Hong Kong in Revolt. Au Loong-Yu
of this movement that lasted for seven months. I am not a neutral observer. I participated in the movement, yelling slogans and joining in civil disobedience, as I did in the 2014 Umbrella Movement. But I have tried to understand the different groups and currents without regard for my own position, because only in this way can one grasp the real dynamics of a movement and ask the right questions about it.
With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan, and its spread to Hong Kong, the writing of this book became more difficult. I had to spend a great deal of time cleaning and stocking up on supplies. I had no idea that soon half of the world would be in the same predicament. With this outbreak, resentment against the Chinese government, or the Chinese, or both, has become stronger, and has quickly gone beyond the city’s limits. There is a similar logic behind both Beijing’s attack on Hong Kong’s autonomy and the regime’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. It first manifested itself in the regime’s contempt for the laws they themselves had made. In the first case it practically ignored the Basic Law of Hong Kong, in the second case the Wuhan authorities simply ignored the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases, which contributed to the spreading of the disease. Behind both important events one can identify the same logic of the Chinese bureaucracy, which combines in its hands state coercive power and the power of capital above all other classes, a bureaucracy which is simultaneously committed to industrialisation but also carries strong elements of premodern absolutism. It is a bureaucracy which learned a lot from its Western counterparts in terms of public administration, but it is also one which is permeated with the residues of a premodern political culture, the culture of imperial China. It was no accident that President Xi Jinping, in his report to the Nineteenth Party Congress, stressed ‘passing on our red genes’ in the great endeavour of making China’s military strong.
These features give the CCP an incredible amount of power, but this necessarily entails all the evils of bureaucracy (with Chinese characteristics): rampant corruption, arrogance, bureaucratic red tape, dysfunction, the formation of cliques, and factional in-fighting, all of which promote tendencies like plundering public wealth, institutionalising degeneration, unnecessarily creating enemies, magnifying problems instead of solving them, keeping officials overloaded with entirely useless work, and making subordinate officials act in counterproductive ways. Both the revolt and the pandemic were necessary products of this monolithic party-state. Both proved that while this half-premodern but all-powerful bureaucracy could industrialise the country at lightning speed it was also increasingly difficult for it to face the challenges of the modernisation that it had created, not to mention those of highly integrated global capitalism. A brief discussion of this topic allows us to see through this apparently monolithic machinery and identify its internal divisions and contradictions, its strengths and its weaknesses.
With this perspective in mind, the 2019 revolt is even more significant. Beijing has always been deeply frustrated by the fact that Hong Kong is the sole city within its rule that remains politically defiant. Whatever weaknesses the revolt displayed, it was nevertheless a great democratic movement of which common people were the heroes. Who taught these former gong zyu the value of democracy? It was none other than Beijing itself. With the pandemic, Beijing is also teaching its people the value of transparency and democracy as well. After the death of the doctor and whistleblower Li Wenliang, hundreds of thousands mourned him online and posted greetings to him. One Wuhan resident even dared to say the following:
I hope people understand that . . . what they need is a government which protects the ultimate interest of each and every citizen. This ultimate interest is not just about property, but also about lives! If I am fortunate enough to live, I will no longer be concerned with the bullshit about the great revival of our nation! Nor about the dogs’ fart of the Belt and Road [Initiative]! I won’t even care . . . if Taiwan is independent or unified! In this crisis I just wish I could have rice to eat and clothes to wear . . . I am above all an individual, a living person! Sorry, I can’t afford to love a government and a country which just allows me to rot in a moment of crisis!1
SUMMARY
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the revolt by first explaining the extradition bill, followed by summarising the events of 2019 by dividing them into four major stages, so as to understand their dynamics. It then goes further to explore the three main components of the movement and its diversity in terms of political inclination.
Chapter 2 tries to present the main ‘actors’ who either helped to provoke the outbreak of the revolt or who were actual players within the movement, and how they, each in their own way, contributed to the protests. Through available surveys and analysis this chapter also traces the rise of what I called the ‘1997 generation’, which constituted the backbone of the revolt.
Chapter 3 describes in more detail the most important protest or strike events, so that readers can have a glimpse of what happened on the ground, of what the protesters said and did, of how they sweated, bled, yelled, and fought.
Chapter 4 goes on to discuss the issues about the movement that I think are the most important. Some see it as a movement for freedom; others see it as right wing and racist, or as a movement of silly people manipulated by foreign imperialists. A lot of people, for instance, have found the waving of US flags and the posting of the ‘alt-right’ icon Pepe the Frog distasteful to say the least. But how did the protesters themselves, in their hundreds of thousands, interpret these aspects of the movement?
The final chapter sums up the themes of the previous chapters. Hong Kongers had been overly moderate for decades. They largely tacitly accepted their role as a goose that lays golden eggs, with no rights to universal suffrage, as long as London or Beijing treated them well by giving them free range, and not caging them. Yet a paranoid Beijing dragon so feared losing control of its goose that it began to harass it repeatedly, eventually leading it to resist. Where does Beijing’s fear come from? Why did it act this way? Why has Beijing, since 2012, felt the need to change its policy over Hong Kong? Studying how the CCP bureaucracy reacted to both the revolt and the outbreak of the pandemic in Wuhan not only gives us some clues to the above questions, it also exposes the weakness of this mighty party-state.
Lastly, a word about pin-yin. Readers are familiar with Putonghua pin-yin, but not Cantonese. Since this was and is a Hong Kongers’ revolt, all the slogans and language used are rendered in Cantonese. This book therefore carries a lot of Cantonese pin-yin as well. To differentiate the two, Putonghua is put within quotation marks, and Cantonese will be put in italics.
1 An Overview
PRELUDE – THE 2014 UMBRELLA MOVEMENT
One may say that the 2014 Umbrella Movement was a prelude to the 2019 revolt.1 Not only because the former preceded the latter, but also for the fact that most of the elements of the former would have their full expression in the latter. Having a rough picture of the former thus is essential for understanding the latter.
One Country, Two Capitalist Systems
Hong Kong was once described as China’s golden-egg-laying goose. When Deng Xiaoping met Margaret Thatcher in 1984 for the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which outlined the conditions of Hong Kong’s handover to China, he said that Hong Kong’s capitalist system would be preserved for fifty years because, with the help of Hong Kong, ‘China hoped to approach the economic level of advanced countries by the end of that time’.2
The Joint Declaration was first and foremost a trade-off between the two countries: in exchange for the UK giving up Hong Kong to China, the UK (and the West in general) insisted that Hong Kong would continue to be treated as a separate customs territory in relation to China, and that under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle Western economic interests in Hong Kong would also be fully protected.