Here is a very useful booklet that distills some recent experience of discussion forums involving Hong Kong and mainland Chinese students at universities in Australia (Sydney) and the US (Columbia) in 2019. We thank the organizers for sharing it with us: http://www.tiny.cc/letstalkabout
Simone Pieranni, China desk editor for the newspaper Il Manifesto, wrote this piece for the Italian online journal Sinosfere, following up on my own contribution in that venue. We translated it and republished here, as it fits well with Rebecca Karl’s post and explores the crucial dimension of “surveillance capitalism.” Thanks to Simone and Sinosfere.
Fabio Lanza’s piece on Sinosfere about what has been happening in Hong Kong since last June has the merit of broadening our perspective. Beyond the limitations that people “from the left” have singled out—folding back on localism, appeals for help to London and Washington, all contradictions that, in different forms, can be found even within instances of mobilization that have faced and kept in check the repressive apparatuses of other nation-states, like the gilet jaunes or Catalunya—Lanza signals how the Hong Kong protests reflect “in a polysemic and complex manner, a crisis within capitalism, specifically the explosion of the tension between, on the one hand, assertions of political subjectivity and desire to participate and, on the other, a system that systematically represses these aspirations in the name of market freedom.”
Let’s now try to increase the chronological distance and project ourselves into the future (which is already the present). We must do that, because in Hong Kong, the protest has taken on a peculiar character, especially in the street—that is, in direct action—and has seen mostly students or the very young as its protagonists. It has also pointed at a series of political intersections that involve us directly.
Hong Kong can indeed be grouped together with all the other rebellions against neoliberalism that we have observed throughout 2019, but this protest has “pushed” more strongly than any other on certain specific issues. What has been happening in Hong Kong has looked at times more like luddism, at times hacker activism, and at times mediatic self-organization. Physically attacking street cameras, removing and destroying them (since July 2019 at least 900 security cams are supposed to have been “switched off,” and that does not include those damaged or obscured in subway stations); deploying the technological systems more usefully to organize (Telegram has denounced interference from Chinese hackers precisely because it is one of the tools most used by protestors); hiding or using one’s body against those who can use bodies to repress; managing the entire communications with apps; inventing memes. This armory of tools highlights a crucial point: what’s taking place in Hong Kong is the first true revolt against surveillance capitalism, that is capitalism in its (so far) most advanced phase, capable of expropriating (extracting) data at no cost in order to perpetuate its system of domination and throw back into poverty large strata of the knowledgeable masses to whom much different promises had been made. And if anyone has a problem with attaching the term “capitalism” to China, we could easily call it “socialism with Chinese characteristics;” it makes no difference [if the we observe these same mechanisms in both].
The protagonists of this form of struggle are in the large majority young.As Sandro Mezzadra has pointed out, what’s happening in Hong Kong “must be placed within a new conjuncture, in which the investment and the penetration of productive urban texture through new technologies confer a special significance to what in other contexts is called ‘the knowledge economy’ and to strata of cognitive labor, which is essentially youth labor.” In the former British colony, we have witnessed a rebellion against what Shosana Zuboff (author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power) synthesizes as such: “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification” (https://www.moralmarkets.org/book/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/).
These “riots 4.0” could not but involve China, which is the current exemplar—even if with its unique “characteristics”—of this global tendency (of which it is also one of many exporters). It is not by chance that just before Christmas, a protest took place in Hong Kong in support of Uyghurs, the Turkish and Muslim minority in Xinjiang (“we are next,” chanted the Hong Kong protestors). Xinjiang is the periphery in which one can experiment unnoticed (except for some minor incidents, immediately covered up by Beijing’s economic might https://ilmanifesto.it/cina-cosa-ce-nei-xinjiang-papers-del-new-york-times/ ) and Hong Kong is the neoliberal financial hub. These are the two territories where the mechanisms of state surveillance (with Chinese characteristics) are being deployed.
