JP from ⁠Lausan Collective⁠ on how Hong Kong’s protests can offer an alternative to the “point-scoring self image-oriented practice” that is so common in the West. March 2020.

Lausan proposes numerous fascinating analyses of Hong Kong’s ongoing situation.

There you’ll find such articles as:

• When a disease is racialized by Edward Hon-Sing Wong
• This is not ‘restoration’ by Tony
• Revolutionizing our times by Gay礎建設
• The perils of imperial alignment by Listen Chen
• Three reports from female inmates at Hong Kong’s prison mask factory by Shiu Ka-chun
• I went to eat at three ‘Hongkongers Only’ restaurants by Crystal
• Redefining mental health amid collective trauma by WY
• Hong Kong political strikes: a brief history by Leung Po-lung
• Neither close nor far away: on solidarity from afar by Nikki Lam
• How real estate hegemony looms behind Hong Kong’s unrest by Brian Ng

They’ve also hosted webinars, such as “Uniting Beyond Borders” with Au Loong-Yu, JS Tan, Shan Windscript and Ailing, among others.

In our conversation, JP and I spoke about the meaning behind the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. What are they about? What are some of their achievements? Some of their weaknesses? Are the recent pro-democracy gains in the elections significant? What is the significance of time in the Hong Kong protests? How has the Coronavirus epidemic contributed to rising xenophobia towards mainland Chinese people? What are some differences and similarities between the protests in Hong Kong and those in Lebanon?

Here are more links related to our topic of conversation:

• What the Hong Kong protests can teach the world about enduring social movements by Mary Hui
• Event: Non-Sovereign Revolutions? Thinking Across Puerto Rico & Hong Kong
• Three Months of Insurrection: An Anarchist Collective in Hong Kong Appraises the Achievements and Limits of the Revolt – Español – Français – Ελληνικά – Italiano – 日本語
• Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill – Deutsch – Español – Français – Ελληνικά – Italiano
• Living in Dark Mode: I look at Hong Kong and wonder whether this is what the end of the world feels like by Karen Cheung – 阅读简体中文版 閱讀繁體中文版
• Make or break: a progressive assessment of Hong Kong’s movement by Yehua
• Hong Kong protests: Imagining the end of the police by Jun Pang
• Hong Kong’s Minorities Face Racism From Police and Protesters by Jessie Lau
• Domestic workers search for rights amid pro-democracy protests by Betsy Joles and Jaime Chu
• ‘Stand with Yuli’ rally: Deported journalist recounts detention by 惟工新聞 Worker News
• Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China
• Epidemic panic and the ecosystem of public speech by Minnie Li 黎明
• The Date Hong Kong Protesters Can’t Escape by Laura Mannering
• Hong Kong’s Sickness by Hon Lai-Chu
• Letter to a Future Daughter on the Occasion of the “Fishball Revolution” by Lo Mei Wa
• New York state to produce hand sanitizer using prison labor by Kenya Evelyn
• Hong Kong medical workers strike to demand total border closure by Violet Law
• Sex workers discuss ‘Restore Tuen Mun’: Hong Kong’s sex workers are a key part of the struggle against police violence.
• More Hong Kongers must speak out for migrants’ rights by Wuliff

Further recommended readings, via Lausan

• “Unsettling Sovereignty,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2017) by Yarimar Bonilla
• “Puerto Rican Politics Will Never Be the Same,” Jacobin (2019), Interview with Yarimar Bonilla
• “This is not restoration,” Lausan, originally published in The Owl (2019) by Tony
• “Hong Kong’s Fight for Life,” Dissent Magazine (2019) by Wilfred Chan

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Transcript prepared by Lizartistry and Antidote Zine:

Hong Kong is a powerful example because it shows the power of a public when it’s truly backed into a corner with no other viable alternative than to organize in the shadows and organize anonymously.

JP: I’m JP. I’m a member of Lausan, which is a collective of writers, researchers, activists, and artists from Hong Kong and its diasporas. We’re interested in sharing decolonial and left perspectives on Hong Kong. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I’m excited to discuss the Hong Kong protests and all the issues related to it here.

Elia J. Ayoub: Can we start with contextualization of the ongoing protests? What makes these different from previous ones? Hong Kong has seen a few in the past; were there any signs in the first weeks or months that indicated this time was different? 

And what are some of the things that you think are being missed on the international scene? What’s missing in the international conversation when it comes to Hong Kong?

