While the world is still fighting the “Wuhan coronavirus,” Hong Kong protesters are resuming their campaign against another recurring threat from mainland China — the threat to end Hong Kong’s political autonomy.
After the withdrawal of a notorious extradition bill last year, mainland China has delivered another gift to its only free port of ideas: national security legislation. A new cycle of political unrest is foreseeable. Now is the right time to recall the events of last summer.
Despite Beijing’s continuous muscle-flexing in Hong Kong, many local democrats have long believed an independent judiciary to be the territory’s ultimate safeguard of political autonomy.
However, the proposal of an extradition bill last summer has shown Beijing’s determination to bridge the gap between the two legal systems.
We all know that the Chinese Communist Party has promised to rule the territory according to the “one country, two systems” principle, but with China’s decision to impose national security legislation on Hong Kong, we witness how this promise has become a sorry joke. Disillusioned Hong Kongers are returning to the battlefield that was once the Waterloo for northern aggression.
Since the beginning of anti-extradition bill protests last summer, Edward Leung Tin-kei (梁天琦), an activist promoting Hong Kong localism who has been in jail since 2018, is widely regarded as the new spiritual leader of the pro-democratic movement. Everywhere in the territory, we hear protesters chanting “Free Hong Kong, revolution now,” the election slogan of Leung in 2016 while he was running for a seat in the Hong Kong Legislative Council.
Provided the fierce competition between different political ideologies, we should wonder why a pro-independence figure’s slogan can suddenly express the inner voices of most dissidents. Does this phenomenon prove Beijing’s official assumption that the demand for universal suffrage is only separatism in disguise?
To understand the political drama on the edge of China, I suggest a parallel reading of the two slogans that have shaped Hong Kong.
From “one country, two systems” to “Free Hong Kong, revolution now,” the final tale of a territory unfolds.
For 20 years since the handover, democrats in Hong Kong have kept accusing the rulers in Beijing of breaching the “one country, two systems” principle. Yet, from the official perspective, the central government has always tried its best to keep its promise to Hong Kongers — on condition that Beijing holds the absolute right to interpret the rules of the game.
In 2014, Beijing issued a controversial white paper, which firmly states that the policy of “one country” precedes that of “two systems.” Thereby Beijing expressed its readiness to sacrifice Hong Kong’s special status in the name of national security, despite the initial idea that the “two systems” principle was to serve a gradual modernization of mainland China, as well as a peaceful unification with Taiwan.
After two decades of a house-sharing experiment, all we see is an overconfident regime that has stopped learning and started selling its “China model” overseas.
If liberals in Hong Kong ever expected to democratize “Red China,” they have failed. They cannot even protect their bastion of liberty from the clenching fist of the “one country.”
In response to suppression, resistance forces gather under the slogan “Free Hong Kong, revolution now.” Interestingly, this imperative phrase once used to arouse a localist sentiment, which is not necessarily shared by all freedom fighters.
Its charm comes from its openness to interpretations. Hence, we can sometimes hear protesters explaining their understandings in the media. In Chinese, “Free Hong Kong” literally means “light returns to Hong Kong” (光復香港), and practically implies reclaiming a land from invaders, which is in line with the localist perception that the “Hong Kong nation” has fallen to a foreign power from the north.
“Revolution now” is also a tricky part of the slogan, as its precise translation is “era revolution” (時代革命).
Leung once considered adopting “generation revolution” (世代革命), an earlier version of the phrase, as his election slogan, which makes sense as most of his supporters belong to a younger generation that thirsts for change. After reconsideration with his team, he decided to use “era revolution” instead, to convey that the will to change does not depend on which generation one belongs to, but on whether one keeps up with the times.
Thereby, he softened the exclusionary tone of the phrase, contributing to its unexpected popularization. Of course, its attraction also owes to the depressive fact that Hong Kong is not yet liberated from the era of colonial brutality, leading to reformists’ appeal to “universal values” as benchmarks of modern society.
From the compositions of the two slogans, we discover a tension between two families of political discourses: that of strengthening national solidarity and that of cultivating global citizenship.
The policy of “two systems” had once planted the hope for a democratic China in the hearts of Hong Kongers, especially when joining the modern world through political reforms was still on Beijing’s agenda.
The cruel reality is that now we are more or less experiencing the overreach of “one country” policies, according to which promoting democracy becomes a “Western conspiracy” to undermine a superpower-to-be in the East.
The fall of “two systems” together with the rise of “one country” is echoed in the streets of Hong Kong. The rapid spread of one-party dictatorship across the border discomforts many who treasure the territory as their home.
Residents increasingly sense the danger of losing their local identity before they could enjoy the promised universal suffrage.
After the failure of the “Umbrella movement” in 2014, support for localism has surged, being the last civil means to seek dialogue and reconciliation with the government.
Defenders of “universal values” face a hard choice between dealing with the devil as usual or keeping their distance from the unchecked patriotism from the north.
Those who opt for the latter believe that freedom from mainland China’s control is a prerequisite of political modernization.
The combination of “Free Hong Kong” and “revolution now” has a convoluted history.
Thanks to its ambiguity, the slogan of localist origin has successfully connected dissidents across the political spectrum.
According to sociologist Amitai Etzioni, the unrest in Hong Kong can be seen as the clash between two kinds of nationalism, namely the authoritarian nationalism on the suppressive side and the civic nationalism on the resistant side. By juxtaposing the slogans that determine Hong Kong’s fate, we can learn that the two kinds of nationalism, the government-led patriotism of China and the localism as a part of a democratic movement, are of very different natures.
The fear of Mainlandization — to follow Etzioni’s judgement — will effectively drive the global territory to the course of Taiwanization.
Chu Ming-hon is a doctoral candidate in Germany specializing in the philosophy of consciousness.
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