Sense Hofstede

Tag: hong kong

  • Lesje Hongkongs maoïsme: waarom Carrie Lam’s hypocrisie bij nader inzien een waarschuwing was

    Vanochtend kwam China’s staatsveiligheidswet voor Hong Kong zoals lang verwacht in actie. De aanleiding voor de grote politieactie? De oppositie wilde een meerderheid behalen in de wetgevende raad (LegCo). Voorverkiezingen moesten helpen bij de beperkingen van een districtenstelsel. Volgens de telling van Holmes Chan zijn er 53 politici en activisten uit het pro-democratiekamp gearresteerd. Peking gebruikt de luwte na de feestdagen en voor de machtsoverdracht in de Verenigde Staten om een grote stap te maken in het gelijkschakelen van Hong Kong. Samen met de ongeveer dertig mensen die al onder de wet waren gearresteerd zijn er nu al meer dan tachtig mensen die onder de door Peking opgelegde regels tot levenslang kunnen krijgen.

    Sommige mensen beschuldigen Chief Executive Carrie Lam nu van hypocrisie. Die zei in juni immers dat slechts een ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ zou worden vervolgd. Dat is wel zo, maar die kritiek mist het punt. Hong Kong praat inmiddels ook steeds meer de taal van Peking. De frase ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ (极少数 jí shǎoshù) is namelijk een vaste uitdrukking in het theoretische idioom van de Chinese Communistische Partij. Hij duidt op een specifieke doelgroep. De uitspraak was een waarschuwing.

    https://twitter.com/sehof/status/1346638166686531585

    Het is een mooie theologische vraag hoe communistisch of socialistisch China nog is. Maar ondertussen moeten alle Chinese partijkaders en ambtenaren nog steeds verplicht naar scholing en herscholing om de laatste theoretische ontwikkelingen van het marxisme-leninisme-maoïsme en Xi Jinpings Gedachtegoed over het Socialisme met Chinese Karakteristieken te leren. Wat deze mensen hier zelf ook van mogen vinden, publicaties, rapporten, notities, toespraken, etc. moeten in dit vocabulaire opgesteld worden. Om te begrijpen wat Chinese bestuurders zeggen, moet je deze ideologie serieus nemen.

    We zijn dit nog niet zo gewend in Hong Kong. Maar elders is de uitdrukking ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ al vaste prik wanneer de Partij tegenstand ontmoet. Dit gaat net zo bij de kwestie Taiwan, hoewel de Taiwanezen al lang een eigen nationale identiteit hebben en de overweldigende meerderheid niet bij de Volksrepubliek wil horen. Alsnog geeft China de schuld aan de ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ Taiwanese ‘separatisten’ en de ‘buitenlandse krachten’ die hun zouden steunen. Deze groep gemeneriken draait ‘het merendeel van de Taiwanese medeburgers’ (广大台湾同胞 guǎngdà táiwān tóngbāo) een rad voor de ogen en leidt ze in verzoeking.

    Want de Partij vertegenwoordigt per definitie de wil van ‘het grootste merendeel van het Volk’ (最广大人民 zuì guǎngdà rénmín). Daartoe behoren volgens Peking ook de Taiwanezen. Alleen de Partij berijpt de ware, objectieve belangen van het Volk en streeft die na. Daarom steunt het Volk per definitie de Partij. Alleen Vijanden van het Volk verzetten zich. Dit is altijd een ‘extreem kleine minderheid’, tegen de meerderheid van het Volk.

    Dit heeft te maken met de zogeheten massalijn (群众路线 qúnzhòng lùxiàn), de kern van de Chinese ‘democratie’. Deze bestaat uit drie stappen. Eerst luistert de Partij naar het Volk om hun wensen en noden te horen. Daarna analyseert de Partij de verzamelde input en distilleert daaruit de objectieve belangen van het Volk. Tenslotte gaat de Partij terug naar het Volk om de massa te onderwijzen wat het werkelijk wil. De mensen die tegen de massalijn in gaan zijn Vijanden van het Volk omdat ze tegen de wetenschappelijk gedetermineerde belangen van het Volk handelen.

