The Struggle for Hong Kong - Transcript

00:00:02

Duncan McCargo

This is the Nordic Asia podcast. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast Collaboration Sharing Expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. With me today is Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor's professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, who recently gave a keynote address to the Conference Unknown Futures Seminar on Hong Kong that we held here at the University of Copenhagen in May 2022. Jeff, welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast.

00:00:40

Jeff Wasserstrom

It's great to be on. Thanks for having me.

00:00:42

Duncan McCargo

So Jeff is specialist on modern Chinese history is very interested in engaging with audiences beyond academia. And I first got to know him when he was a pioneering editor of the Journal of Asian Studies between 2008 and 2018. He's published numerous books, starting with his 1991 Stanford monograph “Student Protests in 20th Century China: The View from Shanghai” and most recently, vigil Hong Kong On the Brink, which was a Columbia Global report from 2020 that examines the protests against Chinese rule that began in 2019. For those who missed Jeff's Copenhagen keynote, which was entitled “The Struggle for Hong Kong: Comparisons Over Space and Time”, we're going to reprise some of the highlights and pick up on some salient points from that presentation. So Jeff, your best known for your research on what we might call China proper. Why did you start writing about Hong Kong?

Jeff Wasserstrom

So I was drawn in to Hong Kong. I'd been going to Hong Kong since the mid 1980s and I'd often gone there on my way to or on my way back home from Shanghai. And I thought of Hong Kong then as a break from my research focus, because my research focus was on campus activism and student led mass movements. And I had begun my career, my dissertation, working on pre 1949 Shanghai student protests. And then when I was in Shanghai in 1986, when some protests took place that were a kind of warm up to Tiananmen. And then when Tiananmen took place, I spent a lot of time writing about and thinking about and talking about ways that, what I talked about as the May 4th tradition of protest dating back to the first half of the 20th century, had been revived on the Chinese mainland in the 1980s and events that most famously involved the protests at Tiananmen Square and in cities across China in 1989. So, Hong Kong was a way of taking a break from thinking about those things. But then in the 2010s, as I was going to Hong Kong, I realized that the kinds of events that I had gone into the field to study were no longer really happening on the mainland, but they were happening in Hong Kong. So there was this kind of reversal of the way I thought about Shanghai and Hong Kong in the sense that in the 1980s on Shanghai campuses, people were talking a lot about politics and about possible futures for the political community they were part of. And that was more muted. And in Hong Kong at the time, there was discussion of politics on Hong Kong campuses, but it wasn't as intense. But then by the 2010s, it was really the opposite. When I would go to Shanghai, I would not expect to see any, say, wall posters or on campuses or discussions on campuses about political futures, because there just wasn't really the space for that, it had to be very muted. Whereas in Hong Kong it was very vibrant and there were even some ways that the discussions were being carried out that very directly paralleled or called to mind things that I'd gone into the field studying. By the mid 2010s there were regular street marches that reminded me of things that I had studied in the archives originally. There were democracy walls up on Hong Kong campuses that there used to be on mainland campuses, but there were no more. But now there were in Hong Kong. So that got me more and more interested in Hong Kong. And then the 2014 protests, the umbrella movement, but even more so, the 2019 protests and the events in between just got me fixated on trying to make sense of Hong Kong and trying to understand what was distinctive and different and quite unlike the mainland protests of the past, but also the echoes of those protests that I was hearing.

00:04:19

Duncan McCargo

Yes. So Hong Kong does seem to be rather distinctive. Do you think there's actually now a distinct field of what we might call Hong Kong studies, or is it really just a subset of Chinese studies or East Asian studies?

