Episode 6 | Hong Kong in Protest, Redux
In 2019, more than a million people poured onto the streets of Hong Kong, with many returning week after week. The song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ soon emerged as the movement’s unofficial anthem. What began as a protest against an ill-advised extradition bill quickly became, for many, the city’s last stand against Beijing’s tightening grip.
Six years on, those courageous scenes of struggle feel like a distant memory. New legislations have effectively outlawed dissent. ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ is banned. Pro-democracy activists and legislators have been jailed or forced into exile. Was the movement a failure? How should we measure success in a struggle that was, in many ways, quixotic? And how might we situate the 2019 protests within Hong Kong’s unique history of colonisation and capitalist development?
In this episode, Yangyang speaks with sociologist Ching Kwan Lee and historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom about the significance of the struggle, its transnational legacy, and the lessons it carries for this moment of global democratic backsliding.
Guest bios:
Ching Kwan Lee is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and author of three award winning books on contemporary China and global China. Her most recent monograph is Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle (Harvard University Press, 2025). She serves on the editorial board of The People’s Map of Global China, a sister project of the Made in China Journal.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine. A frequent contributor to general interest periodicals as well as academic journals, he is the author, most recently, of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (2025), a pair of short books published by Columbia Global Reports. He has a primer on the People’s Republic of China in the Xi Jinping era coming out in February 2026 from Bui Jones Books, Everything You Wanted to Know About China* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), and is working on a book on ‘Orwell and Asia’ for Princeton University Press.
Full episode transcript:
(Intro music)
Yangyang (00:12)
The song we are hearing now is called Glory to Hong Kong. If I look back at 2019, versions of this song will be echoing in my memories… I was living in Chicago at the time. Many nights I fell asleep to the latest developments of the protests in Hong Kong and woke up to fresh footage of police brutalities. I was in awe of the bravery of the protesters and anxious about their safety. As a Chinese person, I felt grateful to the people of Hong Kong for standing up to Beijing’s iron fist and refusing to acquiesce. As someone born and raised on the mainland, I also felt guilty that I was complicit by my identity.
By contesting an imposed notion of citizenship, the protesters of Hong Kong were also forcing me to rethink what it means to be Chinese. In 2020, Beijing enacted the Hong Kong National Security Law. Under the draconian legislation, the song, Glory to Hong Kong, has been banned. Hundreds have been arrested. Dissenters have been forced to go underground or into exile. The demonstrations from six years ago feel like a lifetime away.
Was the movement a failure? What should be the metric of success? How should one understand Hong Kong in 2019 through a longer, larger history of struggle?
I’m so honored to have two esteemed scholars on the show today to discuss all these and more. First up, we have Professor Ching-Kwang Lee, who goes by CK. Professor Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA. Her latest book is Forever Hong Kong, a global city’s decolonization struggle. I should say at the outset that this is one of the most striking books I have ever read on China and Hong Kong. And I know I’ll be returning to it often.
So CK, you grew up in Hong Kong and before moving to United States and in 2019 you happened to be in your hometown as a visiting professor and witnessed the protests firsthand. Can you tell us a bit about that experience? Hong Kong as a city is no stranger to protests. But what made 2019 so special? What struck you at that time?
CK Lee (02:31)
Yes, well, thank you, first of all, for having me on your program. In 2019, the whole city was involved in an uprising. That means it’s not just the activists that we’ve used to see in the years prior to 2019, but also ordinary citizens who joined the movement in many different ways. And so the scale and the range of people who participated in this particular movement really was what stood out. And I think is one of the reasons why Beijing reacted so seriously and harshly, because it was not just a small minority of passionate activists, but even the pragmatic majority of Hong Kong society also joined forces with the activists and that creates a kind of societal uprising. So that is really something that stood out to me. And another thing that really stood out to me was how young the protesters were. I think people may recall the teenagers who were often in black blocks and were at the forefront of the protests. But actually I was together with many citizens in many, many marches and rallies. And actually, those in the forefront, many of them were preteens, so young and tender and little, their bodies, putting their bodies on the line was really moving. And that’s created a kind of emotional and moral unity among the people, seeing the young ones putting themselves at risk and putting themselves on the line to fight for the future of the city moved many adults, older people to join them because of their moral clarity. And that’s something that really stood out is the scale of the protest, but also the youthfulness of those in the front line.
Yangyang (04:50)
Thank you so much for sharing with us some of that experience. And I know as someone growing up on the mainland, think one of the things that I noted and that has been very important in distinguishing Hong Kong from the mainland in terms of civil liberties, in terms of political freedoms, is that there are topics which are forbidden on the mainland that have been able to be discussed relatively freely in Hong Kong. In particular, is the 1989 Tiananmen protests.
And every year the vigil at Victoria Park had been a major part of Hong Kong identity. And the vigil in 2019 was particularly significant, not just for being the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen demonstrations, but also under the broader context of the protests that were going on in Hong Kong at the time, as CK just mentioned. And on that note, I would like to bring in our second guest, Professor Jeff Wasserstrom.
