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Title: Black Versus Yellow Author: ultra Date: 2015 Language: en Topics: Hong Kong, Umbrella Movement, Urban Revolt, urban riot, analysis, Occupy, occupations, nationalism, China Source: http://www.ultra-com.org/project/black-versus-yellow/ Notes: Best English article so far on Hong Kong's "Umbrella Revolution" and its background, limitations, and prospects from a Marxist perspective, based on first-hand research.
Thanks to all the friends in Hong Kong who provided first-hand
information and photos for this article.
Itinerant shoppers pose for selfies as the skyline of the finance
district across the bay bursts into a kaleidoscope of green and yellow
lights. Below them, the waters of Victoria Harbor stir quietly,
foreboding a typhoon. Despite the churning water, the nearby cruise ship
hardly seems to move. It is docked to the pier at Tsim Sha Tsui, its
gangplank descending into one of the most luxurious shopping malls in
East Asia, a convenience allowing wealthy visitors from all across the
world the ability to disembark from one climate-controlled environment
to another without ever leaving the safety of AC and well-trained
security. Once off the ship, they can spend money tax-free at the cityâs
most fashionable restaurants and retail outlets, eating Japanese BBQ and
then gliding over polished floors to browse retro British outfits at a
boutique marketing 20s-style colonial chic.
Outside on the dock, rain starts to splatter down on the selfie-takersâ
outstretched iPhones. A young girl sings old Cantonese pop songs, even
though everyone listens to K-pop now, accompanied by her boyfriendâs
out-of-tune guitar. People drop a few serrated Hong Kong coins into
their donation jar. The wind begins to pick up, washing away the
Cantonese tones as it sweeps static across the microphone. Behind her,
the cruise ship sits white and motionless.
This is the battle that is Hong Kong: Old Cantonese love songs hurled
into the growing wind of a typhoon, torn apart before they reach the
walls of lifeless Cruise ships and shopping malls looming under the
lights of the financial district. Here spectacle confronts stubborn
humanity in the archetypal âglobal city,â designed to allow capital to
filter through the port, banks and real estate markets to plunder the
Asian mainland without ever having to pass outside the safety of climate
control and security cordon.
For many years, Hong Kong was little more than a backwater colonial
leftover, with living standards hardly better than those seen in the
other hubs of European activity in Asia. After the mainland Chinese
Revolution, foreign support for industrial development and agrarian
reform poured into the city as a hedge against insurgency, but living
standards and welfare programs were not immediately forthcoming. The
colonial regime was still a brutal one, ruling over an unstable society
and struggling to accommodate an influx of immigrants. In the decades
following the mainland Revolution, spates of rioting were common.
marked the beginning of what would soon become repeated conflicts with
the British government. In the spring of 1966 another
began which culminated a year later with the
, the largest domestic disturbance in the city-stateâs history, which
saw massive strikes paired with city-wide street-fighting against
police, the bombing of government offices and targeted attacks against
right-wing media outlets. In the end, after 18 months of open rebellion,
millions of dollars of property had been destroyed, some five thousand
were arrested, two thousand convicted, and many communists deported to
the Chinese mainland.
Following the 1967 riots, the government began a massive expansion of
the welfare state, with the âColony Outline Planâ proposing to house
nearly a million people in new, cheap, state-built public apartment
complexes. The massive build-up in manufacturing seen since the 1950s
was finally paired with moderate wage increases, and Hong Kongâs
position as one of the early âAsian Tigerâ economies was secure. By the
1980s the city was an integral link to a newly-opened China, both
through its geographical proximity to Chinaâs first Special-Economic
Zone across the water in Shenzhen and because of its historical
connections to the Chinese mainland. It was in these decades that the
foundation was laid for the âglobal city,â often very literally:
, one of the richest men in the world, made his fortune in Hong Kong by
buying properties at bargain prices following the 1967 riots. Today,
those properties form the backbone of the city, and Li not only owns
major skyscrapers in the financial district, but also the port itself,
one of the busiest in the world.
