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Bottom line for me re Lausan and the HK liberal diaspora: they've misdiagnosed the problem and coddle nativism.
Long story short: HK is an exceptional place, it creates an exceptional identity, this exceptional identity has a hard time understanding the rest of the world. /
Long story short: HK is an exceptional place, it creates an exceptional identity, this exceptional identity has a hard time understanding the rest of the world. /
Spend any time reading the rather engaging back-and-forth between Qiao and Lausan, and you'll see that Lausan focuses intensely on the 'illusion of the nation-state,' that its critics can't 'catch up' to the reality that capitalism is a stateless, global process. /
You can't actually blame them for this view -- from the perspective of HK, this is true. HK is a global port of capital, it exists as a haven for offshore capital seeking adjacency to China's markets. HK's specialty is dissolving borders to facilitate investment capital. /
HK exists among a set of rarefied global financial hubs which create a culture that almost fetishizes borderlessness, statelessness, 'global citizenship.'
Lausan accepts this worldview, but infers that this is the real state of the world, what capitalism *IS.* /
Lausan accepts this worldview, but infers that this is the real state of the world, what capitalism *IS.* /
Thus the refusal to acknowledge any difference between the US and China -- they are, from the educated HKers perspective, simply jurisdictions which capital can enter and exit. What matters is the alienation that capitalism creates in people who must compete ruthlessly. //
Thus, Lausan keeps insisting that the antithesis to capitalism is a global international movement of "leftist" resistance, seen everywhere from Cairo to Beirut to Palestine to the United States to Chile to... Hong Kong. /
The Lausan POV is that there is some international cabal of capitalists who have taken over the globe, essentially, who operate above national borders, and it is incumbent for their to be anti-capitalist revolutions around the world all targeting this amorphous blob together. /
This isn't that far-fetched, and in a way the world WAS heading towards this Lausan-envisioned 'stateless capitalism' which would infer that a stateless anti-capitalist movement would arise. It's not crazy talk. But that's far from the whole story. /
Qiao offers an elaboration on this that I think is inflected by its more American-centric identity -- the specter of American imperialism as the true global force, not 'stateless capitalism.' And I think Qiao has this right -- the real wizard behind the curtain is the US. /
HK is an exceptional place, but it's merely a port of entry, a place of transit, and such places create very peculiar cultures centered around cosmopolitan statelessness. But that is all it is -- a hub, a landing point. In the larger context, it's a blip, nothing. /
The system of capitalism that Lausan considers 'stateless' is actually a global hierarchical system of American dominance, underwritten by the American military. It is the post-WW2 international system. It is not morphing into stateless capitalism. /
From the perspective of the financial hub, it appears to be stateless, because it involves vast sums of capital from all corners of the world. But that system is primarily dominated by a US-centric global order. The state-y-ness of that system is hidden from the hub. /
That's why, imo, Qiao's perspective is more accurate, *because* it is America-centric. The world is America-centric, and Qiao's insights into Pax Americana and the nature of American imperialism gives a more realistic rendering of the world. /
Whereas Lausan's more abstracted, idealized vision of what capitalism is -- and thus how it is to be resisted -- seems to exist more in textbooks or in elite but insular cultures as found in financial hub cities or elite American universities. In other words, liberal ideals. /
Thus, in practice, the HK mode of resistance is constantly being undermined by co-optation by the US State Dept. That's why Lausan constantly has to deal with 'tankies' posting photos of Nathan Law with Pompeo, or Joshua Wong with Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton. /
There is a reason HK is 'naive' -- because it is exceptional. It is not like the other places, and its people are not like other people. It is largely a beneficiary of both its Chinese and British identities, as a bridge of commerce, and of high-minded cultural exchange. /
Its conception of 'resistance' therefore resembles the conception of the privileged. Resistance against ideas, processes, tendencies, mindsets. Not resistance against people, countries, empires. That kind of resistance is 'low culture,' crass, nationalistic. /
And as is true of all privileged people, they tend to not recognize their position of privilege, as diaspora, as elite educated, as supported by a liberal establishment. In failing to recognize their elite status, they develop blind spots. /
Lausan *kind* of is aware, but ultimately they cannot reconcile this because they refuse to admit that they benefit from alignment with American liberalism. The first is a distaste for the American right wing, which threatens liberal credibility. No to Joshua Wong, bad optics. /
The second are the criminal nativist element of the movement, who are invested in a racialized movement. Again, bad optics, have to write them off.
Good, okay, but then, what is left? /
Good, okay, but then, what is left? /
Just abstracted ideas that connect with nobody except liberals who trade in abstractions, who challenge ideas but never material realities. Lausan is an idea factory, and that's all it will ever be so long as it thinks there is no meaningful difference btwn the US and China.
There is much more real revolutionary potential in Qiao, because its conceptions around American imperialism are real, they exist in the material world, they can be found, and many, many other movements that resist it can coordinate on reality, not ideas. /
First and foremost is the Black Radical movement in the United States, the only true antagonist to US imperial ideology within the US itself. Anti-imperialism has always been a major part of Black Radicalism, which never traded in abstracted notions of stateless capitalism. /
Compare that to Lausan's liberal-inflected virtue branding of supporting Black Lives Matter, while actually trying to co-opt its brand to platform itself. Or the vulgarity of Joshua Wong calling LeBron James a 'tankie' for not supporting Hong Kong independence. /
Bottom line is, the HK protesters are aligned with the United States because, in a world that IS dominated by nation states organized under a US-centered empire, the HK protestors are opposed to China, a rival state to the US. It has picked a side in a battle among nations. /
The job of Lausan is to act as liberal obfuscators of that grounded reality, by using intellectual snobbery towards 'nationalism' to the likes of Qiao which dare speak of the reality of nations and national interests, and by using liberal branding to obscure ugly realities.
OK yeah thread done.
