Hong Kong, and the rest of the world, can’t just go on protesting if the free market liberal order is to survive

If everyone resorts to protests to hold the rest of society to ransom, how is it possible to implement reforms or actually govern? Beyond anger, we need solutions to problems, from widening inequality to climate change and technological disruption

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Published: 7:00am, 6 Jul 2019Updated: 7:13am, 6 Jul 2019

The old order is broken. No less than Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared the neoliberal order “obsolete”. We now have to think the unthinkable: the US, the land of the free, no longer seems to welcome anyone, while the freest economy in the world, Hong Kong, is under siege following massive protests.

What is the new order? How do we deal with the myriad problems of inequality, climate change, technological disruption to jobs, deglobalisation and the fragmentation of society? If everyone resorts to protests to hold the rest of society to ransom, how is it possible to govern?

We can trace this tectonic shift to America’s disorderly abandonment of the order it helped construct over the past 70 years. In the past six months, Donald Trump, the Tweet Tiger in the White House, has threatened almost every US ally — Europe and Japan (threatening auto tariffs and renegotiating security arrangements), India (imposing new tariffs), Singapore and Malaysia (added to the currency watch list) and even Vietnam, which was called “almost the single worst abuser of everybody”.

With friends like that, who needs enemies? The irony is that the problem is worldwide. Rational thinking does not work in a world where irrationality and radical uncertainty has become the rule. At the heart of the issue is the loss of trust between the masses and the elites, which leads to disorder.

Most societies are hierarchical, with the masses essentially delegating governance to the elite in a social contract which demands that the few who govern take care of mass interests, especially of the weak and underprivileged.