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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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
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
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