Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

Justin K.H. Tse, Jonathan Y. Tan, Justin K.H. Tse, Jonathan Y. Tan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349948451
• eBook ISBN: 9781349948468
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Politics

This book gathers the voices of four local Hong Kong theologians to reflect on the 2014 democracy protests in the city from the perspectives of Catholic social teaching, feminist and queer intersectionality, Protestant liberation, and textual exegesis. The volume also includes an extended primer on Hong Kong politics to aid readers as they reflect on the theology underlying the democracy protests.
September 28, 2014 is known as the day that political consciousness in Hong Kong began to shift. As police fired eighty-seven volleys of tear gas at protesters demanding "genuine universal suffrage" in Hong Kong, the movement (termed the "Umbrella Movement") ignited a polarizing set of debates over civil disobedience, government collusion with private interests, and democracy. The Umbrella Movement was also a theological watershed moment, a time for religious reflection. This book analyzes the role that religion played in shaping the course of t his historic movement.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Justin K.H. Tse and Jonathan Y. Tan (eds.)Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella MovementAsian Christianity in the Diaspora10.1057/978-1-349-94846-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Umbrella Movement and Liberation Theology

Justin K. H. Tse¹

(1)

University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

End Abstract

September 28, 2014, is usually considered the day that the theological landscape in Hong Kong changed. For 79 days, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong citizens occupied key political and economic sites in the Hong Kong districts of Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and Mong Kok, resisting the government’s attempts to clear them out until court injunctions were handed down in early December. ¹ Captured on social media and live television, the images of police in Hong Kong throwing 87 volleys of tear gas and pepper-spraying students writhing in agony have been imprinted onto the popular imagination around the world. Using the image of a student standing up all wrapped up in plastic wrap to protect against police brutality, the cover story of The Economist on October 4, 2014, was titled “The Party v. the People,” attempting to analyze the Hong Kong protests’ impact on relations with Beijing. Not to be outdone, the Time magazine cover dated October 13, 2014, featured the image of a goggled young man with a face mask triumphantly holding up two umbrellas surrounded almost like incense with the smoke of the tear gas. On the front of the magazine is plastered three words, “The Umbrella Revolution,” declaring that Hong Kong’s youth were fed up with the lack of democracy in this Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Gathering shortly thereafter in their newly formed Umbrella Square, the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism (a secondary school student movement led by the charismatic Joshua Wong Chi-fung, himself gracing the cover of Time the very next week on October 20) declared that this was not a revolution because they were not overthrowing the government. ² They asserted that the occupations were a movement—the Umbrella Movement—to demand that the government institute “genuine universal suffrage,” the right of citizens in Hong Kong to vote for candidates that they could directly nominate and who would not have to be vetted by the central government in Beijing. A series of debates circulated in the Umbrella Movement’s wake, wondering whether the protests constituted Hong Kong’s Tiananmen moment, hearkening back to the student democracy movement that had resulted in close to one million people occupying Beijing’s central public square in 1989, only to be violently suppressed with tanks, bayonets, and live bullets throughout the streets of the PRC’s capital on June 4. ³

Democracy, protest, solidarity, youth At face value, one might suppose that the Umbrella Movement is the birth of a kind of liberation theology in Hong Kong; certainly, that you are reading a volume attempting a theological reflection on the protests might evoke a sentiment of this sort. Indeed, one fascinating focal point of the constant media coverage of the Umbrella Movement was that Christians were not only involved, but heavily engaged in leading the spectrum of groups that composed the democracy movement. ⁴ The official estimates of the actual number of Christians in Hong Kong, both Catholic and Protestant, has been at around a consistent 10 % of its population of seven million since the 1980s, suggesting that the significant influence of Christians on the Umbrella Movement—indeed, in a historical sense, on Hong Kong society—is not captured by sheer statistics. ⁵ For example, Joshua Wong is an evangelical whose family has roots in the charismatic renewal movement. The leaders of the group that arguably brought about the civic awareness that catalyzed the movement in 2013, Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP), boast a law professor of evangelical persuasion, Benny Tai Yiu-ting, and a Baptist minister, the Rev. Chu Yiuming. While the current cardinal-bishop of Hong Kong, John Cardinal Tong Hon, has been less than enthusiastic about the protests, his predecessor, Joseph Cardinal Zen Ze-ken actively led the students out to the protest that resulted in the occupations. In the Mong Kok occupation, an ecumenical band of Christians—Roman Catholics, Anglicans, non-denominational evangelicals—built a makeshift sanctuary called St. Francis’ Chapel on the Street. Even those who criticize these leaders as overly bourgeois count among their number those who identify as Christian. The core of radical democratic political party People Power is a group known as Narrow Church, which is led by seminary students from Chung Chi Divinity School of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). As a mentor to the radical democracy group Civic Passion, politician Raymond Wong Yuk-man is a baptized Christian who attends a socially engaged, liturgically innovative, non-denominational church in the working-class Shaukeiwan district. Certainly, there is something to be said here about how the arc of theology bends toward justice and liberation, engaged in solidarity with the demands of democracy as a way of solving social ills and political corruption.

