The Hong Kong Independence Movement: Yet Another Anti-‐Globalization Revolt
“Dear members of Legislative Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of People’s FUCKING Republic of SHINA…” with these words, a 25-‐year-‐old newly-‐elected legislator paid a special tribute to her “motherland” during her own oath-‐taking ceremony last October.
Wai-‐ching Yau, a millennial politician representing Kowloon West, was the youngest female and second-‐youngest candidate to be elected to the city’s Legislative Council. At the oath-‐taking ceremony, she also displayed a banner on the podium, stating “Hong Kong is NOT China”.
This dramatic episode in the council hall not only quickly made Yau famous across the Chinese-‐speaking world, but also cost her the seat on the Council. Yau and another pro-‐independence legislator-‐elect, Baggio Leung, were soon disqualified by the Council after a failed attempt to re-‐take the oath.
The Hong Kong Independence Movement, however, didn’t go gently into the night after this setback. Thousands of pro-‐independence activists organized a protest outside of the liaison office representing Beijing in Hong Kong on the first day of 2017, shouting out their disaffection with Beijing.
“Hong Kong people are not Chinese, they just have to realize this,” said Frankie Fung, a 21-‐year-‐old student protester from Hong Kong Baptist University.
The year 2016 saw the historical emergence of the Hong Kong independence movement. For the first time ever since 1997’s sovereignty handover, a political rally calling for the city’s independence was held in August and seven pro-‐independence candidates won their seats at the Legislative Council hall in September, including Yau and Leung. A poll conducted by the Chinese University of
Hong Kong in July 2016 showed that 17.4% of all respondents supported the idea “that Hong Kong should be independent after 2047”. Among respondents aged 15-‐24, support for independence showed a higher degree of popularity, with a rate of roughly 40%.
Hong Kong, Asia’s world city and the region’s finance hub, was a British colony from 1841 until 1997, when the United Kingdom handed over its sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China. Under the Sino-‐British Joint Declaration signed in 1984, The Communist Party promised not to apply its socialism system to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong's previous capitalism system and its way of life would remain unchanged for a period of 50 years until 2047. Under this so called “One Country, Two Systems” plan, Hong Kong enjoys a high-‐level of autonomy.
Like Fung, many believe that the failed Umbrella Movement in 2014 helped the pro-‐independence camp gain their momentum. During the 79-‐day movement, more than one million Hong Kongers participated in street occupations and protests, fighting for universal suffrage rights that Beijing refused to deliver.
“Umbrella Movement taught me one thing, that there is zero possibility of realizing real democracy under the Communist Party’s watch, and, we must become our own country to defend our lifestyle.” Fung saidhe engaged in several pro-‐independence political events last year, including working as a volunteer to help elect a pro-‐independence legislative candidate.
But the frustrations and anger brought by the unfinished fight for democracy are only the current reasons why some Hong Kongers are so eager to shake off their national identity as Chinese, as some extreme sentiments that have been demonstrated by the protestors, growing xenophobia and localism in Hong Kong society had already been tearing apart Mainland China and Hong Kong for quite some years.
“FUCK your mother, go back to China!” one protestor yelled at an electronic store in Mong Kok, where they were playing Mandarin pop music to attract Mainland costumers.
The Locusts
Disqualification from the Council didn’t seem to eliminate Yau from the local political circle: she frequently got invited to be on TV, made her name across the Taiwan strait, and online trolls couldn’t stop creating new memes out of her face. This was partly because the controversy she caused was not only about the fearless and unapologetic fashion of showing her pro-‐independence stance, but also the way she referred China as “SHINA”.
“SHINA”, or “支那”, is a widely used term to refer to China by Japanese fascists during WWII, and has been seen as an insulting and degrading way to call China ever since. Pro-‐independence groups in Hong Kong and Taiwan, however, have adopted it as a way to show resentment.
A poll conducted by The University of Hong Kong in 2013 suggested 35% of the Hong Kongers surveyed had “negative feelings” about people from Mainland China, which was the highest in 7 years. Meanwhile, only 22% of them had “positive feelings” about Mainlanders.
