Carrie Lam is right: foreign forces are infiltrating Hong Kong’s institutions|Kevin Carrico
Since today is the second anniversary of June 12, an experience that left an indelible impression upon me and so many others, my original plan for this week was to write a reflection on how things have changed in Hong Kong over the past two years.
Yet as I wrote, I could not escape the feeling that everything I wrote was painfully predictable and pedantic: things in Hong Kong could and should be better, but we should find comfort in the fact the repressive silliness currently hanging over the city cannot last forever.
I found myself vacillating ceaselessly between insights and banality, anxious that anyone who had ever read this column would already be all too familiar with my argument.
I was thus greatly relieved to be distracted by news that Carrie Lam had said something incredibly stupid, which allowed me to redirect my analytical energy to one of my favorite hobbies: ridiculing Hong Kong’s
worst Chief Executive. What better way could there be, after all, to mark June 12?
During a press
conference on Wednesday, Carrie Lam literally said (I kid you not) that there are “foreign forces” driven by “ulterior motives” who were “penetrating into various institutions in Hong Kong including the universities.”
She furthermore added that it was the responsibility of universities to “make sure that university students will not be easily indoctrinated by those prejudices and bias.”
Now, in a joyous leap beyond all predictability, I am happy to announce that this week’s instalment of my dunk-a-thon on Carrie Lam has a unique angle, insofar as I agree with the dumb thing she said, in a sense: behind the obvious obfuscation and the blatant borrowing of Peking’s paranoid political palaver, there is a curious kernel of truth in Lam’s reprehensible remarks.
Of course, we all know what Lam meant, and of course that is terribly dumb: sinister foreign forces, she tells us, lurk deep within Hong Kong’s universities, indoctrinating innocent students with such dangerous alien concepts as exercising free speech and thought, being accountable to one’s citizens, abiding by treaty agreements, and generally just not being a horrible person whose sole purpose in life is to suck up to an increasingly openly fascist state ruled by a middle school graduate who masquerades as a master thinker.
Lam’s sloganeering in this sense deserves little more than an eyeroll and a sigh, but I will take that derision one step further into fully formed sentences: it has been painful over the past few years to watch as the Hong Kong government, a government that people used to be able to take somewhat seriously, has so rapidly transformed into a pathetic Peking impersonator, channeling xenophobic wolf warrior rants about “foreign forces” and “subversion” in desperate, endless attempts to explain the fact that no one likes them.
If Lam paused to reflect on this self-produced governance dilemma just a little more deeply, she might realize that the animosity directed toward her and the rest of the colonizing state is not the result of some elaborate foreign conspiracy, but rather simply the product of her lack of basic dignity: continually stooping to new lows in flattering her bosses up north, all while dragging the city of Hong Kong down with her. To state this is not subversion, unless the Hong Kong government considers reality fundamentally subversive: a real possibility at this point.
Yet if we take these words out of Carrie Lam’s mouth and look at them again, we can see the truth therein: there are indeed foreign forces with ulterior motives; these foreign forces are indeed intent on infiltrating and subverting Hong Kong’s institutions; and these foreign forces indeed want to indoctrinate the city’s youth into believing that such subversion is a positive development.
This foreign power, however, is China.
But wait, how could I say that China is a foreign power?
The answer is simple. From Hong Kong’s founding until 1997, the city existed as an entity independent from China: a reality which allowed Hong Kong to develop a distinct society and dynamic political, legal, and economic systems that differed markedly from the situation in China. Basically, the two places developed their own cultures which are not only distinct but also in so many senses fundamentally incompatible.
Despite this incompatibility, the myth that Hong Kong is a Chinese city lived on and eventually forced Hong Kong together with China in 1997. There was an optimistic although inexorably doomed attempt to maintain the city’s institutions and their autonomy after this handover under the myth of One Country Two Systems: yet anyone who knew anything about that “one country”, China, would know that “two systems” or “a high degree of autonomy” is simply not how the Chinese Communist Party works.
The simultaneously unthinkable and inevitable thus arrived. A foreign force took control of Hong Kong’s institutions under the guise of “return” to the “motherland,” while subverting these same institutions under a simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-confining cult of Chineseness: one is paradoxically to find pride in being held hostage by a dictatorship, celebrating national distinctiveness and exceptionality in the rejection of basic freedoms as silly “foreign” things.
We see these foreign forces in academia, among those who would sacrifice the fundamental principles of academic freedom that have made Hong Kong’s universities great to the pitiful orthodoxies of “red lines” and “national security.”
We see these foreign forces in law enforcement, in the transformation of the police force from defenders of the law to Carrie Lam’s private militia, suppressing the Hong Kong people’s legally guaranteed rights and freedoms.
We see these foreign forces in legal institutions, in the figures of judges and other legal practitioners who go along with the Kafka-esque farce that is Hong Kong’s National Security Law: in reality, not so much a law as the suspension of all laws.
And we see these foreign forces in the political system, in the figures of so-called politicians who still can’t win an election even after all of their opponents have been sent off to prison on fake charges, and who prioritize the happiness of the occupier happy over that of their citizens.
Carrie Lam is thus accidentally correct. There are indeed foreign forces infiltrating Hong Kong’s institutions and subverting the city’s way of life, producing the repressive silliness that I noted at the beginning of this piece. They are even attempting to indoctrinate the city into believing that this subversion is in everyone’s best interest, attempting to use xenophobia to cover over their own fundamental foreignness. And as Carrie Lam said, this is indeed a phenomenon which merits great concern and constant vigilance.
The only point that she missed, I would add, is that she represents those subversive foreign forces.
(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University and the author of the forthcoming Two Systems Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong)
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