    Vanuit de ideologie van de CCP gezien zijn Hongkongers natuurlijk ook gewoon onderdeel van het Chinese Volk, hoe zeer ze ook door decennia van Britse onderwerping zijn verward en misleid. Het Chinese Volk steunt de Chinese Communistische Partij, want de Partij heeft volgens de maoïstische wetenschap bepaald dat dit objectief (in de marxistische betekenis van dat woord) in hun fundamenteel belang is. Ook Hongkongers steunen de Partij dus per definitie. Peking kan niet toegeven dat de meerderheid wantrouwig staat tegenover de regering. Dat past niet in haar epistemologie.

    Daarom moet de conclusie dus zijn dat de gemiddelde Hongkonger – net als de gemiddelde Taiwanees – in verzoeking is geleid, verward door kwaadaardige personen en buitenlandse inmenging. Dat zoveel mensen in Hong Kong het pro-democratiekamp steunen komt omdat ze het zicht op hun objectieve belangen kwijt zijn geraakt. De personen, krachten, en economische factoren die dit kwaad veroorzaken moeten aangepakt worden.

    Dit wereldbeeld leidt bestuurders al snel tot complotdenken. Ik denk persoonlijk dat veel Chinese leiders werkelijk geloven dat ‘monsters’ en ‘terroristen’ zoals uitgever Jimmy Lai en activist Joshua Wong samen met geheime CIA-operaties en meer van zulke dingen de onrust in Hong Kong door manipulatie hebben gecreëerd. Peking denkt dat ze het merendeel van de Hongkongse medeburgers door deze leiders uit te schakelen tot ‘rede’ kan brengen. Dit blijkt uit het woordgebruik: de politieactie was slechts gericht tegen de ‘actieve elementen’; de meer dan 600,000 stemmers bij de ‘illegale’ voorverkiezingen waren slechts passief en hoeven voorlopig niet voor vervolging te vrezen.

    Toen Carrie Lam in juni 2020 zei dat de staatsveiligheidswet slechts een ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ zou raken, was dit een waarschuwing. Door deze specifieke maoïstische formulering maakte de Chief Executive duidelijk welke theorie achter de bestrijding van de onrust zit. De strategie is niet tegemoetkomen aan de zorgen van de mensen, maar keihard het ‘vergif’ uit de samenleving verwijderen. De vraag is of dit zo blijft als de Hongkongse bevolking niet magischerwijs in het gareel valt. Dan is verdere ‘heropvoeding’ misschien alsnog noodzakelijk…

    https://twitter.com/sehof/status/1346732964772683779

  • Summarising Zhao Dingxin’s lessons from 1989 for the Hong Kong protests: protest ecology and conflicting state legitimation

    Talking about the on-going protests in Hong Kong, pundits love to invoke the 1989 Movement that famously centred around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I myself have previously argued that it might be more useful to compare the overall effect on Hong Kong of the ‘Hard Had Revolution’ to the effect that the February 28 Incident had on Taiwan. But even then serious scholarship on what happened in the run up to and during the June 4th Incident can still provide us with tools to understand the ‘leaderless protests’ in Hong Kong.

    In this post I want to summarise a book by entomologist-turned-sociologist Dingxin Zhao in which he tries to provide an empirical sociological explanation for what happened in Beijing in 1989:

    Dingxin Zhao. 2001. The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    The most important contribution Zhao makes to understanding the events in 1989 is to describe it in terms of what he calls ‘state-society relations’: the way the logics of the state and of society and the nature of their linkage determine how the movement comes into being and unfolds. Although this is a path-dependent process, it is undetermined and highly contingent.

    Besides by ‘the authoritarian and democratic dichotomy’, Zhao argues that the nature of a statue is determined by its source of state legitimacy. He highlights three types (putting charismatic legitimacy aside): legal-electoral legitimacy, ideological legitimacy, and performance legitimacy (which has economic, moral, and nationalist components) (p. 22). Since China is a one-party state, only the latter two matter.

