On the Social Movement in Hong Kong

If we look back around five years ago, the Umbrella Revolution began with protests against what was perceived as a set of highly-restrictive, pro-Communist reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) (Lahiri 2019). Fast forward to the present, and we now have the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests. However, this protest was - on paper at least - slightly different than the Umbrella revolution in that the protests spawned out of dissent towards a controversial Fugitive Offenders amendment bill that would allow the extradition of wanted criminals to mainland China and Taiwan – two territories that Hong Kong, as of yet, do not have extradition agreements with (Kirby 2019) Although the two protests are unrelated on the surface-level – both protests aspire to fight for the same end – the preservation of democracy in Hong Kong. This segment will look primarily at the latter social movement which has since grown to be far more complicated than its 2014 predecessor.

However, to understand the social movement in Hong Kong requires looking at its past as a former British crown colony. Historically, Hong Kong has always been a part of China until it was ceded to the British in the 1840s after the First Opium War concluded with the complete defeat of Qing dynasty forces, and the signing of the Treaty of Nanking (Hayes n.d.). Since then, Hong Kong has been under colonial rule by the British until 1997, when the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed between Margaret Thatcher of the Government of the United Kingdom and Premier Zhao Ziyang of the Government of the People’s Republic of China (Brooke-Holland 2019). This marked a new era in contemporary Hong Kong society as its citizens will now be subjected to the grand oversight of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

As recent events would suggest, the citizens of Hong Kong, particularly the youth, are clearly not happy with how politics have progressed in their island. According to Fisher (2019), the Hong Kong people, especially those that constitute the millennial demographics (i.e. people born in the mid-90s to early-2000s), are feeling a sense of “besiegement” not only from Beijing’s rapid encroachment into city-state politics, but also the seminal changes that are threatening collective Hong Kong identity itself. Following the outbreak of the July 1^st Protests in 2003, Beijing decided that stronger policies encompassing state-building nationalism, and subjection of Hong Kong to greater economic, political, and ideological control were needed (Fong 2017). However, the author suggests that such a move, with the good intentions of national integration, instead backfired and created two separate identities – of the Hong Konger, and of the mainland Chinese – that continues evermore today. According to Seiler (1989), this is known as peripheral nationalism and counter-mobilization.

By tracing back a decade or two, we can say that the identity crisis paramount in understanding the current situation in Hong Kong originated immediately after the Joint Sino-British Declaration was signed in 1997 – creating distinct factions in society that were not too fond of the transition. Very interestingly, however, is that national and local identities - conceptualized as two distinct entities – were perceived as highly equal during the years post-1997 (Steinhardt, Li and Jiang 2017). The authors found that political identities within the island only began drifting apart in recent years due to growing distrust towards the central government. This finding is consistent with another study done by Lo (2014) who argues that political distrust is a significant factor contributing to Hong Kong’s growing identity crisis, along with perceived governmental performance, and institutional deadlocks.

Most of the social upheavals experienced by the city-state, namely the 2014 Umbrella Revolution and the 2019 Hong Kong Protests, have almost purely been products of the millennial cohort. This is evident by the age of the leaders that are leading the pro-democracy activist group, Demosisto – Joshua Wong, 22, Agnes Chow, 22, and Nathan Law, 26 (Chappell 2019). These opposition leaders, who are still in their early twenties, are considered by many Hong Kong youth to be the martyrs for democracy and justice. It is completely reasonable to hold this belief because both Joshua Wong and Nathan Law have spent time in prison for their involvement in pro-democracy movements (Siu 2017). This is perceived by pro-democracy Hong Kong youths to be a meaningful sacrifice. However, this view is not shared by the older generations of Hong Kong people. According to Wai (2019), the older generation in Hong Kong, by consensus, do not support the young protestor’s social movement, and generally back the action of the police. In fact, this political divide between the old and the young should not be surprising at all. According to sociologist Gary Wong in an interview by Lee (2019), the rift between the two generations can stem from their different perceptions of China as a country and engaging with social movements as a whole. Furthermore, many parents of Hong Kong youth are actually migrants from mainland China themselves where political freedom is extremely limited, and participating in social movements and confrontation with government is often discouraged in households.