Professor Wasserstrom is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at University of California Irvine. He is also the author of many books, including Vigil, Hong Kong on the Brink, published in 2020, as well as the Milk Tea Alliance, Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, published earlier this year. So Jeff, you were at Victoria Park at the June 4th vigil in 2019. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience? In particular, that vigil ended up being the last of its kind.
Were you feeling that way at the time? the people around you feeling that this was also like a vigil to the vigil?
Jeff (06:25)
So first, it’s a great honor to be on the show and it’s wonderful to be following C.K. Lee, somebody I’ve been reading for and admiring the work by for so long.
I like to say that with talking about social movements that one of the key things about them is their unpredictability. And even for people who’ve spent enormous amounts of time studying and thinking about them, there are always things that are going to surprise you. So I’ll say something about the vigil that both surprised me and that I was, I think, correct about and things that I was totally unprepared for.
I had a feeling when I went there, one reason why I wanted to attend the vigil, having never gone to it, was I thought the time for legal vigils like this in Hong Kong was running out. And I thought it was possible that before many more years, there would not be the ability to hold that kind of event, which you could hold only in Hong Kong and Macau, no other part of the People’s Republic of China, and only in Hong Kong were they really giant. So in that sense, you know, unfortunately, the prediction in my mind turned out to be true. There stopped being these legal vigils. But I was completely wrong in another sense, which was that I also thought that attending the vigil might be the biggest gathering of protest during the year of 2019. And I was completely wrong because the next week there was a giant protest of by some estimates a million people. And then a week after that, an even bigger protest.
So that, I think, just shows you, brings home the unpredictability of it. There was a special feeling there and the event did end with the speaker saying, come back here next week, because this needs to be the start of a movement, not the end of it. But nobody really knew how big a turnout there would be in the next week. And I’ll mention that I had a plane ticket home for the seventh or eighth of June before that next protest. And in retrospect, I feel quite foolish that I didn’t just change my plane ticket to go a little bit later. But on the other hand, nobody who I talked to who was involved with the movement told me it was foolish to be leaving. They were hoping there’d be a big turnout, but they just didn’t know. And there’s one more thing about a vigil. I a vigil can be looking backward, commemorating something that happened in the past, in this case, the massacre of 1989. But to be, to hold vigil is also to bear witness to be by an ailing individual or entity that you’re wishing the best for, but you’re deeply worried about. And I think the vigil in 2019 had both those elements. And the last protest I went to before leaving that, ending that trip to Hong Kong, I came back in December, but the June trip, the last protest I witnessed was a few days later when there was a silent march by lawyers who I think they didn’t call it a vigil, but it was also a vigil of a sort. It was to mourn the impending or potential death of the rule of law in Hong Kong in a way that had been special. So I think of that June as having participated in two vigils, observed two vigils.
Yangyang (09:56)
Yeah, actually, I feel that for me, like just observing the 2019 protests from an ocean away, I felt like since 2019, I’ve been like in a state of perpetual mourning or perpetual grief, thinking about a lot of things that we have lost and how much the world has changed. And for myself, I actually did not know about the Tiananmen protests until I moved to the United States. I was seven years old when during the Hong Kong handover in 1997, and that was one of my earliest political memories. And I think one of the things that Beijing often accuses the people of Hong Kong of is that they are insufficiently Chinese. They’re insufficiently patriotic. Their Chineseness and their national identity had somehow been tainted by British colonial rule. And CK, one of the things that I really appreciated about your book is how historically minded it is that you place the present of Hong Kong into a longer colonial history, including during its British rule.
And in particular, you mentioned that in the decades of British colonial rule in Hong Kong, Beijing or China had acted in the background as quote, a phantom colonizer. And in particular, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, even though the regime under Mao Zedong brandished itself as this anti-colonial, anti-imperial force on the world stage. And in some ways, Mao’s rhetoric and some of the political movements on the mainland, including particularly the Cultural Revolution, had inspired some of the leftist protests in Hong Kong, such as the labor movement in the late 1960s against British colonial rule. On the other hand, in some ways Beijing also sold out Hong Kong’s future or took away the right to self-determination from the people of Hong Kong, both at the UN and later in negotiations with Great Britain.
So can you unpack some of these tensions and contradictions in terms of what Beijing or what the People’s Republic of China meant for Hong Kong during the decades of British rule?