One year before the poll, a group of localists placed an advertisement in popular tabloids calling Mainland immigrants and tourists “locusts” and accusing them of “stealing jobs and resources from HKers”, “just like a troop of locusts, invading our city.”
The tabloids, namely Apple Daily and Sharp Daily, are well-‐known for their explicit populist tendencies. Research carried out by Eric Ma from The University of Hong Kong showed that despite its often biased coverage and low credibility, Apple Daily is still one of the best-‐sold and most influential newspapers in the Hong Kong media market.
Frankie Fung, a self-‐claimed moderate, said he hates these extreme localist media, but somewhat agrees that some Mainlanders are “robbing Hong Kong’s resources”.
“Especially those pregnant mothers and milk powder smugglers, I mean, educational and medical resources in Hong Kong are already in shortage, how could they just come and act like as if they are entitled to…we paid taxes, they didn’t,” said Fung.
The “pregnant mothers” and the “milk powder smugglers” are two of the most notable issues that reflect the growing tensions between Hong Kongers and Mainlanders.
The “pregnant mothers” refers to those Mainland mothers who cross borders to Hong Kong specifically to give birth to their infants. This entitles their children to the right of adobe in HK as well as the chance to benefit from HK’s better welfare and education system.
The “milk powder smugglers” refers to those smugglers who transport baby formula milk powder from Hong Kong to the Mainland. Milk powder from Hong Kong started to gain popularity on the Chinese market after the outbreak of the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, during which several infants were killed due to consumption of tainted milk powder products. The smugglers, however, caused a significant
shortage of milk powder on the Hong Kong market, which was criticized harshly by Hong Kong localism media.
“I am not saying that all Chinese are locusts, but if there is one, she/he would definitely be a Chinese,” wrote “PassingBy”, a user of the well-‐ known localist online forum, HKGolden.com, on its website.
The Subdivided Units
For 32-‐year-‐old Siu-‐Long Lam, a newly-‐graduated masters student from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, “life is really looking up” recently. From submitting a book to a writing competition, he has won a 3000-‐ Hong Kong dollar prize, which is “enough for my whole month’s rent,” said Lam.
The book he wrote is about the place he lives in: a five-‐square meter mini apartment – if you can really call it one. In this tiny space, there is really no room for turning around after he placed his single bed.
“I was really frustrated when I first moved in, it felt like staying in a jail cell. But then, I started to do some improvements to it, you know, a small thing like a book shelf or a tank of goldfish could really improve life quality.” Lam wrote all about his “room make-‐over techniques” in
his book “My Luxurious Subdivided Units Life”, and suddenly it became a big hit.
However, the bitter-‐sweet stories of Lam and many other young Hong Kongers who have to live in a subdivided unit, the special rental units which are divided from a regular size room, have brutally unveiled a dark side of Asia’s world city.
According to data revealed by the HK government in 2012, Hong Kong’s Gini index, which is a measure of income disparity, reached its highest point (0.537) in 40 years. Co-‐research conducted by Bloomberg and IMF last year suggested that the combined wealth of the top-‐10 billionaires of the city accounted for 35% of its GDP; meanwhile, a survey carried out by Hong Kong Shue Yan University demonstrated that 76% of the respondents chose “miserable” and “very miserable” when asked to describe their life status in terms of money.
“There’s something about the wealth gap in Hong Kong that is extra jarring and unacceptable…in the most densely populated city in the world, the injustice feels so much more in-‐your-‐face and a lot harder to stomach, “wrote Yonden Lhatoo, a senior editor from South China Morning Post, warning that the city’s income disparity will lead to social unrest on a historic level if left unchecked.
The rise of Hong Kong nationalism, mostly anti-‐Mainland China sentiment, would certainly hold the illness of the city’s economy accountable. As many cases of social research has shown, the theory which proposes “income inequality leads to the formation of nationalism” is happening to Hong Kong right at this moment.
The CEFA
“Today’s Hong Kong is tomorrow’s Taiwan” – as evidenced by students who occupied Taiwan’s Legislative Council displayed a banner like this in 2014, a joint anti-‐Beijing force has emerged across the Taiwan Strait. Months ahead of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, a similar millennial-‐led protest happened in Taiwan, another region that also
seeks independence from China.
