Hong Kong Reading List

Qiao Collective has curated a short reading list that provides a critical lens on the driving forces of the Hong Kong protests: fervent anti-communism and a fetishization of abstract liberalism, British colonial nostalgia, anti-Chinese racism, and appeals to Western intervention.

While some on the left in the West try to sugarcoat the right-wing nature of the Hong Kong protests, these misrepresentations have resulted in widespread misinformation amongst the Western left. These readings provide a critical lens which undermines Hong Kong diaspora attempts to represent the protests as having a "leftist potential”—a fantasy which provides cover for the reactionary forces driving the protests, which seek to protect a Hong Kong colonial judicial system designed to protect private property and Western capitalist interests.

We must resist attempts to salvage and spin the Hong Kong protests by claiming there is "leftist potential" or "substantial factions" that aren't right-wing. These protests have made explicitly clear to the world the racist pro-U.S. imperialism interests they serve. It is highly deceptive to try to redeem an overtly right-wing protest that in practice and as a whole serves U.S. imperialism by pointing to an extremely minor mythical "leftist" faction or "potential." This type of leftwashing has been done repeatedly to provide left cover to right-wing protests in numerous Global South countries including Bolivia, Venezuela, Syria, and now China.

In addition, coopting movements in the U.S. against the carceral state & racial violence in order to equate them to the right wing, U.S.-funded Hong Kong protests under the guise of "transnational solidarity" is opportunistic at best and dishonest at worst. The Hong Kong protesters and their leaders have repeatedly allied with the Trumps, Pompeos, Rubios, and Pelosis of the world—the architects and enforcers of the U.S. regime of anti-Black death. These sweeping comparisons based on superficial visual references are an insult to the struggle for Black liberation. Those who equate the explicitly self-avowed right-wing Hong Kong protests with domestic liberation movements under the guise of transnational solidarity must reckon with the fact that this rhetorical trick is yet another attempt to provide left cover to the Hong Kong protests and misrepresent the true nature of the protests.

In reality, The Hong Kong "democracy movement" co-opts the language of "self-determination" and "autonomy" as a cover to bring Hong Kong more under Western colonial rule and to maintain Hong Kong as a capitalist imperialist base through which the West can attack China. We must look at the actual substance, interests, actions, and nature of the Hong Kong protests and not be misled by surface-level aesthetics and attempts to obscure and misrepresent the imperialist, racist interests that the protests made clear that they serve. We must take a materialist approach to evaluating pro-imperialist protests in the Global South rather than be distracted by superficial language by Western commentators meant to obscure and misrepresent these protests as somehow “pro-democracy.”

In fact, the fallacy in the Western left's defense of the Hong Kong protests is that they indulge in the fantasy that there are meaningful "leftist" factions that justify the protests, when really the fundamental basis and predominant nature and motivations of the protests is to serve racist, imperialist interests. No matter how much the Western left tries to salvage and misrepresent the Hong Kong protests by falsely claiming there is "leftist" potential and factions, these protests have made overtly clear via their actions the racist, classist, US imperialist interests they serve.

Ultimately, the vast majority thrust of the Hong Kong protests has been to make appeals to U.S. empire and political elite, many of whom are the same figures repressing and demeaning the Black Lives Matter movement. The fundamental question for those that performatively claim that there is hidden leftist potential in the Hong Kong protests is at what point does a right-wing dominated movement that makes explicit appeals for U.S. intervention and affiliation still have "leftist potential" and instead, are these rhetorical moves just providing left cover for a proudly self-avowed right-wing protest in order to confuse people about the actual nature (class nature, geopolitical nature, etc) of the Hong Kong protests.

Understanding the broader geopolitics behind the Hong Kong protests, it is easy to identify the Western corporate media’s investment in celebrating Hong Kong “freedom fighters” while demonizing revolutionary protest movements from Palestine to Haiti, Minneapolis, Bolivia, and beyond.

Reading List

The 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement

Adley, Mnar M. "The NED Strikes Again: How Neocon Money is Funding the Hong Kong Protests." Mintpress News. September 9, 2019.

Bo Xin & Ding Boshun. “Why the fake Left is against China (Part 1)” International Online. December 13, 2020.

“The whole basis for ‘self-determination’ in Hong Kong is right-wing anticommunism & anti-Mainland chauvinism. To say Hong Kong is a ‘colony of China’ is about as absurd as saying that modern-day Manhattan is a colony of the USA. ”

Chu Lap-tung. "Is American Dependency Actually “Self-Determination” for Hong Kong?" Qiao Collective, trans. Sean H. Kang. July 1, 2020.

Cohen, Dan. "Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence." The Grayzone. August 17, 2019.

Flounders, Sara. "Follow the money behind Hong Kong protests." Workers World. August 16, 2019.

International. "On the logic, tendency and nature of the “No Extradition to China” movement in Hong Kong." International Online. August 6, 2019.

PSL Central Committee. "Educational background material on Hong Kong crisis prepared by the PSL." Liberation News. October 6, 2014.

Rubinstein, Alexander. "American Gov’t, NGOs Fuel and Fund Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Protests." Mintpress News. June 13, 2019.

Singh, Ajit. "Hong Kong’s opposition unites with Washington hardliners to ‘preserve the US’s own political and economic interests’." The Grayzone. November 22, 2019.

Vltchek, Andre. "Message to My Young Readers in Hong Kong." Journal of People. June 25, 2020.

Xiao, Sheila. "The Hong Kong protests and imperialism: What the corporate media isn’t saying." Liberation School. September 24, 2019.

Hong Kong: People, History, Society

Chan, Ming K. “The Legacy of the British Administration of Hong Kong: A View from Hong Kong.” The China Quarterly 151 (1997).

“Defending Hong Kong against Britain: the Six-Day War of 1899,” Afakv’s Memories (blog).

Lowe, John & Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang. “Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong.” Patterns of Prejudice 51, no. 2 (2017).

Shelton, Barrie, Justyna Karakiewicz, & Thomas Kvan. “The Making of Hong Kong: From Vertical to Volumetric.” London: Routledge, 2010.

Zhang, Zhuoni & Xiaogang Wu. “Social Change, Cohort Quality and Economic Adaptation of Chinese Immigrants in Hong Kong, 1991-2006.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 20, no. 1 (2011).