It was this port and the financial structure surrounding it that allowed
Hong Kong to step out of its role as a manufacturer and into its role as
an administrative center for global capitalism in the 1980s. As
manufacturing shifted toward the port cities in Chinaâs mainland, Hong
Kong became an ideal location for the management of these new industrial
hubs and a key re-export node for the Asian mainland. Many of the new
Chinese factory zones were themselves piloted by capital from Hong Kong,
Singapore and Taiwan, as well as more far-flung members of the Chinese
diaspora. Asian foreign-direct investment in China today still exceeds
that of the US or Europeâoften in partnership with or on behalf of
Japanese capital.[1]
Today, the Hong Kong border with the mainland is a perfect image of this
divide. On the Shenzhen side, breakneck development sprawls up against
the riverside: faceless, half-empty apartment towers cluster together
under the haze of pollutants. On the Hong Kong side, greenery abuts the
river, the entire border region turned into a nature reserve and
agricultural zone guarded by the military, where one needs a special
license just to enter the forest. At first glance, the two worlds appear
to be antagonistic: the uncontrollable, environmentally devastating
growth of sprawling Shenzhen piling up against the idyllic greenery of
its âpost-industrialâ neighbor. In reality, this antagonism is a sign of
the deepest interdependence. Each side of the divide is co-constituted
by the other. Shenzhen wouldnât have been built without Hong Kong
capital. And Hong Kong would never have become a desert of shopping
malls, office towers and carefully crafted agrarian idylls without the
factories of Shenzhen.
[]
Hong Kongâs boom years were crafted by its own boom generationâlargely
the children of immigrants who had fled to the island first during the
Sino-Japanese war, and then during the civil war between Nationalist and
Communist armies in the later 1940s. As in US, Europe and, ironically,
mainland China, it was this baby boom generation which, though staffing
some of the revolts of the 1960s and early 1970s, was ultimately defined
by the defeat of these movements, with a significant fraction of the
generation turning against those engaged in these revolts in exchange
for a secure position within the restructured global economy. In Hong
Kong, this meant the construction of one of the worldâs most extensive
experiments in laissez faire capitalismâone still often lauded by
conservative commentators.
But this has also created a squeeze effect on those coming after the
baby boom generation. Raised on examples of
pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps billionaires like Li Ka-shing, by
parents who themselves made a killing in the unregulated industrial
slaughterhouse of Shenzhenâs heyday, many of Hong Kongâs younger people
are now faced with nothing but soulless service jobs and repeated
economic crises, first in 1997, then in 2007. Forced into cut-throat
competition for spots in top universities, even those students who
succeed in this system are then made to fight for life-crushing
corporate jobs where they will work for abysmally long hours and still
be spending an average of 40% of their income on housing.
Today, 8.5% of Hong Kong households have a yearly income of one million
dollars or above, and the city
one of the largest
in the world. At the same time, a massive housing shortage exists
alongside
and hundreds of thousands of empty apartments, purchased by the wealthy
as speculative investments. The city is one of the densest in the world
and housing prices are so high that many young people are forced to live
with their parents well into their thirties, while many of the poor are
out to public housing in ânew cities,â from which they have to commute
back into Mongkok or Wanchai to work. Others are forced to find unsafe,
painfully small slum units built on the tops of buildings and in the
interstices of alleywaysâwith more than 50,000 residents estimated to
.
[]
located in the âNew Territoriesâ far from the islandâs main urban core.
Details on this chart can be found at the original source, here.
In all, the countryâs gini coefficient, at .537, is one of the most
unequal in
, and upwards of 20% of the population lives
. Migrant laborers are routinely abused, collective bargaining is
illegal and the city had no minimum wage at all until 2010, when it was
set to a meager 28 HKD per hourânot even enough to ride the subway from
Mongkok to the airport. Meanwhile, wealthy foreign businessmen are paid
enough to afford premium flats in the mid-levels, a neighborhood
constructed in the colonial era to accommodate British functionaries
fleeing an
in the lowland
Even though Hong Kong is by no means in the same â
â as places like Greece, the over-worked, over-shopped, over-crowded
youth of the city seem to have much in common with the unemployed,
underpaid youth of an
. Faced with a foreclosed future, many youth have decided to simply
leave: emigration from Hong Kong is now
at the fastest rate since the mass-emigration of the pre-handover period
of the early 1990s.[2] Despite relatively low unemployment (four to five
percent) due to a still-ascendant East Asia, there are more subtle signs
of the crisis: demand for mental health services
in the past decade, it is commonplace now to hear people speaking about
the cultural âdeathâ of Hong Kong, and what used to be routine protests
against government
and
quickly snowball to increasingly uncontrollable proportions. The recent
student strike and (re)occupation of the Central district (and now
Admiralty, Mong Kok, Causeway Bay and several other key nodes in the
city) are only the latest in a series of such events.