Jeff Wasserstrom

Well, Hong Kong studies is emerging as a distinctive field. And Jeffrey Ngo, both a Hong Kong activist and somebody getting his Ph.D. in history working on Hong Kong and Vietnam connections. When he gave a comment on a talk that I gave recently, he was talking about making the case for viewing Hong Kong as part of Southeast Asia. And I think what's interesting about Hong Kong at the moment is in part that there are parts of this history that I think are productively discussed within a Chinese historical framework. But there are others that that call out for other kinds of frameworks to be used, including the history of colonial cities that then transitioned out of colonialism, but not to independence, but rather to being a part of another empire. And I think that opens up all sorts of very interesting comparisons that take you far outside of a Chinese frame. So I think it's an exciting moment for there is a burst of interest in Hong Kong and the Copenhagen conference was a really stimulating example of that. And so I think the excitement of it in some ways both is that Hong Kong can be interestingly placed beside a variety of places that it's long been placed beside, like Shanghai. There are comparisons there or like Canton and Shenzhen, its neighbors, but there are also ways in which Hong Kong could be placed beside Taiwan. There are ways that it can be placed beside Tibet, but there are also ways it could be placed beside places far, far from it, such as Caribbean islands that went from being part of one kind of empire to not being fully independent, but incorporated into other kinds of empires. I mean, there are ways, as kind of curious as it seems, and these are all imperfect analogies, but there are quite specific moments where you can think about parallels between Hong Kong and Puerto Rico. And, you know, these are just things for sort of thought exercises. Or Hong Kong now and the Philippines had a period when it went from being part of the Spanish empire to after a struggle that many thought of as potentially an independence movement, became incorporated into the American empire. And I think thinking about Hong Kong as the Hong Kong struggle now being largely an anti-colonial struggle in which the colonial metropole has become Beijing, as opposed to in the past, when the colonial metropole for Hong Kong was London. I think it's a it's a really exciting moment to think about Hong Kong as unique, but in some ways there being these imperfect analogies that connect it with many different places.

00:07:10

Duncan McCargo

Right. You're starting to get into some of the the big ideas of the keynote now. And you're making this case for comparing Hong Kong across space and time. I've got to say, I used to travel to Hong Kong regularly around the time of the the turn of the millennium. It always seemed to me to be a pretty singular place, that's not very much like anywhere else except maybe Macao, whether in terms of geography, history or politics. So why would you really want to bother comparing a place like Hong Kong that seems to run on its own, quirky and very specific sort of logic and set of circumstances with all these other places that you are mentioning?

Jeff Wasserstrom

Well, I guess it's one of one of the pieces I wrote about Shanghai was that the value of comparing an incomparable city, because actually, if you want to go back to not Shanghai now, which I think has more in common with other cities on the mainland, but Shanghai certainly before during the treaty period was in some regards was some regards definitely unique. It was not a fully colonized city. There was a part of it that was much like a French colony. But there was another part that was like semi-independent international, city-state, the international settlement in Shanghai, and then there was a part under Chinese control. So I guess, you know, there are other cities that I think are in some ways there's a strong tradition of thinking of them unique, and that's important. And yet I think if we resist completely placing them together with other places, it limits our ability to think about interesting questions to ask or to note parallel phenomena. So I think with Hong Kong now, one of the real questions is if we're talking about a social movement, we're talking about the protests. Social movements take place in unique parts of the world, and yet there's a strong tradition in among sociologists and other social scientists to compare social movements. But there's also the question of repression. And the repression that's going on in Hong Kong, I think is both can be thought about usefully in comparisons. And I guess one of the things that that I'm continually struck by is that even when people are thinking about a place as unique, there's often one comparative frame that even if it's not explicitly invoked, it sort of shapes or it can sometimes warps our understanding of it. And I give you the example with the Hong Kong upheavals, there was a lot of discussion in 2019 and even in 2014 there was a discussion of would Hong Kong see a Tiananmen solution by the Chinese Communist Party? And what that predisposed people to think was to watch for tanks on the streets and a kind of instant moment of crushing everything that was going on, which was one way that conceivably things could have end but was never the most likely way it would end. But the fact that that was out there, that was kind of the elephant in the room, meant that I think anything short of tanks on the street seemed to some people to be a kind of a lesser result. And so I think it's it's useful to have comparative understandings, to think about how transformations of the robbing of a place of its kind of autonomy, its degree of autonomy can happen differently then in a kind of overnight crushing. And what you've had happened in Hong Kong over a period and really it was it began before 2019 and 2019 was kind of a last ditch push back against it, you had a gradual set of efforts to rein in the parts of Hong Kong that made it different from other places within the People's Republic of China. And despite there were promises given by the centre about a degree of autonomy being allowed, the place being able to go its own place, its own rate, its own way, but locals becoming more and more frustrated by how much latitude they really would have and making a kind of last ditch effort to protect that degree of different.

00:11:20

Duncan McCargo

I mean, you've mentioned, obviously, Tibet's Tiananmen, which are very salient comparisons for Hong Kong. What about the place you originally worked on Shanghai.