    Two legacies from the Maoist era led structures which in Western liberal democracies are conformist radicalise Chinese society: the lack of ‘heterogenous intermediate organisations’ meant that there was nothing to channel grievances. Everybody’s attention was focussed on the state (pp. 25–30). Although in Western countries universities work to reproduce the elite, transplanted to non-Western countries they introduce radical ideas with outside legitimacy (p. 98).

    The radicalisation was unleashed by the slow accumulation of grievances during the reform period after 1978. Simultaneously, starting from the Cultural Revolution onwards, as far as the people were concerned, the ideology-based legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime transformed into performance-based legitimation. The continued dominance of the authoritarian regime, however, meant that people kept looking to the state to fulfil its responsibilities (pp. 47–51).

    Zhao spends a lot of time unpacking the various intellectual fevers that swept the newly opened intellectual scene in China and discusses the intellectuals’ and students grievances, as well as the continued relevance of marxism’s linear view of history. There is also a discussion of how the system that previously served to control the students now had the opposite effect. This is more specific to that particular moment and place. What they have in common is that the root cause of the ineffectiveness of government attempts to deal with unhappiness ‘resulted from the presence of conflicting views of state legitimacy’ (p. 209). Both sides were talking different moral languages.

    His largest critique of the narratives of 1989 common in the West concerns the commonly referenced ‘factionalism’ theory that pits hardliners in the Party against reformers. I find this flawed understanding of the party reflected in the contemporary debate on ‘engaging’ China, where some argue in favour of taking actions that strengthen the mythical reformers in the CCP. These reformers have never materialised in the present era and Zhao argues convincingly why they did not exist as such in the 1980s either (p. 211).

    ‘What has been neglected is the fact that the majority of the group had one thing in common—they were absolutely loyal to the CCP and believed in the current political system.’ (p. 213–214) The Party elite, especially the elders, had been through the ferocious battle for control over China together. No one of them was about to follow the path of the Central and Eastern European regimes and lose their hard-won power. Zhao Ziyang was unique in his willingness to compromise, but even in his case—no matter later ruminations while under house arrest—the main point of disagreement, as it was everywhere within the elite, was about the best way to make the problem go away (p. 219).

    What the CCP leaders had in common was an absolute ideological commitment to their right to rule. This clashed with the return of moral and ritual performance as the source for state legitimacy among the intellectuals, students, and workers. In this climate, high-handed justifications of state actions based on CCP ideology did not strengthen the Party but only antagonised the people (p. 224).

    The PRC system also messed with the information flows in ways that aggravated the movement. On the side of the state elite, ‘[w]ith no adequate information and with a rigid mindset, many movement activities could only be understood as organized conspiracies’ (p. 223). When the state media liberated itself from censorship, its open reporting quelled rumours, thereby stabilising the situation (p. 313). But rumours returned as the main source of information when the Party cracked down and that escalated matters (p. 321).

    One element that hallmarked the relatively leaderless movement was what Zhao calls ‘spontaneity’. With that he means that many people did many different things and that it depended on their resonance with the logic of the crowd to what extent they influenced the direction of the movement. Even though several people tried to lead the protests through a variety of organisations, their ability to steer it was limited and the tiger would no longer let them ride if they went against the mood. Because their form invoked traditional cultural values, the failure of the government to respond appropriately to the kneeling petition on 22 April and the start of hunger strikes on 13 May led to great moral outrage. It was this performance failure that empowered the 1989 Movement. One major factor in this process is what Zhao describes as ‘ecology’: the way people were living and what they saw led to certain outcomes.

    The logic of ‘ecology’ applied especially to campus: the way dorms were set up with people grouped in rooms, the way students all had to cross the same places, and the way the campus walls kept them in their closed community greatly helped mobilisation (p. 240). There is also the matter of groups getting a mind of their own, one that needs to build courage before it dares to flout the rules by—for example—marching in circles across campus before growing numbers and heightened emotions allow the students to force their way through the barricaded gates.

    Hunger strikes by young students, kneeling petitions, and (alleged and real) police beatings had powerful effects because of two reasons: the above-mentioned return to moral performance as a way to judge the legitimacy of the state, and the tendency of people to fall back to familiar, traditional behavioural codes when they are acting emotionally (p. 285). Moral issues resonated more than the high-profile calls for democracy (p. 289). The common people seeing vulnerable young students weak with hunger (real or fake) caused great anger at the unmoved state.