But in the financial hub, everything is eventually exposed. “Be water” they repeat in Hong Kong: a new epic narrative was needed, a non-face in the age of facial recognition, a wave-like, water-like way of moving which cannot be traced in the age of territorial tracking, cash in the age of trackable mobile payments, something ever changing in the age of wealth extraction from our bodies in order to exploit that “moment” analyzed by Mezzadra. After all, China today is a giant under transformation, a huge apparatus of social engineering which has found in technological evolution a way to remain hyper-productive on global markets and control its people, while extracting from them the knowhow needed to excel in the age of surveillance capitalism. And where the grasp is less tight, as in Hong Kong, what can happen is that young people, students—who are living the transition between impoverishment (housing, salaries, etc.) and being the object of extraction—are the first to “feel” the problem. China might come up with a creative solution (Chinese politicians are more prone to political inventions than their Western counterparts, for example the theory of “one country, two systems” would have been inconceivable in the West). Or this first rebellion against surveillance capitalism might exhaust itself as happened with similar movements, even if in different contexts. However, Hong Kong in the end does give us something, by revealing to us the form, the sinuous perseverance that one will have to have in order to struggle against and modify the future which is already the present.
“Tout ce qui bouge n’est pas rouge” (“All that moves is not red”)
Alain Badiou (speaking of the Yellow Vests in France)
The Hong Kong Basic Law (1997) was intended, among other things, to lock Hong Kongers into being cogs in the wheel of economic production, China’s in this case. Their political role, by Chinese-UK design, was to be constrained, and their obligations towards the Chinese State were neither to serve in the People’s Liberation Army military nor to participate centrally in the implementation of State or Party authority over political, ideological, or social life in general. There were certain political participatory measures granted by the Law, but these were minimal concessions wrung from both the British colonial government and the Chinese State by incipient HK activists at the time. Mostly, Hong Kongers were to be declared autonomous only in a very particular way: they were to be left to labor freely in the manufacturing and service sectors; to assist freely in the local, national, regional, and global accumulations of capital; and to enhance freely China’s then-emerging and now rigid nationalist project. At the same time, Hong Kongers were expected—along with albeit differently from regular PRC citizens—to suffer freely but in relative silence the depredations of the rapid and vast wealth and power polarizations manifested in the process of Hong Kong’s integration with the mainland. Maintaining a HK way of life was, from the Chinese State’s perspective, to uphold the State-imposed policed line between production (good and free) and politics (the preserve of the few). This was the premise and working practice of “one country two systems.”
The legislated separation of politics from economics—a notion that ignores any materialist analysis of the indivisibility of life under capitalism (not to mention socialism, of course)—hasn’t gone so well recently in Hong Kong, to the utter dismay and perhaps incomprehension of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) overlords and the Chinese-sponsored political apparatus in Hong Kong (Carrie Lam and her coterie). The Chinese State has been somewhat successful in the majority of China over the past several decades in drawing and normalizing the wall of separation between economics and politics – although of course episodic and sharp factory unrest, feminist movements, peasant disturbances, and private protests, among others, have demonstrated the constantly breached and thus precarious nature of that purported wall (Chuangcn.org recently published a report cataloguing the rich variety of such social upheaval [“Picking Quarrels: Lu Yuyu, Li Tingyu, and the Changing Cadence of Class Struggle in China”]). Meanwhile, since 1997, many common Hong Kongers increasingly have not been calm about being silenced politically while being mobilized economically. In fact, the current social movement (since June 2019) has taken widespread internet activism and griping to the street and street activism back to the internet in ingenious, spectacular, and apparently durable form. Rather than mobilize some presumed inherently revolutionary political-identity class (proletarians, peasants, bourgeoisie), one of the main features of this movement has been the fluidity of political subjectivity-formation in the course of the events themselves. Some see this as a weakness. Not I.
Clearly, there are acute social splits and sharp class struggles in Hong Kong, as well as between Hong Kong and the mainland (among others). There is no univocality in the current manifestations of the movement. The range of movement opinion and activist motivation—from right-wing nativist to colonial nostalgia to dreams of Trump-times to Hong Kong nationalism to left-wing proletarian solidarity to anarchism or nihilism to anti-police and many more—has been the hallmark of this round of political voicing. In my opinion, it is a strength and not a weakness not to have a vanguardist notion of how to proceed, a settled class analysis on who leads and in whose name a revolution is being made.
