“Diaspora” is a continuation of “An Exile.” That was about departure from Hong Kong and arrival in a new place. This focuses on the period after arrival.
Both are intended as sequel to the book, Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the freedom struggle, which is about the 2019–2020 protests. That in turn follows As long as there is resistance, there is hope about the period from 2014 to 2018, and Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong about the 2014 Umbrella Movement.
“Diaspora” will appear in installments. The previous installment was “Perfect anarchy.”
7. The Fight for HKDC
In August 2021, the head of Hong Kong Democracy Council announced that he was resigning. Not long after, a board member followed, making it clear she was stepping down because the executive director was.
The news was met with a certain degree of anxiety within the diaspora community in the US. No one knew quite what it meant. There had been a dispute of some kind, but between whom and over what was unknown. It was even unclear whether HKDC would survive the abrupt departure of what was, after all, its only employee for its whole history, which went back only two years to 2019.
Since its inception, HKDC had been the primary HK advocacy organization in Washington, DC. It had been founded in heady times, at the height of the protests. During that period of intense international focus on Hong Kong, it played an important role in pushing three important HK-related bills through Congress, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, the PROTECT Hong Kong Act, and the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, all within a couple of Congressional session. This was indisputably the most legislative attention HK had ever received. Of course, that mostly had to do with the fact that HK was in the news and its situation was widely perceived as urgent, dire and deteriorating, coupled with the staunch bi-partisan consensus in Congress for a tougher US policy on China. But it helped that HKDC was there, and that through HKDC, the HK freedom struggle had a formal advocacy presence in DC.
When I first arrived in the US, I tried contacting HKDC, several times, and never got a response. I had the impression it was a one-man show, a closed shop. It was run by the thirtyish son of a legendary pastor in HK who’d been one of the Occupy Central triumvirate that played a key role in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and, decades before that, had been involved in the to-this-day secretive Operation Yellow Bird which had helped to smuggle participants in the 1989 democracy protests out of China after the crackdown. The son had been sent to the US at quite a young age to be educated, and, as far as I knew, had never really spent much time in HK. He spoke and acted like a full-fledged American.
He seemed quite possessive of HKDC, didn’t like others meddling. From his point of view, he’d made it successful and had a right. But, I thought, even if the organization didn’t have enough money to hire support staff (at one point, there was an assistant), it seemed advisable to cultivate a core of reliable and useful volunteers to help with the work. This would also serve the purpose of helping recent arrivals like myself find a meaningful role to p
lay in exile. I feared that if we didn’t take that challenge seriously, over time quite a few would fall away in discouragement and despair.
When HKDC’s founding director resigned, it appeared to have to do with personal conflicts and power dynamics, but related to those were philosophical disagreements about its direction, purpose and strategy.
This, in turn, had to do with the shifting fortunes of HK. By late 2021, it was no longer “in the news;” the world had moved on. The freedom struggle was entering a new phase, settling in for the long haul, with the awareness that there would probably be no positive changes in HK in the short term; indeed, it would in all likelihood get a good deal worse. The Communist Party was cementing its grip, closing down independent civil society, locking up opponents, bending previously independent-minded sectors of society like education and the judiciary to its will, banning protests indefinitely, and essentially criminalizing just about every act of which it disapproved.
Given this situation, what could be done, what should the diaspora be doing, and more specifically, what should HKDC do? Would the focus on lobbying foreign governments continue to pay off, or was that becoming a bit of a dead end, or at least an area in which the expected outcomes didn’t justify the effort required? And if so, what other things should it be doing?
There were many important questions, but not much discussion of them. In general, the diaspora had not done a good job of fostering internal discourse over pressing issues. It struck me as a significant weakness. I’d often felt HKers weren’t very good at talking, and many important discussions of wider interest were held behind closed doors, if at all. We seemed ill-prepared for the next phase of the struggle, which was bound to be more challenging. We’d surfed on the global attention brought by the massive protests in HK. Now that those were over, what should we do? More than before, we had to find our own way, not let the course of events dictate our direction.
