Episode 23: What Do Hongkongers Want?
Wilfred Chan and Joshua Wong on the Fight For Democracy
Since 1997, Hong Kong has been a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. The freedoms China promised the people of this semi-autonomous region are slowly eroding. Throughout the year, Hongkongers have taken to the streets to protest mainland China’s encroaching influence. The protests persist today, even amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. In January, as the coronavirus began its global spread, Mark Hannah traveled to Hong Kong to meet with a leader of the protests, and he returned to speak with another organizer from Hong Kong who is based in New York City. These two young activists offer different views on Hong Kong's political struggle, especially when it comes to the West's role in supporting the pro-democracy movement. What should Hong Kong be seeking, if anything, from the international community? And, does outside support strengthen or undermine the legitimacy of Hong Kong’s movement?
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Wilfred Chan is a writer, organizer, and courier based in New York City and is a founding member of the internationalist left publication Lausan. @wilfredchan
Joshua Wong is a student activist and politician based in Hong Kong who serves as secretary-general of the pro-democracy party Demosistō. @joshuawongcf
This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.
Transcript:
April 9, 2020
JOSHUA WONG: Democracy is for everybody. And Hongkongers deserve to enjoy freedom and rule of law. But now it's not rule of law, or even not ruled by law, it’s ruled by tear gas.
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MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I’m your host for None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. This week we’re taking you from New York City to a cafe in Hong Kong, where we met a young activist to discuss the protests taking place there.
I was lucky to travel to Hong Kong right before the global outbreak of the Coronavirus, which has of course restricted many people’s movements and ability to travel internationally. From us here at None of the Above, and the Eurasia Group Foundation, we once again want to encourage everyone to stay safe and follow the CDC guidelines. We hope you’re healthy and doing well out there. The spread of the virus has affected political protests and movements in various cities across the globe, including the protests in Hong Kong. And while reports suggest demonstrations across the world have dwindled in size, the fight for autonomy and democracy in Hong Kong persists to this day even under conditions of quarantine and social distancing. It is perhaps even because of the many months organizing and protesting that Hong Kong has been able to prevent the number of cases seen in places like mainland China, Italy, and the United States. In fact, there’s a Washington Post report that mentions how anti-government activists used the networks they built during the months of protesting and organizing to import more than one-hundred thousand medical masks and distribute them to people in need. Perhaps most notable was the medical workers’ strike in Hong Kong back in February which led the leader of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, to shut down the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.
Today’s episode is all about the impressive organizing behind this major movement, which continues to this day. To help us make sense of all of this, we spoke to two young activists with thoroughly different views on the Hong Kong political struggle, particularly regarding the West’s role in supporting the pro-democracy movement. We met Joshua Wong, the twenty-four-year-old Secretary General of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy party, Demonsisto, back in January. You probably know Joshua. He’s received a major international following after his vital role as a student activist in Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement. He’s got a new book out. He’s drummed up a lot of support for that movement among American political leaders here in Washington D.C., he’s been a TIME Magazine Person of the Year and has even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Then we sat down with Wilfred Chan back here in New York. Wilfred is a New York based journalist, an editor of Lausan, which is an online publication aimed at building solidarity across the international left. Lausan has a stated mission of supporting Hong Kong’s fight for emancipation, both from the Chinese and from western imperialism. We’re going to dig right in.
HANNAH: So, Wilfred, what is your goal for your analysis and advocacy around what's going on in Hong Kong right now? What are you hoping to achieve through your writing and commentating?
WILFRED CHAN: My family comes from Hong Kong. I was born in Hong Kong, and my father is a researcher of China. Our family left Hong Kong after Tiananmen Square, and my dad took a look at the environment for research and intellectual thought and decided there wasn't a strong future in this soon-to-be special administrative region. So he moved our family to the U.S., and he never let go of that connection to China and his work there, of course. And growing up, I felt torn between these identities. You’re growing up as an Asian-American, but you're also a Hongkonger and have these deep familial and intellectual ties to what's happening in China. And my dad liked to kind of prod me with a thought experiment in which he's a researcher, and he would say if China and the U.S. went to war, what would you do? And, you know, I was seven years old.
HANNAH: That's heavy, heavy stuff for a seven-year-old. What kinds of things did you—did you give him a response?
CHAN: Well, my answer back then is actually the same as what it is now, which is just that I don't want that to happen, because I know if that happens, the people I care about, especially the people in Hong Kong, are going to be the first to get hurt. And I think that has really informed my work since then. I went to Columbia. I studied international relations and U.S.-China policy, and a lot of that was me as a young person trying to figure out what was happening in the world and how to disentangle this inevitable conflict I had been told about since I was seven years old. That led me to CNN, where I was a journalist for a few years, and now to my work in Lausan, where I'm writing about Hong Kong.