JP: The protest movement started in June—or more technically in March, but large scale protests broke out in June of 2019 in Hong Kong against the extradition bill that would allow anyone living in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China, which has a notoriously corrupt criminal justice system. As the police and state repression of those protests escalated, the protest movement evolved into a broader movement for self-determination, democracy, and autonomy.

When you look at it from that narrow perspective—that is, from the vantage point of 2019—it’s easy to miss that the demands of the protest are not super different from the demands of previous protest movements, such as the Umbrella Movement in 2014, because the demand for universal suffrage and democracy is basically the same. More broadly, the ongoing protests, which have now taken a bit of a backseat because of the coronavirus (but over the weekend broke out again, resulting in a lot of arrests), are all rooted in the longer term struggle against the perceived erosion of the autonomy of Hong Kong on legal, political, economic, and social fronts.

The character of the protest movement is quite different this time around, in that the strategies and tactics look quite different than 2014. In 2014, we saw the large-scale occupation, for about three months, of the city’s central arterial areas. This time around, we’ve seen a lot more diversification of tactics. There’s street protests; widespread mobilization in different industries and professions; an outpouring of creative art, music, and song; and people working in different mediums to make their voices heard, more international outreach, and attempts to frame the international conversation and coverage about Hong Kong.

Also, internally, there’s a sense of unprecedented unity and solidarity. In the years after the Umbrella Movement in 2014, there was a lot of rancor and discord between different factions of the broadly anti-establishment side. People disagreed about tactics: some people wanted more peaceful disobedience-type tactics; others believed in more militant action, and some went to jail for it. People also disagreed previously on whether the way out was independence or reform within the current system; people disagreed about what should be the priority in terms of securing electoral wins or building from the ground up—lots of disagreements and deep feelings of disappointment, sadness, and grief that the Umbrella Movement hadn’t managed to win any concessions from the government and resulted in the arrests and censorship of many. 

All of that has conditioned a response in this movement to be focused on building solidarity within ourselves in opposition to what we see as a larger threat. But we can talk about this and the potential limitations, because it’s also resulted in a particular attitude toward organizing that is not super inclusive and also is not very tolerant of disagreements that challenge the structure of the movement and its decisionmaking.

EA: The movement in Hong Kong is being described as “leaderless.“How accurate is that? Can I get your thoughts on whether this has been efficient so far, or whether there have been discussions (whether on the ground or in the diaspora online) over how the tactics can be bettered, how protesters can see these these demands realized?

JP: The leaderlessness of the Hong Kong protest movement currently has to be situated in the longer history of mobilization. The last five years since the 2014 Occupy Central movement has seen widespread arrests and harsh sentencing of people convicted of having staged riots: all the leaders of the movement in 2014 (and different protests for land rights, and advocates of independence) were sentenced to long prison sentences for engaging in protest. So first and foremost the leaderlessness was a response to this, because of Hong Kongers’ deep awareness of the vulnerability that the state can exploit when there are clear and defined targets and leaders who they can clamp down on and thereby extinguish the momentum of protests.

With this in mind, the original idea of having “no big stage” (which is our word for no big leader or no centralized organization coordinating the protests) is to distribute the risk and vulnerability wider. It also informs how many of us organize anonymously online without any knowledge of each others’ professions, names, personal details—because at the end of the day we know the state will eventually (and is already starting to) act and enact repercussions for people’s political resistance.

On a different level, apart from this negative reaction to the previous protests, leaderlessness is, at least for me and some other people I’ve spoken to, a way of creating a non-hierarchical and truly democratic system of organizing that’s founded on a concept of mutual aid and mutual solidarity. In order for a leaderless movement to be successful, there has to be trust and good faith that people have in one another: to trust they will have the same principles and targets, but also that they will not sell you out. 

This is the second big aspect of the protests: not only leaderlessness, but also this idea of unity. We have this slogan or principle of the movement that’s translated to something like “no severing ties, no condemning.” The literal translation means “no cutting the mat” but that basically means “no criticism.” That’s because we know that infighting and internal discord have such an impact on the effective, strategic, and material unfolding of any protest movement. 

So on the basis of good faith and trusting one another, and believing that no matter what strategy we employ—whether that’s people’s decision to make art or music, or fundraise for medical and legal support, or militant clashes on the street with the police—we’re all united by the same goal, so we don’t need a single leader to tell us how to achieve that goal.

