If nothing else hong kong gave us a good playbook for modern protest tactics and that's about it.
Edit: oh shit I've never been this early to a struggle session. I'm about to get yelled at by other anarchists but I'm used to it.
Anyone nostalgic for British colonial rule can fuck all the way off.
It's ok, I lean towards the anarchist side and got a struggle session from the tankies. Such is life in chapo.
Opposing the police: good.
Seeking US intervention: bad.
Feeling compelled to roll this up into a single conclusion about Thing Bad or Thing Good: a sign of lacking the maturity needed to deal with the complexities of real-world organizing.
Why would an anarchist ever support a state attacking any population with violence especcially in a conflict in wich the people of said state cant even vote and are protesting this
Hong Kong's protesters have by and large been pro-US intervention so fuck em. They're not revolutionaries and they're definitely not anarchist or socialist.
This. The protestors are bourgeois, and there's very little popular support for the protests from the population of HK itself. There's a lot of leftists who don't like China, which is understandable, but to support the HK protestors is to support a neoliberal and neoliberal backed cause.
I'm no fan of the HK protests myself, but didnt they at one point have 1/7th of the population of HK protesting? They seemed somewhat popular
Unfortunately whatever they might be trying to achieve is drowned out by western media framing the entire situation as anti-left anti-communist sentiment.
The chuang interview with anarchists involved in the protest is great, because their grievances boil down to "hong kong cops are shitty, on account of being cops" and then they spend half the thing tearing into the rest of the protest movement as racist, sexist, deeply liberal, violently intolerant of left dissent or criticism, and fundamentally misguided. In fact despite their vocal anti-ccp bias their articles in general have left me with a more nuanced and positive view of China.
Fighting a police state means nothing when seaking the aid of another police state.
Of course not, my point is that people flying American and British flags and waxing nostalgic for colonial rule aren't fucking comrades.
Not really. The movement itself exists because of antagonisms developed by and exascerbated via US funded NGOs, which have all dried up, and so too has the protests which have almost entirely stopped barring absolutely tiny fringe things now that they have put a stop to foreign money channels into the movement. It is not a grassroots movement, it is a synthetic bourgeois funded one and it died the very moment the money stopped.
According to the folks at Lausan, who are leftist Hong Kongers, the situation in Hong Kong is really complex and the people waving colonial flags and asking for Western intervention don't speak for the whole movement.
One of the demands of the protesters is for universal sufferage because corporations are allowed to elect members of the legislative council but not the public at large, so it's not like the protesters don't have legitimate grievances. The government of Hong Kong is neoliberal as fuck and the protests are against it just as much as they are against the CCP.
There were reactionaries among the yellow vests in France as well, and back then people acknowledged that we needed to work to pull them to the left instead of just writing them off completely. It frustrates me that people won't extend the same courtesy to Hong Kong.