Abstract
In this chapter, I will sketch a brief and nonexhaustive history of key frameworks in which Hongkongers have defined the content of self-determination, represented by the exchange between Marxist collective Sun Miu Group and early pro-democracy organizations like Meeting Point, as well as the influential February 2014 issue of Hong Kong student publication Undergrad and its legacy and relationship to the 2019–2020 protest movement. These disparate frameworks do not posit a linear development in how self-determination is theorized. Instead, this history articulates a praxis of self-determination, tracing how a nonprescriptive task of building independent mass structures to collectively and democratically resist colonial state infrastructure can emerge from the historical contradictions between political agents and milieus.
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Notes
- 1.
This is inspired by Colleen Lye’s exploration of “an improvisational conceit of ethnic identity as an aesthetic form that permanently resists closure” and “ethnic identity’s fundamental ambivalence and undecidability, which are the effect of contradiction without resolution” (Lye 2020). But I take issue with Lye’s identification of this paradigm with what she sees as the Maoist dialectic, or “unity of opposites.” More often than not, the various historical practices of Maoism revolve around nationalism and political centralization in the last instance, also identifiable in the inherent hierarchism in the Maoist theory of primary and secondary contradictions; in other words, Lye’s analysis understates the totalizing element of the Maoist contradiction that ultimately undermines the ethos of the improvisation of identity that Lye attempts to excavate. See former Cultural Revolution-era Red Guard (later turned libertarian socialist upon her exile from mainland China) Yu Shuet’s essay “The Dusk of Rationality” for a critique of Maoist China along these lines (Yu 1979).
- 2.
Sun Miu later changed its name to Pioneer Group in 1994, and still continues to infrequently publish new materials and archive older work on https://workerdemo-hk.com/.
- 3.
Listen Chen provides a powerful critique of how the movement’s uncritical dedication to self-determination precludes meaningful solidarity with the mainland working class and flirts with Western imperialist elements. While these critiques are entirely correct, Chen limits the available pathways for self-determination to “national belonging” and “independence.” In doing so, they rightly critique the reactionary, “cultural-national” forms of self-determination as Lenin describes—only to prematurely limit the different avenues from this demand and preclude the radical capacities for self-determination inherent in the mass movement that underscores democratic political practice (Chen 2019).
- 4.
My critique is informed by certain Marxist adaptations of Spinoza’s philosophy, which works against notions of predetermined political sovereignty. As Warren Montag writes in Bodies, Masses, Power, this entails subscribing instead to “a politics of permanent revolution, a politics utterly without guarantees of any kind, in which social stability must always be recreated through a constant reorganization of corporeal life, by means of perpetual mass mobilization, in order to increase to the maximum the power to act and think according to the guidance of reason without the slightest possibility of an ‘individual’ solution, whether through intellectual withdrawal or mystical illumination” (Montag 1999, 84–5). See also Antonio Negri’s Spinoza for Our Time (Negri 2013) for a further exposition on the adaptation of Spinoza to explain how the ontology of popular mass politics justifies its own raison d’etre.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this essay have been published in Spectre Journal and Lausan under the titles of “A Left Case for Hong Kong Self-determination” and “Self-determination without Nationalism” respectively. The author thanks Au Loong-Yu, David Brophy, JN Chien, and Wen Liu for reading and providing feedback on various drafts or versions of this essay.
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Li, P. (2022). Self-Determination Through Struggle. In: Liu, W., Chien, J., Chung, C., Tse, E. (eds) Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4659-1_2
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