Jeff Wasserstrom

So the place I originally worked on, Shanghai, is interesting. I mean, I until recently I thought the parallels with Shanghai were more about patterns of protest than patterns of repression and the patterns of protest, I was thinking about a variety of things, including quite specific things. Like in Shanghai, there were calls for a triple strike, a sandbar, a strike of students, a strike of workers, a strike of of merchants. And the most famous of these were in 1919 and 1925. In Hong Kong in 2019, the recalls for that kind of triple strike. And there were an earlier points in Hong Kong, too. So I thought about that as one parallel. But then there also are some specific modes which the repression parallels some things in Shanghai. Shanghai in 1949 wasn't given a special arrangement deal like Tibet was, but there were signals sent to the business community and to the international community that said, Look, even though the Communist Party is taking control, there will be space left. There will be a realization that Shanghai is a special place, has a special role to play, and there were discussions among people in, say, business families in Shanghai. And there's a wonderful memoir by Lin Pan, “Tracing at home” that talks about a discussion within her family, where there were the people who said, there's no way we can continue to operate and live the life we want under the Communist Party rule. Her father was in that camp, but there were others, including her mother and her mother's family, who said, you know, let's take a wait and see and things and hold out. And there were people who stayed in Shanghai in 1950, 1951. And then it was gradually that that more and more of what they treasured was disappearing. And then they realized they needed to leave or they got stuck there. And that parallels a lot of the discussions that have been going on in Hong Kong in the last couple of years. There are also some parallels with repression, I was noticing. In my dissertation, I had a chapter on the protests of the 1940s when the Nationalist Party was in control of Shanghai. And one of the things that happened when protesters were protesting then was the Nationalist Party in repressing them would work with local thugs and gangsters. And that was something that the Hong Kong authorities did in 2019. So there were echoes there as well. And I've always been intrigued by ways in which there's a kind of double irony to the story of the Chinese Communist Party's activities in trying to rein in Hong Kong in the last few years. One is that the Communist Party prides itself on liberating, they claim China from colonial or imperialist control. But a lot of what they did, a lot of the things that were used to kind of denigrate the protests in 2019, saying things like they were bad for business, bad for the international business community. These were things that the colonial or quasi colonial authorities in Shanghai used to say about protests that were supported by the Communist Party. And the Chinese Communist Party also prides itself as being utterly unlike the Nationalist Party. But again, the way in which they've tried to suppress dissent is very parallel to the way Shanghai Shek's nationalists tried to repress dissent in the 1940s. So there's a lot of ironies there to explore.

00:14:51

Duncan McCargo

Yeah. When you started off your talk by saying that you wanted to challenge conventional assumptions about Hong Kong, I guess you mentioned a couple, but were there some other conventional assumptions that you'd like to set right?

Jeff Wasserstrom

Well, there's a conventional assumption that I think other people that this sort of new wave, the latest wave of writings on 2019 have been and I'm thinking particularly of Louisa Lim's indelible city, which is a memoir infused political analysis, but also Ho Fong Hong's historical sociologist, his “city on the edge”. One of the things that they play up a lot is that the idea that Hong Kong only recently became a place with kind of feisty political movements and sort of residents who were politically engaged, that it's a myth to think of that as only having a recent history. And I admit I knew better than that. I mean, I knew that there were protests in Hong Kong in the 1920s, and I knew there were big protests in support of 1989. But in my in vigil, I, I tended to focus mostly on the recent past. So I think these books are a useful corrective in going back further in time. And they even go back before the 1840s moment when Hong Kong becomes part of the British Empire and they look for traditions of resistance even in these kind of things. Hong Kong before it was a city, but that whole region and develop and have very interesting things to say about this kind of long roots of critical thinking, critical action and upheaval. So I think that's useful - that there's this kind of myth of it as a place where people only cared about making money and enjoying themselves, but that there was often a political kind of a side to it. But here again, you know, there's a bit of that in some of the discussions of Shanghai's past. If you talk to people sometimes in Beijing, they'll talk about how, oh, Shanghai people only care about making money and enjoying themselves and fashion and superficial things. But time and again, actually, Shanghai as well as Beijing were centers of political action. And just thinking about that is also always worth reminding people of, because China in the West is often thought of in kind of monolithic terms. But local identity, local pride about all kinds of things, including traditions of resistance, is something that's very much a part of the Greater China story.

00:17:17

Duncan McCargo

And Hong Kong was also, wasn't it, the site of a lot of militant labor activity and strikes.

