Identity Politics and Democracy in Hong Kong's Social UnrestAuthor(s): Pang Laikwan

Source: Feminist Studies , Vol. 46, No. 1 (2020), pp. 206-215

Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.

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Pang Laikwan

Identity Politics and Democracy

in Hong Kong’s Social Unrest

Hong Kong’s anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) move-

ment began with legislation proposed in February 2019 to allow the
transfer of fugitives to jurisdictions with which the city lacks formal
extradition treaties. The law quickly attracted a tremendous amount of
criticism and generated enormous anxiety because mainland China was
one of those jurisdictions.1 In fact, many believe that this bill was pro-
posed to allow the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
to transfer wanted persons of any nationality from Hong Kong to China,
subject to a legal process that many view as highly dubious. A large-scale
anti-government movement exploded in June 2019 when pro-establish-
ment legislators in Hong Kong insisted on passing it, and millions of
people took to the streets. The government waited three months to with-
draw the bill, only doing so after some of the most violent confrontations
between civilians and the police in Hong Kong’s history. With Beijing’s

1. The law was originally proposed after a Hong Kong man, who killed his
pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan, could not be extradited back to Taiwan
to stand trial for the murder due to the lack of formal extradition laws.
The proposed law, which would be applied to Hong Kong citizens, foreign
residents, and even people passing through on business or as tourists, is
being opposed due to the fear that it would be used to extradite Hong Kong
political/civil rights activists and dissidents to China, where they would be
harshly punished.

206 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

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Pang Laikwan 207

support, the Hong Kong government has doggedly resisted negotiating

with the protestors over other demands, such as setting up an independent
inquiry into police misconduct. As people have become completely disillu-
sioned with the government and their own futures, tensions have increased.
Collapsing many of the city’s socioeconomic problems into one
cause, the anti-ELAB movement is primarily an anti-authoritarian impulse
motivated by the unifying power of the term “Hongkongers.” As the move-
ment unfolds, one of the most popular slogans, “Add Oil, Hongkongers!”
(meaning “Keep going, Hongkongers!”) gradually transformed into
“Rebel, Hongkongers!” and “Revenge, Hongkongers!” showing the protes-
tors’ anger about unrestrained police violence and the Beijing regime
behind it. The militarization associated with these protests is both wor-
risome and symptomatic.
This short essay analyzes this movement and uses it as a vehicle
to disentangle social and political identity. My concern is about how a
large-scale political movement can realign identities to generate power
from the bottom. I use an Arendtian approach to ground my theoretical
orientation, asking: How can political actions be understood as the pur-
suit of freedom to transcend one’s biological and social identity? From
an intersectional feminist angle, if we are aware that social discrimi-
nation operates within a complex network of simultaneous discrimina-
tions, real social change can only be envisioned using a broad political
canvas. Hong Kong’s anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement
provides such a setting.

Division and Inclusion

“The people” might be the emptiest, but also the most powerful, phrase
in the modern political lexicon. It can be used by politicians to justify
groundless proposals or criticisms, but it is also the foundation and
source of legitimacy for all modern political institutions. Indeed, the
most basic meaning of democracy is “rule of the people,” which is impos-
sible to avoid in any democratic imagination. As has been widely seen
throughout the world, however, “the people” is often attached to various
degrees of xenophobia — hatred of outsiders in the name of in-group sol-
idarity. While the Hong Kong protestors’ courageous demands for the
PRC to honor its promise to grant the city a high degree of autonomy
have gained widespread international sympathy, thorny social divisions
persist within the movement.