Therefore, such polarizing identities – split along generational lines - can give us an insight into the type of political subjectivities that exist in Hong Kong. Though other than the demur towards the extradition bill and mainland encroachment, Hong Kong youth are also frustrated over the exponentially high cost-of-living, and the near impossibility of owning property in the city-state (Peter 2019). According to Leung and Tang (2015), some of the main factors contributing towards high housing price volatility are lack of housing supply, and growing income inequality. In fact, the income inequality has grown so disproportional that in 1997, the top 10% of the adult population accrued over 39% of total labour income while in 2007, this number rose to 54% (Hung 2018). This is a staggeringly large margin, and its effects has undoubtedly contributed to the growing antagonisms toward the current economic, political, and social situation.

Part 2: Analytical part/effects

In this segment, the curious case of Hong Kong will be viewed through the lens of Gramsci and his theory on hegemony. To begin, it is generally accepted in Marxist political discourse that socioeconomic organization is a reflection of the “base” and “superstructure” of a given society (Mills, Durepos and Wiebe, 2010). However, according to Bates (1975), Gramsci’s notion of hegemony expands on this and describes how society is broken down into two “floors”; 1) Civil Society, and 2) Political Society. Each floor has its own distinctive traits – the former is made up of schools, churches and clubs which contributes in small amounts to the formation of social and political consciousness whereas the latter is composed of public institutions such as governments and police with the ability to exercise direct dominion. However, the caveat is this; intellectuals enter the society, and extend the worldview of the rulers to the ruled; citizens accepting these worldviews they are subjected to creates “free consent” of society to obey law and order.

My research thus far has identified five factors driving political and hegemonic decay in the city-state; 1) Housing crisis, 2) Identity crisis, 3) Government distrust, 4) Income inequality, and 5) Failure to honour terms set out by the Sino-British Joint Declaration. When you look at the housing crisis in Hong Kong, for example, it is not too far-off to assume that prices are high because of the domination by property tycoons over the market. However, this reductionist view would turn out to be false as, according to Lee and Tang (2016), every sector of society including the “government, property developers, professionals, charitable organizations and the general public” had a role to play in that they contributed to the capital accumulation of these developer conglomerates. This is directly in-line with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. As the housing chokehold in Hong Kong increases, it is no surprise that its citizens would eventually mobilize into mass protestors. This is not something uncommon either. According to Carriere (2010), Bolivia’s collective capacity to mobilize and resist under the banner of socialism is characterized by non-hegemonic movements, tactics, and practices. This struggle was many years in the making. As such, the fundamental objectives of the social movement in Bolivia eerily mirrors that of Hong Kong’s – one that strives for political change, amongst many others. 

However, the similarity ends there as Bolivia’s movement for socialism has since won them the presidency whereas Hong Kong has largely remained the same. Although Bolivia’s movement was a fight for socialism, Hong Kong’s was a fight for the “five demands”. According to Wong (2019), the five demands put forth by protesters includes; 1) full withdrawal of the extradition bill, 2) a commission of inquiry into alleged police brutality, 3) retracting the classification of protesters as “rioters”, 4) giving amnesty for arrested protesters, and 5) dual universal suffrage for both the legislative council and the Chief Executive. Since then, the Hong Kong government has since retracted the controversial extradition bill, fulfilling one of the five demands (Kam 2019) in what appears to be a resolution to hegemony. However, protesters are incredibly skeptical about this, and are still taking to the streets to protest (and more violently each time) as we speak. As such, the movement has largely been unsuccessful at achieving its stated goals thus far – leaving one to wonder whether this is so because of the effectiveness of the state in controlling the population, or the ineffectiveness of the tactics employed by the protesters.