00:17:23

Jeff Wasserstrom

Yes. Yes, there's there's quite a lot of that. There's a lot in its in its history as well. And, that's something also that sometimes gets too short shrift. I think the only thing that I read, in fact, I was thinking about this, that in graduate school when I was being trained in Chinese history, I really didn't have much of anything assigned to me about Hong Kong except some things about the 1925 strikes.

00:17:46

Duncan McCargo

So obviously people would have tended to be rather presentists and focused on the recent protests in Hong Kong, especially those starting in 2019. How far do you see a lineage of protest going back, particularly to the 2014 umbrella movement? What are the differences if you're doing your space and time comparison between the movement as it evolved over the past decade or so?

Jeff Wasserstrom

So I think the key part of the kind of there's a sort of longer term lineage that goes back to 1989, the fear of what kind of PRC Hong Kongers would become part of in 1997. But I think there's a quite specific kind of lineage to go back to 2003, when there were big protests against efforts by the Hong Kong authorities to impose a new kind of law, a new sedition law, Article 23. And those were very large protests, which really put paid to any notion of the post handover, Hong Kongers being in any way apathetic. There were very large marches. And I think an important thing to realize is that the government blinked and they tabled the idea to this new kind of sedition law, which was a lot like the American Patriot Act that had come in after 9/11, in fact. So it was I think there was a sense that often the moves are made when there seems to be a global situation that maybe will make it easier for local authorities to impose things. That's something I think happened in many parts of the world and we often don't pay enough attention to it. But anyway, in 2003, these protests succeeded. And I think it's important that when there are occasional victories in this, but the more immediate lineage, I think crucial was in 2011, 2012. There were efforts by the authorities to make another move that was toward what locals think of as mainland-ization, making Hong Kong more like its neighbors just over the borders, which has been very different from since 1997 in many ways. One of the ways that it's been different is that you could have protests. Another way, which you could do more organizing. Another way there was stronger rule of law and more independent judiciary. But there was also a different kind of education system about ethics, about civics, and about history. And in 2011, 2012, there were moves by the local authorities to try to bring in more mainland style patriotic education and a group of middle school students. And I know you, Duncan, have been writing wonderfully about the sort of increased role of high schoolers in activism recently in Thailand. In Hong Kong, his was a moment in 2012 when there was a big protest called an anti-brainwashing movement or anti patriotic education struggle in which a group of teenagers emerged as leaders. And some of them have remained high profile figures as they've grown up and they’re grown up into their twenties now. So figures like Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, who would become very important during the umbrella movement of 2014 and would still be significant symbolically, if not purely as as leaders in 2019, because 2019 was a largely leaderless movement, but they emerged as organizers of these movements, supported by some teachers, supported by some people of different ages, to push back against patriotic education moves. And once again, the government blinked and they put on hold these moves to do things like minimize discussion of Tiananmen and schoolbooks and things like that. So those 2012 protests were important, and I think the 2003, 2012 and 2014, they're part of a lineage. But I think it's also interesting that they they're of two different kinds. One is to push back against encroachments on the degree of local autonomy there was. But 2014 was largely an effort to get something new, which was to get real universal suffrage and real open elections for the chief executive in Hong Kong and the 2014 movement, the umbrella movement was the biggest sustained urban social movement in any part of the PRC since 1989, and it lasted for weeks and it paralyzed the city and it was tremendously photogenic and it captured the global imagination, but it didn't succeed in changing the way the chief executives were chosen. So it was an important movement and inspiring movement for many people. It made many people politically aware, but it ultimately afterwards, there was a fair amount of dispiritedness that set in, and in some cases, despair. And then the next few years there was a kind of building up a push and pull of restarting activism over specific new encroachments. But then it exploded in 2019 with a new kind of push toward a new encroachment, this time over legal forms that people fear would really do away with the degree to which Hong Kong was a different place legally in terms of criminal justice, and that's where things just exploded. But with each of these protests, the protests became in part of struggle for the right to protest itself. And that's been one of the things that made Hong Kong different. So as long as there could be those protests, there could be a sense of that demonstrating literally Hong Kong's difference. And that's where the period since 2019 has been quite different because there's been so little space for that.

00:23:12

Duncan McCargo

Right. You've already mentioned my interest in the Thai protests that started in 2020, as some ways seemed to emulate the Hong Kong protests. To what extent do you see what happened in Hong Kong, not just as something specific to that locale, but as a sort of a catalyst or a multiplier for dissatisfaction amongst people, especially perhaps young people across other parts of East and Southeast Asia?

