{"id":12536,"date":"2016-04-26T20:38:06","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T09:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaworker.info\/?p=12536"},"modified":"2016-04-26T23:59:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T15:59:15","slug":"hong-kong-federation-of-students-withdraws-from-tiananmen-vigil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaworker.info\/en\/2016\/04\/26\/12536\/","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong: Federation of Students withdraws from Tiananmen vigil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decision is not \u2018radical\u2019 but a further step backwards from mass anti-government struggle<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dikang, Socialist Action in Hong Kong<\/p>\n

The Hong Kong Federation of Students has officially withdrawn from the group that organises the annual Hong Kong (Victoria Park) vigil to mark the 1989 Beijing massacre on 4 June. While this is not unexpected, it\u2019s a bad decision \u2013 it is sectarian and a step backwards, not forwards. The Federation has also withdrawn from the Civic Rights Front, the main organiser of Hong Kong\u2019s annual 1 July \u20187.1\u2019 demonstration.<\/p>\n

Socialist Action has many criticisms of the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which hosts the 4 June vigil. The Alliance has deliberately de-politicised the vigil and cut the link between the 1989 movement and today\u2019s struggles. Many youth criticise the annual torchlight ceremony as just a ritual.<\/p>\n

The Alliance has always been run as a closed top-down group, with no effort to open up and involve other forces in a truly democratic way. This reflects the dominance of the moderate pan-democrats who, if the truth be told, have long given up the belief that it is possible to fight and defeat the Chinese dictatorship (CCP). Socialists don\u2019t agree. We believe the Chinese regime has in fact entered an extremely troubled period \u2013 economically and politically \u2013 and this is paradoxically why it is lashing out with increased \u2018white terror\u2019 against striking workers, lawyers and NGOs, and this year has even exported this terror through a series of illegal foreign abductions.<\/p>\n

Mass character<\/strong><\/p>\n

What signal does the Federation of Students send with this decision? It is a negative one of course, not least because the Federation was one of the founding groups behind the Alliance and because students played an important role in the 1989 struggle. Actually, the pan-democratic leaders and the Alliance have exaggerated the role of the students. The impression they give is that the 1989 struggle was only a student movement, when in truth the workers and masses of Beijing and other cities increasingly took over the movement that the students initiated. This was what most alarmed the dictatorship all those years ago.<\/p>\n

The decision of the Federation of Students to withdraw support does nothing to correct or change the political deficiencies of the Alliance. The main factor that makes the annual Victoria Park vigil an important event is its mass character. In recent years, 150,000 to 200,000 have gathered. The important thing is the place that the 1989 movement occupies in the consciousness of the masses in Hong Kong (and in recent years up to 20,000 participants from across the border). This makes the vigil an important platform for today\u2019s struggle against the dictatorship, despite the increasingly diluted and sentimentalised message of its organising committee.<\/p>\n

What are the student leaders proposing instead? They criticise \u2013 and we agree \u2013 that the vigil has largely been reduced to a ritual. But their alternative is to organise separate university-based gatherings, which will have a similar ritualistic character \u2013 just smaller and more fragmented. How is that a step forward? There is nothing new in this, nothing that marks an escalation or an injection of \u2018real struggle\u2019 into 4 June. All the Federation of Students is offering is smaller rituals! The new policy is\u00a0therefore a sectarian policy. Sectarianism is promoting the narrow interests of a small group \u2013 in this case the right-wing nativist student leaders \u2013 at the expense of\u00a0the wider interests of the masses.<\/p>\n

\"Victoria\"<\/p>\n

Demonstrations not enough<\/strong><\/p>\n

The decision reflects the recent shift of direction in Hong Kong\u2019s student movement, with a layer of nativist activists taking control of all eight of the city\u2019s student unions and unseating the old leadership that was closer to the pan-democrats. Four student unions remain inside the Federation, the others split away, but they are all dominated by the right-wing nativists.<\/p>\n

The nativists present themselves as a \u2018radical\u2019 alternative to the \u2018weak\u2019 pan-democrats, but their \u2018radicalism\u2019 is based on mostly empty gestures with no real content. The decision to switch to \u2018smaller rituals\u2019 on 4 June is an example of this method. It is a step backwards from the standpoint of real struggle to change the system.<\/p>\n