Despite being located at a more privileged position in the division of
labor, the youth in Hong Kong are clearly participating in the same
global dynamic of revolt spearheaded by young people worldwide following
the financial crisis that began in 2007/2008. The people involved in
these events are, precisely, âultrasââthose members of our âgeneration
with no futureâ who have sensed the looming economic, environmental and
social doom all around them and chosen to fight back. Worldwide, there
are major differences in the origin and experience of those engaged in
these activities. Some are students, some are street kids, soccer
hooligans or service workers. Coming from such divergent backgrounds,
these revolts have been marked by what the communist theoretical
collective Endnotes
the âcomposition problem,â wherein âclass fractions that typically keep
their distance from each other were forced to recognize one another and
sometimes live together.â The problem embedded in this is the question
of how a movement might âcompose,â âcoordinateâ or âunifyâ âproletarian
factions, in the course of their struggleâ when faced with these
divergent experiences, especially as the social base of the movement
begins to grow. The result has been the production of movements that,
though broadly resonant with large segments of the population, are
ultimately inchoate on the ground.
Each of these revolts, whether in Egypt, Greece or
, has been profound in its potential but also crippled by this political
incoherence and practical inexperience. Some places, like Greece and
Spain, have a more cohesive left-wing political tradition that is now
being rediscovered and revived by young people. Other areas, however,
have seen sharp
, as far-right groups in places like the Ukraine and Thailand have
outmaneuvered others in their ability to defend, extend and coordinate
the movement, drawing more of this disaffected generation into their
ranks.
Hong Kong, unfortunately, sits closer in many respects to these latter
examples than the earlier ones. After 1967 the communist-leaning left
had lost much of its mass base and was ruthlessly dismantled by the
police. Meanwhile, the state began giving concessions to workers,
students and others in exchange for their participation in the project
of economic restructuring. Hong Kongâs own Cold War climate, relative to
China, persisted even after the opening of the Chinese economy to
foreign capital, further preventing the resuscitation of any sort of
substantial communist left in the city-state by forcing every nascent
radical grouplet to take a position on the âChina question.â Any
âviolenceâ in a protest is, to this day, invariably explained as the
work of CCP provocateurs from the mainland.
The result has been that Hong Kongâs so-called âleft,â has for decades
been dominated by a naĂŻve discourse of âdemocracyâ against mainland
âauthoritarianism.â Inspired by the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing
and terrified by the ruthlessness with which it was crushed, most of
Hong Kongâs radical students since 1989 accepted at face value the
mainstream media portrayal of Tiananmen as a student-led movement for
âdemocracy.â In Beijing, despite the widespread participation of
non-students, the formation of the Beijing Autonomous Workersâ
Federation, and the stateâs decision to charge worker-participants with
far higher crimes carrying much longer sentences than their student
counterparts, it was the students who were able to
of the movement and appeal to western liberal audiences with calls for
the liberalization of the political and economic system. This was the
distorted image of the movement transmitted to viewers in the US and
Europe, and its influence was only amplified in Hong Kong.
The first immediate effect was the formation of the âHong Kong Alliance
in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China,â which began to
bring together figures such as Szeto Wah, Martin Lee, and Lee Cheuk-yan,
all of whom were quickly attacked by the mainland government. Two years
later, in 1991, Hong Kong held its first direct elections, which saw a
landslide victory for the electoral alliance between the United
Democrats of Hong Kong and the liberal Meeting Point party, alongside an
amalgamation of smaller liberal-leaning parties. The 1991 election is
seen as the birth of the âPro-Democracyâ camp, which has splintered and
reunified several times in the twenty years since. Today, these
electoral parties, alongside a loose amalgamation of academics,
activists and NGOs, are broadly referred to as the âpan-democrats.â
A key component of the pan-democratsâ activist wing has been the
secondary-school organizations such as
, formed to protest the Chinese governmentâs âpolitical educationâ
curriculum, and the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS), which is
elected by the student unions the cityâs seven major universities.
Though these organizations technically have a very broad base, their
leadership is almost universally in line with the pan-democrats, and
they seek a legalistic and polite path to reform. Even while the student
organizations often force the more institutionalized wing of the
pan-democrats to take action in an uncertain situation, many of these
student groups still pride themselves on âHong Kong civility,â even
going so far as to condemn those who fight back when police attack
protesters. At each stage of recent political events in Hong Kong, HKFS
and groups like Scholarism have played both a leading and an ultimately
stifling role. From protests against
developments in the New Territories
to the brief
following this yearâs annual July 1st march, the student groups have
been integral to getting the protests off the ground, but almost
universally falter when faced with actual police repression.
This has created a situation where Hong Kongâs young protestors are
stretched between an ideologically weak but well-funded âpan democratâ
liberalism and its far-right variant, loosely grouped around the
, or âPeople Power,â party and its followers, called
, or âCivic Passion.â Though they officially have no position on
questions of immigration, Civic Passion has widely accepted far-right
Hong Kong nationalists into their organization and their yellow-shirted
membership can frequently be spotted at rallies telling immigrants
(particularly mainland Chinese) to leave.
