Hong Kong belongs to China – no foreign interference!

The following is the text of an interview by George Galloway (GG) of Dr Ranjeet Brar (RB) which was aired on the RT programme ‘Sputnik’ in August 2019.

After many weeks of demonstrations everywhere in Hong Kong, it seems that that the effective seizure of Hong Kong’s airport, one of the world’s busiest, has proved to be the final straw for China, and most expect a distinct hardening of the line that China will take towards the mass destruction and economic loss caused by the demonstrators.

Gayatri

The British government, which seized the Territory 150 years ago to punish China for stopping the British opium trade, has called for calm. The American government has, however, been turning up the heat. A suspiciously large number of US flags have appeared in the hands of the demonstrators and the Stars and Stripes appears to be their anthem.

Joining us to discuss what is going on in Hong Kong and what might happen next is one of Britain’s leading communists, a longstanding friend of China, Dr Ranjeet Brar. Doctor, welcome to the show. Let’s start with what the demands of these protestors actually are because it is obviously quite difficult to negotiate change in Hong Kong’s status within the country. Are there any of the protestors’ demands that China could accept?

George, thank you very much for having me on the show. Thank you to you both, George and Gayatri. I think it’s a very interesting question. The protestors do have some demands which are longstanding. They have a particular cultural identity: they will speak Cantonese, rather than the mainland Potohua (the common tongue, or Mandarin) and increasingly since there has been the union once again between Hong Kong and China, there have been a large number of people coming in who speak the mainland language. So there are some elements of their regional and national identity which they are very proud of and wish to preserve. That’s not unique to the people of Hong Kong. There are 80 million people who speak that language group, and the vast majority of them are within Guangzhou, within the wider area surrounding Hong Kong and part of China. So that in itself is not a demand that would lead to major protests.

There are elements around housing, which is very expensive; there are elements around schooling, which is in short supply; there are elements around medical care – normal social demands. Mao would have characterised all these as contradictions among the people, things which can be raised as legitimate grievances and are in every society – and can also be sorted out within the context and framework of that society.

What is very clear to me is that when you look at it, it bears all the hallmarks of being not just a domestic dispute, and how the mainstream media are very keen to present it as purely a domestic affair, but it is far more intermingled with the longer term history of Hong Kong and the history of Hong Kong, I have to say, is one which mirrors the history of British imperialism. It is a history which mirrors the intervention of Britain within India, within China, and the very founding of those huge financial institutions which make Hong Kong a major global city.

The flags have become quite a totemic issue. When the protestors broke into the Assembly building, the local parliament, they hoisted the British colonial flag, but that has been kind of superseded. Perhaps the Americans didn’t like that quite so much because, out of nowhere there seem to have been a very large number of American flags appearing. This seems to suggest what China called the black hand of American interference in the Territories. Is that how you see it?

I think that’s a very succinct and apt summary, George. They had all the hallmarks of what we’ve come to be so familiar with as really the beginnings of a colour revolution. If you look at the beginning of the dispute in Syria – it’s straying from the point but I think it bears some comparison – in 2011 there appeared to be genuine social discontent around certain issues, with large demonstrations and the government trying to address that; and, within that, there was a radical group that was not content. No concession that could be granted by the government would satisfy them. Rather, they used every grievance and every dispute as grounds for furthering the dispute and widening the anger, deepening the protest and escalating. There is a theory circulating amongst the demonstrators in Hong Kong where they talk about ‘marginal violence’, so what they want a core group of protestors to do is to be very provocative. And they have actually engaged in acid attacks upon the police, in taking their weapons and surrounding and beating them, indeed coming very close to lynching, policemen. None of that is shown in our social media, but you can see it if you look for it on YouTube. It has very clearly happened. And then in response, and in acts of self–defence … (One doesn’t associate an act of self defence with the state: there is an automatic assumption that if a policeman pulls a weapon, he is the aggressor. That comes from our own experience in the United States, in Britain and in most countries where workers are very much oppressed by the state. That is actually not the case in Hong Kong or China). What is very clear is that they provoke the police into acts of self defence and then picture very widely – as they did in Venezuela – alleged acts of state repression. So they are trying to build up – and this is not a new thing – a very clear propagandist image of a repressive state crushing democracy.