Many youth, and not only youth, are frustrated over the ineffectiveness of the struggle methods and strategy (i.e. the lack of) that has been offered by the pan-democratic leaders. \u201cWe\u2019ve tried marching and demonstrations, but they don\u2019t work,\u201d is an increasingly common view. But this conclusion is one-sided and therefore wrong. Marches and demonstrations are needed; they are absolutely critical elements in the struggle to gather, organise and educate a mass force to overthrow a dictatorial system. All revolutions begin with marches and demonstrations. But by themselves a demonstration or even several demonstrations are not enough.<\/p>\n

The problem with Hong Kong\u2019s long history of mass democracy marches is that the pan-democratic leaders who dominate the movement have always wanted to limit them to one-off events and disperse the masses as quickly as possible. These marches have never been linked to a serious strategy of escalating action to bring down the government and change the system. For this to work, the working class needs to be organised in strong democratic trade unions with a political force \u2013 a workers\u2019 party \u2013 at its head. The mission is to carry out a revolution against the current dictatorial system and this must of course go beyond marches and demonstrations, even very big ones\u00a0such as\u00a0Hong Kong has experienced in recent years.<\/p>\n

The methods of the workers\u2019 movement, tested over more than a century and a half, of strikes, mass action, blockades, general strikes and an appeal to the state (the police) to join forces with the people against the regime \u2013 these are what are needed to bring down an undemocratic regime. Not least, the power of the capitalist tycoons who stand fully behind CCP rule, must also be broken through socialist policies and public ownership in order to create a pension system, affordable housing, good jobs and higher wages.<\/p>\n

\u201cPriority to the Hong Kong struggle\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The reactionary effect of the gains by right-wing nativists in the student sphere is clearly shown in their rejection of\u00a0the Alliance stand on \u201cbuilding a democratic China\u201d. The Federation of Students says it no longer supports this idea, because \u201cpriority\u201d should be given to the Hong Kong struggle.<\/p>\n

This invents a completely fake \u2018contradiction\u2019 \u2013 as if supporting democracy in China in any way negatively impacts on the democracy struggle in Hong Kong. The opposite is true. By the same twisted logic, action against global warming or for world peace would also contradict and undermine Hong Kong\u2019s struggle for democracy. To not support democracy in China means at the very best to take a position of \u2018neutrality\u2019 in the face of the CCP\u2019s white terror, arrests and abductions. The absurdity of this position is shown by the call of several nativist groups that people should not protest CCP Standing Committee member Zhang Dejiang\u2019s upcoming visit to the city because, \u201cit has nothing to do with Hong Kong\u201d.<\/p>\n

The message this gives to the masses in China is, \u201cwe don\u2019t care\u201d how many are arrested, abducted, tortured, or sacked from their jobs. Equally bad, the message this gives to Hong Kong people is that the existence and continuation of the world\u2019s biggest and wealthiest dictatorship is \u201cnot important\u201d for the Hong Kong struggle \u2013 a fatal miscalculation! Ironically, the nativists and the pan-democrats who they denounce so severely have the same \u201costrich attitude\u201d \u2013 to think Hong Kong can achieve democracy on its own.<\/p>\n

This is to turn away from the only force that can actually defeat the CCP dictatorship \u2013 the multimillion working class of China. Only the CCP dictatorship gains from these political ideas that aim to fragment the struggle, reduce it to its smallest and weakest parts, and serve up empty \u2018radical\u2019 gestures as a substitute for a serious strategy to overthrow the regime. It is high time for those who want to rebuild a genuine mass democratic struggle to call time on the nativists\u2019 reactionary pseudo-radical gestures!<\/p>\n

\"SA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Decision is not \u2018radical\u2019 but a further step backwards from mass anti-government struggle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":12539,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[132,133,124],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12536","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-china","8":"category-hong-kong","9":"category-news"},"yoast_head":"\nHong Kong: Federation of Students withdraws from Tiananmen vigil - China Worker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/chinaworker.info\/en\/2016\/04\/26\/12536\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hong Kong: Federation of Students withdraws from Tiananmen vigil - 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