[]
an anti-CCP banner behind.
Consistent with nationalist politics elsewhere, Civic Passion tends to
obscure class conflict with the language of national belonging. In terms
of political analysis, many are more similar to people like Ron Paul and
Alex Jones than to anything recognizably leftist. Rather than seeing the
true role of the international capitalist class in the looting of Hong
Kongâs future, they only see the role played by mainland capitalists in
this process. More dangerously, they then attribute a completely false
role to thousands of poorer mainlanders who have migrated to Hong Kong
(or simply visit as less wealthy tourists), portraying them as locusts
come to infest the city and drain it of all its resources.
is a widely accepted and very public form of racism in Hong Kong,
clearly visible on the surface of everyday life. In 2012, Apple Daily,
one of the few media outlets without direct or indirect censorship from
Beijing, ran a full-page ad that portrayed a
looming over Hong Kong, asking: âAre you willing for Hong Kong to spend
one million Hong Kong Dollars every eighteen minutes to raise the
children born to mainland parents?â Then, earlier this year, over 100
people joined an
, marching to Canton Roadâa site of many expensive jewelry shops favored
by wealthier mainland touristsâwith signs that said things like âgo back
to Chinaâ and âreclaim Hong Kong,â yelling abuse at any
mandarin-speaking bystanders. In moments of exacerbated social tension,
this everyday racism is a convenient pressure-release, structured such
that it both divides the protestors and prevents them from looking
across the border to find their natural allies in the rioting migrant
laborers of the Pearl River Delta.
[]
But, when disillusioned by the conservatism of the pan-democratic
alliance, groups like Peopleâs Power and Civic Passion are the first
visible alternatives, since they have been some of the few groups
willing to attempt more militant actions. In only a few years these
groups have seen a marked increase in popularity, as young people have
watched the pan-democratsâ vigils and party-pandering going nowhere. To
take the most frequently cited example: On June 4th, the mainstream
democratic parties hold an annual candlelight vigil to commemorate the
1989 Tiananmen Square movement. Civic Passion began a yearly alternative
rally, more militant but also interspersed with nationalist (what they
call âlocalistâ) and racist slogans. In 2013, their alternate rally only
brought together around 200 people, but by 2014, it had
. Attendance at the official vigil shrank by tens of thousands in the
same interval, though this main event still remained far larger.
In todayâs âUmbrella Revolution,â it may appear that anti-mainland
groups have again been sidelined. But past experience shows that, when
the pan-democrats begin to falter through their own inaction, only the
far-right has been capable of pushing for tactical advances capable of
winning over increasingly militant swaths of the youth. Politics in Hong
Kong has been running up against this wall for years now.
[]
i.e., mainland Chinese â pictured in Mong Kok prior to the newest
Occupation.
The current âOccupy Centralâ groupâtechnically âOccupy Central with Love
and Peaceââtends to obscure the existence of Hong Kongâs
. Like Occupy in the US, Hong Kongâs 2011 Occupation targeted a downtown
financial center, raising tents in the bottom level of the HSBC building
in the heart of the cityâs finance district. Though Occupy Central was
among the longest-lasting of any of the 2011 Occupations (starting in
October 2011 and ending around September 2012), it saw much smaller
numbers than elsewhere, with only hundreds participating at the height
of the movement. Nonetheless, it marked a new era of civil unrest in the
small city-state, and many of the participants in the original
Occupation went on to build the groundwork that made the current
movement possible, organizing against the New Territories developments
or helping to coordinate the student strike that ignited the âUmbrella
Movement.â
[]
But the original occupation, like many others, was also politically
chaotic. Alongside a nascent anarchist presence, the movement churned
together the usual mixture of conspiracy-theory types, short-sighted
activists and, of course, some liberals. In Hong Kong, these liberals
were of the pan-democratic variety, though their political perspective
is basically parallel to the shallow âget money out of politicsâ
critique hoisted by liberals involved in Occupy Wall Street. Despite the
divergence between these liberals and the original occupiersâa swath of
young professionals, students, the unemployed, and homeless peopleâit
was the older liberals who, following the eviction of the Occupation,
were able to use their media connections and international acclaim to
announce a plan for what was effectively a re-occupation, despite the
fact that hardly any of them had participated in Occupy Central itself.
A triad of talking headsâprofessor Benny Tai, professor Chan Kin-man and
the reverend Chu Yiu-mingâformulated and proposed a plan for a series of
collective deliberations that would culminate in a reform program to be
proposed to the legislative council, demanding a government elected by
popular vote. In Hong Kong, this is referred to as âuniversal suffrage,â
despite the fact that it excludes segments of the population such as
. If the reform plan was not accepted, the three leaders threatened mass
civil disobedience in Central, calling the new movement âOccupy Central
with Love and Peace,â to emphasize that it would be ânon-violentâ and
not go against the wishes of the majority of people of Hong Kong.