Hong Kong is a powerful example because it shows the power of a public when it’s truly backed into a corner with no other viable alternative than to organize in the shadows and organize anonymously. On the other hand, it’s a real refreshing corrective to the individualistic, neoliberal transformation of activism into a point-scoring self-image-oriented practice that is so often seen in European, American, and general Western movements. It’s definitely explicitly organized against a cult of personality, and that’s what’s given it such longevity. People tap in and out, but there’s a general momentum to continue.

EA: While you were talking, I was thinking of the case in Lebanon, because we had fairly sizeable protests in 2015. Back then, the fundamental flaw, which is generally agreed upon now in retrospect, is that it was way too centralized. It was not just centralized in Beirut, which is problematic in itself, but it was centralized in the sense that it was organized by a handful of individuals (I was part of the organizing committee in the early weeks, even though my role wasn’t particularly important). It was one of those flaws that when the October 2019 protests hit, it was almost as if we instinctively understood that this should not happen anymore. 

Anytime since then that we’ve had attempts, either by the government to appoint representatives of the movement or the media for sensational reasons to also decide that this or that person is a leader in the movement, we’ve always had lots of protesters rejecting that. And so far, it hasn’t stuck; there’s no “leader” of the movement. It doesn’t mean anything to say there is any leader in the movement—which is definitely a plus. There is an explicit instinct against this tendency, which I find very interesting; it speaks to why the protests in Hong Kong have definitely inspired many of us elsewhere.

I had a question related to that. In the November elections, we saw an unprecedented rise in the “pro-democracy” camp’s victories in those elections. Can you talk a bit about that? Explain why that matters. Why is it something we should be paying attention to, or not?

JP: The media attention on the 2019 Hong Kong district council elections was quite over-optimistic and exaggerated. That extends from a basic lack of understanding of the Hong Kong political system. Because even though the elections saw an unprecedented contesting of all the constituencies (of which there are 452), and the pro-democracy camp broadly won an incredible majority, and there was also an unprecedented turnout, at the end of the day the district councils don’t have much power. 

The councilors sit on committees where they discuss the livelihood issues of Hong Kongers, but there’s no real power to create policy. It’s mostly the implementation of existing policies that are devised for them by the legislative council—which is a different council, and whose elections are happening this year (likely in September if there’s no delay).

In one respect the district elections were important, because they were a litmus test for the strength of the pro-democracy protest movement majority. One of the arguments of the pro-establishment camp was that there was an amorphous “silent majority” that secretly did not support the protests at all and wanted them to end—but this result laid to rest this idea and showed that it’s not just young people, not just protesters, not just particular groups of people in society who support the protest movement, but a massive majority.

At the same time, Hong Kongers themselves know it’s a limited victory within a flawed system. If any election is important, it’s going to be the legislative council elections this year, because if the elections return a pro-democracy majority, then they will have the power to veto repressive laws. And there are many laws in the works, like the dreaded National Security Law Article 23 that triggered mass protests in 2003—there’s fears it may be reintroduced because of the protests, and a pro-democracy majority will be able to counter that. Also, big infrastructural projects like the plan to build a new island and reclaim the land, which is terrible for the environment but also completely unfeasible and economically detrimental to the city. 

But at the same time, even if a pro-democracy majority is returned by a series of elections, it can be easily negated, which is what happened in 2016, in the last series of elections. The government disqualified six lawmakers on the basis of a made-up technicality and then reduced the pro-decmoracy camp’s majority so that it didn’t exist anymore—and then it was able to push through this extradition bill. 

Elections in general are a very limited sphere of mobilization for Hong Kongers, because we recognize that the system in which we exist is already so flawed and structurally problematic. This is not even to mention “functional constituencies,” where particular professions like financial industries have a greater proportion of say: members of the financial services industry have a greater say over who gets to represent them and how many representatives they have in the functional constituency system than, say, teachers. 

That aside, the electoral system is fundamentally flawed. It’s easy for the Western media, and for media in general, to latch onto so-called “successes” in electoral politics as a sign of a success, but I think Hong Kongers are a lot more cynical than that.

Contingent solidarity is not really solidarity at all. We have to be better at mobilizing against the heart of what causes the suffering people experience, whether that’s extrajudicial attacks or suppression of freedom of assembly and association, and look at the source, which is state violence.

