Month: June 2019

Local struggles in a global city

A few weeks ago, I met up with a number of local activists in Hong Kong. I wanted to know how much support they still had from the general public and what their chances were for asserting any political influence, given that their leaders were under attack and their elected representatives had been disbarred. At the time, the HK administration was barreling ahead with its controversial extradition bill and nothing seemed to be able to stop it. But now, in the last two weeks, we have seen the answer to my question. A million people protested and they had come together not as members of an organized opposition but through a spontaneous grassroots movement making use of the power of the social media. Popular democracy, so it seems, has triumphed and the administration has now suspended – for the time being – the process of pushing the extradition bill through the otherwise pliable legislature. An important battle seems to have been won.

But the war is not over. The bill may be resurrected at any time later and the fears of the Hong Kong protestors are hardly assuaged, as I have found out. The year 2047 is still looming, when Hong Kong is scheduled to become an integral part of China with the end of the “one country, two systems” arrangement. That arrangement has already been under increasing pressure for some time and the proposed extradition bill was only to be one more nail in its coffin. When I asked my localist friends a few weeks ago how they pictured Hong Kong in 2047, unsurprisingly they had no clear answer for me. Will Hong Kong simply melt away into the cauldron of greater China and become just another Chinese city?

I tried to convince my localist friends that this was unlikely, that because of its history Hong Kong would retain its distinctive character whatever happened to it politically. The struggle of the localist advocates is certainly more than a political one. They want to maintain also their distinctive history and their Cantonese language. The use of Cantonese extends, moreover, beyond Hong Kong and the cause of he localists is thus also one over the cultural identity of Southern China as against the Mandarin speaking North. Hong Kong has, strictly speaking, been never a Chinese city. It was a British creation, grew up as a colonial stronghold, became a refuge for people dislodged from Communist China, and it has in recent years, since the British left, part of that web of megacities that now span the globe. No wonder that many Hong Kongers do not consider themselves Chinese. This cultural consciousness will not disappear for the foreseeable future, whatever happens to Hong Kong. It is thus plausible to think that Hong Kong will remain a thorn in the flesh of China – just as Taiwan is, though for somewhat different reasons. Whether the distinctive identity of Hong Kong will persist, depends, of course, also on the vitality and creativity of its people. A cultural distinctness cannot be defined only in terms of Hong Kong as a global financial center.

Hong Kong in turmoil

When I arrived in Hong Kong a month ago it was already clear that a political crisis was brewing. The HK administration had tabled a new extradition law and opposition to it was growing by the day. Now the issue has come to a boil. On Sunday, a million Hong Kongers braved sweltering heat to demonstrate against the law. The next day, Carrie Lam, the chief executive announced that she was going ahead with it any way and that he legislature would vote on the law this Wednesday. More confrontations are inevitable.

The British left Hong Kong with an incomplete democracy when they handed the territory back to China under the “one country, two systems” agreement. Till today only part of the legislature is elected by the public and the choice of the chief executive is controlled by Beijing. No wonder that the relation of the Hong Kongers to the administration is fraught with tension. Few people mourn the departure of the last chief executive, C. Y. Leung who seemed to be set only on pleasing Beijing. His successor, Carrie Lam, came into office promising to do better but now she has changed course (or been forced to do so).  Her new motto is: The public be damned. There is no doubt that her hardline tactics on the extradition bill has lost her the good will of a large part of the Hong Kong population. She is not likely to get that back. Her next few years in office promise to be rough.

The extradition bill is a further blow to the already shaky democracy of Hong Kong. It will allow the extradition of HK residents to the mainland, if they are accused there of serious crime. The expectation is that Beijing will use the law to stifle political opposition. The existence of the law will, in fact, be enough to make critics of Beijing speak more circumspectly. And the way the law is being funneled through the legislature is another insult to democracy. Normal legislative procedures have been abandoned to push it through. The result will be a much hated law pushed by an unpopular and unrepresentative administration on an unwilling population.  No wonder that people in Hong Kong are speaking of the end of democracy.

And here are two headlines from today’s South China Morning Post:

Tensions in Hong Kong on rise as city’s leader Carrie Lam gets death           threats and more protests loom over extradition bill

Strikes, class boycotts and ‘picnics’: how ordinary people across Hong Kong are mobilising to take action against extradition bill

 

Living in the twilight

“Fully 99.5 per cent of human existence was spent in the Palaeolithic era, which began about 3 million years ago when humans began using primitive tools. That era ended about 12.000 years ago with the last ice age. During this long twilight period, people noticed almost no cultural change at all, ‘The human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death’.” (Jamie Susskind, Future Politics, p. 4)

But was it really a twilight period? Or was it, perhaps, not a time in which the human species truly flourished and in which it could hence live contentedly for some millions of years? We hardly ever think of the price of civilization. You have to turn to someone like Nietzsche to raise that question. Susskind is writing of the coming of a new, digital world. And while he discerns problems along the way, he is still imbued with the spirit of technological optimism. He describes with admiration how our computers can now play chess and Go better than any human player. The technological capacities are remarkable, but the value of our games has been diminished and we ourselves have become thereby diminished. Who are those engineers who work so eagerly at the diminution of our species? What spirit of resentment drives them? What drove us out of the paradise of our primitive, pre-historic existence? Were we already stained by the will to power whose effect we see before us every day now in its terrifying beauty?

Nietzsche, for all his clear-sightedness, was also still blinded by the idea of progress when he projected the coming of the Übermensch. Who says that whatever or whoever comes after us will be beyond and above us? Is it not possible that we are living right now in the twilight period of our species?