For Solidarity. [rough thoughts]. [probably controversial].
Many have written about how Mutherland is about to wipe HK off all maps or to leave its presence as merely an empty shell, but I also think what HK is isn't just how it looks like on a map. If we believe that politics is, ie can and should be, done bottom-up [e.g. democratic politics] as well as top-down, then there must be a limit to how much top-down impositions can determine? I still believe in the power of the people -- the solidarity HKers have shown for about a continuous year now, a present 'yellow economic circuit' that has performed some effects of mutual aid when gov benefits failed during peak coronavirus hits, landslide in district council elections, etc. I think we have built a lot in the past years, and all that effort is not useless despite the presence of many steeper hurdles.
As I wrote in the Dissertation I had just submitted two weeks ago, many HKers I know work with 'precarious' labour conditions, but their livelihoods and personhood cannot really be described as 'precarious', as it is defined by most social theorists (cf. Guy Standing, Anne Allison), because they continually form social relations of love and care to support each other. On the other hand, despite all critiques of 'capitalism' and 'neoliberalism' (which do posit real problems for HK and elsewhere), HK's market, often dubbed the freest in world in economics textbooks, can provide a useful alternative space for citizens to construct and realise their own projects in spite of whatever the state is trying to impose (cf. Alexei Yurchak's late/post-Soviet 'entrepreneurial governmentally).
So, taking inspiration from (1) anthropological provocations for critique to turn from a negative mode of 'anti-s' or 'dark' depictions to the 'productive' or the 'good' (cf. Foucault, Ortner, Robbins) and (2) an anthropology of ethics arguably born from debates about the diversity of meanings which 'freedom' or the 'good' may take, perhaps it could be helpful to think about what we want HK to be for us--citizens & residents ourselves? How do we want our 'freedom' to look like? I, for one, would not like to live in a city where racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia are deemed acceptable for the sake of 'freedom of speech', and I think a lot is yet to be done to make HK more inclusive and equitable for everyone who lives here. Is there anything we can do so that our next generation, or say the third generation in the future, can access affordable housing and not have to work three jobs and live with their parents until their 40s to make ends meet?
Could we perhaps hope to create a kind of society/community that is desirable for people who inhabit the city, despite shit top-down policies, surveillance, governance, etc.? E.g. sustaining a kind of yellow economic circuit, organising ourselves to help each other out in times of need, making local decisions democratically, such as in professional and educational settings... idk. I'm defo not saying that we should retreat from the state of 'official politics', whatever they are, but I don't think it's viable to always go heads-on against a regime we know to be monstrous, and I'd also refuse to be defined by what this regime reductively and strategically claims that we must be -- I mean HKers have long resisted BJ's attempt to define us by their terms... I don't believe politics to be a simple zero-sum game, and I do hope we can continue our collective project for defining and constructing freedom and democracy in our own terms and progressively realise the many contested things that we value.
p.s. I find campaigns for 'Trump-saves-HK' quite problematic. I get that the situation looks grim and any support is better than none, but I fear that suggesting Trump as a viable saviour of HK would, in a best case scenario, just replicate a kind of American politics in HK (yes, wild hypothesis), which does not seem very desirable to me. More realistically, seeking US intervention without critically assessing what exactly we may be asking for not only aligns us with all that malice Trump represents but also likely erects a whole set of neo-imperial/colonial relations that open doors for whoever to exploit us.
[originally meant to be a casual FB post].