CK Lee (12:02)
Well, in a way, I think there wasn’t that much tension or contradiction from Beijing’s point of view. Its stance has always been clear, which is taking a very instrumental orientation towards Hong Kong. It treats Hong Kong as an object rather than the people as subjects of history. And its policy towards Hong Kong changed according to China’s needs. so as you said, despite his rhetoric of anti-colonialism or being the leader of the third world against US and Soviet domination, China itself perpetuated Hong Kong’s status as a colony and most illustratively in 1972, when one of the first things that Beijing did after becoming or after unseating Taipei as the representative of China in the UN was to remove Hong Kong from the list of dependent territories that were slated for self-determination or independence. And so if it was really anti-imperial, then it would have allowed Hong Kong like all the other colonies in the world at that time, the option of becoming independent. But it did not. But so what I was going to say was what China has always been doing towards Hong Kong was to make it an instrument of whatever goals Beijing wanted. I still remember this phrase that Beijing officials used to describe Hong Kong. It was the the goose that laid the golden eggs. And we Hong Kong people have listened to that for a long time and it became a normalized kind of expression. But the more you think about it, you can see the dehumanization to describe a people, a society, as an animal, as a goose that does some very good purpose for the owner. And this is this kind of dehumanization that we find in history of colonialism throughout. It has taken many forms. But China has always looked at Hong Kong as an instrument. so, and in that sense, denying the people their own vision and their own desires and their own project as a society.
Yangyang (14:52)
Yeah, I think what is really striking to me is also how the people of Hong Kong have agency and have exercised their agency in negotiating with this complex landscape of double colonization. And Jeff, if we come back to you, and I want to come back to Tiananmen, since you’ve done a lot of work on that as well, in addition to your work on Hong Kong. And by the time the people… the students and workers gathered in Tiananmen Square as well as this nationwide protest. This was in 1989, five years after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that in a way had sealed Hong Kong’s political future, at least legally speaking on paper. And I think, of course, Hong Kong was still a British colony at the time. And I think the people of Hong Kong really stood out during that historical moment in terms of their support and solidarity with the protesters in China. And in a way that was almost distinct in the Sinophone world outside the People’s Republic of China’s jurisdiction. And I’m curious about that in terms of why was Tiananmen so important to Hong Kong? Were the people of Hong Kong not just supporting the protesters on the mainland, but also through that process was also asserting or negotiating their Chinese identity and their own political futures.
Jeff (16:21)
I think that’s a good way to put it. I think there was a feeling of a special stake in the direction that mainland was taking because the clock was ticking until there would be the integration into this polity. there was a real sense of urgency about it.
As much as I’ve thought about Tiananmen, there are always new things to think about it and in, it’s sometimes forgotten in the way in which it’s sometimes remembered outside of China. There’s a memory of it as a student movement and it did begin as a student movement. But a key thing about 1989 was that workers joined, that it became a movement of urbanites of all groups, like what CK was describing happened in 2019. And the governments move the use of brutal force to break that movement had a lot to do with the fact that it was more than just Beijing. was protests in cities around the country. And if you include Hong Kong in a place that wasn’t part of the country, but was going to become part of the country. And that was something that made the CCP so nervous about it. But after 1989, after Tiananmen, the tendency was for the regime to think that what you needed to never have again was a movement that would connect people across social divides and across geographical divides. And there was a very different attitude taken with some degree of latitude allowed to single class or single locale protests as long as they were not in Tibet or Xinjiang, which were handled with a particular kind of force.
I think connecting Tiananmen to 2019, one of the ways to think about it is that was the first Hong Kong movement that had people in every part of the territory, not just in a couple of zones within it, and of all social and generational groups. So you have an interesting kind of mirror in that way of 1989 and 2019, that that was you know as CK described it, it was something that felt like the entire urban setting was on the streets. And that was the nightmare for the Chinese Communist Party or what they intently wanted to avoid after Tiananmen. So I think the Hong Kong activism in 2019 in support of what was going on, and there were all kinds of interesting kinds of support, including a rock concert, including sending aid, as well as people, as well as just spreading news about it. There were all kinds of ways that Hong Kongers were enacting a way of being connected to the people of the PRC, but on the side of those people who were pushing to make it a different kind of country. So it was asserting a kind of connectedness that I think is part of what’s important about the fact that there was activity on both sides of that border in 1989.
Yangyang (19:41)
It was like a way to manifest not just what China is, but what China can be. And thank you, Jeff, for also mentioning that Tiananmen was not just a student movement, right? It was also a labor movement. It was a nationwide demonstration that people from all walks of life had taken part in. And it was not just an abstract yawning for abstract notions of freedom or democracy, but a major instigator for Tiananmen was indeed China’s messy transition from socialist planning into global capitalism and a lot of these fissures and issues that have been exposed in that process. so CK, coming back to you, as you also mentioned, Beijing had seen Hong Kong as this instrument, as this goose that lays the golden egg. And in your book, you laid out this tension in Beijing’s view of Hong Kong on one hand, wanting it to be a patriotic Chinese territory in a way no different from any other major Chinese city. On the other hand, also needing Hong Kong to continue to be this global city to act as a gateway to Beijing or to China’s integration into global capitalism. And for many years after the 1997 handover, the latter, the need for Hong Kong to be this global gateway to global capital, to be China’s gateway to global capitalism, had in a way helped Hong Kong maintain by and large its way of life. However, that delicate balance no longer holds over the past decade. And a lot of that was not just about Hong Kong or about Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing, but as you describe in the book, it’s also a manifestation of crises in global capitalism and between China’s relationship with the West. So can you unpack some of that?
