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About the Uprising in Hong Kong Written by the Vitalist International About the Written by Uprising in the Vitalist Hong Kong International In memory of the martyrs of the movement. Mr. Leung Tsun Kit (35 years old) - June 15th, 2019 Ms. Lou Yan (21 years old) - June 29th, 2019 Zhita Wu (29 years old) - June 30th, 2019 Mrs. Mak (28 years old) - July 3rd, 2019 Mr. Mui (32 years old) - July 5th, 2019 Mr. Fan (26 years old) - July 22nd, 2019 Mr. Kwok (25 years old) - August 27th, 2019 Mr. Gei (16 years old) - September 2nd, 2019 Ms. Chan Yin-Lam (15 years old) - September 19, 2019 Mr. Chow Tsz-Lok (22 years old) - November 8, 2019 And all those unnamed Report from the World’s Biggest Black Block Written 7-14 September 2019, with additions on 3 October. Vitalist International 22 up in, been tortured and humiliated in police dungeons. We too have tast- ed victory, if only for an instant. We have built barricades and freed our friends, set fires and made history. We admire your determination and your relentlessness, your capacity to care for one another so thoroughly. Your courage gives us hope and momentum, clarity and confirmation. The scale of your movement, its technical ingenuity and its creative joy will contin- ue to amaze us for years to come, and we will share its secret tactics to revolutionaries here. You have shown what is possible when millions of people collaborate amidst emergency, defeat and catastrophe to fight for their lives against all odds. We stand at your side against all police and all governments, wheth- er capitalist or socialist, fascist or democratic. From Chile to West Papua, from Sudan to Hong Kong, from Puerto Rico to Okinawa, in Kurdistan and Chiapas: the people have chosen. Hong Kongers, your fight is not over yet, this will not be your last battle. There is no way to regain the Empire’s grace that would restore Hong Kong to glory. Western democracies are col- lapsing, and America has certainly never been ‘great.’ Let’s keep our sights set forward and steer our hearts past the truths we believed in yesterday. As for all of us, it seems our revolutionary imagination is trapped in an anachronistic framework which, ironically, doesn’t go back far enough. As the sea rises in the Pearl River Delta, your struggles, like all others, will become ecological struggles, fighting for access to food, shelter, medicine and water. We will not struggle to win negotiations with governments but rather to fashion collective forms of living that are not catastrophic, and which offer us a vision of the good life: We must fight and we must win. Youth of Hong Kong, you’ve taken us to the furthestmost place, and we look to you in the struggles to come. And if you burn, we burn with you. 21 pro-democracy activists fighting “Communism” in the East, recognizing each other as partisans of the same struggle. Places at the edge of the for- mer Socialist Bloc, like Hong Kong, or Ukraine before it, are especially important for international partisans to engage. Movements that unfold in these contexts are susceptible to nationalist impulses as a means of count- it was only a matter of time before it happened. The protesters er-identifying with totalitarianism. Revolutionaries fighting against bor- and the cops both knew it. On October 1st, a teenager was shot point- ders and nation states must find ways of identifying with these struggles blank in the chest by police. The bullet missed his heart by approximately to prevent opportunistic right wing forces from establishing even more three centimeters. repressive regimes. Thousands of Hong Kongers gathered the next evening at a play- As with the Arab Spring, leftists may dismiss the movement in Hong ground to fold paper cranes and wish the young protester a speedy recov- Kong as merely a struggle for “democracy.” But movements will not always ery. They held banners saying “stop shooting our children!” and used the fit neatly into established discourses. As friends wrote at the beginning of flashlights on their smartphones as torches to light up the night. In the the Yellow Vest movement, “whoever satisfies themselves with their po- center of the playground, a thousand origami cranes spelled out “Hong litical ideology is condemned to perish. This is the terrible lesson of the Kongers, Add oil!”, a Chinese expression which has come to define the twenty-first century.”