[]
But after the new Occupy Central group held an online vote (in which
only one tenth of the Hong Kong population ultimately participated),
anti-Occupy forces sponsored a city-wide petition and
signature-gathering campaign and public opinion polls found that there
was not majority support for the re-occupation. In response, Benny Tai
that the movement had âfailed,â fearing that an actual occupation would
drive more and more of the so-called âpragmaticâ citizens into an
outright rejection of the pan-democratsâ program. Around this time, it
was common to see ads broadcast on the public busses, in which everyone
from young Hong Kong hipsters to old business-owners explained that the
plan to occupy Central would shut down small businesses and ruin weekend
shopping. This fear that a protest movement might lose the support of
civil society is a constant anxiety in Hong Kong politics, effectively
forcing most movements to stifle themselves before they even begin, all
in the name of politeness.
The post-facto re-branding of Occupy also conveniently disguised the
more radical aspects of the original occupation with the new liberal
platform. Though the significance may not be apparent to outside
viewers, the original Occupation was one of the few spaces where some of
the members of the âgeneration with no futureâ were coming together and
collectively critiquing the whole of Hong Kong politics, pan-democrats
included and politeness be damned. Some of the core members of that
Occupation even distributed a lucid critique of liberal democracy,
effectively âslaughteringâ Hong Kongâs âsacred cowââsomething that would
have been completely unthinkable throughout much of the cityâs post-â89
history. And it was out of this milieu that more radical segments of
students and young people ultimately circumvented the quavering
âdeliberationsâ of Occupy Central with Love and Peace to initiate the
student strike, not only Occupying Central, but also Admiralty, Causeway
Bay and a large stretch of Mong Kok.
It wasnât the first time that younger people had come into conflict with
the old guard of pan-democrats. When tensions began to heighten in the
city after the ousting of the original Occupy in 2012, this newfound
antagonism began to percolate outward. In March of 2013, a massive
strike began among workers at the Kwai Tsing Container Terminal of the
port of Hong Kong, resulting in the largest, longest labor conflict that
the city had seen in decades. Though there was no immediate connection
between the original Occupy, the strike and the present protests, itâs
clear that each was generated by the same economic stagnation and
intensifying class antagonism. More importantly, each movement has
created a shift in peopleâs general political awareness, and this new
awareness has become the base of support for subsequent movements.
Though
independently by crane operators within the port, the strike was quickly
picked up by the Union of Hong Kong Dockers, which is affiliated with
the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and the Labour Party, all
led by the old guard of pan-democrats. With union representatives
spearheading negotaitions, the initial energies of the striking workers
were quickly diverted and the strike was prevented from spreading to a
majority of the workforce. The port, owned by Li Ka-shingâs flagship
company,
, is central to both the image and economy of Hong Kong. A true shutdown
would have resounded through the entire regionâs economy, drying up the
profit flows for many of the areaâs richest capitalists in both Hong
Kong and the mainland. Realizing that such a shutdown would mobilize the
mediaâand the wealthy people who compose âcivil societyââagainst the
workers, the union and labor party convinced the strikers to accept the
court injunction banning them from the port only days after the strike
began.
This meant that, instead of occupying the port itself, workers set up
tents on the sidewalk outside of it and erected a mostly symbolic
blockade in front of one of the portâs entryways. Media worldwide
reported on the âstrike,â but, behind the show, the port was running
only slightly slower than usual. Even at the height of the strike the
port was still operating at 80% capacity. Only a fraction of workers
within the port were members of the union, and, among the unionized
workers, those who argued for increased economic obstruction were
sidelined or ignored. Younger supporters attempted to make contact with
more workers, but were again sidelined by the old guard of liberals
staffing the unions.
Fearful that even the minor disruption caused by the roadside occupation
was too much for the palate of civil society (who were, after all, the
main contributors to the strike fund), the union soon dismantled the
camp altogether, setting up a second, much more meager encampment at the
foot of the downtown Cheung Kong Center, where Hutchinson Whampoa has
its headquarters. From then on, âstrikersâ were far removed from the
port itself, reduced to holding signs in front of a downtown building.
In the end, only a fraction of the demands were met, and most workers
.