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208 Pang Laikwan

While Hong Kong has never been a united society, the anti-ELAB
protests — like most social movements — have been highly divisive, split-
ting Hong Kong people apart. Most obviously, “the people” are divided
by their political identifications, forming a primary antagonism between
those who support the protests and those who do not, usually described as
the yellow camp and the blue camp, respectively. Protestors, associated
with the yellow camp, tend to further identify with one of two groups:
the courageous-militant wing or the pacifist-rational wing. Peaceful
protestors, who busily support the protests by creating propaganda and
providing aid of all sorts, are clearly the majority. However, the much
smaller number of aggressive protestors, who throw bricks and Molotov
cocktails, keep emerging despite assiduous police arrests. Because of its
leaderless nature, the movement’s pace and intensity tend to be orches-
trated by the more aggressive frontline protestors even though such
large protests could not be sustained without support from the city’s
population across a wide range of sectors. After months of social unrest,
the discord between the yellow and blue camps has become deep-seated,
while the militant and peaceful protestors try their best to understand
and “tolerate” each other’s different protest ethics.
Behind this political stratification, Hong Kong society comprises
a wide range of existing identities as well as related forms of social dis-
crimination. One prominent dichotomy is between native Hongkongers
and Chinese immigrants who were born and grew up in the mainland.
This social antagonism between these groups in Hong Kong has deep
roots, but is constantly transforming due to many complex social and
economic factors currently at play. One of the most prominent criticisms
of the anti-ELAB movement in the PRC and its diasporic communities is
that the Hong Kong protests emerged from hatred of and discrimination
against Chinese mainlanders. In this highly pressurized society, consid-
erable evidence can be found to support this criticism.2 Unfortunately,
the recent COVID-19 outbreak has exacerbated fear in Hong Kong about
mainlanders as possible virus-carriers. Here, I argue that overcoming

2. These two groups tend to have different political opinions, cultural values,
and mannerisms, which has contributed to the antagonism. See, for exam-
ple, John Lowe and Eileen Yuk-Ha Tsang, “Disunited in Ethnicity: The
Racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong,” Patterns of Prejudice
51, no. 2 (2017): 137–58.

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Pang Laikwan 209

this native/foreign dichotomy might be one of the most important tasks

for the ongoing Hong Kong democratic movement beyond the anti-ELAB
protests. The nativist ideology of the PRC’s propaganda machine oper-
ates ferociously to politically sever these two groups of people accord-
ing to their place of origin, capitalizing on the existing social animosity
between the people of Hong Kong and mainlanders. Despite character-
izations of the anti-ELAB movement as nativist, I argue that the move-
ment is also doing the opposite: it is defining people by their political
position rather than their origin and therefore subtly realigning the rela-
tionship between political, social, and biological identities.
This new political identity formation in Hong Kong also provides a
concrete social example of the enduring concerns that feminist scholars
have expressed about the tensions between essentialized identity poli-
tics and larger emancipatory projects. Feminists in Hong Kong fiercely
debate whether the anti-ELAB movement is patriarchal. One group of
feminists criticizes the chauvinist attitudes of the protestors and their
use of sexual slurs directed at policewomen and the female partners of
policemen. Another group highlights the many female protestors who
exercise their political agency and fight patriarchal values. Undoubt-
edly, this movement contains both tendencies, but I am more interested
in asking how it surpasses biological or social sameness to address the
diversity and intersectionality of intra- and inter-group dynamics. It is cer-
tainly true that sexism is perpetuated among some protestors. However,
there are also indicators of new political dynamics that more fundamen-
tally challenge the existing ideological regime. Though far from com-
prehensive, I will now offer a quick social analysis of this movement in
order to provide some clues about its capacity for social transformation.

Gender, Race, and Class

Many people in Hong Kong people have been astonished by the pres-
ence of large numbers of young women on the frontline of anti-ELAB
protests, throwing bricks and committing arson. According to the only
gender-related data released by the Hong Kong police so far, 1,753 people
were arrested between June 9 and September 30 in relation to the anti-
ELAB movement; of these, 336 were female, or about twenty percent. For
comparison, only ten percent of those arrested during the 2011 London
riots were female according to UK government data. Though the domi-
nant image of the angry rioters is a young, heterosexual male, local and

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210 Pang Laikwan

global media are eager to capture images of women protestors in Hong

Kong, particularly after their arrests when their face masks are torn
away by the police. The defiant faces of these young women might be
sensationalized, but their pictures powerfully fly in the face of the many
stereotypes of womanhood that exist in Hong Kong. In interview after
interview, these female protestors disclose how they willfully position
themselves on the frontline, trying to help the effort based on their own
capabilities while also demanding recognition from the male protestors.
It is on this battlefield that many women are seeing themselves for the
first time as fighters with physical and psychological readiness, facing up
to the social and political establishment with both courage and dignity.
There are also many LGBTQI people participating in the anti-ELAB
movement, although an accurate count is not possible. Gay social media
platforms detail how members of the LGBTQI community fight on the
frontline, how they reconcile their political participation and sexual
identity, and even how romances have developed among protestors.
Some LGBTQI protesters, such as Jimmy Sham, are prominent figures
in the movement. He is both the convener of the Civil Human Rights
Front, which has organized many anti-ELAB marches and rallies, and
he is also the secretary of the LGBT+ rights organization Rainbow of
Hong Kong. As the spokesperson for all the major anti-government ral-
lies, Sham has twice been physically attacked by unidentified individu-
als, which received huge public attention. Having also won a seat in the
in the November 2019 District Council election, Sham is one of the most
symbolic public figures in the anti-ELAB movement, and yet he does not
act as a leader. Instead, he presents himself primarily as a convener and
a secretary, responsible for exercising the general will of the protesting
public. Such a position is extremely important for this new type of lead-
erless social movement, which endorses the equality of all protestors
while also requiring them to assume important organizational tasks.
The second attack on Sham in October 2019 brought two minority
identities into conflict: South Asians, who purportedly attacked him, versus
gay people, like Sham himself. The South Asian community has been
marginalized in Hong Kong, and South Asian men are often stigmatized
as troublemakers and even gang members. Rumors were spread imme-
diately after the attack that there would be retaliation against Muslims
(many of whom are South Asian), causing considerable anxiety among

