Oops, I forgot to upload photos of the 1 July pro-democracy rally here in Hong Kong. It seemed that the only political tendency not on display was the Chinese Communist Party, whose loyalists held their own rally earlier in the morning, so it was a political free-for-all, featuring liberals, fatcat democrats, ultra-reactionary Guomingdang types, trade unions, and the assorted people involved in “the movement for global justice”. (And while my Cantonese isn’t good enough to really tell, the non-CCP “Old Left” seems tiny and almost nonexistent, although there was a group loudly singing the Internationale.) From what I could tell, the most identifiably radical elements were those that sidelined the questions of suffrage and parliamentarism in favour of more immediate issues of exploitation and poverty, like the organised migrant domestic workers, with whom we marched for a time. You can do much worse than be associated with a throng of Indonesian and Filipina nannies chanting “Long Live International Solidarity!”.
And while I find the vortex of weirdness around Falun Gong and their repression almost impossible to interpret, my favourite banner was one advertising the cult’s “CCP Membership Withdrawal Service” hotline.
On second thought, perhaps there’s something meaningful that can be located precisely in the seeming arbitrariness of Falun Gong’s repression by the Chinese state, and the strangely rapid crystallisation of Falun Gong’s own propaganda machine, which, like the somewhat less successful LaRouchite aura of weirdness, has all the feel of a front-group. The situation reminds me of the strange, “content-free” maneouverings in spy novels, or the hovering vacuum at the heart of Don Delillo’s Libra, where Lee Harvey Oswald and the people around him (CIA agents, fascists, erstwhile Marxists, whoever) all seem to have been located at some kind of ambivalent, zombie-like “tipping point”, after which everything proceeds in an unlikely fashion and pace. Perhaps this arbitrariness also demonstrates an abstract relationship between dissent and the state that can be divorced from manifest “political content” — despite Falun Gong’s overtures to Western liberal democracy, they might just as easily be on the receiving end of an ATF firebomb in Waco as in a CCP labour camp or torture cell.
As for Lady Liberty, I’m (perhaps uncharacteristically) into her, as I found when I visited New York last year. But of course, my enthusiasm is always laced with an appreciation for tragic ironies — not in terms of the rather obvious abuse of the rhetoric of liberty to justify US foreign policy, or even radical critiques of democracy, liberal or otherwise, but in terms more immediate to the statue itself: we’d all do well to remember that as “Liberty Enlightening the World” was unveiled in 1886, women didn’t have the right to vote in either the US nor France, and were banned from the statue’s official dedication ceremony. Suffragettes circled the island on boats, heckling with megaphones.
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