“Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech.” That's how Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old leaker who slammed National Security Agency surveillance as an "existential threat to democracy," described his decision to flee to China.

That remark has led to understandable bewilderment. Yes, Hong Kong and China are technically “one country, two systems.” But the reality, reminded James Fallows in the Atlantic, is that Hong Kong is part of China, “a country that by the libertarian standards Edward Snowden says he cares about is worse, not better, than the United States.” In the New Yorker, Evan Osnos compared going to Hong Kong out of devotion to free speech to going to Tibet out of a devotion to Buddhism: “The people love it, though they live under authorities who intervene when they choose.”

It’s true that if you want to feel secure that your freedom of speech will be protected by the government, then Hong Kong is not the place for you. But if you measure democratic liberties by the willingness of the population to fight for them, than at least for now, Hong Kong remains a rare and inspiring model.

To be clear, I am not here to defend or explain Snowden’s methods. Nor would I argue that Hong Kong was a smart destination, at least practically speaking, given its extradition treaty with the U.S. Hong Kong’s Regina Ip, a current legislator and former security secretary, described Snowden’s choice as “really being based on unfortunate ignorance.” But Hong Kong, for all its constraints, still illustrates what it means to be a democratic society. In other words, governments alone do not protect basic freedoms. People do. As Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch, a longtime Hong Kong aficionado, put it to me on Monday: “Hong Kong people took this ‘one country, two system’s’ model and animated it themselves. And they defend it on a daily basis.”

One of the most remarkable examples of this took place on July 1, 2003, when half a million of Hong Kong’s people took to the streets to protest Article 23, an internal security law that would establish long prison sentences for offenses like sedition or even the handling of documents seen as seditious by the government. The protests were also a criticism of then-Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, who many viewed as a mainland puppet. One poster had an image of Tung with a pie in his face.