The 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan called for the cancellation of the Cross-‐Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA), which is a follow-‐up agreement to the Economic Cooperation Framework
Agreement(ECFA) that was signed between China and Taiwan in 2009. Many Taiwanese believe signing a free trade agreement with a gigantic economy like China would only crush Taiwan’s own economy, and cost Taiwanese people jobs. According to protesters in Taiwan, Hong Kong is obviously a vivid example of Chinese invasion.
Chi-‐Tak Song, a Hong Kong labor union leader, believes that 2003 was a pivotal year for HK’s future economy: on June 29 of that year, a trade agreement was signed between Hong Kong and China. The Closer Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) aimed to “progressively
reduce or eliminate tariffs and non-‐tariff barriers and progressively achieve liberalization of trade in services.”
“It (CEFA) only benefits big corporates and highly-‐skilled workers; for ordinary Hong Kong job seekers, it really is disastrous. For example, the call centers of HSBC bank have all relocated to Shenzhen or Guangzhou, how many Hong Kong jobs are we talking about here?” Song told several Taiwanese labor organizations at a seminar held in Taipei in 2009.
Song believes that what’s worse is the influx of Chinese capital after CEFA and the fact that it was mostly invested in financial and real estate sectors. “These two sectors do not provide many middle class jobs, and they are hotbeds of economic crises…once an economic crisis outbreak,
capital just flies away, while workers stay to be the first waves of victims,” said Song. “This is why when every cycle of crisis ends, the income inequality evolves to a new level.”
However, according to Wing Chung, an economy researcher from the Institute of Hong Kong and Macau Studies of Jinan University, the current industry structure of Hong Kong that predominately relies on finance and real estate was formed way ahead of CEFA. “The economic integration between Mainland and Hong Kong dates back to the 80s, when China started its economic reform and opened its market.”
Due to lower labor costs, manufactural sectors of Hong Kong had mostly been relocated to neighboring Guangdong province of China during the past decades and led to the rise of tertiary industries, namely finance and real estate.
According to a 2002 government report, the “four pillar industries (financial services, trading and logistics, tourism, and producer and professional services)” of Hong Kong accounted for 53.2% of that year’s GDP. “So CEPA has really just attracted more Chinese capital into these sectors,” said Chung.
Chung believes that the growing wealth gap in Hong Kong can also be attributed to the Hong Kong government’s decades of practice of its “positive non-‐intervention” policy, which advocates deregulation and low taxes for businesses and had made Hong Kong the “freest economy
in the world” for years. But the heaven for capital and big corporates could also mean a living hell for the disadvantages: the GDP of the city has kept growing over the past decade, but the median income of average household can’t keep the same pace.
“Rich people on both sides are counting money together like best friends, while the have-‐nots are cursing each other as if they are worst enemies. Nothing can be as heart breaking as this,” wrote Annie Zhang, the editor-‐in-‐chief of The Initium.
The future
Unlike other notable nationalism movements elsewhere around the world, such as Scotland, Catalonia or even Brexit, the Hong Kong independence movement doubtlessly faces a much bleaker future: not only because of the ultra-‐powerful opponent -‐ the Communist Party -‐
they are facing, but also the fact that, even within Hong Kong society, pro-‐independence is not a mainstream voice.
Fung, on the other hand, is an optimist about the future of a possible HK Republic. “It IS difficult, extremely difficult, but the younger generation has a higher tendency of favoring independence, that’s where our hopes lie.”
Chung suggests that the policy-‐makers of Hong Kong should put more effort into addressing social injustice. “Regional integration, or to a bigger extent, globalization, is somewhat irreversible, but the wealth generated by it, can be distributed a little bit more evenly.”
“We used to believe that working hard always led to results, but now young kids really didn’t see the chance of realizing something in their lifetime. It’s just profoundly comprehensible why Hong Kong’s millennials are so angry about our society,” wrote Peter Mathieson, the president of the University of Hong Kong, on his blog after the 79-‐day Umbrella Movement.