When later asked how they felt about the strike, which many media
outlets portrayed as unprecedented, many of the older workers pointed
out that two earlier strikes had actually occurred at the port prior to
the 1997 handover, when the Labour Party was non-existent and most labor
unions were illegal. These older workers argued that the earlier strikes
were actually far more successful, since the workers had no union or
party representation pushing them to appeal first and foremost to the
tastes of civil society. They had therefore simply engaged in wildcat
strikes that crippled the actual functioning of the port and thereby won
them significant portions of their demands. By comparison, the most
recent strike was a dismal loss.[3]
comes from first-hand accounts by people we are in contact with on the
ground, who have been conducting interviews and inquiring into the state
of the different political factions involved. Some of the people we are
in contact with were involved in the initial student strike. Others have
only begun participating after the police crackdown. Because of the
first-hand quality of the information, these sections will frequently
provide information, including quotes from interviews, without a link or
citation.
The port strike is an important precedent for understanding the
âUmbrella Movement,â since todayâs occupiers will doubtlessly be faced
with the same dilemma. Just like the strikers, they risk becoming
deadlocked between appealing to civil society and deepening their
economic obstruction. Already, internal divides within the movement make
this apparent. Most of the younger protestors have completely rejected
the leadership of âOccupy Central with Love and Peaceâ group, lambasting
Chan Kin-man when he claimed that the blockades would end if Chief
Executive CY Leung stepped down. Meanwhile, these same young people have
parroted popular language about democracy, universal suffrage and
non-violenceâdemanding that no property be harmed and that people not
fight back even if the police attack.
[]
for democracy (but not literally)
This servile spirit of âpolitenessâ risks stranding the protestors in a
dead zone. In this dead zone, theyâll find themselves incapable of
escalating the economic disruption that gives power to the
movementâsince many see even damaging private property as uncivilâand
this inaction will make it easy enough for the government to starve out
or appease the protestors with more minor concessions, such as the
firing of the Chief Executive. Many, though aware of this conundrum, are
equally fearful that (rumor has it) gangster provocateurs[4] might
escalate the situation on orders from Beijing, creating a convenient
excuse for a military occupation of the island.
An interesting contradiction arises here. The latent nationalism of the
protests makes it so that the police, as âHong Kong people,â are seen as
allies and potentially future participants, while the intervention of
the militaryâeven if it used all the same tactics as the policeâwould be
universally rejected. This is because the military units themselves
would be composed of mainlanders under the direct order of Beijing,
rather than the secondary control of Beijingâs Hong Kong politicians.
For the protestors, this does not represent any sort of logical
contradiction. Many firmly hold to the position that it is
counterproductive to fight police or resist arrest, then, in the next
sentence, argue that people would be fully justified in using violent
tactics to resist the military.
A populist perspective prevents the recognition of any antagonism
internal to âthe people,â transposing the source of all conflict outward
onto external groups, whether defined by race, national origin or simply
immigration status. When such populism is predominant, riots, property
destruction and even âimpolitenessâ on the part of protestors will be
invariably written off as the work of âoutsidersââin this case, mainland
Chineseâat least until they generalize. But strikes have a much greater
propensity to break such a populist logic, since they immediately make
visible antagonisms internal to the given society.
[]
[]
characters, top center, referencing the âDemocracy Wallâ movement in
mainland China from 1979-1981.
[]
that the police cannot easily break through. One car has had its tires
removed in order to prevent it from being pushed away.
The current movement has only a few paths forward, and many routes to
defeat. The tactical stagnation of the protests could allow the
government to simply wait them out, as the protestorsâ own inaction
delegitimizes them in the eyes of more casual participants. There are
already complaints from people who have newly joined the protests that
the entire movement seems to be simply drifting, with no real force
leading it forward. At best, the revolt may fail by becoming a âsocial
movementââa sterile spectacle put on for civil society, where future NGO
leaders and politicians gestate before being unleashed upon the poor. At
worst, the people of Hong Kong might actually get the popular vote, in
which case theyâd be allowed an enormous amount of participation in a
system over which they have no control and in which all the same
problems of inflation, inequality and immiseration would continue
unabated.[5]
In this situation, however, there is also the risk that defeat might
come in the form of a resurgent rightwing. If the far-right is capable
of becoming the force that can torque the protests out of their
stagnation, then the movement as a whole will slide farther down the
path of nationalism. In the current â
,â the right-wing tends to be capable of magnetizing people to itself
regardless of whether the majority of people agree or disagree with the
racist politics of groups like Civic Passionâwhich went normcore early
on in the movement, abandoning its public presence in favor of an
âundercoverâ agitation, spreading flyers and speeches attacking the
inaction of the âleftist pricksâ[6] in charge, and only more recently
has become a visible presence, their yellow-shirted members defending
the barricades in Mong Kok (barricades built by anarchists, no less)
against attempts by âblue ribbonâ opponents (mostly older anti-Occupy
protestors) to dismantle them. This situation bears a miserable
similarity to the
, with the far-right acting as hatchet men for an alliance of more
West-leaning capitalists.