Be Water, the movement activists have proclaimed. Be fluid, flow, change directions and respond in real time to real crises on the streets and in social life as they emerge; force new crises upon the police to make violence inescapable, not because violence is fetishized, but because the stability of State power and capitalist order demand invisible as well as visible violence. Make revolution and allow revolution to re-make Hong Kong.
Ideological eclecticism has enabled the participation of huge swathes of the HK populace, and it has led to an elaboration of a stunning range of visual and aural presentations that function as integral to the events, as a form of spectacular domestic argument as well as a visible global tactic. Ideological eclecticism has meant that, as Badiou remarked with regard to the Yellow Vest movement in France, “not all that moves [that augurs unrest] is red.” Indeed. So it is. Slavoj Zizek recently cited the lack of “redness” in Hong Kong as a debilitating factor and a reason perhaps that leftists globally should keep their distance. Do all movements these days need always to be red in the old or the same way? And in whose mandated shade? Of course, the possibility of right-wing capture of movement politics is ever-present; the history of the post-1989 world is evidence enough of that. But why pre-emptively foreclose the issue by dismissing it a priori in some Zizekian way?
The undemocratically negotiated and enacted Basic Law of 1997 mandates that Hong Kong is part of China. If so, one could say that it is Hong Kong, as part of China, that most persistently, acutely, and concentratedly has called attention to and dissented from the Chinese State’s desire for the smooth separation of economics from politics. It is Hong Kong, as part of China, that has given the lie to the Chinese State’s efforts to depoliticize social, cultural, and economic life in general, to separate economics from politics. It is thus Hong Kong, despite and even because of the broad and fragmented movement this time and of the past decades (e.g. the Umbrella Movement of 2014), that potentially points the way towards an analytical reconceptualization of our contemporary global capitalist moment and its discontents. Will this reconceptualization be “red” in the politically vanguardist way of the past? Do we want that, given all we know now about how seizures of State power turn away from their radical democratic premises and devour themselves in technocratic, bureaucratic, and violent managerialism? The leftist collective, Lausan, has been systematically working through some of these issues.
What Hong Kong means for China could be considered alarming to the CCP and the State. It might mean that materially, by swallowing Hong Kong, China has swallowed a wasps’ nest of proliferating protest and dissent that defies neat categorization and thus neat suppression. It means that logically, by insisting Hong Kong is part of China —inalienably so— China will have to recognize that Hong Kong’s activist political critique of its post-1990s presumptions about political quiescence and economic growth come from within, that they are domestic critiques and are intractable. It means that China cannot seriously insist that Hong Kong is alien, foreign, other (except in weak rhetorical fashion), because Hong Kong gives the lie from within to China’s desired depoliticized present and future. It means that there is no return to the Basic Law and life as usual. It means then that Hong Kong, a place C.K. Lee has recently called a frontier of global China (a frontier that is joined by Xinjiang, Tibet, and other so-called peripheries, where Chinese state repression is not restrained by Basic Laws or other agreements and thus where mass incarcerations and cultural genocides can proceed outside the glare of international media and its capacity to whip up global sympathies), could very well be deemed entirely significant in today’s multiple worlds of political protest, where centers may be holding for now, but where the margins are spectacularly unfolding in unpredictable ways.
Rather than impose analytical closure and demands for ideological purity on an emerging activist movement, leftists globally might wish to embrace the most radical meaning of praxis as it has unfolded and continues to unfold in the recent and ongoing Hong Kong events: the transformation of subjectivity through a dialectics of activity, or, that is, the realization of political philosophy in the here and now, with all the messiness and incoherence that that might connote. In my opinion, we do not now need settled-ness, nor old definitions of redness or rigid parameters of what is or is not appropriate. What we need and what Hong Kong’s activists in all their variety and courage have provided so far is disruption of business as usual. Through unpredictable disruption, leftists may find new ways of troubling the smooth reproduction of capitalist and State-sponsored power relations. It is only thus by defying stability that we might find a new, more progressive path forward.
© 2024 positions editorial collective. all rights reserved.
