History shows that we are still living in a time of exceptional peace and prosperity – we mustn’t throw it away on war
- Despite the struggles of the pandemic, we can count ourselves lucky to live in a period of relative stability, unlike those alive during the Cultural Revolution or world wars
- The rising threat of war and hunger today is a fresh reminder that peace and prosperity should not be taken for granted
I have been spending the past couple of weeks feeling sorry for myself. Bored by our hermit existence. Stressed by the terrible economic impacts of the pandemic. Angry at the ineptitudes of Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s government. Jealous to see friends in other parts of the world resume normal life. Shocked by the years that have passed since I have been able to see my closest family and friends.
But is this self-pity really justified? Damaging though Lam’s policies have been to our economy and Hong Kong’s long-term future, we have no ruinous hardship to compare with Ukrainians in Mariupol, or families cowed by Taliban rule in Afghanistan, or famine-stricken Ethiopians.
As I have angrily reflected on the “lost years” since the middle of 2019, in particular for our schoolkids and their lost school and university years, I have been prompted to think about other “lost generations” – and how our current era of hardship compares. I recall three in particular.
First, China’s Cultural Revolution. This has particular resonance for me because I was born in 1950. If I had been born inside China, I would have been aspiring to head off to university just as Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution on the country. As a bookish, geeky teen, I would for sure have fallen victim to the Red Guards’ vicious self-criticism campaigns. I would probably have been rusticated down to the countryside for “education through labour”.
While schools began to reopen in 1970, China’s universities were not properly reopened until 1977 when China’s famously gruelling university entrance exams – the gaokao – were held for the first time in more than a decade, open not just to school-leavers but to that “lost generation” swept up in the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution years.
Would I have been among the 5.7 million people that sat the gaokao? More significant, would I have been among the 273,000 who passed? Or would I have remained stuck down in Gansu, grubbing a bare living as a peasant farmer? At the very least, there would have been a decade-long “black hole” filling what is perhaps the most formative decade in anyone’s life.
Our “suffering” over the past three years surely pales in significance compared with the suffering of that generation. The losses of those tens of millions were also China’s losses.
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Second, Europe’s World War I generation, who were reshaped both by miserable endurance of bloody trench warfare, and then by the 1918 Spanish flu which so resembles the trauma we are reliving today. My grandmother, born in 1896, was old enough to find a husband before war broke out, and lucky enough for him to be exempted from military conscription. My grandmother’s three younger sisters lived into lonely spinsterhood, with all potential husbands killed off in the trenches.
They were the first female generation to experience work on factory production lines – mainly munitions factories – and after the war ended, my great aunts supported themselves running small retail businesses. This dreadful period scarred and traumatised tens of millions of families across Europe. Again, the hardships we are living through today hardly seem to compare.
Third, the grim reality of the Great Depression years that followed into the 1930s, and leeched into World War II. This was the trauma of my parents’ generation, though my grandmother would say it was a continuation of her own childhood years. It is hard to imagine so many years of part-time school, air-raid sirens and the overflight of German bombers. Food rationing and other austerities continued into the 1950s that would have made those currently suffering lockdowns in Shanghai feel positively well-fed.
The lesson of these three protracted periods of widespread hardship – which surely have parallels in many other parts of the world over the past two centuries – must be that even after three terrible coronavirus-blighted years, we must still count ourselves as a lucky generation.
Those of us born since 1950 have largely experienced peace, and come to take continuously strong economic progress for granted. We have over the past 70 years come to expect steadily rising living standards, lives increasingly filled by material comfort, and miraculous scientific and technological progress that has extended the reach of life in even the world’s poorest countries.
These deeply depressing lockdown years are minor sufferings compared to many eras of hardship that have gone before. They are perhaps a reminder that our good fortune over the past seven decades is in historical terms more the exception than the rule.
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We are naive and complacent if we take this era of good fortune for granted, and lull ourselves into believing that it cannot unravel. And the hawks among us who are currently talking up the need for wars to settle our differences ought to examine close and hard the awful suffering of millions of innocent families in Ukraine. We have lived so long with peace that we have forgotten the deep and protracted harm that wars do.
So I am mistaken, and self-indulgent, to be feeling sorry for myself. I don’t feel guilty at the complaints I have thrown our governments whose gross mismanagement has made the past three years feel so tough. But I should remember that things could be much worse – and indeed have been in many parts of the world in quite recent history. We remain a lucky generation, and I pray we can keep it that way.
David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view
