The way libs talk about Hong Kong is insane because if you were to seriously accept supporting the Hong Kong protests as a necessary and sufficient condition for being a progressive you would have to accept Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and literally every single Republican in congress as being progressive thinkers among many other shitheads but people's brains evacuate their skulls at terminal velocity the second China comes up so really not surprising
Why are so many American leftists terminally incapable of discussing Asian politics without relating it to America first?
Asian politics is just an orientalist abstraction for you, a mirror for your own American guilt, an opportunity for you to pontificate about the ~real~ people who actually matter: Americans. “You should feel this way about Hong Kong, because of this other stuff that’s happening in America.” (Not because of anything that’s happening in Hong Kong, naturally, because who cares?)
So some right-wingers in the U.S. “support” the Hong Kong protestors (whatever that means, because they have done fuck all to materially help HKers). Ok?
Is it because they care about what Hong Kongers want? Please, not a single one of them could point to HK on a map.
Is it because they think it’s unfair that Hong Kong is the most expensive housing market in the entire world, by a large margin? Lolno.
Is it because they think that it’s fucked up that corporations can vote in Hong Kong? Hahahaha no of course not.
Is it because they’re against the HKPF (who by the way were LITERALLY TRAINED BY THE US STATE DEPARTMENT and fired on peaceful protestors with tear gas made in the US)? No, of course not, they love cops.
American rightwing politicians “support” HK solely because doing so is a domestic signifier of being “tough on China.” And so many American leftists are the exact same in reverse: you smear Hong Kongers as fascists and CIA agents because doing so is a signifier to your other American leftist friends that you’re anti-American, and pro-CCP. Trump or tankies: in either case Hong Kong doesn’t exist as a real place, and Hong Kongers don’t exist as real people.
Do you know literally any Hong Kongers? The HKers I know who come from lower- and middle-class backgrounds supported the protests. Some are more radical, and some are more liberal, but more than anything what united them was a deep love for the city and its culture, and a desire to have a say in their own fate, rather than just being subjected to increasingly militarized repression and economic deprivation.
Meanwhile, the upper-class Hong Kongers I know were against the protests and mostly found them embarrassing, because the protests were interfering with their lucrative business opportunities and making it harder for them to network with mainlander CEOs. How proletarian of them.
Any mass movement is bound to contain a bunch of conflicting tendencies that don’t always overlap 100% with each other. Understanding the nuances of those conflicts requires actual local knowledge, and a willingness to center the perspectives of people on the peripheries of empire rather than just defaulting to the perspectives of people from the imperial core.
Of course none of that fucking matters to you though, it’s just debate club bullshitting that you have no actual personal stake in. Just cheering for the red sports team versus the blue sports team. It’s always the same shit. The same shit that people like you pull with Syrians, Ukrainians, Bosnians, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, and any other people who have the audacity to exist while being inconvenient for whatever non-American country you’ve decided to stan.
In conclusion, 願榮光歸香港, and fuck you.