Some of those involved in the disagreements over the future direction of HKDC portrayed it as a matter of “professionalizing” and “institutionalizing” the organization. By this, they meant that the goal should be for HKDC to be run like other DC lobby groups, down to the requisite financing. According to this view, HKDC was well-placed to further the cause of the freedom struggle among US politicians and it should aim to make itself as effective as possible. This basically meant ensuring that those working for HKDC were the best lobbyists possible. This was the best way of responding to the new phase of the struggle.
Others felt that HKDC had become too isolated from the rest of the diaspora, to which it should be responsive and accountable. It should also be inclusive and involve the diaspora in its work, both through collaboration and by using them as volunteers, which would also facilitate the expansion of its work. They wondered about its focus: should it retain such a laser-sharp focus on lobbying or should it broaden to include other types of work and activities, or even shift substantially away from lobbying? It was hard to see how the struggle could be furthered through US government legislation and policy, not to mention the fact that it would be harder to get desired changes passed. Opening HKDC to wider involvement would, among other things, make it more more sustainable in the long run.
The first group, the one arguing for “professionalization” and “institutionalization”, criticized the second group for lacking in knowledge and experience. The second group regarded the first group as entrenched and lacking in openness both to new ideas and the participation of new people.
Those arguing for “professionalization” and “institutionalization” (basically, keeping things the way they were and just doing more of it and even better) tended to be older and to have been in the US longer. They knew how things worked in the US, so others should listen to them. Those arguing for a re-examination of HKDC’s role, field of activities and mode of operation tended to be younger and more recently arrived. (When I showed this to someone else, I was told that I shouldn’t exaggerate these divisions—old versus young, long-time US residents versus newcomers— or make it seem that they were hard and fast or represented tensions in the diaspora community in the US as a whole. And this is a good point. Different people had different views, regardless of age or tenure in the US. Most people wished the best for HKDC and simply wanted it to play an important and effective role in the freedom struggle.)
The abrupt resignation of HKDC’s founding director represented the culmination of the conflict of both personalities and ideas. Or to put it another way, there had been no resolution of that conflict and so one side decided to leave.
Several weeks later, a new board chair and executive director took over. Both were young—one in his twenties, the other in his early thirties. Both were recent arrivals to the US. Both were well-known back in HK for their roles in the struggle. One had been a student leader of the Umbrella Movement; the other, a key figure in the 2019 protests. In this sense, they were far more Hong Kongers than Americans; in fact, neither was a US citizen. They were both studying for PhDs at US universities and had decided to interrupt their studies to take up the responsibilities at HKDC. It felt as if they were assuming these positions out of a sense of duty to the struggle; it certainly wasn’t due to personal ambition. In fact, I was surprised they were even interested at all, as I’d had them down as aspiring academics; this move seemed an unplanned detour, a response to an emergency.
Intellectually, they were high-powered; they came with many new ideas. They were also well-rooted in HK, with good relations with many leaders and groups there. Some among those who had backed the recently departed founding director thought their youth, lack of experience, lack of connections in DC, and lack of knowledge of how DC works would prove insurmountable obstacles—they might have been good activists in HK but that didn’t mean they’d be good lobbyists. In that attitude, I noticed a disdain for youth similar to what I had seen among the older generations of the pro-democracy movement in HK. It wasn’t until the 2019 protests that those elders really came to accept young people as equals, with their own ideas, perspectives and skills to bring to the game. Now that same dynamic was repeating itself here.
The new people at HKDC were inclined to think that it should move away from lobbying the US government as its sole focus. The new director explicitly said that he believed networking with other HK groups and helping to empower and develop the diaspora should be an important part of HKDC’s work as well. The organizational transition was both parallel to and helped to bring about other developments in the diaspora, signalling the end of the initial phase, which lasted from 2019 to mid-2021, and the beginning of the next.