And that’s a point I think we can come back to because there is a general misconception propagated by our own media that Hong Kong has a long history of democracy prior to its being reunified with China. And that is absolutely not the case.

That’s a good point because everything that is in the mainstream media is ahistorical. Gayatri’s point there that we only actually every had Hong Kong in our possession to punish China for refusing to allow us to sell drugs in their country …

Gayatri

It’s amazing if you think about it – so ridiculous.

Even in the history of imperialism that is quite a sordid affair. But there was no democracy in Hong Kong throughout that 150 years.

Absolutely. And I think there are a couple of points that I will briefly make, that illustrate that very starkly. One is – you will be familiar with that, George – is the rubber bullets which were so notoriously used in the north of Ireland, in Britain’s oldest colony, to repress the Republican community. A rubber bullet is a dangerous thing: it is fired with a high explosive round and there have been many deaths associated with it. But the rubber bullet that we associate with that conflict in the north of Ireland was invented and first deployed in Hong Kong against rioting Chinese. The Chinese lived really as colonial slaves. There were literally cage cities where the workers would live – they were so poor and housing was so expensive: they would sleep within a cage, in the open air, the cages stacked one on top of another in entire areas of the city.

So this is the economic poverty, the relative economic enslavement of the population who had not a word to say about the appointment of a governor.

So are you saying that we fired rubber bullets first in Hong Kong when we ruled it?

Yes. This is true. That is an absolute fact.

Every day is a school day! Now, what’s going to happen next? I happen to think – I think the record shows it – that actually the Chinese authorities have been quite patient with these demonstrators. If Heathrow was occupied by thousands of demonstrators for days, and even weeks, bringing all flights to a halt, I can promise you that Heathrow would be cleared of those demonstrators; and I think that’s true of anywhere in the world. But that is now only beginning to happen in Hong Kong. At the same time, people’s fear is that China will crack down on this with a heavy hand and really serious widespread violence and casualties will be the result. Do you think there’s a danger of that?

There are dangers both ways, and that is the beauty of these destabilisation scenarios. If you don’t do anything to check an act of mass destabilisation which ultimately does not have defined goals because its goal is to get as much as it can, they can push and push and push. They wanted in Tienanmen Square a Yeltsin moment. They wanted to have a full counter-revolution and to turn over the huge area of China with all its natural resources – this huge prize – India was the jewel in the crown of British imperialism, but modern business looks to China, as a source of investment, as a source of cheap labour and a place to make profit, so if they can gain not only marketisation but also full control, economically and politically, there’s huge amounts of money to be made. They didn’t get that, and now they are looking more towards a kind of Maidan moment – a campaign of destabilisation to see what they can get.

Of course, people argue about what China is. It is a very common topic of debate: is it socialist? Is it communist? Is it capitalist? Economically there are huge elements of capitalism within China: there are more billionaires in China than in any country apart from the United States, and that is an apparent contradiction. And that means that within Chinese society there are some elements that would be open to that kind of movement. But I can tell you that the vast masses of Chinese people are thankful for the Revolution that liberated them from 150 years of colonial humiliation and took hundreds of millions – four or five hundred million people lifted out of poverty.

It is widely put about that communism equals mass carnage, devastation, destruction and death. This is a kind of dogma that we are asked to accept and which is repeated so often that we do accept it quite often, unfailingly. Let’s actually look behind the statistics. When Mao came to power, when he famously said – and we are coming up to the 70th anniversary on 1 October this year of the Revolution when the Chinese finally achieved liberation, and kicked colonial elements out, and kicked the comprador elements who actually represented the United States and the Chiang Kaishek government and still occupy Taiwan of course – the Chinese people have stood up. The Chinese people at that point had a life expectancy of 35 years, average life expectancy. Yet we are told that millions died under Mao. We can talk about the ins and outs on another occasion, as well as the vicissitudes of a long struggle for liberation, but you know when Mao died the life expectancy of the Chinese people had doubled. And that is really a statistic which speaks volumes about what the Chinese people won from their Revolution.

And overall they are very keen to protect it, and certainly to protect their independence and national sovereignty. And that is really what is at stake, at the heart of this issue.

Dr Ranjeet, thanks for joining us on the Sputnik.