China

Hong Kong cops shoot 18 year old school student with live rounds

On October 1st, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong was rocked by a huge wave of protests. Huge numbers of protestors took to the streets in many parts of the city even though the police had refused to grant permission to any demonstration and had declared all protests that day as illegal assemblies. At the time of writing, one protestor, an 18 year old secondary school student, had only just been transferred out of intensive care, a day after he was shot in the chest at close range by riot police. The bullet could easily have been fatal, having...

Hong Kong: the build up to 1st October

As I write on 30 September, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Here in Hong Kong, tonight is deadly quiet, the calm before the storm. 30 September was an international day of protests involving many cities around the world, and Saturday 28 September was the fifth anniversary of the 2014 Umbrella movement, when HK police launched 79 tear gas canisters five years ago that day. The level of police weaponry and brutality five years on have far exceeded most people’s expectations. On Sunday alone over 100 more protesters were arrested. In the old days, protest...

A lazy day in the office

Life isn’t always easy for Steve Sweeney, International Editor of the Morning Star . Earlier this year he was detained and interrogated by Turkish police when he landed at an Istanbul airport. Thoughts of what had happened to Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate six months before in the same city flashed through his mind. The Morning Star – quite rightly – is highly critical of the Erdoğan regime in Turkey. But when it comes to regimes that the paper approves of — “anti-imperialist” Venezuela or Syria, for instance, or “socialist” China, Steve’s job is a lot easier. Most of the time he just...

The left at Labour conference

Workers’ Liberty comrades and those around us had a huge impact on Labour Party conference this year (21-25 September, Brighton). When the Leader’s Office was fishing for compromises on Brexit in the run up to conference, some prominent Remainers were arguing that we’d already won everything we wanted, and that it was reasonable for Labour not to argue explicitly for Remain. It was at the Labour for a Socialist Europe steering committee that was all put to bed. Following that, the AEIP/L4SE campaign was clear all the way through conference: we were going to refuse to accept being swallowed...

China: 1949-1989-2019

The Maoist regime began not in 1949, with the declaration of the People’s Republic of China, but twenty years earlier, with the defeat of the Chinese working class movement at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek. Masses of communist workers were slaughtered by the White Terror. After the Canton uprising of December 1927, the Chinese working class remained prostrate under the heel of Chiang. But it was still alive and capable of reviving – at least until the full-scale Japanese invasion of 1937 crushed political life in the cities. What happened to the Chinese working class was partly determined by...

Hong Kong spirits stay high

It’s 100 days since the protests in Hong Kong burst onto TV screens around the world. Since last week [9-14 Sep], the Government has started to make some moves to address the deep structural problems of land and housing, and attempting to copy Macron’s rounds of public consultation. Even Beijing has issued a statement indicating that young protestors with heavy student loans and poor job prospects faced with no housing solutions could do better by seeking jobs in China! Hong Kong’s richest tycoon, Lee Ka Shing, has appealed to the Hong Kong government to mend bridges with the “future masters...

Beijing goes for attrition

On the morning of 9 September, outside hundreds of secondary schools in Hong Kong, thousands of students, supported by their alumni, held hands to form human chains. This followed days of school student protests the previous week, at the start of the academic year. That previous week too, Chief Executive Carrie Lam eventually announced the complete withdrawal of the Extradition Bill. Immediately the entire spectrum of the protest movement declared this as “too little, too late” as they insisted that the Hong Kong Government concedes to all five of their demands. Lam opposed the demand for a...

Hong Kong moves to student boycott

As Hong Kong citizens seek to recover from a horrific weekend of escalated police violence against tenacious protesters, 2 September marked the start of the academic year, with a two-week boycott of lectures declared by student unions in all major universities, widely supported by secondary students boycotting lessons in dozens of schools. Organisers of the successful city-wide strike on 5 August are planning their next strike to link up with the students. 31 August is the fifth anniversary of the Chinese National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s decision to deny Hong Kong the right to...

Uyghurs: a history of oppression

The book The Uyghurs: Strangers in their Own Land was published in 2010, so it predates by six years the intense escalation in repression by the Chinese State against the Uyghurs and other national minorities in Xinjiang. In Xinjiang, a region in the northwest of China which is known to most Uyghur people as East Turkestan, recent years have brought indoctrination-internment camps and intensified intrusive surveillance on a mass scale. But the ongoing, unresolved and undiminished conflict between the Uyghur people and the Chinese state over many decades goes back further. The author, Gardner...

Let the light of democracy shine in every corner of Hong Kong!

This is a statement issued on 31 August 2019, by the broad-based campaign, the Civil Human Rights Front, who have been calling all the big demonstrations in Hong Kong. Their application for a demonstration on 31 August was refused by the police and their appeal to court was rejected. 31 August was the 5th anniversary of the National People's Congress decision to block universal suffrage for HK to elect its own Chief Executive, even though this is provided for in the one country two systems arrangement agreed between China and the UK in 1984. Thanks to Chan Ying for translating the statement...

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