Hong Kong stands together with the people of East Turkestan: on the establishment of the Hong Kong Uyghur Human Rights Concern Group
[Originally published in Apple Daily English edition April 16, 2021, subsequently removed from the Apple Daily site]
[Author’s note: Tonight, I was going through my old Apple Daily articles. I was surprised to discover that this piece from April has been removed from the Apple Daily site. The original article is reproduced here in full. I was the sole author, stand by every word of this article, and take full legal responsibility for its content.]
In recent weeks, the CCP has manufactured a pseudo-controversy about international companies refusing to use cotton from occupied East Turkestan.
Insofar as this product has been implicated in forced labor and a modern-day slave trade linked to the concentration camp system that the region’s Han colonizers have built in recent years, one can easily understand why companies would be eager to distance themselves from this product.
Yet the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to whip up pseudo-spontaneous anger at companies engaged in such distancing, taking the Chinese nationalist trope of “hurt feelings” to ludicrous new levels: boycotting slavery hurts our feelings (see my April 2 column https://hk.appledaily.com/opinion/20210402/X2P3NWWLTNHZRPSAG6MFLXTMO4/).
As I sighed in exasperation at the latest sad round of Two Minutes Hate to sweep the motherland, I was relieved to learn last weekend of the establishment of the Hong Kong Uyghur Human Rights Concern Group, which aims to raise awareness of ongoing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, as well as calling for a mass boycott of clothing brands that use Xinjiang cotton. I would like to use this week’s column to raise awareness of this group and its significance in Hong Kong today.
Reading through the group’s announcement on its Facebook page, I immediately felt that is founding is significant not only for raising awareness of the ongoing crimes in East Turkestan (a matter of utmost importance), but also for developing Hong Kong’s distinct political culture. The group’s concern for the human rights of the Uyghur people colonized by China overcomes, in my analysis, three traps in which Hong Kong’s politics and relationship with China have at times become entangled in recent decades.
The first of these traps is pan-Chinese nationalism, which thrives on emotionally charged notions of racial-national pride.
According to official pan-Chinese nationalism, China is rising and everyone with any type of Chinese heritage should be exhilarated by this prospect. Any attempt to question any aspect of this rise, including halting the use of Xinjiang cotton, is then read as an attempt to hinder this rise and return to a century of humiliation.
Now, this ideology might seem strange and even ridiculous, but we must remember that it is not altogether foreign to Hong Kong: even the pan-democrats have toyed in varying ways at varying times with pan-Chinese nationalism. The peak of this type of sentiment in Hong Kong, according to my casual observations, was around 2008 with the approach of the Beijing Olympics.
Every event since then, however, has shown the Hong Kong people the dangers of this ideology. China’s rise, which is really just the perceived rise to some illusory global respectability of a genocidal dictatorship occupying the geographic space currently known as China, has resulted in the destruction of Hong Kong’s legal system, an obsessive security state in occupied Tibet spurring a wave of self-immolations, and the incarceration of millions of Uyghurs and other non-Han colonial subjects in a concentration camp system in occupied Xinjiang.
The idea that anyone should take pride in any of this is, to put it bluntly, fascist. Socially distancing from these pathological modes of thought and embracing the ideals of human rights and human dignity, as the Hong Kong Uyghur Human Rights Concern Group does, are important steps away from the perverse affective incentives and accompanying controls of pan-Chinese racial nationalism.
The second trap that this group overcomes is an impotent leftism.
We all know how Hong Kong’s social movements over the past decade have increasingly distanced themselves from tired and sad “left plastic.” Yet insofar as this leftist mode of thought is less a practical framework for political action than a religion before which the pious kneel, its irrelevance can only ever drive its devotees to seek to prove its relevance yet again.
We saw this in countless hard-leftist commentaries on the 2019 protest movement, which attempted to latch on to this movement to prove their ideology’s relevance.
What, in sum, was their prescription for moving forward? “Solidarity.” Solidarity with who, you may ask? Solidarity with the people of China, they responded. Sounds nice, but doesn’t work: since when, one must ask, do a colonized people need to express solidarity with their colonizers?
This call for solidarity with the Chinese people showed just how simultaneously predictable and gullible leftist commentary is: even if you are a hyper-nationalist who thinks that Hong Kong needs China for its basic needs and literally couldn’t care less if the city’s entire population disappeared, all you need to do is toss in the word “communist” and add some mumbo jumbo about the third world, and you will get a little solidarity from these old comrades.
Toss in some whataboutism and some discussion of “China hawks” in the United States, and you have a fully formed leftist commentary: what you don’t have is a commentary that makes any sense or is of any relevance to people’s actual experiences.
I personally have no interest in participating in the thriving but purely self-referential industry of telling the people of Hong Kong what to do and not to do. I can however say that if the concept of solidarity is to be useful, this usefulness will not be found in solidarity with one’s colonizers, but rather with fellow victims of CCP-Han imperialism.
In this sense, solidarity with the people of East Turkestan, also suffering under CCP-Han oppression, can help to build an international community of respect for human rights and resistance to CCP-Han imperialism.
The final trap that attention to the unfolding crimes in East Turkestan overcomes is the trap of blind optimism.
I remember when Jack Lee wrote his Undergrad piece on whether Hong Kong had the right to self-determination back in 2014, I felt a sense of discomfort at the comparison developed therein between Tibet and Hong Kong. At the time, this comparison struck me as hyperbolic, even slightly offensive, insofar as Tibet was in 2014 being swept by a series of self-immolations while Hong Kong was debating a path to universal suffrage .
Yet in retrospect, even in my unyielding pessimism, I was too optimistic. We see today that the concentration camps in occupied East Turkestan reveal the inevitable endpoint of so-called “autonomy” in the People’s Republic of China: complete subjugation.
As this complete subjugation begins to cast its shadow over Hong Kong, the most hyperbolically pessimistic predictions have turned out to be the most prescient. Very few saw where Hong Kong is today, and there is still no way to know where it will be tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. To begin to truly wrap our minds around where this might be going, we need to adopt an all-encompassing pessimistic attitude with regards to the city’s rulers, recognizing that no move is too low for the CCP.
At the same time, we also need optimism with regards to the people of Hong Kong’s ability to take action, to awaken people to this situation, to remain vigilant to Hong Kong’s potential fate, and to refuse and resist this possibility: this reality is captured in the simultaneous dark pessimism and hopeful optimism of the work of the Hong Kong Uyghur Human Rights Concern Group.
To help the world stand together with Hong Kong, Hong Kong should stand together with the colonized and oppressed people of East Turkestan: the Hong Kong Uyghur Human Rights Concern Group is significant not only for raising awareness about this unfolding genocide, but also for overcoming the ideological lures that hinder the city’s ability to resist and overcome CCP hegemony.