Hauntologies by Elia Ayoub
The Fire These Times
77/ From Hong Kong to Lebanon, Basebuilding Against Authoritarianism (with Promise Li)
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77/ From Hong Kong to Lebanon, Basebuilding Against Authoritarianism (with Promise Li)

This is a conversation with Promise Li. He’s a US-based member of the Lausan collective and the Democratic  Socialists of America doing solidarity work with Hong Kong and China’s  dissident movements.

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Blog: https://thefirethisti.me

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Topics Discussed:

  • Growing up in Hong Kong in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square massacre and after the UK-China handover

  • What is Lausan?

  • The difficulties of navigating online discourses on Hong Kong (and Lebanon, Syria etc)

  • Rooting ourselves in democracy

  • Translating Self-Determination

  • Hong  Kong’s water revolution (context and history) and how the Chinese  Communist Party crushed it, at least for now (the national security law,  ongoing crackdown etc)

  • The globalization of the war on terror rhetoric and how ‘anti-imperialist’ governments and parties also use it.

  • How governments and politicians learn from one another (example of Gebran Bassil in Lebanon; Saudi and Palestinian ambassadors to China; Henri Kissinger praising the CCP and vice versa, Chinese cops praising American cops; Hezbollah in Syria)

  • What’s so different about the CCP’s oppression compared to other governments’ authoritarianism, and how western leftists don’t seem to quite grasp that (example of China and Syria)

  • How tankies and others try and think like Xi Jinping or Bashar Al-Assad (and always fail)

  • The multiplicity of places

  • Reacting to the camps in Xinjiang

  • Having a specific anger towards people who were oppressed in the past and who now oppress others (Israel, China)

  • Identifying as Hong Konger Chinese, the complicated identities of being both Jewish  and Arab, the example of Hindutva and Indian Muslims

  • Being anti-nationalist and how that intersect in the global south

  • The importance of including migrant domestic workers in our struggles

  • Linking up Hong Kong with Black Lives Matters

  • Learning from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

  • What BLM could look like in Lebanon

  • Fighting anti-Asian violence cannot include apologism for the Chinese state

Recommended Books:

Discussion about this episode