I attended the fringe meeting titled “Is International Liberalism dying? Persuading the world that the future is liberal” in the Autumn conference. One panel member expressed a sentence like this: “The reason the Global South countries are not cooperative with the West is so-called Liberal Imperialism.”

Coming from one of Global South countries – China – 19 years ago, I knew different answers, which could be the more realistic ones, yet have rarely been noticed by the West. Thanks to Rachel Smith’s encouragement, I raised my hand up for the first time in this conference, and got the attention of host Christine Jardine MP, to ask: “I am a British Chinese. I took 18 years to learn what freedom is after I moved here in 2004. The West has taken freedom for granted, my question is – Do the South counties who don’t know much about freedom have rights to pursue global fairness? ”

There were a few of the audience who gave me applause, yet stopped immediately, because of no more echoes.  My question didn’t get well received from the panels, the one who answered my question said: “Your question is not what we are talking about.” Yet from what I have seen, her attitude was exactly the problem – Western have taken democracy and freedom for granted.

When I studied International Relations at the University of Bristol, there are two major theories – Realism and Liberalism. The latter is based on the principle of individual liberalism in our party,  and was the leading theory representing then global positive cooperation atmosphere, economic globalization. I didn’t know Lib Dems then and thought Brits were all liberals. I corrected myself this year as I finally realized Labour and Tory both borrowed the idea of liberalism from the Lib Dems. We are the true liberals.

I am a different liberal though. I remember the first year I was in the UK;  a few Brits asked me a question: ‘’Why doesn’t China have democracy?’’. The attitude was like ‘”how come you don’t have such a easy political system?”. I spent my first 30 years in China before I immigrated to the UK. I have always known how impossible it is to have freedom in China. Sometimes people asked: ‘’Why don’t your people fight?’’. I was speechless, at that time I was equipped with a 1.0 generation (1.0 G) of immigrants’ mindset (Mainland Chinese mindset, I set Brits’ mindset as 2.0 G), had never been educated about civil society, never known what human rights are truly about,  let alone known about campaign action, all of which took me about 20 years to learn, until today.

Is International Liberalism dying? NO. I have admired and believed in liberalism.  The point is that liberalism was developed in Europe, a Christian society, first due to the Renaissance, then through the  Enlightenment, liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill, ideas of human rights, etc. Democracy and freedom is really impossible to be copied without these fundamental factors. This can explain very well why it has been so hard to realise freedom in China. Since the last Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, China’s short moment of democracy didn’t last,  and it suffered from incessant fighting between warlords. It was then unified by Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), former Guomindang leader, and has been in the hand of CCP since 1949.

Confucianism, unification (of the nation) and one party dictatorship are the main characteristics. My 30 years of life in China and nearly 20 years in the UK have helped me to draw a conclusion – the conversations between the two counties are very much like Chicken-Duck talk (Chinese slang, means no way to understand each other). How can you expect a Duck’s world to look like a chicken world?

Is International Liberalism dying? No, but it is in danger already. Since Russian invaded Ukraine, the Global South countries have coincidentally chosen neutrality, which is tantamount to automatically taking the opposite side to the West. And China and India have already taken the opportunity to show their strengths to be the leaders of the South by taking advantage of the BRICS and G20 meetings, respectively. China’s strength lies in its status as the second-largest economy; and India’s advantage is the bridge between the West and the South.

Therefore, power and military, not world rules and human rights, could be the key point to decide the fate of liberalism in the future. Please don’t take liberalism for granted, otherwise we may be dragged into realism which has been the main reality, war, for our humankind.

I joined Liberal Democrat Women after this fringe meeting.

* Yue He Parkinson is an Executive member of North Somerset Libdems and a member of Chinese Libdems. She was a candidate for this year's local elections in North Somerset and is a columnist of FT Chinese and a freelance writer for South China Morning Post.