I wrote an article recently about the Hong Kong Occupy demonstrations and the coverage they had received in the western media. I concluded my article: Whereas if tens of thousands of Hong Kong Occupy protestors had been out with their barricades on the streets of London, they would have been dispersed within days and many of them would now be in prison...

The British government could hardly wait to prove me right. Their own home-grown Occupy Protest was taking place in Parliament Square in London right at that very time, and it lasted precisely three days before the few hundred demonstrators were swept from the streets by the police. I looked in vain for any news of the events in my standard sources: the BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph. Nothing. Plenty about Hong Kong, nothing about London.

Eventually I found a report on the Independent Television network website. It transpired that fifteen of the demonstrators had been arrested over the three days that the protest had lasted, and that one hardy soul had fought it out to the last, climbing onto the statue of Winston Churchill and staying there, alone, for 24 hours until he too was hauled off. In the great British traditions of free speech and liberty he has been charged with criminal damage, public order offences, theft, and offences under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 – presumably this last charge involves possession of a statue with intent to use it for the purposes of sleeping.

I was given further cause to reflect on the issue of freedom of speech in the west by a completely different set of events that have unfolded in Britain over the past couple of weeks.

I have been reading the account of Deng Xiaoping’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, written by his daughter Deng Rong. It is a personal account of events, and because she was a child at the time, and because for much of the time she was held in confinement, Deng Rong was distanced from many of the worst physical atrocities that were carried out.

Even so, it was horrifying to read how, to punish him for his father’s ‘rightist tendencies’, her older brother Dong Pufang was imprisoned, tortured, and abused so badly by his classmates that he eventually tried to commit suicide by jumping from an upper floor window of the Physics Block at Peking University where he was being held prisoner. He failed in the attempt, broke his back, and has remained a paraplegic to this day.

Few westerners realise that the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution was not formed by time-served extremists in the Communist Party, workers, peasants, or soldiers, but by China’s students. They were the ones at the forefront of the ‘Red Guard’. Although relatively few in number they were loud of voice, and as is always the case with a mob, whoever holds the megaphone holds the whip hand.

Equally disturbing, on a different level, were Deng Rong’s unemotional accounts of the ‘denunciations’. Those which she witnessed were largely those of senior politicians who had fallen foul of the revolution. Elderly, battle-hardened veterans of the anti-Japanese War and the Civil War were forced to publicly debase and humble themselves before howling mobs of students who were not much more than children, struggling to invent imaginary crimes to which they could confess in order to appease their accusers.

It might seem odd if I say that what brought these historical events from 1960s China into such sharp focus concerned a rape case in Britain, so I should probably explain.