HANNAH: You mentioned that you thought conflict of some sort between the U.S. and China was inevitable. Do you still think that's the case?
CHAN: I think the contradictions that were in place twenty years ago when that thought experiment was first posed to me haven't really improved. There hasn't been a framework that can convincingly show those tendencies are getting better and not worse. So I'm still just as concerned.
HANNAH: We were in Hong Kong, and we interviewed Joshua Wong, who's been sort of held up as a leader of the democracy protests there. You interviewed him several years ago. What were your impressions of his advocacy and his position?
CHAN: Joshua was a really impressive subject. He was seventeen years old when I spoke to him. It was seven days before the start of the Umbrella Movement, and he was calling upon Hongkongers to rise up to defend what freedoms we had left. And part of that piece was me also interviewing Hu Jia, who is a seasoned Chinese activist under perennial house arrest. His work dates back to the ‘80s. I asked him for his perspective on what was happening in Hong Kong, and he wanted me to tell Joshua that it's going to be a long war, that this is not something that will be over quickly. Joshua at the time told me something differently. When I interviewed him, the Umbrella Movement hadn't started. It was a student strike that was supposed to be a week long. And even the most radical plan for street occupations anticipated that people would be occupying for forty-eight to seventy-two hours at the time. So it was hard to imagine what was about to take place.
Interlude featuring archival audio
CHAN: I think Joshua had an idea that if people really came out and pushed hard, you could win a decisive victory. And there was a sense in the early days of the Umbrella Movement where you saw tens of thousands of people occupying the streets of Hong Kong. You'd never seen anything like that. Up until then, the stereotype of young people in Hong Kong was: we’re materialistic, and we’re unconcerned about social issues. And suddenly you had this total upsurge of political activism and people just trying to take matters into their own hands. And there was a sense that this was a revolution. Of course, the movement ended less than three months later with a police clearance, not a single concession from the government. And in the aftermath, Hongkongers fell into a kind of political despair in which it felt like even their best efforts were not enough.
HANNAH: For a very long time China has wanted to curb democracy in Hong Kong, but why pick this fight right now?
CHAN: So I don't think the central leadership in Beijing actually asked for this particular fight. I think it was a blunder by Chief Executive Carrie Lam. The extradition mess really began after a Hong Kong resident murdered his girlfriend while on vacation in Taiwan, and that exposed a loophole in Hong Kong extradition policy. The Hong Kong leadership has long wanted to deliver this gift of a revised extradition policy to Beijing. It's been something Beijing has wanted for many years, partially because a lot of Chinese oligarchs flee to Hong Kong to kind of escape their Chinese law. And so chief executive Carrie Lam saw an opportunity, and she went for it. She decided this would give her the popular pretext to force through this extradition bill. But her timing couldn't have been worse. She'd failed to read the room, and she created a huge mess. And I think privately Beijing was furious with the way Carrie Lam created this whole issue.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: That brings us to Joshua Wong. We met at a cafe at the edge of Tamar Park, where not long ago massive protests were being staged.
You just had this protest here a few days ago, right? Right there in the park behind us. And that was a peaceful protest. You had a permit for it, and the police shot tear gas and ended it five hours early. Can you talk about what that experience has been like for you being an organizer?
WONG: I've been arrested eight times and been jailed four times, and of course, I have experience being shot by rubber bullets. And tear gas is already a part of the life of homeless people. It's really insane how police provide a permit for us to organize a peaceful assembly, but they just cut off the assembly without any reason at all. It's just allowed more clashes to happen in Hong Kong, and this is just one of the tensions among Hong Kong people and the government. And now Hong Kong is already the police state with almost eight thousand people arrested. One thousand people were prosecuted, and even the youngest one was arrested at the age of eleven, still a primary school kid. Oh, one is an eighty-four-year-old man. So that's a difficult time.
HANNAH: So, Joshua, what has it been like for your family and friends to see you put in prison? Are they supportive of your protest?
WONG: My friends and family support me, and I've only been in jail for one hundred days, compared to some of my friends, just because a fight for freedom in Hong Kong, not in mainland China, is already facing a jail sentence of seven years. The price I pay is really small.
HANNAH: I mean, are you facing charges right now? And are you worried personally, or are you afraid you're going to spend more time in jail?
WONG: Oh, yeah. No surprise for them to jail me again for a few months. Yeah, compared to others facing the riot charges, unauthorized assembly is really a small charge.
HANNAH: How are you treated in jail?
WONG: It's hard to explain. And how to keep your distance from society without any access to digital devices. And you feel spending time in prison, of course, it's exhausting, but every country, no matter South Korea or Taiwan or other places, when they push for democratization, politicians, myself, faced jail sentences previously. So we just learn from those, the leaders in history.