CK Lee (21:34)
Well, yes, the contradiction if we focus on China is really this dual purpose that is seized in Hong Kong, both as a gateway to the world, but also as a Chinese city within its territory. And the result of that contradiction, contradictory need for Hong Kong to be both global and Chinese. The result of that is it really creates this whole situation that got out of hand for Beijing. Think about the generation of Joshua Wong. In the book, I call this generation the post-colonial generation that came of age around the time of 1997.
And they became this major political force that was at the forefront of pushing for autonomy, for rule of law, and all the things that Beijing didn’t want. But who created this generation? I made it very clear in the book that arguably it was Beijing or China that created its own biggest enemy in Hong Kong. Because when this generation came of age, they were told by Beijing, not by anybody else, by Beijing that Hong Kong people should rule Hong Kong. 50 years, autonomy, one country, two systems, these were all from Beijing, from China. And so the young people took it to heart and took it perhaps more seriously than Beijing did, that they would be master of their own society, they would be the one ruling Hong Kong. And because Beijing set a deadline to this blueprint, 50 years. So for this group of youngsters, this generation, they have 50 years to maximize what they could do to the Hong Kong system. After that, China would take over. So in sort of promising autonomy but also imposing a deadline sort of motivates this group of young people to take things into their own hand and make use of the limited time that they have before the deadline hit that they should try to strike for a democratic and liberal Hong Kong. So this is one of the contradictions, the results from that contradiction.
And so you see the impetus of the young people to fight and take a last stand in 2019. You can trace it all the way back to one country, two systems with a deadline. so, and also you could also ask why and people should ask why didn’t Beijing crack down with a national security law 20 years ago? Why did it wait until 2019 because protests have happened in Hong Kong over two decades. It wasn’t day one in 2019. 2019 was the peak of a 20 year long period of agitation. And it was because Beijing was caught in his own contradiction that it couldn’t crack down earlier. And so in the 20 years between 1997 and 2019, Hong Kong people were able to develop the capacity for collective action. They developed a collective identity more determined and insistent on its local identity and local agenda that Hong Kong people should determine Hong Kong as a political project. All these were not there in 1997. Hong Kong people were not heroic in essence.
We used to feel very powerless. We used to acquiesce to whatever Beijing and Britain had decided for us. People felt powerless. And what changed in the past 20 years was exactly the space, the political space created by Beijing, that it couldn’t take away those freedom for its own good of showing the world, integrating with the world, using Hong Kong as a bridge for its own national development.
So you have to see that the whole result, not just the generation that spearheaded all these protests, but also the whole political situation whereby Hong Kong people could develop the capacity and the interest to fight Beijing actually originated from the contradictory design and objectives of Beijing. Now, that’s one part of the story. The other part is really the crisis of global capitalism crisis that really shaken people’s um, Accuracies to the status quo didn’t come from Beijing It was right after 1997. It was the Asian financial crisis That hit hong kong and made the middle class lost a lot in the in the asset and the value of the homes and and then very soon unemployment hit because of SARS and some missteps taken by the Hong Kong government. So that was the ruptures that made people rethink whether Hong Kong could stick to the status quo and still enjoy the prosperity and stability that both Britain and China sold them. That, you know, you don’t need democracy. You have prosperity and stability if you stick to the status quo. But Hong Kong people were awakened to the fact that it’s not so easy and what waken them, awakened to that reality. It was not China. It was not Chinese intervention. It was really crisis of global capitalism. And then very soon we have the anti-globalization movement, the social justice movement coming to Hong Kong in 2005 because Hong Kong government hosted the WTO ministerial meeting that year. And that brought the whole anti-globalization movement to Hong Kong.
And that’s when that movement also coming from global capitalism, the end of the thesis of global capitalism brought to Hong Kong people all these social justice objectives, the ideas, the ideals of social justice to Hong Kong people. that also gave Hong Kong people the idea that, well, prosperity and stability is not the only thing that…define a good society. also wanted social justice. We also wanted power in social planning, urban planning, the claim to use our own space, claim to our identity and our history, and so on and so forth. So what I’m saying here is that the first decade, the social movements that emerged in the first decade after 1997, wasn’t so much because of Chinese intervention. It was about the crisis. It was originated from crisis of global capitalism and because Hong Kong was a global city. We were just, you you couldn’t avoid that. And then come the second decade after 1997, it was the contradictions emerging from China, the contradictory policies from China that really intensified and pushed the movement further.
Yangyang (29:17)
Yeah, thank you. So it’s really like this historical juncture that has given rise to this generational struggle. In many ways, it is the post-colonial generation in Hong Kong who are leading the current decolonization struggle. And so, Jeff, coming to you, you spent a lot of time with the youth protesters, including some of the most prominent ones, and you wrote about them in your book. And some of the things that I also noticed, like when I read about these young protesters or see footage of them. on one hand, I feel old. On the other hand, it also makes me feel energized. And there are some things that are very distinct about their generation in terms of the language, the imagery, the references they use in terms of political expression, in terms of asserting their identities. And also the younger generation as digital natives, right? They have a particular connection with youth in other parts of the world.