But there is something that needs to be cleared up before we can answer that question. If the state is said to be the “mastermind” that determines expansion or limitation of political opportunities that social movements respond to (since the state writes the “rules of the game”), then Bolivia must be the exception since social movements there actually decided not to play by the “rules of the game” – knowing that these rules were created to hold minority or oppressed groups down while sustaining the majority at the top (Oikonomakis 2019). Therefore, the question now becomes; What is Hong Kong doing different?  According to Purbrick (2019), the strategies employed by the protesters are three-fold: 1) they capitalize on decentralized open platforms to communicate, 2) they use web forums such as LIHKG (similar to Reddit) to discuss protest matters, and 3) they use Telegram to form a “HK Confirmed Sightings” channel that provides protesters with immediate intelligence of police movements. Technologically sophisticated tactics like these, according to the author, are incredibly disorientating for the government – so much so that authorities are claiming that protesters are being supported by “foreign forces”. Furthermore, Hong Kong protesters would switch tactics each time they went to protest in relation to the state’s coercive policing efforts – one day they would march peacefully, and the other day they would storm legislative complexes, besiege police headquarters, and occupy offices by surprise (Leung, Dormido and Leigh 2019). At one point, an executive of the police forces even stated that the rule of law in the city-state was “on the brink of total collapse” as protesters become increasingly violent in their methods, the BBC reports (2019). This clearly highlights how the state’s attempt to resolve hegemonic crisis only leads to more cunning counter-responses from the protesters. However, according to Bradsher (2019), the protests in Hong Kong may ultimately lead to nowhere as even the most influential pro-Beijing groups in the island “do not agree on much”. This is because, according to the author, politicians in the pro-Beijing coalition are only motivated by self-interests, while moderates in the state government itself are motivated by political stability, and pro-democracy blocs are only interested in preserving democratic institutions for the greater good of Hong Kong. Though ironically, the movement – having only achieved one goal - has resulted in massive damages to Hong Kong’s economy as the retail sector witnessed falls in sales by 23.6%, fall in luxury fashion goods sales by 43.5%, and a contraction of the island’s GDP by 3.2% annualized - the largest in a decade (Rapoza 2020). Evidently, the entire situation is a mess as no single party actually agrees on one thing - collectively undermining the system (i.e. government, police, citizens) and how it operates as a whole.

Final Insights and Conclusions

Admittedly, the dynamics of the 2019 Hong Kong movement seems to converge with the old Bolivian one at some points – at least in the sense that if peaceful protests fail, resort to violence; which is exactly what Bolivian leftists did through the use of successful organizational planning and militancy revival in the region. Although Hong Kong protesters, similarly to the Bolivians, are looking to avoid playing by the rules - throwing bottles at government offices are simply not the same as throwing grenades. It is clear now that the strategies employed by the protesters are effective on paper, seeing as even the police could not contain a movement that is over a year old. Though in spite of this, the youth in Hong Kong are too caught up and disoriented in the political subjectivities created by pro-democracy medias such as Apple Daily, generational gaps in belief from their parents, and the consumption of Western neoliberal and democratic ideology that they truly believe mainland China is the evil that mass media makes it out to be. This issue is further compounded by the fact that there is no collective Hong Kong identity: it was part of China before the Opium Wars, then it became a British colony for over a hundred years in between, then the short period post-1997 saw Hong Kong become a truly independent state, then in 2014 the city-state begun being subjected to rapid encroachment by the central government. It makes sense that the youth are angry – they have no distinctive identities for themselves (i.e. “what does it mean to be a Hong Konger?”). Furthermore, the social movement in Hong Kong reflects exactly the sort of Foucauldian logic underpinning the interrelationship between power and knowledge, and their relational nature and situational character. Along with the idea of hegemony, it is safe to conclude that the social movement in Hong Kong should not be defined by the failures of either the government or the protesters to preserve stability or evoke change, but the systemic failure of existing institutions to honour promises ((i.e. the Sino-British Joint Declaration), resolve real social issues (i.e. housing crisis, income inequality), integrate society based on prevailing attitudes (i.e. modern youths and old Hong Kongers), and ultimately sustain itself in times of immense civic disorder.