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.
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