HANNAH: We were just coming in from the airport yesterday, and the sixty-five-year-old taxi driver says it's a lot of young people who are protesting. And so we assumed he wasn't very active or interested in the protest, and he said, “No, no. I go. I went out, and I was in the park with my grandkids.” How exactly did you get essentially a quarter of the population of Hong Kong into the streets?
WONG: When two million Hongkongers went to the streets, I was still in prison. So, frankly speaking, I didn’t mobilize them. Xi Jinping is the one who mobilized people to take to the streets. But I think that's the solidarity of Hongkongers, and that's why we got the landslide victory in the last election. Eighty-five percent of the seats in that district won by the democratic camp to show how we fight for freedom.
HANNAH: What do you say to people—and I don't necessarily subscribe to this view—who view human rights, democracy, as essentially Western inventions, products of the sort of Enlightenment era philosophy which emerged in Western Europe? Hong Kong was ruled by the British, so it makes sense that those values would spread during a time of colonial rule, but they're not necessarily universal. And Chinese people and ethnic Chinese people have a different set of values, different set of cultures and traditions that go back thousands of years. And therefore, maybe democracy isn't for everybody.
WONG: Democracy is for everybody, and Hongkongers deserve to enjoy freedom and rule of law. But now it's not rule of law or even not ruled by law, it’s ruled by tear gas. And they used batons to target a high school student. They fly uncountable canisters of tear gas just to crackdown on protests, or perhaps if the unrest might have been all over the world. But what Hong Kong people are asking for is just to get a chance to vote in the election to elect the administration of Hong Kong. And that's the simply humble demand and also the promise made by Beijing. And now China broke that promise, so we must continue the fight. The long term goal is to ask for free elections. The mid-term goal is to ask to stop police brutality. The short term goal is to withdraw the extradition bill that violates our human rights, and we successfully forced the government to withdraw the evil bill last September, which proved that lobbying by those senior politicians doesn’t matter. Most important is how Hong Kong people took to the streets and showed the power of our people.
HANNAH: How much of the solution has to come from the Hong Kong people rather than Americans?
WONG: Hong Kong is the international city with the failure of One Country, Two Systems. One Country, Two Systems comes from the Sino-British Joint Declaration. That's the International Treaty registered in the United Nations. So, when the constitutional system in Hong Kong faces such challenges and difficulties, it’s not only a matter for Hong Kong, it’s also a matter for the world, to recognize Hong Kong as a global city. I think maximizing bipartisan support around the world also matters to put pressure on Beijing.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: While the bill supports Hong Kong, it also gave China another way to paint these protests as generated by the United States.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: I wanted to get both Joshua's and Wilfred's opinion on the legislation. And if on the whole, it was helping or hurting.
WONG: Lots of Hong Kong people recognize that we must see international community support around the world and how Senator Rubio introduced Hong Kong human rights and democracy. And he's ready to show his strong support to Hong Kong. I think the situation in Hong Kong is really unique, and in U.S. politics, no one could imagine. Ted Cruz and AOC can make the joint statement together, but they did it last year during the NBA discussion of their Beijing friends and the censorship. And I think no matter if Republicans focus more on taking a more active approach on foreign policy or how Democrats recognize the importance of human rights or free flow of information and freedom of speech, et cetera—I think it matters to support Hong Kong, no matter from which approach. In a previous day, I remember the last time for me to travel the U.S. is September and is the time that having congressional hearings set up by Senator Rubio and also a joint press conference by Speaker Pelosi, and during that time lots of congressmen or senators supported. But I remember the first time I joined the congressional hearing in 2017, only five or six politicians co-sponsored Hong Kong human rights and democracy, just like Chris Murphy, Marco Rubio, et cetera. So I think it's really important for American people to understand that perhaps different reasons from the rich political spectrum might still have some of the hesitation. But in order to deal with China, never be the Beijing loyalist, or the Beijing Puppet.
HANNAH: While Joshua welcomed the support, Wilfred was a little bit more cautious.
CHAN: I think it's China's playbook to smear Hong Kong's movement as the work of Western powers, that these are all Western-backed separatists. Now, the Chinese leadership doesn't actually believe this, but they know it's effective in creating the kind of nationalist backlash within mainland Chinese people that will further put pressure on Hong Kong people. It goes beyond simply fighting for democracy. It's about reconfiguring our position within this complicated system of capital and nation. And to do that, we need support from folks like workers in mainland China. We need support and understanding from people across the border. But I think the threat for this sort of western alignment goes beyond the question of whether or not it affects support among neutral Hongkongers or what have you. And I think it gets to the bigger question, which is that it covers up the role the West also plays in perpetuating Hong Kong's paradoxical and difficult situation. And we don't recognize that the reason Hongkongers are denied democracy, the reason we have such an absurd political system, is precisely to maintain Hong Kong's usefulness to the powers that be in the West and in Beijing. You know, we're going to miss the bigger picture. And I think that's the real problem with going to folks like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and asking for their support. They're actually helping to uphold the fundamental problem at the heart of all of this, which is that the deal that's been given to Hongkongers is not a good one.
