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.

Get early access + more perks at Patreon.com/firethesetimes

Blog: https://thefirethisti.me

You can follow on Twitter or Instagram @ firethesetimes too.

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:

• China: The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution by The 70’s Collective

• Punching out and other writings by Martin Glaberman, edited by Staughton Lynd

• Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha