Hong Kong Working Class Needs to Fight for Itself Against Patriots and Autonomists

For more than two months now, hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets of Hong Kong have been clashed with the police, so much so that it is feared that the Chinese army will intervene.

The first demonstrations were launched by the Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), a platform that unites about fifty pro-democracy groups, with protest marches on March 31 and April 28. In June, membership of the Front grew enormously, with impressive demonstrations.

Faced with this massive opposition, the Hong Kong government announced the suspension of the bill on 15 June.

But this did not stop the protests, which continued uninterruptedly until September. The most significant: July 1, on the occasion of the 22nd anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, with hundreds of thousands of protesters, a group of whom broke into Parliament waving the flag of the former colonizer. On 5 August there was a general strike in the city, which, according to figures provided by the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, one of the main trade union centers in the metropolis, deployed with pro-democracy forces, participated in 350 thousand, and which hit hard the transport, with 200 flights cancelled and the blockade of the subway buses and offices; on 18 August when in response to police brutality the CHRF convened a peaceful demonstration in which, according to the organizers, participated in 1.7 million.

In addition to the withdrawal of the bill, the protesters call for: the resignation of the Governor of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam; the release and acquittal of the arrested protesters; an «independent investigation» into police violence; the withdrawal of the qualification of «revolt» with which the authorities have defined the protest. All of this was within the framework of a general demand for greater democracy.

The definitive withdrawal of the proposed law on extradition, announced on 4 September by the Governor of Hong Kong, has not brought back order: the law has given rise to protests, but there are much deeper contradictions that undermine the social peace of the great metropolis.

«One country, two systems»

Hong Kong has been a colony practically since 1841, when British troops occupied it during the First Opium War, which was formalized the following year with the Treaty of Nanking which sanctioned the Chinese defeat and the beginning of the series of so-called «unequal treaties» that foreign powers imposed on China to subdue the great Empire to imperialistic appetites. Apart from the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, Hong Kong will remain a British colony until July 1, 1997. From the 1980s onwards, Great Britain and the People’s Republic of China began to negotiate the future of the metropolis, reaching an agreement in 1984 that on July 1, 1997 the colony that would come under Chinese administration.

This agreement stipulated that Hong Kong should maintain «a high degree of autonomy» with «independent» legislative and judicial powers, democratic government and «fundamentally unchanged» the laws in force at the time of signing the Declaration. The only areas of concern for the People’s Republic would have been foreign policy and defence. Hong Kong would maintain until 2047 its «economic system» and its «social organization», that is, its «way of life», the customary individual and corporate, civil and commercial law inherited from British rule.

The State of false Chinese communism with the formula «one country two systems», which expresses the principle of the unity of a nation with a single destiny, would grant that portion its own «economic system», different from the so-called «socialism with Chinese characteristics». The same formula is also proposed for the return of Taiwan to its homeland.

The Jacobin centralism of the People’s Republic and the will to defend its territorial integrity by force is another confirmation that the economic and social regime in China is capitalist and that the theory of «socialism with Chinese characteristics» is nothing more than a formula to cover the brutal exploitation of the proletariat. The emphasis on the «two systems», capitalist one as much as the other, rather than wanting to preserve in Hong Kong a type of society qualitatively different from that in mainland China, has only served to allow the trafficking of the Chinese giant, which has been useful to recognize the former colony a «special administrative» regime. So the formula «one country two systems» worked well. Over time, however, it has undergone changes that have affected the degree of autonomy granted to Hong Kong. This is where the current dispute revolves, the causes of which are all economic.

The decline of the former colony

Under colonial rule, while mainland China was an economically backward country with an almost exclusively peasant population and limited industrial areas, the influx of foreign capital allowed Hong Kong to develop trade and manufacturing activities, making the peninsula an advanced stronghold of capitalism in the East, an urban metropolis with a highly concentrated and combative proletariat, as evidenced by the great workers’ struggles of the twenties. As well as being a regional trade hub and an important industrial centre, Hong Kong has built its prosperity on its role as an intermediary between foreign capital and the vast continental hinterland, a function strengthened with the birth of the People’s Republic.

But with the progressive opening of the People’s Republic in the late seventies, the Hong Kong foreign market it became less and less important for the Chinese economy. In recent years its financial role has been undermined by other markets that have developed in China, such as the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. More than forcing the former colony to become «Chinese», it is Chinese society and economy that have come to host more and more monstrous concentrations like Hong Kong. The «integration», in the practical life, is therefore almost already done.

The Hong Kong peninsula has suffered a decline not because it is conditioned by the central government in Beijing but because of its new position in the global market. But it is only a relative decline compared to the mother country: Hong Kong remains a financial and commercial centre of world importance, one of the areas where the capitalist mode of production has reached the apex of its parable. When it returned to China in 1997, Hong Kong was home to about one fifth of China’s entire economy. Today, after the tremendous development on the continent, Hong Kong produces only 3% of China’s GDP. The former colony is no longer so fundamental to the trade of Chinese capitalists as to justify the granting of special treatment.

China’s pressure to integrate more closely with the metropolis and to erode the terms of «special status» is therefore already increasing. This puts everyone in the peninsula in turmoil and benefits from the economic advantages of the «special position».

Social causes of protests

To explain the vast movement that has developed, one has to dig into the contradictions of the capitalist monster that is Hong Kong, distinguishing the role and interests of the social classes involved.

First of all, the law on extradition has been criticised by the commercial and financial giants based there. The loss of the «protection» of such legislation would make the citadel stretching out over the South China Sea unattractive for capitalists, since there would no longer be any difference between Hong Kong and any of the large Chinese metropolises, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which are all on the rise. They therefore supported the protest movement against the bill: in June, more than a hundred companies, with the consent of the various international chambers of commerce, encouraged the participation of their employees in the protests, granting «flexible» working hours or even closing their offices.

It should be noted that the autonomist tendency of the Hong Kong bourgeoisie comes not only from the interest in preserving its business paradise, but also from the desire to maintain the freedom to squeeze its own proletariat «autonomously», without the intrusions of Beijing.

But the Hong Kong bourgeoisie is beginning to feel the effects of the current protests, with the fall in the stock exchange, and fears the serious consequences that an intervention by the Chinese army could have on the city’s economy. But what he fears most is the possibility that from the current protests a working class movement will develop with very different objectives than the current democratic demands. In the case of an autonomous entry of the working class into the scene for its own objectives, the Hong Kong bourgeoisie would have no problem in reaching an agreement with Beijing for the violent repression of the proletariat.

So the bourgeoisie now wants an end to the protests and a return to order and discipline. This is the sense of the appeals to the beginning of September of the main banks of Hong Kong (HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of East Asia) and of a dozen other large groups that in the city’s newspapers have condemned the «violence» and called for the return of social peace.

The movement of young people and students, on the other hand, is more determined to oppose integration into the Chinese motherland. The petit-bourgeois classes feel threatened by a complete integration into the People’s Republic. Behind the words of Democracy and Freedom there is a defensive motion of these strata, nostalgic for some past privileges and appearances of Western lifestyles, but also the typical uncertainty of the half classes that, crushed by capital, seek protection in vain in law and in the State.

This has given rise to a «democratic» and micro-nationalist movement, strongly anti-Chinese, which in the desperate struggle for autonomy from the People’s Republic goes so far as to appeal to American imperialism and the former British colonizer. The most violent actions come from these very sectors, which in general have a great media visibility, especially for the references to an alleged noble struggle for freedom that so much pleases the putrid Western democrats.

If, on the other hand, it has been possible for hundreds of thousands of protests to follow one another, it is certainly because these demonstrations have been swollen by the participation of the proletariat. The Hong Kong working class certainly does not benefit from its wealth. Since the arrival of British imperialism, that prosperity has been based on the ferocious exploitation of workers. Even today, industrialists in Hong Kong squeeze the proletariat for more than 50 hours a week. One fifth of the population is in poverty. The minimum wage is set at just over $4.5 per hour, which is largely insufficient for one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The dramatic aspect for the proletariat is the housing issue. In little more than 1,000 square kilometers are crammed about 7.5 million men, and this makes Hong Kong one of the places with the highest density in the world. This situation is compounded by the fact that, under pressure from a few landowners who control the property market, only luxury housing is being built there. The price of rents is therefore skyrocketing, so much so that tens of thousands of workers are forced to live in cells of a few square metres, some of which, called ’coffins’, are two square metres in size. The participation of proletarians in the ongoing struggles therefore takes place under the pressure of precise material needs.

