Not simply the lack of democracy, or the “core values” of Hong Kong, but rather the underlying structural issues: namely, the wealth gap, income disparity, the lack of focus on policies that address anything from education to healthcare to housing-the list goes on. We are still pushing radical direct action but also trying to educate the people of Hong Kong about the issues we are facing. Obviously over the last decade, a lot has changed: the whole city has become radicalized, which is good.
It was because of my education through my work that I really took notice of Hong Kong’s fundamental issues. Initially we were the only left-leaning party, and our tactics were based on relatively radical direct actions, whether in the street or within Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo).īefore I joined the LSD in 2009, I was a corporate strategy consultant and actually specialized in mergers and acquisitions. Ng: The League of Social Democrats (LSD) is a center-left political party in Hong Kong, established in 2006.
So there’s certainly great room for progressives to push our platforms.Ĭhan: You’ve been involved with progressive politics in Hong Kong for over a decade. But there are still these root causes of inequality in Hong Kong that people can feel every single day and know need to be addressed. It shows why the Beijing government has always been afraid to even touch universal suffrage over the last few decades.įor voters, this election was purely about pro-democracy versus pro-Beijing any discussion of left versus right was secondary, if not nonexistent. The election has also brought in a new wave of young, pro-democratic district councilors who will be instrumental in further organizing citizens on the district level. We see the result as a de facto referendum on the legitimacy of Carrie Lam’s government, as well as a sign of our determination to achieve the Five Demands. We mobilized in force, and a lot of first-time and younger voters are finally using their votes to voice their anger toward the establishment. Wilfred Chan: What just happened in the district council elections?Īvery Ng: This is a landslide victory for the pro-democracy camp. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Currently anticipating a return to jail this week for a previous conviction in leaking details of a corruption investigation into a top establishment politician, Ng describes the left’s role in this year’s movement, the challenges of linking street organizing to structural critiques, and how outside observers frequently misunderstand political dynamics in Hong Kong. To understand the political energies at play, I spoke to Avery Ng, chairman of the League of Social Democrats, one of Hong Kong’s few openly left-wing political parties. Some left-wing activists’ efforts to broaden the movement by incorporating class critiques or involving labor unions have failed to gain popular traction.Īt the same time, a share of the credit for the movement’s mass mobilization must go to the city’s progressives, whose under-acknowledged and persistent organizing efforts helped spur June’s sudden eruption-and suggest the potential for a broader anti-capitalist politics in the former British colony. However, this tactical flexibility around advocating for the “Five Demands”-including police accountability, amnesty for protesters, and universal suffrage-has not accompanied critiques against other well-known social and economic injustices in Hong Kong. The movement owes much of its resilience to its leaderless structure: participants coordinate semi-anonymously over decentralized networks, pursuing a variety of protest methods from peaceful organizing to violent street confrontations with police. On Sunday, protesters mobilized a record-breaking turnout of pro-democracy voters in the city’s elections for district council, winning a landslide victory and gaining control of seventeen of eighteen districts-a clear rebuke to the Beijing-backed establishment. Nearly six months of increasingly brutal state violence have failed to break the massive anti-government uprisings in Hong Kong. An interview with Avery Ng, chairman of the League of Social Democrats in Hong Kong.
0 kommentar(er)
