Democracy

Longhair of Hong Kong is the new generation leader we’re looking for  

The popular left wing revolution in South America, inspired by Che, has spread to Hong Kong  

by Dan Adleman  

Che Guevara’s insurgent re-surgence is far from limited to South America. Nowadays, from Southeast Asia to the much-beleaguered Middle East, Che’s face seems to be popping up everywhere. One of the most interesting cases has been taking place in Hong Kong. In 2002, when Beijing tried to impose Article 23, its own version of the American Patriot Act, in order “to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, [and] sub-version” against the central government, thousands of Hong Kongers of every stripe flooded the streets to protest Beijing’s ploy to spy on and arrest anyone suspected of dissidence. But the government refused to back down.

Finally, in 2003, the situation came to a head when 750,000 people hit the streets to protest for full democracy. The protest was so large that it brought the usually whirring and humming city to a standstill. It was Hong Kong’s largest act of civil disobedience since 1989, when over a million people had protested the Tianan-men Massacre, and Beijing finally pulled the plug on Article 23. Out of the ashes of that protest, Leung Kwok-hung, one of Hong Kong’s most devoted democracy activists, emerged into prominence.

In 2004, in a huge victory for democracy, Leung Kwok, aka “Longhair” (because of his long hair, which he refuses to cut until Beijing apologizes for Tianan-men), won a seat on Hong Kong’s half-elected and half-appointed legislative council.

His main concerns include creating democratic reform, providing welfare for the under-privileged, introducing a livable minimum wage and compre-hensive social security, and broadening workers’ rights. Longhair showed up at the legislative council swearing-in ceremony in a T-shirt with Tiananmen Square on the front and Che on the back.

After reciting the standard oath, Longhair added his own little spiel, demanding vindication for those killed for protesting in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crack-down and the release of political prisoners; he also called for an end to the Beijing oligarchy. In a show of solidarity with the brave students and workers who risked their lives to protest against government corruption and throw rocks at Mao’s decaying Big-Brotherly portrait, Longhair concluded his oath with "Long live democracy! Long live the people!"

Like Che, and unlike so many other ostensibly leftist politicians, Longhair is interested in neither fame nor fortune. In spite of his popularity, he has no interest in a Maoist cult of personality and gives most of his Legislative Council salary to charity while living and socializing amongst the working class in Hong Kong’s underfinanced public housing projects. And while many of his fellow bureaucrats spend all their time shmoozing with and pan-dering to Hong Kong’s and Bei-jing’s political and economic elites, Longhair haunts Hong Kong’s busy public thoroughfares and university campuses in his Che T-shirt, decrying the Beijing government and its stoolies and encouraging the people to find the courage to do the same.

But unlike so many so-called democracy activists in former communist nations, Longhair doesn’t equate democracy with Americanization. In fact, having inherited Che’s wariness of being turned into an imperial pawn, he is just as strident and articulate on WTO parasitism and America’s oil wars as he is on the failures of Maoism.

This has led some com-mentators to paint Leung Kwok-hung as a savvy jedi trickster at war with not just “Darth Mao” (as some democracy activists refer to the authoritarian state) but also the much larger American empire that seeks to set up bulwarks in places like Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong.

We stand at a unique point in human history. The acceleration of technological evolution is increasing so sharply that the future is not just unknowable, it is unrecognizable from anything we’ve seen before. And as our tools and means of communica-tion continue to evolve at a dizzying pace, so too does our social fabric. It no longer seems to make any sense to speak of the trajectory of history as moving in a straight vertical line of progress, as so many Christian and Marxist philosophers have imagined; history is spiralling off in every direction at a rate much faster than anyone can fathom.

At such a time, as we feel our once seemingly secure founda-tions shifting and sliding beneath our feet, the promotion of rigid ideologies that claim to have a monopoly on the Truth can only lead to disaster. Innovative leaders like Longhair, Chavez, and Morales realize that socialism must not become a tyrannical state religion with Che, rather than Stalin or Mao, as its deity. Instead, they realize that Che, like Marx, should be looked to as a source of inspiration, not as the object of a backward-looking fundamentalism. They are unique-ly creative progressive leaders because they are able to pierce through the crust of convention to incorporate that which is truly useful from the past into approaches that are keenly at-tuned to the nuances and exi-gencies of the present.

One thing about which Marx was dead-on is the fact that it takes great adversity and oppression to galvanize the masses to defy authority and fight for democracy. But change alarms conservatives. It is in fact a maxim of social conservatism that the ways of the past are superior to modernity; through the lens of this ossified worldview, rapid, progressive change is the enemy.

But conservatives refuse to acknowledge that the Pleasant-ville reality that they seek so desperately to preserve requires an absolutely arrogant arrogation of the world’s labour force, limited resources, and environment. Canada has now elected a government that identifies through and through with the neo-conservative Bush administration which flagrantly fixes its facts around pre-selected policy decisions that are callously indifferent to the real ebb and flow of the world outside.

The neo-conservative hawks are convinced that their rigid, fundamentalist template for the arc of human history—one in which the American military-industrial, capitalist-evangelical machine must always reign supreme—is both righteous and beneficent. We will soon find out whether reality has other things to say.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have covertly hijacked the Canadian political narrative. Their notion of progress involves a not-so-subtle arc from John A McDonald to Brian Mulroney, all the way through to Preston Manning, Stephen Harper, and finally, the dissolution of the Northern European welfare state.

Perhaps their opponents will be savvy enough to invoke a different Canadian narrative, one that channels Louis Riel, the Great Winnipeg Strikers, Norman Bethune, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, Farley Mowatt, and everything about these world-historical individuals that Canadians need to be proud of if we’re to put our country back on the right track to healthy self-determination.

Hopefully it won’t take a bloody war with Iran or the decimation of Medicare to galvanize us into meaningful action. danadleman@gmail.com