But, as far as we know, without making any claims of their own. They therefore seem to be towing half classes and students, who soften the movement with the rotten democratic ideology. In Hong Kong, the proletariat is now called upon to fight for objectives that are not its own. The five demands made by the movement have nothing to do with the interests of the proletariat, with its class defense, are objectives of the small bourgeoisie that would like to involve the working class in this struggle for democracy and autonomy.

The proletariat, certainly determined to move for its material interests, can only do so with its class autonomy, political, ideological and organizational, certainly not under the direction of opposing social classes and bourgeois objectives, ending up being enlisted on one of the two bourgeois fronts, as has historically happened and continues to happen unfortunately, taking the form of a struggle in the Hong Kong question between a pro-democracy faction, autonomist and pro-western, and the historical Chinese homeland.

The process of disintegration of the Chinese countryside frees up millions of peasants who pour into the cities. In China, this process is taking on enormous proportions. It is estimated that over the next few years, an additional 250 million Chinese will be upset. It is an unstoppable process that the CCP deludes itself of trying to manage. Clusters, clusters, cities, urban areas of regional dimensions would form due to the proximity of huge metropolises. The migration from the countryside to industrial areas that would have an army of more than 50 million proletarians at their disposal would be poured into them. The one that would form around Shanghai would have 150 million inhabitants; another, called Jing-Jin-Ji (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei) 112 million. They will be wonderful explosive proletarian concentrations where capitalism will make a disastrous failure in the precipitation of the world crisis, communism objectively presses and the struggle for communism will mature until it just waits to be triggered.

Hong Kong’s future is therefore already understood in this inevitable evolution, with the further strengthening of its international role as a financial centre, transport and trade centre. Moreover, the fact that Hong Kong’s integration with the mother country is not waiting for 2047 is witnessed by majestic infrastructural works such as the series of 55 km long bridges, partly under the sea, connecting the peninsula to Macao.

It is inevitable that sooner or later legislation will also adapt to the process. So Chinese capitalism will not give in to the autonomist demands of Hong Kong whose fate is marked. A unification that is certainly not to the detriment of the future class struggle.

Neither democracy nor Chinese homeland

Whatever the form of the state, democratic in Hong Kong or one-party in Beijing, it does not change its nature as a bourgeois class, a bureaucratic and military machine aimed at the subjugation of the working class to the needs of capital.

Only an autonomous and supportive intervention of the working class of Hong Kong and China would upset the plans of the opposing factions.

So much so that the prospect of the working class entering the scene autonomously with its own claims disturbs the dreams of its exploiters in Hong Kong as well as in Beijing. An explosion of workers’ struggle in Hong Kong could extend to the metropolises of nearby Guangdong, where millions of proletarians are squeezed out of Chinese and international capital.

It is a not without foundation perspective if one retraces the history of the Chinese labor movement, with the great proletarian struggles of the 1920s characterized by class solidarity that transcended the boundaries of companies, sectors and localities. We remember the seafarers’ strike of 1922 which, supported by the general strike of the whole colony and by the solidarity of the proletariat of all the Chinese cities, after 56 days of struggle bent British imperialism; and the Hong Kong-Canton strike of 1925-1926, the longest in the history of the workers’ movement (from June 1925 to October 1926!).), with about 250,000 workers on strike in Canton, to which were added another 100,000 Hong Kong workers who left the city and moved en masse to Canton, where the proletariat was armed and practically controlled the city.

But today, an autonomous resumption of the proletarian struggle must necessarily pass through the affirmation within it of a party that is based on two cornerstones: the rejection of nationalism and the rejection of inter-classism cloaked in democracy.

As in all the other capitalist metropolises, the proletariat must not allow itself to be deceived by the democratic myth that the small bourgeoisie passes on in all corners of the world: Occupy, Arab spring, yellow vests, although at the base there is the worsening of the living conditions of masses of workers, have all been inter-classist movements that divert the struggle of the proletariat towards objectives that are not theirs and compatible with the domination of capital.