They are inspired by and in turn also inspire other youth led movements in other parts of the world. And your latest book is called The Milk Tea Alliance, which in many ways is describing this kind of transnational youth led struggle. So can you tell us a little bit about what is the Milk Tea Alliance and what is so distinct about this younger generation of protesters in Hong Kong and beyond?
Jeff (30:43)
So it’s really interesting to be talking about this right now when there’s a lot in the headlines about Gen Z activism and the series of movements that are taking place in Nepal, Madagascar, Morocco, Indonesia, in which there’s a connecting thread with the generation and also the use of a globally circulating symbol that comes from popular culture, in this case, the one piece pirate flag that came from a manga that became a live action show and that a lot of young people in very disparate places are aware of and are putting to use to exemplify and connect and show a kind of solidarity with one another. And when I’m following this news, I’m thinking so much about how certain kinds of symbols circulating among Gen Z when they were active during the late 2010s, but also millennials who were just a little bit older than the Gen Z group, what people born in like the mid 1990s, the youngest of the millennials. And that’s where, who a lot of the people involved in say the umbrella movement, but also the sunflower movement in Taiwan just before the umbrella movement. So the milk tea Alliance specifically was a term that was coined early in 2020 to express a shared sense of concern about limits on freedoms, but more specifically at that moment, Beijing’s assertiveness, Beijing’s increased assertiveness to try to impose a singular vision of Chineseness and a singular view of geography on many different parts of the region.
So what happened was a Thai celebrity had liked a social media post that referred to Hong Kong as its own kind of place. And also at another point had liked a social media post that referred to Taiwan as a country. And there were some virulent nationalists on the mainland who went online and called for the celebrity to apologize for harming the feelings supposedly of all the Chinese people.
And this was at a time when similar kinds of efforts to impose Beijing’s view of the world on different groups had been made to companies, to corporations that had been done things like showed Taiwan as a different color on a map than the mainland, which implied that it was its own place, which it is. And there were companies that had backed down from pressure from Beijing. And so…the activists, young activists who had started to pay close attention to each other, many of them in Thailand and Taiwan had been following the Hong Kong protests in 2019 with a great deal of enthusiasm. There were some personal friendships between people, Netoet Chodhaphizal in Thailand and Joshua Wong in Hong Kong. And Netoet had tried to bring Joshua to Bangkok to speak in 2016 and Joshua had been… turned around at the air had been detained at the airport by the Thai authorities surely in league with the Chinese authorities and sent back but anyway there were these connected threads and there were use in these three places that that called out to the celebrity online is it don’t back down don’t don’t apologize you haven’t done anything wrong and we will support you if you lose some share of the mainland market will double our sub our fandom for you and when they thought about what they had in common with each other, digital natives very into popular culture in different ways, they thought of the fact that they were each from places that the iconic form of tea drunk had milk in it, whereas on the mainland, the iconic form of tea doesn’t have milk in it. So they began to talk of the speak of themselves kind of playfully as the milk tea alliance. And there were things showing up online of three cups of tea, each representing the distinctive tea drink with milk of these different places, swearing allegiance to each other, like a kind of three musketeers or like the sworn brotherhoods from Chinese popular bandit novels. And so this took off as a way of characterizing a sense of solidarity, a sense of playfulness within even a serious struggle, which is something we’re seeing now with the one piece flag, but not just there. We see it in other cases where a kind of playfulness of and things go from entertainment to the real world often among youth not always among youth because it’s not just the domain of youth because there are there are feminists concerned about threats to abortion rights who have been dressing in handmaids costumes to show a protest and that’s a similar kind of use of something that can seem playful but has a very serious meaning to it.