    However, because the state elite and the protestors operated in such different moral logics, finding common ground was impossible after the state-society interactions had escalated the movement. Initially, the 1989 Movement was about certain grievances held by the intellectuals and students, but in the end it fundamentally challenged the ideological legitimation to which the Party leaders were absolutely committed. Ideological surrender ruled out, to maintain the coherence of their own legitimation their only solution was a brutal crackdown.

    Lessons for Hong Kong in 2019

    Hong Kong, too, is facing distorted state-society relations. Whereas the people expect a certain moral, democratic, economic, localist performance from their local government, it in its stead has been co-opted by Beijing into its ideological legitimation of Party-rule.

    As I have written before, this creates alienation among a public that hears its elite put out statement after statement invoking justifications people does not subscribe to. Because of inadequate information provision by the police and SAR government, rumours swirl. Riot police brutally beating up and arresting young protestors and bystanders go against the moral code of the Hong Kong public, escalating the movement with every viral incident. When your judgement of the SAR government depends on its compliance with PRC ideology, a group of gangsters beating up protestors in Yuen Long is unfortunate but not really damaging to the government’s legitimacy, since that is based on something else. If you judge the government on its moral performance, the obvious police collusion is damning.

    Hong Kong has its own unique ‘ecology’, which helps the movement develop as well. Lennon Walls in highly-trafficked places probably function somewhat like the big character posters at Peking University’s famous Triangle. Fruitful studies could be made of the way the road layout and the MTR system shape the marches. Ecology is also at work in protests that develop out of residents coming down to scold the police gathering below their flats in dense neighbourhoods. Besides a lack of democracy, Hong Kong has built up a large reservoir of economic grievance.

    Zhao Dingxin’s account should make us worry about the future of Hong Kong. In the end, thanks to the PLA, the Party elite was secure enough materially to securely hold on to its ideological legitimation. With the PRC behind it, the Hong Kong SAR government also has no reason to waver in its ideological commitment. Those in positions of power who have risen to the top since 1997 have been thoroughly inducted in a system where their commitment to the PRC ideology was a requirement for their rise. At the same time, the ordinary people live in a different moral universe. Under the current mode of state legitimation in Hong Kong, real compromise is not possible. In the case of the 1989 Movement, honest state media reporting and concessions by Zhao Ziyang were enough to halt the progress of the movement. Radicals only managed to fire it up again by initiating the 13 May hunger strikes, helped by the Party creating moral outrage by not responding to them and a pushback in the elite and law enforcement to Zhao Ziyang’s conciliatory tone.

    If a hunger strike-like action manages to create a similar moral outrage in Hong Kong, the movement could escalate to such a level that a brutal crackdown will replace the slow-motion crackdown that is currently underway. As Mainland China proves, you can afterwards restore government control and assuage society by delivering on most of the output demanded by performance legitimacy, but absent political reform the dormant volcano created by the chasm of legitimacy remains, waiting.

  • The Hard Hat Revolution will not be Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Square, it might be its February 28 Incident

    Tension had been building for a long time. The former colonial power had returned the island to China a while ago already, but rather than act as happy patriots, the local inhabitants were increasingly chafing under what they saw as a breakdown in orderly government, encroachment on their economic opportunities, and discrimination against locals in favour of recent arrivals from the Mainland. Finally, one incident of aggressive policing set the people aflame and they turned on the symbols of China with great violence. Retribution, however, would be shift.

