This is a conversation with Promise Li. He’s a US-based member of the Lausan collective and the Democratic Socialists of America doing solidarity work with Hong Kong and China’s dissident movements.

Topics Discussed:

• Growing up in Hong Kong in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square massacre and after the UK-China handover
• What is Lausan?
• The difficulties of navigating online discourses on Hong Kong (and Lebanon, Syria etc)
• Rooting ourselves in democracy
• Translating Self-Determination
• Hong Kong’s water revolution (context and history) and how the Chinese Communist Party crushed it, at least for now (the national security law, ongoing crackdown etc)
• The globalization of the war on terror rhetoric and how ‘anti-imperialist’ governments and parties also use it.
• How governments and politicians learn from one another (example of Gebran Bassil in Lebanon; Saudi and Palestinian ambassadors to China; Henri Kissinger praising the CCP and vice versa, Chinese cops praising American cops; Hezbollah in Syria)
• What’s so different about the CCP’s oppression compared to other governments’ authoritarianism, and how western leftists don’t seem to quite grasp that (example of China and Syria)
• How tankies and others try and think like Xi Jinping or Bashar Al-Assad (and always fail)
• The multiplicity of places (Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine)
• Reacting to the camps in Xinjiang
• Having a specific anger towards people who were oppressed in the past and who now oppress others (Israel, China)
• Identifying as Hong Konger Chinese, the complicated identities of being both Jewish and Arab, the example of Hindutva and Indian Muslims
• Being anti-nationalism, and how that intersect in the global south
• Why opposing Hezbollah must include internationalist solidarity with Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis and Iranians and not simply appeal to a national rhetoric
• The importance of including migrant domestic workers in our struggles
• Linking up Hong Kong with Black Lives Matters
• Learning from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement
• What Black Lives Matter could look like in Lebanon
• Fighting anti-Asian violence cannot include apologism for the Chinese state

Resources mentioned:

• Preventative Policing as Community Detention in Northwest China by Darren Byler for Made In China Journal
• Hong Kong’s protest movement must stop ignoring migrant workers by Promise Li for Open Democracy
• The Hong Kong movement must stand with Black Lives Matter by JS and Promise Li
• Fighting anti-Asian violence cannot include apologism for the Chinese state by Promise Li

Previous episodes mentioned:

• 55/Lessons from Workers’ Resistance in China (with Zhongjin Li & Eli Friedman)
• 01/Hong Kong’s Existential Crisis (with JP)
• 46/ Hong Kong, Disappearances and the Emotional Cost of Disinformation (with Shui-yin Sharon Yam)
• 43/ The World’s Most Technologically Sophisticated Genocide is Happening in Xinjiang (with Rayhan Asat & Yonah Diamond)
• 69/ The Entrenched “Manliness” of Ethnic Power-sharing Peace Agreements (with Aida A. Hozić)
• 39/ Basebuilding, Sex Workers’ Rights and Mutual Aid (with Kate Zen)

Recommended Books:

• China: The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution by The 70’s Collective
• Punching out and other writings by Martin Glaberman, edited by Staughton Lynd
• Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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Music by Tarabeat.