India, July 10 -- The first response we should always make to the banning of authors by an authoritarian system is to read their works. As it happened, I was reading the latest book by the young Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong titled, Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now, when news emerged that his previous works were being seized from booksellers under the new security law imposed by Beijing.

If we want to understand the worldwide collision of ideas, which seems increasingly inevitable, events in Hong Kong are a good place to start. It is here that Western values of free speech, openness to ideas and belief in the rule of law have come into direct conflict with a fundamentally opposing idea: That unity a...