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Pang Laikwan 211

 rotestor in front of Kowloon Mosque on October 20, 2019, four days after
P
Jimmy Sham, Convener of the Civil Human Rights Front, was attacked
by unidentified South Asians. Photo credit: Raquel Carvalho/South China
Morning Post.

that community. Sham, however, quickly condemned any suggestions of

attacking the Muslim community, and social media soon featured many
posts celebrating South Asians as faithful comrades in the anti-ELAB. The
Kowloon Mosque was in fact targeted during a protest that took place
a few days after Sham’s assault, but anti-ELAB protestors were not the
culprits; it was a police water cannon that had blasted the mosque. To
show their solidarity, a group of local volunteers showed up quickly and
cleaned the caustic blue dye from the mosque’s metal gates, meanwhile
reminding each other that the Muslim community is a legitimate part of
Hong Kong society. A mob attack and police misconduct allowed ethnic
minorities to reconnect with the mainstream anti-ELAB movement, for
which many in Hong Kong are grateful regardless of their ethnicity.
This movement has also been criticized by many leftists for its lack
of class consciousness, which is accurate since the protestors are not

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212 Pang Laikwan

driven primarily by economic interests.3 Nor should anti-ELAB activ-

ism be described as populist, which is sustained largely by a differenti-
ation between ordinary people and the elites. In this anti-government
movement, there is prominent support from many professionals, includ-
ing lawyers, medical doctors, and business people; it is clearly supported
by different classes. Most interestingly, a new “yellow economic ecol-
ogy” has been developed to boycott enterprises run by “blue” business-
men and “red” capitalists. This protest strategy is gradually evolving into
an alternative bottom-up economy. Social media platforms have been
developed for supporters of the movement to match consumers with
service-providers as well as employers with employees. New financing
channels and crypto currencies are also being experimented with. More
than one hundred unions, though most are small, have been formed
in recent months, most with the aim of supporting a general strike if
required. We do not know how this socioeconomic structure will unfold,
but its formation demonstrates how a society could be built based on
political beliefs rather than rigid class identities.

Political and Emotive Bonding

It is not my aim to paint a rosy picture of social harmony within the anti-
ELAB movement. Political participation has become a more important
factor than gender, sexuality, class, or ethnic identity in constructing
new meanings of “Hongkongers,” opening up a space for radical social
transformation of existing social divisions. In previous work, I have dis-
cussed how the 2014 Occupy Hong Kong protesters embodied the demos,
composed of individuals leaving their own private dwellings to enter the
streets and develop a non-hierarchical political community.4 More than
five years later, the anti-ELAB movement seems to have engendered a
very different protest community. With the lessons of the Umbrella Move-
ment learned, protesters have taken Bruce Lee’s martial arts philosophy,

3. It is true that local people are highly frustrated about the city’s high housing
costs, job opportunities lost to mainlanders, and the increasing domination
of PRC state capitalism in the city’s economy. However, it is also important
not to allow these economic issues to cover up protesters’ calls for democ-
racy, as the Hong Kong and PRC governments are trying to do, so that the
state can ignore these clear, loud demands for political reform.
4. Pang Laikwan, The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the
Umbrella Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).

