泰晤士報人物專訪【Joshua Wong interview: Xi won’t win this battle, says Hong Kong activist】
Beijing believes punitive prison sentences will put an end to pro-democracy protests. It couldn’t be more wrong, the 23-year-old says.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/joshua-wong-interview-xi-wont-win-this-battle-says-hong-kong-activist-p52wlmd0t
For Joshua Wong, activism began early and in his Hong Kong school canteen. The 13-year-old was so appalled by the bland, oily meals served for lunch at the United Christian College that he organised a petition to lobby for better fare. His precocious behaviour earned him and his parents a summons to the headmaster’s office. His mother played peacemaker, but the episode delivered a valuable message to the teenage rebel.
“It was an important lesson in political activism,” Wong concluded. “You can try as hard as you want, but until you force them to pay attention, those in power won’t listen to you.”
It was also the first stage in a remarkable journey that has transformed the bespectacled, geeky child into the globally recognised face of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy. Wong is the most prominent international advocate for the protests that have convulsed the former British colony since last summer.
At 23, few people would have the material for a memoir. But that is certainly not a problem for Wong, whose book, #UnfreeSpeech, will be published in Britain this week.
We meet in a cafe in the Admiralty district, amid the skyscrapers of Hong Kong’s waterfront, close to the site of the most famous scenes in his decade of protest. Wong explains that he remains optimistic about his home city’s prospects in its showdown with the might of communist China under President Xi Jinping.
“It’s not enough just to be dissidents or youth activists. We really need to enter politics and make some change inside the institution,” says Wong, hinting at his own ambitions to pursue elected office.
He has been jailed twice for his activism. He could face a third stint as a result of a case now going through the courts, a possibility he treats with equanimity. “Others have been given much longer sentences,” he says. Indeed, 7,000 people have been arrested since the protests broke out some seven months ago; 1,000 of them have been charged, with many facing a sentence of as much as 10 years.
There is a widespread belief that Beijing hopes such sentences will dampen support for future protests. Wong brushes off that argument. “It’s gone too far. Who would imagine that Generation Z and the millennials would be confronting rubber bullets and teargas, and be fully engaged in politics, instead of Instagram or Snapchat? The Hong Kong government may claim the worst is over, but Hong Kong will never be peaceful as long as police violence persists.”
In Unfree Speech, Wong argues that China is not only Hong Kong’s problem (the book’s subtitle is: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now). “It is an urgent message that people need to defend their rights, against China and other authoritarians, wherever they live,” he says.
At the heart of the book are Wong’s prison writings from a summer spent behind bars in 2017. Each evening in his cell, “I sat on my hard bed and put pen to paper under dim light” to tell his story.
Wong was born in October 1996, nine months before Britain ceded control of Hong Kong to Beijing. That makes him a fire rat, the same sign of the Chinese zodiac that was celebrated on the first day of the lunar new year yesterday. Fire rats are held to be adventurous, rebellious and garrulous. Wong is a Christian and does not believe in astrology, but those personality traits seem close to the mark.
His parents are Christians — his father quit his job in IT to become a pastor, while his mother works at a community centre that provides counselling — and named their son after the prophet who led the Israelites to the promised land.
Like many young people in Hong Kong, whose housing market has been ranked as the world’s most unaffordable, he still lives at home, in South Horizons, a commuter community on the south side of the main island.
Wong was a dyslexic but talkative child, telling jokes in church groups and bombarding his elders with questions about their faith. “By speaking confidently, I was able to make up for my weaknesses,” he writes. “The microphone loved me and I loved it even more.”
In 2011, he and a group of friends, some of whom are his fellow activists today, launched Scholarism, a student activist group, to oppose the introduction of “moral and national education” to their school curriculum — code for communist brainwashing, critics believed. “I lived the life of Peter Parker,” he says. “Like Spider-Man’s alter-ego, I went to class during the day and rushed out to fight evil after school.”
The next year, the authorities issued a teaching manual that hailed the Chinese Communist Party as an “advanced and selfless regime”. For Wong, “it confirmed all our suspicions and fears about communist propaganda”.
In August 2012, members of Scholarism launched an occupation protest outside the Hong Kong government’s headquarters. Wong told a crowd of 120,000 students and parents: “Tonight we have one message and one message only: withdraw the brainwashing curriculum. We’ve had enough of this government. Hong Kongers will prevail.”
Remarkably, the kids won. Leung Chun-ying, the territory’s chief executive at the time, backed down. Buoyed by their success, the youngsters of Scholarism joined forces with other civil rights groups to protest about the lack of progress towards electing the next chief executive by universal suffrage — laid out as a goal in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution. Their protests culminated in the “umbrella movement” occupation of central Hong Kong for 79 days in 2014.
Two years later, Wong and other leaders set up a political group, Demosisto. He has always been at pains to emphasise he is not calling for independence — a complete red line for Beijing. Demosisto has even dropped the words “self-determination” from its stated goals — perhaps to ease prospects for its candidates in elections to Legco, the territory’s legislative council, in September.
Wong won’t say whether he will stand himself, but he is emphatically political, making a plea for change from within — not simply for anger on the streets — and for stepping up international pressure: “I am one of the facilitators to let the voices of Hong Kong people be heard in the international community, especially since 2016.”
There are tensions between moderates and radicals. Some of the hardliners on the streets last year considered Wong already to be part of the Establishment, a backer of the failed protests of the past.
So why bother? What’s the point of a city of seven million taking on one of the world’s nastiest authoritarian states, with a population of about 1.4 billion? And in any case, won’t it all be over in 2047, the end of the “one country, two systems” deal agreed between China and Britain, which was supposed to guarantee a high degree of autonomy for another 50 years? Does he fear tanks and a repetition of the Tiananmen Square killings?
Wong acknowledges there are gloomy scenarios but remains a robust optimist. “Freedom and democracy can prevail in the same way that they did in eastern Europe, even though before the Berlin Wall fell, few people believed it would happen.”
He is tired of the predictions of think-tank pundits, journalists and the like. Three decades ago, with the implosion of communism in the Soviet bloc, many were confidently saying that the demise of the people’s republic was only a matter of time. Jump forward 20 years, amid the enthusiasm after the Beijing Olympics, and they were predicting market reforms and a growing middle class would presage liberalisation.
Neither scenario has unfolded, Wong notes. “They are pretending to hold the crystal ball to predict the future, but look at their record and it is clear no one knows what will happen by 2047. Will the Communist Party even still exist?”
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1119445/unfree-speech
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