authoritarianism, a third. These and other blasts are cold, bitter and often deadly, sometimes tremendously so. There is never certainty regarding what follows. But so long as the blast is met with sufficient resolve there is always the possibility of post-storm sunshine, and therefore some cause for optimism.
Putin and many others expected he would be able to claim victory within days of his assault on Ukraine. That was in February. The suffering and destruction caused by the attack have been immense, but Ukrainians have shown remarkable tenacity to deny Putin a quick victory, so that now at the close of the year the outcome of the war is still in question. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and “the spirit of Ukraine” were named by Time magazine as their Person of the Year – appropriately so. Thanks to Ukrainian leadership and spirit, sunshine after the storm remains a possibility, although the deciding factor will likely be the strength of the West’s determination to support Ukraine and hamper Putin.
China’s Xi Jinping has, with Putin, been a major source of withering blasts in 2022. But mass protests at the end of November against China’s severe zero-COVID policies — despite the Chinese Communist Party’s massive police state with its extensive surveillance and censorship — show there is appetite for a cleaner, better, stronger land. A deadly fire in Xinjiang in which quarantines prevented people from escaping a burning apartment helped ignite the protests, but the protestors, as Terry Glavin writes, have made clear they are fed up not only with cruel lockdowns and quarantine camps but also “with the regime’s zero-COVID pretext for insinuating itself into every aspect of the lives of ordinary people, for testing mass behaviour-control technologies, for persecuting minorities and enforcing compliance with the most absurd and cruel do-as-you’re-told orders.”
Hong Kong’s continued slide into authoritarianism has been another cold and bitter development of 2022. In a vote managed by Beijing, John Lee was made Hong Kong’s new chief executive, with 99 per cent of the votes cast by a 1,500-member election committee. “Self-awareness is not a trademark of Chinese propaganda,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized. “Even Russia and Belarus are more modest about victory margins as they conduct rigged elections.”
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Under former chief executive Carrie Lam, John Lee was Hong Kong’s security chief, overseeing Beijing’s crackdown on democracy and freedom of the press, which continues unabated. Jimmy Lai, 75-year-old entrepreneur and freedom advocate, who a year ago was sentenced to 13 months in jail for taking part in an annual vigil marking Beijing’s Tiananmen Square massacre, was this month sentenced to almost six additional years in jail on fabricated charges of business fraud related to his former newspaper business. The sentence was handed down while Lai awaits trial under China’s draconian “national security” law.
The verdict of the national security trial is already in, but a silver lining is that even from his prison cell — and likely facing the rest of his life in prison — Lai continues exposing Chinese political corruption, embarrassing the authoritarians and ensuring Chinese suppression of rights and freedoms in Hong Kong is well recorded. By refusing to lie and plead guilty in hopes of a lighter sentence, Lai has sent his persecutors scrambling. His trial, originally scheduled for earlier this month, has now been delayed until September as the Hong Kong government fights to deny him access to a British lawyer.
The cold and bitter winds that blasted 2022 will continue on into 2023, with new ones as well. Yet in each case there is reason to think there may be blue skies behind the dark clouds: resilient Ukrainians, courageous Chinese protestors, freedom fighters who stand on principle and refuse to lie. So long as there are people fighting for a cleaner, better, stronger land, there is a strong possibility of sunshine after the storms.
Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.