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Pang Laikwan 213

“Be Water,” as their motto. They do not occupy any place for long but
use hit-and-run tactics to elude identification and besiegement. They
appear on the streets as an undifferentiated mass whose abstruse, tena-
cious vitality has earned them the derogatory name of the “cockroaches”
from police. Some have characterized the protesting masses in Hong
Kong as regressing from their role as “the public” in 2014 to become a
mob by 2020. I disagree. Most of the frontline protestors are independent,
and they exercise their judgment carefully before choosing their posi-
tions. This autonomous, yet collective, political participation is power-
ful enough to transcend many existing divisions around biological and
social identities.
The anti-ELAB movement has been described by many local people
as both the best of times and the worst of times. With so much vandal-
ism and many physical attacks between members of the two political
camps, the destruction and agony produced are clear to all. However,
there are also new bonds forming inside the movement. Because of the
long period of protest and the high level of resistance involved, activists
have developed strong feelings of identification with one another. This
new solidarity has broken down existing identity boundaries, radically
opening up and diffusing the meaning of the term “Hongkongers.” As
this movement has permeated society so deeply, the mutual faith among
protestors is, both cognitively and affectively, extremely strong. The iden-
tity of protestor can dissolve many extant forms of social discrimination.
The increasing use of the term sou-juk in the anti-ELAB move-
ment is most telling. This phrase literally means “hands and feet,” but
also functions as a Chinese metaphor for biological and social broth-
erhood. It has also been used in this movement to describe all those —
women or men, locals or non-locals — who have participated in the pro-
tests with their actual bodies, being assaulted by the police, suffering
from pepper spray and tear gas, taking part in human chains, or engag-
ing in political confrontations with friends and family members. When
Yuli, a domestic helper from Indonesia was detained and deported by
the Immigration Department, presumably due to her writings in sup-
port of the movement, fellow protesters described her as sou-juk. These
common corporeal acts define membership in the protest community,
allowing protesters’ political experiences to make lasting marks on their
fellow comrades.

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214 Pang Laikwan

In fact, the anti-ELAB movement has produced a new breed of

“Hongkongers” who do not need to be culturally or biologically tied to
Hong Kong. In spite of the enormous censorship apparatus and wide-
spread patriotism in the PRC, a small number of mainlanders are polit-
ically sympathetic to Hong Kong, as evidenced by social media plat-
forms collecting messages to show support for the Hong Kong protests.
However marginalized they may be, these mainlanders have developed
a new kind of political identification with Hong Kong. Here, the term
“Hongkongers” does not so much designate a people defined by blood
or history, but acts as a symbol of resistance and political participation.
I believe that the Hong Kong-mainland social and cultural divisions
are a source of high levels of social discrimination in local society, but
since this movement is defined by political actions and judgment, not
by birth or residence, I remain optimistic that the original social cleav-
age between locals and mainlanders can be softened and rebuilt through
political bonding. This extensive and far-reaching political unrest may
give Hong Kong society a chance to redraw its social divisions and cor-
rect former prejudices, although it might take a long time, with many
hurdles to overcome.
A female Taiwanese activist, Wang Yan-ruh, posted on Facebook
about her experience of participating in a mass protest in Hong Kong.
She described how she developed friendships with other Hong Kong pro-
testors in the street. On August 28, Wang posted that after a violent con-
frontation with the police in Tsuen Wan, she ran for her life along with
some local protestors. Finally feeling safe on a busy street, she discovered
that one of the female Hong Kong protestors she had just met was still
beside her. They began to talk, and at the same time, she was intrigued
by both the overt as well as subtle support the protestors were receiving
in the neighborhood where they were walking. We might not know how
much of this self-narration is true, but even if we read it as a piece of lit-
erary writing, we can see that this moment delivered a trans-local fas-
cination and sense of liberation. In Wang’s recounting, she developed
a romantic sisterhood with her local counterpart, reverberating free-
dom and mobility. At the same time, female fraternity and autonomy are
embedded in and supported by a political community that, fictive or not,
defines new “Hongkongers” both inside and outside the city itself.

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Pang Laikwan 215

Though Hannah Arendt has been both criticized and celebrated

by feminists, her rejection of identity politics cautions against the nar-
cissism of conceptualizing the collective as a natural extension of one-
self. Instead, she entrusts our future to human beings’ capacity for trans-
forming themselves in the process of producing new alliances. Hong
Kong’s anti-ELAB movement complicates Arendt’s ideas because identity
matters very much in this emerging social movement. However, anti-
ELAB activism also supports Arendt’s general optimism that identity is
not innate but rather socially formed and capable of being challenged
politically. She emphasizes that political participation is the only way to
define and distinguish oneself and that this is where hope resides: “To
act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin, to set
something into motion.” 5

5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1998), 177.

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