[]
being dismantled by other members of the occupation. This role has not
always been played by the right-wing, but acts like this reinforce their
public presence. Note that their yellow shirts say, in English:
âproletariat,â consistent with the general usurpation of leftist
terminology by far right or âthird positionistâ groups.
[]
us] to disperse Remember that we are [doing] civil disobedience, not
having a Party!!! What we want is TRUE UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE!!! No karaoke
No group photos We still havenât won No leaders No small-group
discussion [this refers to âdiscussion groupsâ organized by liberals]
But defeat is by no means inevitable here. Young people in Hong Kong,
like pretty much anywhere these days, are recognizing that their future
has been looted and are attempting, through whatever means they have
available, to both reach some understanding of how they have come to be
in this position and how they might fight back. In Hong Kong, China is
very much âthe future,â as the small city-state is integrated more and
more into its massive mainland neighbor.[7] This means that the sense of
a doomed future among youth translates into the intuition that China is
also the origin of that approaching doom.
There are plenty of young protestors who are frustrated with the
inactivity of the movement, but feel isolated and incapable of pushing
anything forward themselves. This is especially true at night, when more
of the angry and dedicated young people tend to come out, but there are
currently no means whereby these protestors are able to make contact
with one another and coordinate their activity. More importantly, even
these protestors tend to translate their discontent into the language of
âdemocracyâ and âuniversal suffrage,â and they fail to look across the
border to find allies among the factory workers of the Pearl River
Delta.
But despite the fact that the pan-democratsâ terminology is the lingua
franca of the movement, itâs clear that the movement itself is, for many
people, hardly about liberal âdemocracy.â In fact, most discussions of
what protestors actually want quickly jump into entirely different
terrain. When asked what their goals are, many will respond with the
parroted list of demandsâthis is incredibly consistent across social
strata and different age groups. But when pressed about why they want
these things, most protestors then immediately jump to economic, rather
than purely political, problems.
People bemoan skyrocketing rents, the inhuman levels of inequality,
inflation in the price of food and public transport, and the
governmentsâ tendency to simply ignore the vast swaths of people sitting
at the bottom of society. One speaker at an open mic made the commonâif
simply wrongâargument: âWhy is Hong Kong just a couple of rich people
and so many poor people?! Because we have no democracy!â Many claimâwith
abysmally poor awareness of how liberal democracies actually function in
places like Greece or the United Statesâthat once they are able to
âchooseâ their own leaders these leaders will be able to fix widespread
problems of inflation, poverty and financial speculation. Democracy has
thereby come to designate less the practical application of a popular
voting system and more a sort of elusive panacea, capable of somehow
curing all social ills.
[]
handover. In town visiting family, he is seen here having picture taken
in front of the barricades. Visible at his right is the word
âDemocracy.â
But both the populist and democratic illusions of the movement are
capable of being destabilized. As the occupation spreads to broader
segments of the population, new participants bring their own demands to
the barricades. Some of the original liberal students, including the
HKFS leadership, have become increasingly frustrated by this, and have
been plastering up signage encouraging people to stick to demands of
universal suffrage. Interviewees have expressed the fear that the
movement will get âconfusedâ and âwatered downâ by many of the new
protestors, who have come out to protest against the police attacks on
students more than they are protesting for electoral reform. But itâs
just as possible that the new demands may actually re-ignite the
movement itself, pushing it beyond the domain of mundane electoral
demands. Generally, when class strata far distant from those that
initiated the movement begin joining in, it signals a sort of phase
shift in what is going on and amplifies the movementâs power, rather
than watering it down.
[]
protestors stop demanding things beyond electoral reform
One particularly volatile potential is the increasing involvement of
workers. The relatively small Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions
has called for a general strike and, on October 1st (Chinaâs âNational
Dayâ), at least
began heading the call.[8] Several of the port workers who were involved
in the initial dock strike were also present early in the week, showing
their support for the protestors, though also claiming that another port
strike seemed âimpossible.â But as the occupation in the streets
continues to grow, particularly in areas with more residential housing
such as Mong Kok, it becomes more and more likely that other workers may
begin to join in.
The extension of the occupation into a general strike would have the
added effect of inherently destabilizing both the exclusively political
demands of the movement as well as questioning its populist
presumptions. If the port workers were to initiate a second strike, for
example, there would be no denying the role of Li Ka-shing and other
Hong Kong capitalists in the plundering of workersâ everyday lives and
the pillaging of young peoplesâ future. It would be simply impossible to
defer this conflict out onto mainlanders. The class antagonism internal
to Hong Kong would become increasingly undeniable, and the protests
could be forced off their path-of-least-resistance and toward a future
simultaneously more dangerous and hopeful.