EA: You mentioned in the beginning that the coronavirus epidemic has reduced numbers, at least temporarily. Besides the inevitable panic that we’ve been seeing among people, which is a global thing, it’s been manifesting itself at least in some case in Hong Kong with this anti-mainland Chinese xenophobia. How are activists—anti-authoritarians and others—trying to navigate this problem and tackle it?

JP: This has been a difficult conversation, in my personal experience, because it’s entangled with so many threads of discussion. There’s the legitimate public health concerns, and the efficacy of containment and quarantine measures that we don’t know except by counter-factual argument—and of course racialized health discourses. 

On the other hand, there’s legitimate trauma from SARS in 2003, and the trauma of Hong Kongers being abandoned by their government, given that the government has failed to provide adequate medical supplies to the people and adequate information about what’s going on, refusing to listen to Hong Kong medics’ concerns in a legitimate way. 

In my own example, my family lost someone in SARS in 2003 and I’ve been trying to mail them supplies from abroad because there’s a shortage of everything, from toilet paper to surgical masks to antiseptic alcohol sanitizer, because there’s no government supply. People have had to resort to international donations and sourcing to rectify something that, in a city with an incredible financial reserve and connections to the world, should not be a problem. People shouldn’t be scrounging for regular medical supplies.

The coronavirus epidemic has been an important litmus test for what some have called the “dark side” of the protest movement—like you were saying, anti-mainland Chinese xenophobia. Anti-authoritarians and leftists and principled supporters of the movement (and also a genuine “revolution of our times” in Hong Kong) can locate our pain in trauma not in the people who suffer under governments, but the governments and apparatuses of state violence themselves. The worst part of this discourse about coronavirus—internationally and in Hong Kong—has led some shops to exclude people who speak Mandarin Chinese, or activists perpetuating anti-mainlander xenophobic comments.

The effect of all of this is to obscure the real and painful suffering of those in the worst-effected places, for example Wuhan, where people are on total lockdown, have no access to services, and are trapped in their homes and subject to the whims of an un-transparent government that also has been failing its people. It’s not the people in Wuhan’s fault that the coronavirus developed in Wuhan and that the Chinese government failed to enact policies to contain it properly.

Also, the general lack of sympathy for mainland Chinese people who are suffering the brunt of the effects of coronavirus—a friend was talking to me about how in conditions of natural disasters in mainland China, Hong Kong people used to donate millions of dollars because at the end of the day it’s a humanitarian situation. But this time around, there’s very little of that, and very little sympathy or solidarity with people on the mainland who are resisting the Chinese state’s lack of transparency. 

After the death of the doctor who was the whistleblower on the disease, Dr. Li Wenliang, there was an ongoing period of resistance—people organizing vigils all around the world to commemorate his death and to issue more demands, including freedom of speech and expression and increasing medical supplies to medics.

All of this is obscured by the racialized discourse on public health that necessarily exists with the trauma but then ignores and obscures the pain and suffering. This is how I’ve been trying to think about it: to locate the trauma and try to find the root of the trauma, which is ultimately state violence. It’s a quite good example of the general approach we use in Lausan, and it would be a good thing for leftists in general, and anarchists, and people who genuinely support anti-authoritarian politics, to be like, Look, what is the root of our current social, political, economic injustice? 

It’s not each other, but it’s the state. It’s the structures that the state uses to divide and rule. It’s the impacts of colonialism and imperialism that created structures of racism, economic injustice, and exploitation that are the root of why people are getting hurt. The core of all of this is to remind ourselves that we have to start our analysis where the hurt begins and then try to unpack the structures that create that hurt.

That’s why we at Lausan have been trying to translate lots of pieces around the coronavirus that look into different perspectives of how the outbreak is hurting people—whether that’s female prisoners who are being forced to work overtime to produce surgical masks for who-knows-who in Hong Kong, or people whose legitimate criticism of xenophobia as a result of the coronavirus outbreak are being suppressed because of this allowance of xenophobic discourses to be aired out as a result of trauma, because trauma is taken to be an excuse rather than an explanation that ultimately can’t exonerate those points of view.

All this to say: it’s a difficult conversation, but it’s important to remember that it’s not down to individuals to rectify. The ultimate effect of this nation-state, and its paranoid authoritarianisms, which deregulates capital but allows for (and justifies and legitimates) the suffering of others for the benefit of the rich and powerful—and that includes containing people in a particular area—is ultimately the suppression of people. And we have to act against the suppression of people wherever that stands.