HANNAH: Let's talk more about that. Do you think ultimately, well-intentioned Western lawmakers are undermining the cause of democracy and human rights in Hong Kong by passing bills that are nominally about democracy and nominally about supporting democracy and human rights?
CHAN: The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act has some misleading elements. You have this bill that professes support for Hong Kong's movement and democratic ambitions. At the same time, the bill is bringing Hong Kong closer and closer into the fold of U.S. foreign policy. It's asking the U.S. Secretary of State to make sure Hong Kong is abiding by U.S.-Hong Kong extradition treaties, which actually is a kind of backhanded mention at Hong Kong's failure to extradite Edward Snowden back in the day. It requires Hong Kong to comply with U.S. sanctions against Iran, which the U.N. and all sorts of European countries have agreed are killing ordinary Iranians. It asks Hong Kong to do all sorts of things which aren't in line at all with what the movement is asking for or democracy or human rights, for that matter.
HANNAH: Given all we had talked about, I wanted to get these activists’ long term view of what the relationship between the United States, China, and Hong Kong might look like.
It's quickly becoming the reality that the United States is no longer the world's sole superpower. Do you think thirty years from now we'll be competing in essentially a new Cold War with China? Or do you think these two countries and these two systems can coexist peacefully?
WONG: No one expected the Berlin Wall to fall before it really fell. So perhaps now might already be the new Cold War happening in the world. Specifically, the ideology battle in Hong Kong. But I think the things we hope in the world isn't how Hong Kong people kowtow to China, to Beijing. They’re being recognized as the second largest superpower in the world but never respect universal value.
HANNAH: I actually met the Foreign Minister at the Council on Foreign Relations back in New York. He said something I thought was interesting. He said, “You know, you Americans, you think we want to be like you. You think we want hegemony. You have hegemony. But, hegemony goes against our Marxist values. And therefore, we want order and to have influence over our region. But we don't necessarily want to be a global superpower.” Do you think he's lying when he says that?
WONG: They are always lying, of course. When Chinese ambassadors all over the world conduct interviews with foreign media, they'll always say, “We have excellent human rights conditions in China, in Xinjin, in Tibet, in Hong Kong,” And even, “It's time for Taiwan to consider reunification.” But anyway, that’s bullshit.
HANNAH: You've said that you do not want to be independent from China. But what if that's the price to pay for democratic self-determination? Why not call for that independence outright? Why do you want to remain part of China?
WONG: No one would enjoy staying under the rule of the communist regime, and no one can choose whether the sovereignty of Hong Kong should transfer to China or not. That's the decision they can make, by Hongkongers in the last century. But the more important thing is the world still cares about Hong Kong because of the international treaty of the existing constitutional framework that promised to have Hong Kong people rule Hong Kong and a high degree of autonomy. Of course, people might think independence might be the dream and maybe even a target for some of the politicians. But I think the simplest question for every world leader that they might need to consider is, in a great city like New York or London, they can elect their mayor. So why can't Hong Kong? And I think this is already the strongest argument to ask world leaders. They must recognize that autonomy and democracy should be served by Hong Kong people. I think it is a must for the world to understand that Hong Kong is the battlefield over liberal value and authoritarian rule.
HANNAH: Let's get back to Wilfred.
So it sounds to me like you're saying that Hong Kong is stuck in the middle of this sort of great power politics between China and the U.S. I mean, at the risk of sounding almost offensive, do you think your family members and friends who are living in Hong Kong right now are simply pawns in a chess match between the U.S. and China?
CHAN: Totally. Hong Kong is a pawn, and it's been one since the Opium War. And I think if we're going to talk about freedom and democracy and the right to really figure out our own futures, we have to analyze that dynamic, and we have to figure out a way to get free of that. And I think Hongkongers can't do that by themselves. It really requires a rethinking at the global level of what conditions caused Hong Kong to emerge in the first place and why people are now stuck in this situation and can't get out.
HANNAH: I want to give a big thank you to both of our guests today: Joshua Wong and Wilfred Chan.
I’m Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation, and this has been another episode of None of the Above. If you enjoyed what you heard, we appreciate you subscribing on Google Play, iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere you find podcasts. If there's a topic you want us to cover, please send us an email at info@egfound.org. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
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