I have a pretty good sense for what is happening in Hong Kong, having lived there and worked as a journalist and as a member of the Hong Kong Journalists Association during the critical six-year period from 1992-97. That was when the terms of the handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty were finalized, and when China finally took back the city stolen by the British during the Opium War in 1841. Hong Kong people, and the students and young people I knew back in those days, were both proud and anxious about that handover - proud because they had never liked being colonial subjects of Britain, which had a long history of repressing, diminishing and looking down on local Chinese residents of the city, and anxious because they had won many valued freedoms over the years of British rule, which they feared could be lost if the city became too much like China. Students in particular were committed to hanging on and even to expanding those freedoms from the start.
I don't buy the claim being made by some in Hong Kong that the current student revolt - being conducted by young people most of whom were actually born since the handover of the city to China - is the work of outsiders and of outside funding by the likes of billionaire anti-communist George Soros. I'm confident that what we're seeing in Hong Kong today is the genuine, heartfelt desire by Hong Kong's educated younger generation for the preservation of the freedoms they and their parents have won over years of struggle from first the British and then the Chinese government. None of it was just handed to them. It was the result of insistent pressure for more democracy, for freedoms of press, speech and assembly, and of a willingness, often on the part of their parents, to take to the streets to make their demands clear. In recent years China, uncomfortable with the degree of freedom Hong Kong people won, has been trying to push that genie back into the bottle.
The students, to their credit, aren't having it.
If they are strong, steady, and work out how to modulate their protests and their demands as they maneuver their way along the tightrope of political activism, they may yet win and serve as an inspiring model to young people everywhere.
One thing is sure, and it's important too: The whole world is watching and needs to keep watching Hong Kong.
DAVE LINDORFF, after spending a year living with his family in Shanghai in 1991-92, lived and worked in Hong Kong as a correspondent for Business Week covering the city and China from 1992-1997. He is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on November 17, 2019 at 21:13)
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