    This was Taiwan in the year 1947. On the evening of 27 February, one and a half year after the Republic of China had taken over control of the island from the defeated Japanese Empire, agents of the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau seized the goods of a widow peddling illegal cigarettes and beat her. Bystanders gathered. As things got heated, one of the officers fired a gun into the crowd, killing one person. The next day, tension that had been building up burst and turned into rabid violence. Riots filled the streets. Soldiers fired into groups of people protesting outside government buildings, killing several. Taiwanese lynched a number of Mainlanders, especially outside Taipei. Over the following weeks, citizens’ committees took over in many locales, while the embattled Governor Chen Yi (陳儀) sought to negotiate with the public after cabling the central government in Nanjing for help. His attempts at defusing the situation were ineffective. The police was unable to maintain order. Eventually, National Army troops arrived from the Mainland to take back control, shooting from the ships as they were still sailing into port. The Nationalist Party (KMT) began a murderous crackdown on what it perceived to be traitors, often blaming the Japanese legacy for insufficient patriotism. Thousands of Taiwanese were killed in the ensuing terror, which often targeted local notables.

    This was the February 28 Incident, known in Mandarin simply as 2.28 (二二八事件). Scholars pinpoint it as the starting point of modern Taiwanese nationalism. In the eyes of many Taiwanese the event and the ensuing period of White Terror cemented the view that the arrival of the shambolic KMT regime was not a return to the ‘Motherland’, but a corrupt and violent colonial regime replacing another harsh but effective colonial regime. Its present symbolic importance to the young nation can be gleaned from the fact that the large park next to the Presidential Office Building on Taipei’s main ceremonial boulevard has been turned into the 228 Peace Memorial Park (二二八和平紀念公園), the site of the annual Peace Memorial Day commemoration on 28 February and home to the Taipei 228 Memorial Hall. Taiwan’s civic nationalism contrasts the island state’s present freedom and democracy with the KMT’s terror and indoctrination of the 1947–87 martial law era. However, in the first period after the February 28 Incident, what dominated was a Taiwanese ethnic nationalism that cast the local Taiwanese (本省人 běnshěng rén) as victims of the ‘invading’ Mainlander (外省人 wàishěng rén) colonisers, who needed to be expelled back to China.

    During the height of the Hong Kong protests in the summer of 2019, many Anglophone observers fretted over potential military or paramilitary intervention by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The statements and videos Beijing released show it was eager to reinforce the fears of this threat at the time, even though it is already exercising plenty of violence through the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF). This intimidation leads people to invoke the memory of the violent and bloody suppression by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the nation-wide protests that rocked China in 1989. However, the ‘Hard Hat Revolution’ is no Tiananmen Square protest. Rather than almost the whole of Chinese society finding itself in opposition to the Party leadership and its rural army, we have a much more confident and powerful government in Beijing backed by a solidly nationalist Chinese public facing a small, recently-recovered former colony. The comparison with post-war Taiwan is much more apt, not in the last place because the protests are leading shaping what Hong Kong is and who Hongkongers are. Just as in Taiwan’s case, the violence is solidifying a separate identity.

    The reaction to events during the occupation of Hong Kong International Airport in the night of Tuesday 13 August 2019 are instructive. Two Mainland men were captured by protestors and roughly tied up, supposedly on the mob’s suspicion that they were police spies or working for the Party. This event sent shockwaves through the public. People inside and outside Hong Kong felt something nasty had emerged from this unguided mass movement. However, responses differed based on where observers were from. For foreign observers, the two attacks were mostly regrettable excesses against likely pro-CCP people, one of whom in fact was a propaganda worker for the nationalist tabloid Global Times. On the contrary, many Mainlanders—also those critical of the CCP—saw it much more as an anti-Mainlander attack. Their lives in Hong Kong often take place amid a background of powerful nativist sentiments.

    This is complicated by diverging perspectives on what Hong Kong is. For many of the people in Hong Kong protesting on the streets, Hong Kong is special city in a Greater China; since 1949 it has become a distinct community that has unfortunately been governed by outsiders for the outsiders’ benefit throughout its history, first from London and now from Beijing. If you see the PRC as a hostile, outside power, growing numbers of Mainlanders moving into the cramped city—often bringing a Chinese nationalist view—might create some unease. Add to this a dose of condescension to and fear of the Mainland’s system of government (which might be justifiable, but obviously feels insulting to Chinese primed for humiliation by their patriotic education), and Hongkong’s post-1997 fears compare to the Taiwanese worry in 1945 about losing the ‘harsh but effective’ Japanese colonial overlords in return for the questionable governance of a regime that had for decades been wrecked by domestic strife and accusations of incompetence and corruption.