Tsim Sha Tsui is now occupied, but the rumor is that the right-wing has
a strong presence. Barricades have been built outside the shopping mall
and crowds huddle under umbrellas, debating the future of the movement
under the looming shape of the cruise ship. The right-wing pretends that
the cruise ship is just full of mainland capitalists, while the
left-wing seems unable to speak. The girl singing Cantonese love songs
and her boyfriend playing off-tune guitar are gone now, maybe building a
barricade somewhere out of tourist kiosks and traffic signs. But the
singing is not so much simply absent as it is transformed, extending now
to the entire city in the shape of peopleâs hopes plastered onto emptied
buses and rain-splattered government buildings.
The typhoon has come, and the waters are shaking so violently that itâs
unclear how much longer the cruise ship can sit immobile above the city.
Its wealthy denizens, mainland and otherwise, sit quiet and invisible
behind the white walls and cordons of police. If the pier is occupied,
will the port come next? Despite the miserable servility of Hong Kong
politeness, the short-sighted demands and the bitter populism of the
movement, it is at least clear that, after this, Hong Kong will not be
the same. There is no longer the possibility of preserving the status
quoâand this fact, if anything, ensures that there is a potential to the
movement, even if it is defeated.
The typhoon is by nature a chaotic creature, and, after the island is
flooded, it may seem to leave things even worse than they were before.
But that chaos also holds a certain promise. The breaking of the status
quo cuts a glimmer of possibility in a horizon that had appeared before
as nothing but sheer doom. There is an opening. Maybe people begin to
learn how to navigate toward it, despite the rain. And, even if it keeps
raining for years to come, people have umbrellas.
âan American ultra and some anonymous friends
[1] For a more detailed history of Chinaâs economic opening and the role
of East Asian capital in the late 20th century, see Giovanni Arrighiâs
article, âChinaâs Market Economy in the Long Run,â in China and the
Transformation of Global Capitalism, edited by Ho-fung Hung. Johnâs
Hopkins University Press, 2009. p.22.
[2] It has to be noted here that out-migration today is still far lower
than out-migration in the early 1990s, when as many as 60,000 were
leaving every year.
[3] This information comes from interviews with several people in Hong
Kongâs post-Occupy milieu who were present on the first few days of the
strike and organized alongside workers throughout.
[4] In Hong Kong, many of the organized gangs are now âpatriotic,â
working with the Hong Kong government and serving the interests of
Beijing. This is not universally true, however, and the rumors of
Beijing-backed gangster provocateurs have run up against reports of Mong
Kok gangs working with the protestors to build up the barricades.
[5] There may well be something to the claim that a future Hong Kong
democracy would create a political space where class antagonism could be
galvanized in a way that ultimately goes well beyond the bounds of
reformist politicsâthis is essentially the argument (as far as we can
gather) of some groups like Left 21. Nonetheless, this is a disingenuous
position, basically attempting to continue the delusion a little longer
and defer the recognition of antagonism indefinitely. Usually deferring
action to the âright timeâ is simply a method of rejecting action
altogether.
[6] Literally âć·Šè ,â âleft penisesâ in Cantonese, referring to the
pan-democratic leadership more than the (largely invisible) leftist
grouplets. è is a word that literally means plastic but is also used to
mean dick, due to the similarity between the sounds of è and éł©, a more
common euphemism for penis (though it literally means turtledove). The
insult of âleftist prickâ has in the past day or two gained broad
purchase in the movement, and can be heard repeated every major
occupation in the city. Even leftists have begun using it as a good,
short-hand insult for the pan-democrats. Thereâs nothing inherently bad
in the use of the termâdespite some soft-stomached leftistsâ inevitable
butthurtâthe problem is more that it is the far right that has put
itself in the position to coin and popularize slogans that are being
picked up by the entirety of the movement. When these slogans (or
aesthetics, or tactics, or whatever) generalize, it puts the right-wing
in a de facto leadership position.
[7] Since the 1997 Handover of the island from British Colonial Mandate
to the Chinese government happened to occur at the same time as the
Asian Financial Crisis, China is also irrationally associated with the
era of economic stagnation that this crisis initiated for Hong Kong.
[8] Itâs ambiguous, however, whether claims of â10,000 striking workersâ
have any connection to reality, since National Day is also a national
holiday on which many workers are not required to come to work in the
first place. Many, given the holiday, simply came to the occupations
instead, since they had the day off. By no means were these people
âstriking.â