So the youths in those three places and eventually Myanmar, AKA Burma, became part of it as well when there were protests there that took on some of the symbolism of the Milk Tea Alliance as well. The Milk Tea Alliance, along with Milk Tea as this playfulness, there was an interest in one work of popular entertainment, which is even more kind of resonant with the one piece Jolly Roger flag and the form of popular entertainment was the Hunger Games novels and films. In Hong Kong, one of the slogans, which had in 2019, which has a link to the Hunger Games, was if we burn, you burn with us. And that was that sense of a last ditch struggle by young people against a more powerful capital. In the Hunger Games universe, young people from different areas that face the same powerful capital as a threat to them, band together, and spoiler alert, in the end they win, which is one of the things that made it such a compelling story to bring into protests. The other thing in The Hunger Games that I talk about a lot in the book was the three-finger salute of resistance, which was the dominant hand gesture from the series, the dominant gesture of defiance, like a raised fist in some earlier periods and other places. The three finger salute was used as a sign of resistance by a small number of young people in Hong Kong and Thailand back in 2014. But it didn’t really take off as a gesture until 2020 in Thailand and then 2021 in Burma when it was used by tons of people on the streets in protest. And it was a way these kinds of symbols were a way of expressing solidarity and a sense of shared purpose. It was also a way of infusing even a very serious movement with a sense of play and excitement. And I think of it in the same category as songs that take on an essential unifying role, either within a setting, the way Glory to Hong Kong did within Hong Kong once it was coined, and also across settings, when there were large numbers of people in very different movements, not just the Milk Tea Alliance, but other ones, that were singing versions of Do You Hear the People Sing in the 2010s and early 2020s. And Do You Hear the People Sing even was picked up by some on the mainland, resisting the harshest forms of COVID controls. And so popular music has long been a part of social movements. This isn’t a new thing by Gen Z or by millennials. And I see it as an earlier version of taking things from one realm that has a sense of creating unity across borders, creating a sense of purpose, keeping people invested in a movement and interested in a movement. And so I see some of the uses of popular culture. It’s new kinds of popular culture when you have things drawn from movies and from these novels. But in a sense, there’s something very familiar if you’re a historian who’s looked at social movements. You can think about the spread of the song, We Shall Overcome, around the world in the 1950s and 60s. You can go even back further and think about the way that spirituals or stories of David versus Goliath or stories of Moses freeing people from slavery, that these kinds of things can have a way of being part of the cultural side of social movements that I think is very important.
Yangyang (39:49)
Yeah, I should also say that I, speaking of feeling old, I have never consumed any The Hunger Games content, because I was not particularly interested in the genre. But each time, Jeff, I read your work or hear you speak about Three Fingers Salute, I feel that I should at least go and watch perhaps like at least like the first movie. But on that note, CK, I would like to come back to you as a labor scholar, because as Jeff also was mentioning, these iconic songs that were sung during the Hong Kong protests, but I also did notice there was one song that was not nearly as prominently featured, which was the Internationale. And speaking of protests in Hong Kong, inspiring protests in other countries in Southeast Asia, on the other hand, Hong Kong as a hyper-capitalist city, also practices its own form of racial capitalism where migrant workers from South and Southeast Asian countries work under very exploitative labor and immigration conditions. And so I’m curious about your thoughts on that. Is there awareness about these capitalist inequalities or labor conditions within the 2019 protests? I know there are dimensions of it, but is that marginal?
I know there is also calls to a general strike that you also describe in your book that never fully materialized. So is that dimension a limitation to the political awareness or imagination of the protesters in Hong Kong, or does that still indicate underexplored potential?
CK Lee (41:30)
Well, that’s a great question. The labor inequality that has to do with labor has been kind of a marginal issue in 2019 and has always been in Hong Kong. What is unique in the 2019 movement was that there was a part of the movement consisted of a new union, new unionism, which emerged around the end of 2019 and the early part of 2020 as a response to violence on the street. That is, many people, citizens felt that it is hopeless to send protesters onto the streets to be just beaten up and arrested by police. The movement needed another venue to move forward forming unions to use the legal institutional space of trade unions was considered a very good way to sustain the movement in a kind of legal manner to avoid “sending people to the guillotines”, that was the expression. And so we saw many professionals. Now these are not your blue collar workers that formed the new union movement. These were young professionals and you could tell they were professionals just by looking at the name of the unions. Like they were IT professionals, airport employees, and therapists, quite a few medical professional groups, speech therapists, nurses and new medical unions. So what they were trying to do was to sustain the movement, continue the movement through the, using the organizational form of unions. But once they formed unions, they began to look at their members’ interests and demands. And so they were both political unions, but also the regular labor unions mixed together and what their target. I followed them quite intensively for several months. What I saw was that they launched a critique of capitalist exploitation, but mostly targeting red capital from the mainland. And so you could say, and why red capital? Well, because many from many of these unions experiences, it was red capital rather than Western capital that really undermined the professional standards that these professional groups wanted to embrace and have embraced for long time. So accountants, for instance, there were several new accountants unions. And I talked to them and realized that it was not just to continue the political movement 2019, but also… They were also very alienated from the accounting profession, having to serve red capital, know, Chinese companies from the mainland, because these Chinese companies wanted them to bend the rules of their practice. They wanted to cut corners. They wanted to do a lot of gray paperwork that really violated the sense of professionalism of these accountants in Hong Kong.
