From Hong Kong to Lebanon, Basebuilding Against Authoritarianism w/ Promise Li (E77)

This is a conversation with Promise Li. He’s a US-based member of the Lausan collective and the Democratic  Socialists of America doing solidarity work with Hong Kong and China’s  dissident movements.Topics Discussed:Growing up in Hong Kong in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square massacre and after the UK-China handoverWhat is Lausan?The difficulties of navigating online discourses on Hong Kong (and Lebanon, Syria etc)Rooting ourselves in democracyTranslating Self-DeterminationHong  Kong’s water revolution (context and history) and how the Chinese  Communist Party crushed it, at least for now (the national security law,  ongoing crackdown etc)The globalization of the war on terror rhetoric and how ‘anti-imperialist’ governments and parties also use it.How governments and politicians learn from one another (example of Gebran Bassil in Lebanon; Saudi and Palestinian ambassadors to China; Henri Kissinger praising the CCP and vice versa, Chinese cops praising American cops; Hezbollah in Syria)What’s so different about the CCP’s oppression compared to other governments’ authoritarianism, and how western leftists don’t seem to quite grasp that (example of China and Syria)How tankies and others try and think like Xi Jinping or Bashar Al-Assad (and always fail)The multiplicity of placesReacting to the camps in XinjiangHaving a specific anger towards people who were oppressed in the past and who now oppress others (Israel, China)Identifying as Hong Konger Chinese, the complicated identities of being both Jewish  and Arab, the example of Hindutva and Indian MuslimsBeing anti-nationalist and how that intersect in the global southThe importance of including migrant domestic workers in our strugglesLinking up Hong Kong with Black Lives MattersLearning from Hong Kong’s Umbrella MovementWhat BLM could look like in LebanonFighting anti-Asian violence cannot include apologism for the Chinese stateRecommended Books:China: The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution by The 70’s CollectivePunching out and other writings by Martin Glaberman, edited by Staughton LyndBeyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha