Unfettered Editions

A correspondence in Chuang from a reader about shifting attitudes among white-collar workers in Beijing towards the situation in Hong Kong. A lot seems to have to do with media control and the highly monitored flow and interpretation of information, coupled with resurgent nationalist sentiment. Similar phenomena could surely be found in other territories where states and ruling classes have a vested interest in quelling sympathy for revolt elsewhere in the populations they control, pitting people against people along lines of division (in the border, in identity, in opportunity, etc.), or using rhetorics of subsumption to justify assimilationist policies that preserve the status quo. This is a chilling read when taken in consideration with questions of transnational solidarity and liberatory horizons for movements coming and underway that have been posed in preceding zines.

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In this second interview by Crimethinc, an anarchist collective in Hong Kong appraises the achievements and limits of the revolt three months on (as we write this post, it’s approaching 5 months. Weekly clashes continue, with journalists being harassed and arrested, as multiple other sequences of insurrection erupt elsewhere in Haiti, Chile, Ecuador, Catalonia, Iraq, Lebanon, Indonesia, West Papua, and more, perhaps with more pointed attacks on material conditions, and questions of transnational solidarity are debated). Incisive analysis here covers reflection on liberalism and nativism, strategy and trajectories, as well as relationships with the mainland and the courting of other state powers.

Due to the length of this text, we’ve split the print version into two, one containing the interview, and a half-sized A6 booklet containing the timeline imposed in 2-up format, which could be an insert or bound together. If you’d like a file with bleed and crop marks, get in touch with us.

READ | PRINT (interview) + PRINT (timeline)

“When friends ask us why ‘anti-capitalist’ discourse and rhetoric seem so outlandish to people in Hong Kong, we must answer that this is very much a matter of context and circumstance. For Hong Kongers, capitalism represents enterprise, initiative, and self-reliance, which they juxtapose with the corrupt nepotism of the party and the big Hong Kong tycoons and politicos who ingratiate themselves into the company of this cartel. Beyond ‘capitalism,’ however, we find the sacredness of the law, which remains the transcendent horizon beyond which social struggle has yet to cross. Yes, everybody across the world continues to bear witness to the feats of heroism that black shirts take part in every day—reducing the façades and machines of subway stations to rubble, devastating police stations, and the like—but there is still a latent belief that this is all done on behalf of preserving the rule of law and the institutions that specific personnel have betrayed.

Seen in this light, all these acts of illegality can be apprehended as a means of reminding the authorities that the ‘mandate of heaven’ has been withdrawn from them. While it might seem ‘mythological’ to utilize an archaic conceit to describe current events, as if we were speaking about a ‘collective millenarian Chinese unconscious’ that has persisted from the ancient dynasties up to the present, it remains apposite, because everything leads us to believe that we continue to live in mythical times. How else can we explain the continual appeals to the courtiers of the ‘international community,’ utilizing the international mass media as a tribunal through which we hope to gain an audience with the emperor—i.e., the United States? There remains the faith that at a higher court of appeal, the criminality of the rogue states that govern us can be brought to justice and punished, in the name of elemental, natural rights that have been violated in the full light of day. Somewhere, we believe, even if only in the hearts of decent, right-thinking people everywhere, there is a sense of solidarity with this primordial and transcendent law, and justice will be done, justice will descend from the skies.

Just before the second “Restore Tuen Mun” rally (targeting women public performers on the pretext of “reclaiming public space”) was set to take place, the Lausan collective translated a text from a group of Hong Kong sex workers and allies published by Grassroots Media Action. While the original text may not have been explicit in addressing xenophobia when highlighting the discrimination and harm sex workers face generally and in this particular action, the translators provide context and a reminder that such violence is always intertwined and should be part of considerations within the wider movement.

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“As local sex workers advocacy group Zi Teng also notes, elements of coercion and trafficking are indeed huge problems in the Hong Kong sex industry, but many ‘anti-trafficking solutions’ of governments, NGOs, and even social justice organizations in fact further entrench these workers in abusive conditions by criminalizing them and forcing them underground, away from legal protections. There are no easy solutions, but as the authors of this piece suggest, an important first step is to recognize and help make visible the voices and struggles of sex workers. This is far from a secondary task in the face of the extradition bill: Hong Kong sex workers have been facing the police’s brutal oppression long before the protesters. In this sense, sex workers ‘have been a central pillar of Hong Kong’s fight against the police’s systematic abuse of our basic rights.’

[...] We detest those who take over a space by drawing a line in the sand, and this is why we may oppose some dama performers. We oppose military bases for the same reason—they simply draw a perimeter around a space as they see fit and then take it as their own. We stand firmly against any of these enclosing and exclusionary ways of using space. 

This zine features a text by Promise Li published on Lausan, as well as a short text from Grassroots Media Action translated for further reading. In contrast to the kinds of “pan-democratic” and xenophobic nativist discourse dominating the fight for “freedom and democracy” in Hong Kong, these perspectives centre the struggles for greater autonomy migrant workers (link to a recent report on how migrant domestic workers’ lives have been affected by the movement) have been both engaged in and supporting in solidarity. Ignoring and excluding the most marginalised in society while focusing on legitimising constructions of the “citizen” would be detrimental to any emancipatory horizon.

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“Hong Kong is still considered a better place to work and organise than other major hubs for migrant workers like Dubai, despite lacking many basic employment rights. Hope, a Filipino who has worked in Hong Kong since 1996, fears that the extradition bill would open the way for policies that would further affect both migrants and locals alike. Above all, she worries that the right to unionise and freedom of assembly would be jeopardised. Hope was told by the Philippines consulate that the demonstrations are not a concern for domestic workers. But Clarisse rejects this stance, ‘We are living and working in Hong Kong, this is our second home and whatever happens we will be affected.’