And so one of the major impetuses for these young professionals forming these unions is really to regain and to preserve the autonomy that they saw as being eroded by the influx of investors from the mainland. So there is this kind of anti-capitalist critique, but mostly focusing on Chinese investors in as part of the New Union Movement and the New Union Movement is part of the 2019 movement. But the situation of the domestic workers that mostly come from Southeast Asia, that was never an issue for the movement. The movement itself didn’t really critique that aspect of Hong Kong society. so, you know, if you think that decolonization is a project to achieve equality among people, then definitely this is not part of the agenda for most Hong Kong people. Although I would say that the critique of market-driven capitalism is very much part of the movement in 2019. If people recall, there is the yellow economic circle, yellow economy idea where people would boycott businesses that are very successful, these chain restaurants, chain supermarkets, and people wanted to boycott these successful businesses, which in the past didn’t happen. If you were successful in the market, Hong Kong people worship you, think that, it is right that you become so rich and powerful. But in the 2019 movement, people sort of think that, well, if the market, if businesses are, even though they are successful, if they are anti-social, that is, they are against what people want in society, then… we as a community should boycott this kind of business. there is a critique from that angle that market is not always rational. You may be successful in the market, but it doesn’t mean that we want that kind of economy. We want an economy that is supportive of democracy. So that in itself is something that is new. We rarely see this kind of idea seeing the market as a political phenomenon, seeing the market, asking the market to serve communal or social or political purpose. I think that has to be considered a step forward towards debunking the neoliberal ideology that whatever market can do is right and reasonable.
Yangyang (48:07)
This is so fascinating. CK, you also describe in your book, But because movement is a dynamic process, and lot of these protesters were also developing their political awareness and political consciousness in the course of the protests, of the struggles themselves. And so, Jeff, coming to you, I also noticed that towards the closing of Vigil, you made one of your typical historical analogies where you are comparing Hong Kong in 2019 to Shanghai a century ago at the end of the 1910s and with the protests, the anti-colonial struggles, but also very interesting what happened in Shanghai in the late 1910s was a general strike. So I’m curious, what are your thoughts on this?
Jeff (48:54)
So yeah, think that’s, I’ve been flashing back to Shanghai a lot. Shanghai was the first place that I studied. It’s what I spent, it’s first place in Asia that I ever lived. It was the focus of my dissertation. I first thought of it though, listening to CK describe the Chinese Communist Party wanting Hong Kong to be both a Chinese city and a global city. And actually the Chinese Communist Party faced that dilemma when it took over Shanghai in 1949 and in the early 1950s and trying to figure out though much sooner reigning in the things that made Shanghai different. But there was initially a point there where they didn’t want all of the business people to leave. didn’t want, they wanted it to still function in some ways as this kind of go between zone and it had been a place that was never fully colonized, it had foreign run enclaves. So there are a lot of ways in which I think it’s natural to think about Shanghai and Hong Kong together in different ways. And then of course there were when the noose started to close on Shanghai, some of the people who could no longer have the kind of life they wanted there went to Hong Kong and became part of its story going forward. In the movements, the protests in 1919 and 1925, both of those movements that were anti-imperialist but also anti-authoritarian or anti-warlord, there were general strikes and those were crucial things about it. And there was a move from mobilizing or organizing on campuses to doing so among workers. Something else there was was some discussion, there were some slogans in what was a national movement at that point by 1919 and 1925. They were partly against rising Japanese encroachments on Chinese territory and the Chinese government being too ready to compromise. But in Shanghai, there was also the concern about these foreign run districts. And one of the slogans that was used on the streets in 1925 was Shanghai should Shanghai ran to Shanghai. Shanghai should be the Shanghai of the Shanghainese. And that was a very kind of if you talk about people developing their their political consciousness during a movement there was a way in which they’re saying, even if this movement is about what Japan is doing, shouldn’t this also have us think about controlling our own destiny? So I think we can see yet another way in which there’s a kind of connection between that earlier moment and the moment 100 years later.
Yangyang (52:07)
Thank you so much, Jeff, for giving us this historical lesson. And I think if we think back to Shanghai or China in the early 20th century, and a lot of the political leaders went into exile, including Sun Yat-sen, and some of them also found temporary refuge and camaraderie in Hong Kong. And now a century later, a number of the prominent protest leaders you profiled in your book, some of the pro-democracy activists and former legislators from Hong Kong are either in jail or in exile. And I know that you’re speaking to us today actually from the Netherlands where you’re going to an event of a Chinese diasporic bookstore in the Netherlands.
And so in closing, I would like to ask you this question that I myself think about a lot, right? How does one fight for the freedom of one’s country from an ocean away? On what kind of battleground could such a fight take shape? And what does freedom mean in this context?