EA: For some reason that brought me back again to Lebanon. The recent cases—there’s three or four confirmed ones in Lebanon so far—have all come from Iran. And not necessarily from Iranians; it could be Lebanese who went to Iran and came back. But because of the specific positionality of the Iranian state—which for many Lebanese is viewed as a promoter of sectarianism and imperialism in Syria, Iraq, and in Lebanon as well—this has translated itself into anti-Iranian xenophobia.

I see this intersecting with generalized fear. The panic usually starts when people realize it’s not the fact that they’re coming from Iran, it’s the fact that they’re coming from Iran and there’s no one at the airport checking them. Having basic health checks is supposed to be required to prevent the spread of something like the coronavirus. Instead of anger toward the Lebanese state in this case, which is supposedly responsible for the airport, it gets translated sometimes into anti-Iranian xenophobia. 

It’s not new. It’s preceded by the still-continuing anti-Syrian and anti-Palestinian xenophobia and racism. Some evoke the civil war days to accuse Palestinians of all being armed militants, or to accuse Syrians of all being secretly part of the Syrian state, which was an occupier in Lebanon. It gets muddled. The irony, or the tragedy, is that the vast majority of Syrian refugees in Lebanon are refugees fleeing the Syrian state—the same state that previously occupied Lebanon; the son of the same person. The tragedy is that instead of building links with these people who are right now physically in Lebanon (most of whom have been there for several years now; we speak the same language), the potential has been squandered.

One of the points of comparison I’ve been seeing between the two movements—of course there are always lots of differences and you need context, but one point of comparison (I also read this critique on Lausan) is that a failure or limitation so far by protestors in Hong Kong, as indeed is the case in Lebanon for that matter, is to include groups like migrants and refugees in their respective movements. In Lebanon it has led some migrants and refugees to feel alienated from the movement. 

I co-wrote an article with a Syrian friend—a comrade, a fellow protester—who in the early weeks was protesting and then at some point stopped, because she felt that the attention on her was too much. She couldn’t be too “visibly” Syrian, if you see what I mean: she couldn’t speak Arabic because then you might know from the accent that she’s from Syria and not from Lebanon; she becomes hyper-visible. So she had to, for some time, accept to be the opposite—to be invisible—and at some point that demotivated her and she stopped participating. 

I heard the same thing from Palestinian friends, and from migrant domestic workers who tend to be Ethiopians, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos (but also from other places). It’s a very gendered category, because the overwhelming majority of them are women. They have not been included at all. The only time I’ve seen so far is the few protests by feminists, who try to be more intersectional and would include them in their chants. 

If I can get some of your reflections on this topic—I know it’s difficult, and I’m not expecting you to tell me the solution or anything like that. I’m just curious: to the extent you’ve thought about this question, how have you thought about it, and what are some of the conclusions that you’ve come out with?

JP: The main way I’ve been thinking about the politics of inclusion in social movements is to move away from the more liberal multicultural argument for inclusion, which is that we need to expand our category of who is an X person—in our case, Who is a Hong Konger?—and therefore who is a legitimate interlocutor in the protests. This logic is still trapped in the broader logic of who belongs, who deserves to belong, and inevitably if some people belong, then others must not belong. It’s a bordered logic, because it necessarily separates who’s in and who’s out, even though it demands a wider version of who’s in. And for me it’s also a very carceral logic, because it posits the people in the “out” group as disposable, or not necessary, or fundamentally beyond redemption. 

In my personal experience, that kind of politics is extremely hostile and not helpful—especially in a context where we operate in such a difficult set of circumstances with a shared fate. Our fates are tied together as people living in Hong Kong, a fate that was decided for us and not with us, and in very particular historical circumstances: post-colony, new imperial situations. I don’t think reverting to a bordered carceral logic is going to save us. 

Instead, I’ve taken to heart this idea of our slogan for this movement (which has been reclaimed, to be fair, from a pro-independence activist often criticized to be somewhat nativist): “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” I take seriously this idea of “revolution of our times,” because it encapsulates the need to reimagine our future. 

