Nearly 20 years after moving from China to the UK, I’m still not sure what freedom means

Those arriving in the UK in search of freedom will find it comes in conflicting forms, from uniting against an invasion to refusing to wear a medical mask
For a Chinese expat taught that national interest comes before personal want, such expressions are eye-opening, if sometimes confusing

Yue Parkinson

Published: 3:30am, 19 Oct 2022

Why you can trust SCMP

Recently, many new immigrants from Hong Kong have moved to my town. They say they come here to find freedom, and I understand and sympathise with that.

Freedom is something that I couldn’t understand before I came to the UK. It was just a word. The specific acts it seemed to refer to were speaking and demonstrating. Freedom of speech always sounded desirable, but freedom to demonstrate felt like something that would damage the social order.

During my 18 years in the UK, freedom has been the most difficult concept for me to understand, because it is so abstract. I know vaguely that Britain is free, but I don’t know how free it is.

Could any British person give a straightforward definition if asked to? My British family and friends had such a benign assessment of the world that they thought democracy and freedom were common sense, so naturally they didn’t know that I needed help understanding.

Freedom of speech is something I have gradually begun to practise; freedom to demonstrate I still feel resistance to, because I can’t yet feel as justified as those around me in asking the government to serve me and to protect my quality of life.

In China, I learnt that we had to share with society, to not be selfish and that national interests came first. To this day I still think society would be more harmonious if the British had a little more of this collective consciousness and less self-consciousness.

06:15

BN(O) passport holders flee Hong Kong for new life in the UK, fearing Beijing’s tightening control

But my body language has started to relax, a change first felt by my British family when I would laugh with them. There is a certain logic to British humour that I am beginning to understand.

Still, I suspect that Chinese people can tell that I am from mainland China because there are traces of Chinese society in my posture and facial expressions. Most British people do not convey panic, impatience, inferiority or contempt. Instead, expressions that combine modesty and self-respect fill the streets of Britain.

This attitude extends to many aspects of society. Britain is very liberal. In China, looking after one’s elderly parents is a strict matter of filial piety. In Britain, each family’s situation is different. Life paths are more free.

In the China of the last few decades, success is defined exclusively by money or status; everything else is looked down upon. The British are free to lead their lives as they wish, even if it means being lazy and staying at home on welfare (which again I think is too much freedom).

What is the purpose of life? The Chinese say it is to strive to get ahead, not to play with things, because time is money. As such, for many years it was hard for me to appreciate the popular British practice of holidaying – lying on the beach for a week, not moving, not sightseeing, not gaining new knowledge; it all seemed like a waste of life.

People sunbathe on the beach in Brighton, UK on May 31, 2020. Photo: AFP

Economic regulation is of course also liberal, and much more so since Margaret Thatcher’s leadership in the 1980s. Britain’s current prime minister, Liz Truss, has recently tried to invoke Thatcher’s liberal-conservative policies, but so far without success. This is because in addition to freedom, fairness and equality are also important. British freedom, it is becoming clear to me, is not absolute.

My real understanding of freedom came after the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. At that time, many British people were against wearing masks, which surprised me and my Chinese friends, who were unable to understand why Britain, a leader in medical technology, had a population that did not accept medical common sense.

It felt very similar, albeit at the other end of the spectrum, to the Chinese who believe that GDP is more important than fairness. Indeed, the terminology and concepts that are prevalent in each society appear to simply be separated by a time gap. I have always thought that the current social situation in China is similar to that of Victorian Britain, when the goal was to climb the social ladder.

When Britain went into lockdown, people demonstrated against it, which was confusing to me – was that freedom, or was that illegal? Moreover, the British government respected this freedom to demonstrate, rather than worrying that it would contribute to the spread of Covid-19.

I later gained some clarity on the matter: the demonstrations stemmed from a common fear that the government was abusing a public crisis to try to expand its power. This shocked me; I didn’t expect it at all.

In 2019, I experienced a society tormented by Brexit and unable to compromise. Yet earlier this year, after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the media and government united in swift and collective support for Ukraine. The reason was instantly clear: this was a reaction based on a common British understanding of freedom. I was shocked again.

Right now, economic sanctions against Russia – prompted by support for Ukraine’s freedom – have fuelled inflation and led to marches by industries demanding wage increases, another expression of freedom. And Truss’s liberal economic policies don’t seem to be working. It’s going to take me a bit longer to fully understand what freedom is.

Yue Parkinson is a freelancer writer and bilingual author of China and the West: Unravelling 100 Years of Misunderstanding, and China’s Ukraine Dilemma: The Shaping of a New World Order