Terry Glavin
Do not split, even if you’re a respectable solicitor and veteran of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy politics and you are obliged to hold your tongue while young militants take to confronting the tear gas and truncheons of the widely-loathed Hong Kong Police Force with mayhem and Molotov cocktails.
Do not split. That was the idea. And you could say it succeeded, even if Hong Kong’s democrats are now united only in grief over their abandonment by the world’s democratic powers and by their distress as Xi Jinping’s police state carries out the final stages of its encirclement, occupation and extinguishment of the flourishing and nominally autonomous city-state.
Hong Kong’s democrats are now united only in grief and distress
Do Not Split is also the title of Norwegian journalist Anders Hammer’s brilliant and heart-rending cinéma-vérité documentary chronicling Hong Kong’s street battles and the desperation of the young Hongkongers who threw themselves into the struggle. The film was nominated in last Sunday’s Academy Awards in the category of Best Documentary, Short Subject. The prize ended up going to Antonio Giacchino’s Colette, a film that in its own way echoes the themes in Do Not Split. It’s about a 90-year-old woman who fought in the French resistance, and her visit to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where her brother died.
In the Hong Kong resistance, the Do Not Split principle discouraged any public condemnation of pro-democracy activism even if it strayed from the movement’s overwhelmingly non-violent commitments, and counselled solidarity and unity among Hong Kong’s variously arrayed pan-democrats, “localists” and neo-separatists.
It was the maxim that finally broke through the discord that the former Democratic Party leader Albert Ho Chun-yan described to me as a crippling “hostility between the radicals and the conventional democrats” when we met in Hong Kong five years ago. Back then, the authorities were still prosecuting and jailing the leaders of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and the city’s political culture was paralyzed in a gloom of dispiriting malaise.
After largely abandoning the hopes of his Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, Ho still found it possible to hold onto some optimism for democracy’s prospects in Hong Kong. In the ranks of Kong’s democrats, Ho is as far from a young anti-Beijing militant as it’s possible to get. Even so, two weeks ago he received a suspended sentence of a year in prison, on charges arising from his participation in an August 2019 procession that drew 300,000 people to Hong Kong’s Central district.
Among those sentenced in the same proceedings were the outspoken newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai (jailed for a year), Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee (11 months imprisonment, suspended), and several other lawmakers. Lai was remanded in custody — the 73-year-old Apple Daily founder is facing separate charges under the absurdly draconian National Security Law that Beijing unilaterally imposed on Hong Kong last June.
There is no escaping the law’s reach. It criminalizes any activity the Chinese Communist Party deems to constitute subversion, separatism, or collusion with foreign forces. Almost every prominent pro-democracy figure in Hong Kong — 100 people, at last count — has been arrested under the new law.
Correctional officers perform a drill during an open house to mark National Security Education Day at the Staff Training Institute of Correctional Services Department in Hong Kong on April 15, 2021. PHOTO BY LAM YIK/REUTERS
Correctional officers perform a drill during an open house to mark National Security Education Day at the Staff Training Institute of Correctional Services Department in Hong Kong on April 15, 2021. PHOTO BY LAM YIK/REUTERSUnilaterally imposed on the pathetically gerrymandered and eviscerated Hong Kong Legislative Council, the national security law dramatically expands the powers Beijing intended to usurp to itself through the proposed extradition bill that lit the spark for the 2019 protests in the first place.
Last month, 47 prominent pro-democracy activists and politicians were arrested under the law for participating in an unofficial primary election process last year that was built on the “do not split” principle (the primary process was deemed “subversion” by Beijing’s Hong Kong proxies). Only 11 of the 47 have been granted bail. No trial date has been set.
Following the democrats’ successes in local district elections in November 2019 — democrats swept 17 of Hong Kong’s 18 districts, taking more than 400 of the 452 district council posts — the primary process was intended to build unity slates in an effort to wrest control of the Hong Kong Legislative Council from pro-Beijing forces.
Thousands of democrats have been fleeing Hong Kong
As for the Legislative Council, its pro-democracy members resigned en masse last November to protest the ousting of four of their colleagues under provisions of the national security law that bar insufficiently “patriotic” Hongkongers from election to the council. As for the September legislative council elections, candidates are required to gain the approval of several Communist Party committees and the national security branch of the Hong Kong Police Force before their names can appear on a ballot.
Thousands of democrats have been fleeing Hong Kong, and several hundred who have made it to Canada have applied for asylum to the independent Immigration and Refugee Review Board.
Prominent among the more recent arrivals is the Hong Kong Civic Party’s Dennis Kwok, one of the democrats ousted from the legislative council last November. Earlier this month, Kwok’s family said he was living incognito in Canada out of fear of Beijing’s agents in this country. And last month, Ernie Chow Shue-fung, a student leader who helped organize a cross-party platform in Hong Kong’s aborted democratic primary, also surfaced in Canada.
But it’s no longer clear whether emigration will be an option for Hongkongers wanting to escape the noose Beijing is tightening around Hong Kong’s neck. Roughly 300,000 Hongkongers are Canadian citizens, but Beijing refuses to recognize dual nationality. This week, Hong Kong’s increasingly rubber-stamp legislative council adopted an immigration law that the Hong Kong Bar Association says could be used to prevent anyone from boarding a flight to get out of Hong Kong.
The organizing principle that kept Hongkongers united through their gallant uprising — do not split — the maxim that kept hope alive among the students, the shopkeepers, the trade unionists, the young radicals, the lawyers, the maverick politicians and the marching masses from Kowloon to Sham Shui Po, and from Sha Tin to Wan Chai, was missing one critical constituency: the rest of us.
The world’s democracies, in varying degrees of disunity, parochialism, cowardice and cynicism, allowed Hong Kong to disappear down Xi Jinping’s gaping maw.
Unpardonably, obscenely, disgracefully.
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