There is widespread indifference to the plight of migrant workers in Hong Kong, their voices have largely been ignored by both the pro-Democracy movement and the government. In spite of this, interviews with migrant workers demonstrate the complex ways in which migrants do see Hong Kong as a home away from home. And a recent report shows that migrant domestic workers enable more East Asian women (especially mothers) to participate in the workforce. In other words, migrants, despite their limited participation, already play a central role in the demonstrations: their work enables more families to be involved.

This zine collects a short text by Jun Pang originally published on Popula, and later on with the Lausan collective. In the wake of particularly brutal actions on 11 August, it probes the question of police abolition in a city which has historically for the most part loved the police, in addition to proposing solidarity with sex workers and migrant workers, highlighting the border and security as emblematic of broader racialised, gendered oppressions. Lausan also recently published a reading guide on the abolition of police in the context of Hong Kong.

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“This critique of ‘criminality’ may well create the foundations for moving from an anti-HKPF to anti-police stance altogether––in short, an abolitionist politics. As Angela Davis writes in Abolition Democracy, egalitarian democracy will only emerge when all structures of domination are abolished. Apart from eliminating the existence of police and prisons, we must, in Davis’s words, ‘contest the absolute authority of law’: we must commit ourselves to the process of imagining solutions to structural problems—ways of relating to one another—for ourselves, and beyond pre-constituted frameworks designed to maintain the status quo.

The next step—one which has already been taken by some thinkers and commentators—is to strengthen the connection between the escalating police violence against protesters, and the daily violence suffered by those excluded from the ideal model of middle-class Hong Kong Chinese citizenship. As Hong Kong protesters fight against the kind of violence enacted by ‘dirty cops’ against protesters, they must also commit to fighting the arbitrary designation of particular communities as ‘criminal’. In 2013 alone, HKPF conducted 1.6 million spot-checks—four times the number of spot-checks conducted by police in London and New York—disproportionately targeting minority groups.

An interview with an anarchist collective in Hong Kong, published by Crimethinc, laying the groundwork for an understanding of the composition of the movement, providing an anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist analysis, and reporting on tactics and tendencies in its early days.

For anyone who reads Chinese, this interview has since been translated into Traditional Chinese by comrades in Hong Kong.

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“It’s no exaggeration to say that the founding myth of this city is that refugees and dissidents fled communist persecution to build an oasis of wealth and freedom, a fortress of civil liberties safeguarded by the rule of law. In view of that, on a mundane level, it could be said that many in Hong Kong already understand themselves as being in revolt, in the way they live and the freedoms they enjoy—and that they consider this identity, however vacuous and tenuous it may be, to be a property that has to be defended at all costs. It shouldn’t be necessary to say much here about the fact that much of the actual ecological ‘wealth’ that constitutes this city—its most interesting (and often poorest) neighborhoods, a whole host of informal clubs, studios, and dwelling places situated in industrial buildings, farmland in the Northeast territories, historic walled villages and rural districts—are being pillaged and destroyed piece by piece by the state and private developers, to the resounding indifference of these indignant citoyens.

In any case, if liberals are successful in deploying their Cold War language about the need to defend civil liberties and human rights from the encroaching Red Tide, and right-wing populist calls to defend the integrity of our identity also gain traction, it is for these deep-rooted and rather banal historical reasons. Consider the timing of this struggle, how it exploded when images of police brutalizing and arresting young students went viral—like a perfect repetition of the prelude to the umbrella movement. This happened within a week of the annual candlelight vigil commemorating those killed in the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, a date remembered in Hong Kong as the day tanks were called in to steamroll over students peacefully gathering in a plea for civil liberties. It is impossible to overstate the profundity of this wound, this trauma, in the formation of the popular psyche; this was driven home when thousands of mothers gathered in public, in an almost perfect mirroring of the Tiananmen mothers, to publicly grieve for the disappeared futures of their children, now eclipsed in the shadow of the communist monolith. It stupefies the mind to think that the police—not once now, but twice—broke the greatest of all taboos: opening fire on the young.

The first zine we put together in support of friends amidst the struggle in Hong Kong, it is an attempt in beginning to collect and document autonomous “left” anti-capitalist perspectives from a movement that has largely been dominated by a mix of liberal, conservative, and nativist tendencies – while also carrying the conditions for generalising revolt against the state (or at least, its security apparatus). These early short texts were published on the Chuang blog, and are presented here in English alongside the original Traditional and Simplified Chinese. They offer a couple of views from the ground, one from students joining the protest, while another offering a contextual read of the movement and its contradictions.

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“Under this sort of mobilization through fear, one disturbing tendency is for participants to regard anyone who’s against China as their allies. Friends in a Whatsapp group have repeatedly sent links about going to the US to protest and seek out support. Several left-wing friends signed a petition asking the US to put pressure on China. In the trade war, many Hong Kong protestors hope that the US will defeat China in order to save Hong Kong from losing its freedom. Amidst the demonstrations, one protestor dressed up as Kim Jong-un and carried a placard with the words ‘Oppose extradition to communist countries,’ eliciting many a thumbs-up from passersby. Other protestors waved the British flag, apparently yearning for the former colonial ruler to return and save them. Ironically, today’s headlines on RT read: ‘British Home Secretary signs extradition order to send Julian Assange to US.’