⁶ Nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies will movement, meaning roughly: don’t stop, keep going, add fuel to the fire. instruct but not determine the content or the form of the emerging dis- Within an hour, the protesters were setting up barricades in the streets and array. From the margins of proletarian life, new hypotheses will emerge throwing molotovs at the nearest police headquarters. for resolving the impasses of the present, and in most places they will be The movement that began as a protest against a proposed extradi- rolled out in unrecognizable costumes and empty slogans. If we are always tion agreement with China has now entered its fourth month of unrest, looking for what we expect, evaluating these movements based on precon- with no end in sight. The bill—now withdrawn—would have granted the ceived ideological criteria, we will never be privy to their most unique and Chinese Communist Party unprecedented authority to extradite dissi- singular advancements. We will miss that which is entirely new and unbe- dents, criminals, and refugees to be processed in the shadowy court system lievably complex, born of singular circumstances. of Mainland China. Coming on the heels of 2012’s Moral and National Education Law and 2014’s Electoral Reform Bill,1 this amendment was CODA: A MESSAGE TO THE YELLOW HELMETS only the latest attempt at slowly dismantling the region’s tenuous political arrangement of “One Country, Two Systems.” With the movement rap- Hong Kongers: you are so brave, and we stand with you in your fight for idly evolving into widespread resistance against Chinese control, and the liberation. But we come bearing a message of caution. The American gov- Hong Kong government declaring a State of Emergency, the situation has ernment—the ‘democracy’ it supposedly represents—is as bankrupt as the reached a political stalemate, with violence escalating on both sides. CCP. In our country, you will find no justice, as so many of us discovered In the following we lay out a brief timeline of the movement’s defin- during Occupy Wall Street, in Black Lives Matter, and on the plains of ing moments, why tensions are so high in the Pearl River Delta, and what Standing Rock. We too are gathering our forces. Like you, we have risen tactical and strategic lessons we can take from this. We will not evaluate against an absent future, been tear gassed in the shopping malls we grew the movement based on its ideology, but describe the protest movement in Hong Kong as providing the basic arsenal and grammar for the future of struggles against the techno-authoritarian surveillance systems to come. 6 “Paris / November 30th, 2018,” Liaisons (February 20th 2019). 20 5 1. SAVAGE DISCORD folding all around us. From this perspective, we can see that every road leading into the neighborhood has been blocked. Cars are honking incessantly, and The first major demonstration against the proposed Extradition Law many people have left their cars in the middle of the street to join the crowds. Amendment Bill took place on June 9, with more than a million people From the ledge of the rooftop we shine lasers at the cops below and laugh when taking the streets. On June 15, Hong Kong's Chief Executive Carrie Lam they look to find its source. The mood is ecstatic and fearless, it is the hour of announced that the bill had been “suspended,” a move widely perceived as revolt, and everyone can taste it. The cops are forced to retreat behind giant a political ruse, buying time for Hong Kong's Legislative Council to pass shields into their doghouse by 4 am. At a press conference two days later, police the bill quietly at a later date. superintendent Yu Hoi-Kwan said that “some protesters were pretending to A few hours after the announcement, a young man in a bright yel- be civilians.” She later admitted, however, that “it was difficult for police to low rain jacket, his face concealed under a surgical mask and sunglasses, differentiate between reporters, civilians, and protesters.” That night the police climbed the bamboo scaffolding of a famous shopping mall in the city’s barricaded themselves inside, and we controlled the streets. central business district. A few days earlier, a peaceful demonstration at the mall was characterized by Lam as a riot. When the man unfurled banners 5. YELLOW HELMETS, YELLOW VESTS, BLACK MASKS from the rooftop demanding the government retract its designation of pro- testers as rioters and release those arrested, it became clear the movement The movement in Hong Kong shows us something very essential about the was turning into something much bigger than a demand to withdraw the future of revolution: not everyone will be there for the same reasons. We bill. will find ourselves in Unholy Alliance. Movements like this, which chal- Thousands live streamed the stand-off, as police negotiators and lenge the traditional categories of left and right, will continue to happen members of parliament tried to persuade the man to step down. He kept as the present organization of the world collapses. We need to develop his back to the cameras, displaying the message painted on his jacket: partisan procedures for engaging with these movements and cultivating “Carrie Lam is killing Hong Kong.” After a grueling five hours, the man discursive, technical, and infrastructural leadership.
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