The Puerto Rican scholar and activist Yarimar Bonilla writes about how imagining a non-sovereign politics—that is, a politics not based on the logics of inclusion and exclusion of a nation-state and instead focused on solidarity on the basis of shared material conditions—is a true future logic that we can aspire to. Also, that imagining is an incredible act of courage, because you’re trying to imagine something into being without it existing yet. Hong Kongers are on the way to doing this even though they may fall into patterns of existing logics. That theoretical argument hopefully will shed some light on the example of the movement’s interaction with ethnic minorities.

When you asked this question, I was thinking about the Hong Kong protest movement’s relationship with ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, who are predominantly South Asian, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, refugees, asylum seekers—many of whom have been in Hong Kong for generations but who have been historically excluded from the education system, political positions, and many different structures in society by the majority Hong Kong Chinese population but also the British colonial white administration up to 1997. 

We have the makings of a political community that can imagine beyond the exclusionary logics of the nation-state, and we can take logics of mutual aid and solidarity to their full extreme and thereby reimagine a future for ourselves.  That’s the most exciting, heartening, and amazing thing about our movement.

At the beginning of the movement, there was not much awareness of the need to involve ethnic minority people (I’m conscious that even the term “ethnic minority” is a bit problematic but that’s the term that is generally used rather than “people of color” or something like that) from the majority Hong Kong Chinese side. Mostly out of ignorance—I don’t think out of blatant exclusion—but of course that is in itself a form of racism and exclusion. So there’s that. 

And then there were some attacks by Triads, or gangs, on pro-democracy activists, and some of these were reported to be South Asian people who had enacted these attacks—or at the very least were contracted by Triads to do so. So there was this moment where people—potentially agent provocateurs but also people in general—anonymously called on others to vandalize Chungking Mansion, which is a building made of many shops and restaurants owned by South Asian, Southeast Asian, African, and other ethnic minority people in Hong Kong. 

In that moment, lots of Hong Kongers and ethnic-minority Hong Kongers started to interact and to engage in a dialogue around racism and how we need to redefine what is a Hong Konger. And then there were some solidarity actions, like people created a “Protect Chungking Mansion” campaign, and people at Chungking Mansion handed out water to protestors. Soon after, there was a police clearance operation on the protest, and the police used a water cannon against Kowloon Mosque, which is the biggest mosque in Hong Kong. In the aftermath of that, many ethnic Chinese Hong Kongers went and wiped the dye of the mosque and there was another moment of discussion and solidarity, and the idea that we need to protect all Hong Kongers, and religious freedoms, and all of this.

If we take back that theoretical discussion that I had earlier, we can situate this in a broader idea of the Hong Konger to include ethnic minorities. But the other perspective is, as one academic said, that the identity of Hong Konger has been expanded to included ethnic minorities, albeit sometimes in a tokenistic way—but that has been used against mainland people, which is a weird reversion of the border logic now to include more people but also to exclude other people more vociferously. We saw that from nativist protests against women who were alleged to be sex workers, instead of criticizing the policies that were the root of these alleged sex workers’ noise nuisance issues.

Contingent solidarity is not really solidarity at all, as we know as principled activists. We have to be better at mobilizing against the heart of what causes the suffering that people experience—whether that’s extrajudicial attacks or suppression of freedoms of assembly and association—and generally look at the source, which is state violence and the maintenance of Hong Kong’s state of “stability and prosperity” that necessarily demands no protests and no mobilizations. 

I want to highlight the case also of the deportation of an Indonesian journalist and migrant domestic worker, Yuli Riswati, who was detained in horrific conditions in Castle Peak Bay Immigration Detention Center, and deported after she reported on the Hong Kong protests. The response to that was quite lukewarm from the general public; that showed how contingent the majority dominant Hong Kong public solidarity is. I think we can all do better.

EA: My last question is the most philosophical one. You had mentioned this academic whose book I read and I quite liked, Ackbar Abbas. His book is called Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. He speaks of Hong Kong as being “a port city located at the intersections of different spaces” which “will increasingly be at the intersection of different times and speeds.” 

The question of time interested me here because there are two dates in the past that seem fairly relevant—1997 is the big one, and then the other one is 1989, Tiananmen Square—and a future date, 2047, which is when the one country / two systems arrangement might come to an end (although it’s argued that it’s already being eroded now). 

Can you reflect a bit on the significance of these dates (and others I may have missed or that are not talked about as much as they should be), and the generalized feeling of having an “expiry date” like 2047? How can that affect the present in the sense of creating a looming, existential crisis?