    However, if your perception of Hong Kong is that it is just a special Chinese city, things change. In that case, it makes sense that you should be free to move within your own country; a visceral reaction to this by the obviously also Chinese people in Hong Kong is arrogant discrimination. After a century and a half of unjust separation of part of China by Western imperialists, now that Hong Kong has finally returned to the motherland, the former colonial subjects seem to feel superior to other Chinese almost precisely because they were once colonised. Many Mainlanders who have spent time in the SAR can tell you stories of smaller and bigger slights they have experienced. Mainland Chinese sometimes could show a bit more awareness of the balance of power in China and within Hong Kong. Moreover, Chinese nationalists living outside Hong Kong demanding subservience of its 7.3 million inhabitants on behalf of 1.2 billion Chinese can hardly portray themselves as victims of a stronger party. Nevertheless, the rejection and exclusion of Mainlanders in Hong Kong is often appalling and alienates many people, including those who would otherwise have been more sympathetic or Mainlanders who also see Hong Kong as its own place.

    Ideally, Hong Kong would have ‘returned’ in 1997 to an increasingly peaceful and democratic China and the 50 years of Two Systems guaranteed by the 1984 Joint Declaration would grant time for the SAR and the Mainland to grow together as One Country. However, the chance for such an ending was crushed with the crackdown of 1989 and the patriotic education that the Party initiated afterwards. The Chinese Communist Party presides over an authoritarian state fuelled by increasingly aggressive and entitled nationalism. Meanwhile, the socio-economic situation in Hong Kong seems to put Mainlander arrivals in competition with the squeezed locals, while pro-Beijing factions prefer Mandarin-speaking Party-loyalists. This already was a recipe for disaster. The abhorrent violence coming from the anti-riot police and the waves of hatred Chinese officials and Mainland nationalists direct at Hongkongers have amped up the alienation. The resulting antagonism does not help Hong Kong develop an identity as a democratic Chinese space that can include ‘non-natives’. The way events are currently going only increases the perception of Mainlanders as outsiders to Hong Kong. In May 2020, the bubble burst. The Central People’s Government is now forcing through state security legislation for Hong Kong while the National Anthem Law pushed by pro-Beijing politicians in the city’s Legislative Council (LegCo) is only the start. The HKPF has lost all self-control and seems intent on violently crushing the protests forever. The end of Hong Kong’s freedoms now appears to be only a matter of time. In response, growing numbers of young Hong Kong protestors have begun chanting for Hong Kong independence, once an unthinkable fringe idea.

    In Taiwan, the February 28 Incident dampened the enthusiasm that may have been there for ‘China’. Taiwanese national identity developed in opposition to Chinese ‘colonialism’ and the KMT-ROC regime oppressing it. The rift between Taiwan and China has only expanded since then and now cannot be healed, as the trends in various identity surveys make clear. Taiwan, of course, has been separate from China since 1895, has been its own country since 1949, and is geographically separated from China by 160 km of sea. Hong Kong is different. Throughout its history, it has always remained connected to China. However, the risk for those who care about One Country is that the Chinese party-state’s response to the Hong Kong protests will do the same for that special city’s identity as 28 February did for Taiwanese identity. Hong Kong is developing its own self-understanding. A June 2019 survey showed a collapse of Hongkongers identifying as Chinese. Already, the verbal and physical violence is hammering away in the forge of an even more distinct identity. Pro-Beijing elite figures alienate much of the public. In addition to the escalating violence and suppression from increasingly brazenly pro-Beijing nationalist Hong Kong officials and police, the new national security law would allow Mainland state security to deploy to Hong Kong. The biggest expression of care about China in Hong Kong, the annual 4 June vigil, may be banned in the future. The battle lines are getting clearer every day. Hongkongers see clearly that they are suppressed by those calling themselves Chinese. As the KMT experienced during the period of martial law in Taiwan, after such an assault in the name of Chinese nationalism, you can try to force people to see themselves as ‘Chinese’, but once they have learned through sacrifice of blood to see ‘China’ as their oppressor it is hard to change that.

    Updated: 2020/05/27