Jeff Wasserstrom

So that's what I'm trying to figure out now. This is the new project I'm doing, which is sort of a sequel to Vigil, and it's also with Columbia Global Reports. And the tentative title is “Impossible Dreamers”. And what I'm interested in is the motivation and the psychology, particularly of young activists who are struggling against what seem to be quite impossible odds. And where do they find the kind of emotional resources? How do they keep struggling? What are the stories they tell themselves about the protests? And also, how are different actions in different places really linked to each other? And I think there are symbolic and some personal connections between the Hong Kong protests and the Thai protests. And these go back to actually as far back as sort of 2014 when there started to be uses of the Mockingjay three finger salute from The Hunger Games. This is kind of a new vision of a David versus Goliath struggle with Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of Hunger Games, as a kind of model for bravery against impossible odds. So in 2014, that hand signal appeared in Thailand and in Hong Kong, and there was definitely some discussion between very young Thai activists and young Hong Kong activists. Soon after that, the Thai, a Thai university activist, tried to bring Joshua Wong over to speak in Bangkok, and he was blocked from coming, which everybody assumed was due to pressure from the Chinese government, so Joshua Wong then spoke via Skype to the students in Thailand. So there definitely that was definitely a connection. There was definitely a kind of mutual awareness and mutual watching. But I think it's it's it's a tricky question for scholars to kind of tease out how much movements that are taking place that have some kinds of connections of kind of mutual watching and mutual inspiration. How directly are they really connected and how much are they carried on by their by very distinctive internal logics? And I think it's an interesting again, I mean, there's both a comparison between the movements within Asia, but comparison across periods. I mean, we for somebody like me, I grew up in the sixties with an idea, very young in the sixties, but this idea that there was something in different places that was somehow connected, but yet later, looking back at it, a lot of the connections between different struggles in the sixties were much more imaginary than real. And people have asked the same kind of thing about Arab Spring, or 1989 different movements in different places. Some of them are connected, some of them much less so. So that's really, I think with Thailand, with Hong Kong, with Burma. I think it's worth thinking about how symbols, strategies, tactics and personal connection fit together, expressions of solidarity between places and yet also how much the dynamics are really quite distinctive. But I think you need to make room in your mind for both of those things, for a degree of connection and a degree of utter distinctiveness. But it's not that I think Hong Kong will go in any of the directions that a kind of optimistic scenario would have. I don't see reasons in the short run for being optimistic about Hong Kong struggles, but I think people are very aware that there are historical figures like Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel, where they were involved in struggles that if you looked at a certain point in both of their cases, if you looked at a point even in the early 1980s and said these are people who faced incredible setbacks in their movements, seem to be completely lost causes. But just stay tuned. These are you would be kind of laughed at if you'd said that Havel at some point would go with that, that the trajectory from the crushing of Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution was not something that really would seem plausible if you'd written into a work of fiction where you have this playwright becoming becoming president. So there's this this awareness of these kind of possible things, and they can take a long time. I mean, so I think that this is part of the value of comparisons is to think of a range of possible futures. There can be a possible future where Hong Kong is like Tibet, where to the extent that a struggle is kept alive, is kept alive in the diaspora and via desperate moves within Hong Kong. Ho Fang Hong talks about a variety of scenarios quite powerfully in his his new book, but there also a ways to think about - forgetting about the sort of even the famous ones like Havel or Mandela, sometimes forgotten one is Taiwan. There was activism that was crushed and martial law was imposed in the late 1940s. And it was decades later after these very brave efforts to keep some kind of civil society alive or reignite it. And then something about the world changed in part, and people kept struggling. And the combination of that, you had, again, a very unlikely kind of scenario where you had Taiwan going from being a martial law dictatorship to being a place with open and free elections. So I think history just tells us to be prepared to be surprised, but that shouldn’t mean that we expect any of these either the darkest or the lightest scenarios. But we should be aware of how often course of events can surprise us.

00:29:07

Duncan McCargo

Thanks very much, Jeff, for discussing your Hong Kong conference keynote lecture with the Nordic Asia Podcast. This has been a great chance to hear some of your ideas about what's been going on in Hong Kong within the framework of a sort of spectre of comparisons in Greater China and beyond.

00:29:25

Jeff Wasserstrom

Thanks so much for giving me a chance to talk with you about this.

00:29:28

Duncan McCargo

I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and I've been in conversation with UC Irvine history professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom from about his recent keynote on The Struggle for Hong Kong, given here at the University of Copenhagen in May. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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