JP: It’s an interesting question that provides important context to the movement. I think the reason Hong Kong people are so invested in this movement, fundamentally, is because there is a sense we’re running out of time. With every protest movement since the handover, when the timer was set—the hourglass was flipped on our continued existence as we currently are—every protest movement since has seen this escalated feeling of doom, but also a fundamental reluctance to declare defeat or be complacent about our rapidly diminishing autonomy/existence.

There’s a story I read in a newspaper about the handover recently that stuck with me. It was about how on June 30, 1997, British and Chinese officers had to prepare for some flag ceremony for the official handover, and the British and Chinese event organizers had a massive fight about when this would happen, and the logistics of who was going to lower the flag, when the British colonial flag would be lowered, and when the Chinese flag would be raised. 

It is important to note that Hong Kong people were excluded out of the negotiations of the handover in 1997, and the negotiations happening prior to the joint declaration that was signed in 1984 between the British and Chinese governments—so Hong Kongers were already deprived of their voice and agency. But even in the last moments of the handover ceremony, these proto-nationalist rituals, British and Chinese officers were still fighting about who would get to do what first, and at what time they would do it. 

At the end of the day, there was this plan to raise the Chinese flag at immediately midnight, because the Chinese side apparently couldn’t bear for Hong Kong to be a colony for a minute longer than was agreed in their lease, and Britain had no bargaining power so was like, Okay, sure. Then the article talks about how there was a plan for the orchestra to start playing the Chinese national anthem at exactly midnight and for the flags to go up and down at that moment.

But then the articles says, as a result of some mishaps and mistakes, there was a five second delay between midnight and 12:00:05 where nothing happened—something went wrong and the schedule was messed up. And the author was like: For those five seconds, Hong Kong was truly itself. Hong Kong existed in and of itself beyond the logics and colonial temporalities of Britain and China. 

That moment stuck with me because it encapsulated this existence between the accelerationist tempo of neoliberal financialized capitalism, which Hong Kong was always bred to be (this port city, a funnel for the world’s capital, first for the British empire and then for China) and on the other hand, Hong Kong’s situation between two colonial, national temporal logics.

On the one hand, when 1997 happened, Hong Kong was abruptly pulled out of the British nation and therefore removed from that national narrative which it had grown up in since the beginning of its existence, after Britain gained the lease to Hong Kong and the new territories. And then Hong Kong was thrown into this other national logic of progressive integration into Chinese sovereignty through this fifty year period that we’re now in. 

So we’re trapped in these timelines and tempos of movement that also reflect contemporary geopolitical realities, while at the same time trying to remain firmly rooted in our daily realities of daily life—but also now, in this protest movement, rapidly escalating police force, repression, and censorship. All of this fundamentally gives us a heightened sense of the stakes, because living with an expiry date looming overhead—and it is an expiry date—makes people think in black-and-white, all-or-nothing terms. 

It’s one of the saddest and most tragic parts of being from Hong Kong and living in the city and feeling committed to it that we can’t ever imagine ourselves beyond these set logics that we never had a part in forming. Of course we can say that people all around the world have never had a choice in the conditions that they were born in, especially in post-colonial places, and in this way there are many resonances between our situation and those of other struggling peoples around the world. But it’s a very specific situation that we’re in where we’re expected to—as a matter of time—integrate or be assimilated or come under another country’s sovereignty. 

In this interregnum, it’s an ample opportunity for us to recalibrate what we see as revolution and liberation for ourselves, because clearly the sovereign logic of nation-states has not served us well, and Hong Kong independence is also not exactly a viable option. Also it’s not necessarily a desirable option! We have the capacity, and we have shown through this protest movement—through our ability to be self-sustaining and to mobilize in support of one another even though sometimes that may be flawed—that we have the makings of a political community that can imagine beyond the exclusionary logics of the nation-state, and we can take the logics of mutual aid and solidarity to their full extreme and thereby reimagine a future for ourselves. 

That’s the most exciting, heartening, and amazing thing about our movement. We have a lot to learn from Lebanese activists, like we’ve discussed previously, but also people who are theorizing forms of existence outside the state and the nation—for example Palestinian activists or Kurdish activists, people all around the world who are imagining ways of being in community without subscribing to bordered, carceral logics that ultimately uplift the interests of state and capital. So it’s an exciting time, even in the worst circumstances.

EA: That’s an excellent way to end this conversation. Thank you.

JP: Thank you so much for letting me share my thoughts. I’m really grateful.