Abstract

With the events in Hong Kong in 2019 to 2020, it is clear that the “one-country-two-system” is no longer working as it should. Under the sovereignty of the largest remaining totalitarian state, this chapter will first argue that, apart from the undermining of freedom, rule of law and basic human right, the biggest danger of totalitarianism to Hong Kong is the jeopardizing or even destruction of the mutual trust in the civil society. It then moves on to show that totalitarianism, communism in particular, is a form of nihilism in the Nietzschean sense that “the highest value devalues itself, the question ‘why?’ finds no answer”, and will go through texts from Karl Marx and Sergey Nechaev to Hannah Arendt to illustrate this point. It will then analyse how this process of destruction is happening in Hong Kong in the form of what we may call, in Harvel’s term, “post-totalitarianism”. Finally, using Hegel’s theory, it will argue that the civil society can act as a bulwark against totalitarian state by championing arete as the common good.