Jeff (53:18)
It’s such a deep, hard, hard question. And I do think that one of the things to say, which isn’t, you know, maybe it’s a typical thing for, for a professor to say, is that in thinking through these things, it can just be very useful to read about and think about other settings in which there have been related dilemmas. I know that some of the young Hong Kongers in exile who I’ve talked to have talked about becoming increasingly interested in learning from the Tibetan experience. And it took me a little while at first when one said they found the Tibetan diaspora so inspiring. And I was thinking in a kind of simplistic notion of wins and losses, Tibet is no closer to having a kind of freedom in Tibet than it was at any point in the past. But what some of them explained to me was that what they found inspiring was that members of the Tibetan diaspora had managed to keep alive an idea of something precious and different about Tibet and something valuable. And one of the kind of concerns of some of Hong Kongers in exile is that even as in political and economic and other terms, Hong Kong’s difference may be being endangered and hollowed out within Hong Kong itself, there’s some way to keep alive that kind of the sense of what this something very special is being lost. But I think it’s worth looking at all kinds of places, all kinds of struggles by people who had been exiles and I was struck at the JF bookstore in Washington DC, one of these other diaspora ones like the nowhere bookstore here in The Hague. There’s a whole section set aside for books about struggles in other places that seem to face impossible odds that were carried out partly by people living under a difficult authoritarian regime, but others who were who were carrying on that kind of struggle and exile. They had books about Soviet dissidents. They had books about other things, other kinds of settings where there were both exiles others. I think, I mean, we can talk about it in a happy mode, which I mean, in a hopeful mode, which talks about how often struggles by, by exiles or by colonial struggles against colonialism seem impossible, seem impossible, but it’s something changes and there is a space for sometimes seemingly impossible struggles to win. And we can see examples of this in many places. In Taiwan, the struggle to overthrow, to make Taiwan a freer place than it was under martial law. It was unsuccessful, unsuccessful for decades. And then we now see the exciting place that Taiwan is now.
But there’s also a darker side to this, which is that we can see recurring patterns of things that exiles sometimes have to deal with. A very common term right now is being talked about transnational repression. And there was a depressing story, but apt one, in the Journal of Democracy saying this might be seen in some ways as the golden age of transnational repression. But even transnational repression isn’t completely new. You go back to the period when Sun Yat-sen was in exile and you can talk about this as a story where he ends up being able to go back to mainland that’s changed, but he also had to face a form of transnational repression by the Qing being kidnapped in London. And in that long struggle that people from Taiwan in exile were fighting for change there, there was an assassination in the United States of a journalist who is digging into the private life of Kuomintang leaders. And you think about the threats to people now who dig into the private lives of CCP leaders. So there are things that are recurring patterns worth paying attention to, both in the history of resistance and in the history of oppression.
Yangyang (57:50)
Yeah, I think one of the things I think about in terms of keeping a movement alive in a diaspora is also that it forces one to rethink one’s relationship to land and forces one to contest the notions of national identity or notions of political community beyond these constructs of territory and borders. And I think that is also some of these possibilities that were manifested in Hong Kong in 2019.
And so CK coming to you for the last word, as a scholar and as a Hong Konger, you mentioned in your book, and as Jeff also mentioned earlier, right, the 2019 in Hong Kong, there was this kind of end times mentality that in some ways inspired the incredible bravery of the protesters. Like if we burn, you burn with us, like this is the last stand. And I think as we speak now here in 2025 in United States and in many other parts of the world,
This also feels like end times. So as a scholar and as a Hong Konger, what is like one key lesson from Hong Kong for this moment of global crisis and historical juncture?
CK Lee (59:04)
Well, first of all, I want to say I agree with many of the things that Jeff just said, that whether in the diaspora or for people who are still in Hong Kong, it’s not enough to have things changed. It’s not enough what we do. There are external political economic situations that are not up to us to decide.
Sometimes these forces will open up opportunities, other times they become very repressive. So I just want to make the point that, yes, a lot of people are asking what we can do, whether it’s outside of Hong Kong or in Hong Kong. But I think that question seems to assume that this is the major factor that would determine the outcome. I just want to say that, no, we always have to make an effort but don’t ever think that is a one factor kind of an equation where we do A and you will bring out certain outcome and if you don’t then no, it’s not that simple and we should always try to do our best in whatever way we think should be done but it would never be the only determinant of the outcome. Now back to you, what is the things that we’ve learned, I think having been with so many activists and citizens during 2019 and having observed and thought about 2019 for a long time, think sacrifice is the thing that I’ve learned, that Hong Kong people have learned, that in order to continue the fight for freedom, democracy, all these good things, we have to take sacrifice seriously. Ask ourselves, are we willing to sacrifice? To what extent can we sacrifice? And I think in Hong Kong in 2019, we’ve seen a lot of sacrifices, but also we’ve seen that people haven’t made enough sacrifice. There are a lot of people who retreated at critical moments when people proposed a general strike. The unions didn’t get enough votes to pass the general strike motion, people consider lots of things, other things, than the movement itself. And so when it comes time to go to prison, how many Hong Kong citizens are willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause? I think these are issues that we have to ask ourselves and to realize that even in a democracy like in the United States, we all have to work day and night to guard against his backsliding so again, sacrifice for some cause and values that we believe in, whether in the diaspora or at home.
Yangyang (01:02:03)
Yeah, I am reminded of this line from a Hong Kong diasporic writer who said that the magnitude of the challenge is also its emancipatory potential. And so thank you so much, Professor Ching-Kwang Lee, and congratulations on the book.
CK Lee (01:02:22)
Thank you.
Yangyang (01:02:23)
And Professor Jeff Wassistrom, thank you so much for joining us. Do you have a favorite milk tea flavor?
Jeff (01:02:29)
Ahahaha, I think I drink I like to drink chai…
Yangyang (01:02:33)
Ha ha ha!