That the call for grassroots political agency has been key to many articulations of theologies of liberation in both Latin America and in Asia prompts the question of whether the Umbrella Movement can be considered a moment of liberation theology in Hong Kong. Certainly, there are resonances with what theologians Joerg Rieger and Kwok Puilan call the “theology of the multitude,” the “rising up” of the ochlos (“a crowd or mass of people”) and the laos (“the common people”) against their rulers by invoking the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. ⁶ Typical of academic theological reflection, though, the essays that have been included in this collection do not tell a simple story that is easily continuous with such theological trends, even though one of our authors, Lap Yan Kung, has certainly drawn inspiration in his work from the Peruvian theologian known as the founder of liberation theology, Gustavo Guttiérez. ⁷ Indeed, the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the meeting of the Latin American bishops at Medellín, Colombia. in 1968 produced what we have come to call liberation theology and brought about the adoption of concepts such as “basic ecclesial communities,” the Second Vatican Council’s moniker of “the people of God,” the “see-judge-act” method, and the critique of unjust structures of domination through groups such as the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC), minjung (“of the people”) theologians during the Park Chung Hee dictatorship of Korea in the 1970s, Dalit (“untouchable caste”) theology in the Church of North India in the 1980s, the People Power Movement in the Philippines, and the emergence of theologies from migrants and indigenous peoples within Asia. ⁸ Yet the simple fact that there is a tradition of Asian liberation theology should not obscure the fact that the Umbrella Movement has its own theological genealogy, one that is not generically “Asian” or beholden to “theologies of liberation,” but that is rooted in the odd history of Hong Kong’s pre-1997 colonial relationship with the United Kingdom and its post-1997 arrangement with the PRC, in which it enjoys both legal autonomy and suffers a national identity crisis through the principle of “one country, two systems.”

Indeed, the Chinese case is what makes the Umbrella Movement difficult to neatly conceptualize within the otherwise straightforward rubrics of liberation theology. After all, liberation theology has its origins in the critique of capitalist dictatorships that had allied themselves during the Cold War with the so-called “free world” of North American Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. This is not to say that liberation theology, contrary to popular opinion (as well as that of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith from the 1980s to the 2000s), is necessarily beholden to Marxist ideologies of class struggle and the agency of capital processes. Indeed, Paulo Freire’s influence on the “conscientization” of Latin American liberation theology is—as philosopher of education Sam Rocha and his students argue ⁹ —perhaps better seen as a proto-evangelium for Medellín’s call for “‘conscientización’ ordered to changing the structures and observance of justice.” ¹⁰ So too, theologies of solidarity with the minjung in Korea, the dalit in India, the people in the Philippines, and the migrant workers and indigenous peoples of Asia usually have more to do with the inculturation of Christian concepts than the ideological indoctrination of secular materialism. ¹¹ However, the objection still stands: Most of these cases have to do with “liberation” from the un-free conditions of the free world. With the emergence of Chinese democracy movements such as the one in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the various protests that have riddled the Republic of China in Taiwan and Hong Kong SAR when a closer relationship with the PRC central government has been suggested, this is—strangely enough—liberation theology done in relation to a nation-state that for all intents and purposes still identifies with the now-defunct Soviet bloc of yesteryear. ¹²

The question of whether such geopolitical conditions qualify the protest movements as “liberation theology” is thus complex. Add to the mess the complexity following the Open Door Policy reforms of 1978 that opened the PRC to a platform of “market socialism,” ¹³ and one hears political psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek joking that the PRC is really “totalitarian capitalism” more similar to the style of Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore than Mao Zedong in revolutionary China, ¹⁴ what Marxist geographer David Harvey calls “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” in a deliberate jab at then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s description of the post-reform era as a time of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” ¹⁵ On the one hand, the conditions of market reform do place the Chinese case, complete with its pretensions to “market socialism,” in square continuity with the Latin American and Asian cases. However, an intact communist government will still have the ideology that the expansion of its central government’s powers is a mode of liberation itself. In a stunning analysis by geographer Kean Fan Lim, “market socialism” may be nothing more than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) slowing down its strategy to initiate the class struggle to bring in a communist utopia. ¹⁶ Asserting sovereignty claims in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong SAR, and Taiwan can thus be understood from the CCP’s perspective as liberating these territories from the ideological work of capitalism, placing a damper on the glib usage of “liberation” to describe theologies that might be emerging from the participation of Christians in the Umbrella Movement.

A better approach—one that we take in this book—is to perform thick descriptions of the concrete situation in Hong Kong as a distinct approach of doing theology, rooting our discussion not in the generic language of “Asian” liberation theology or evangelistic inculturation, but in the history, politics, and public spheres of Hong Kong itself. ¹⁷ To be sure, such an approach is a direct application of Joseph Cardinal Cardijn’s see-judge-act method from the early twentieth-century Young Christian Workers movement in Belgium: one sees a sociological situation of injustice, judges it theologically, and takes action. Enshrined as the ecclesially sanctioned approach to social justice in Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra, see-judge-act has become a staple of theologies of liberation that have both been central to the implementation of Catholic social teaching and transcended their Roman origins. ¹⁸ Yet keeping in mind the caveats for calling protest theologies “theologies of liberation” in Hong Kong, we ask for patience and understanding from our readers as we nuance the continuities and discontinuities of the Umbrella Movement from other movements that have gone before it. While a Hong Kong-specific “liberation” is certainly a theme that emerges from the essays, a more accurate description of the task we have set for ourselves is that we are trying to tell the story of Hong Kong through the Umbrella Movement from several different theological perspectives—Catholic solidarity, feminist theology, the theology of kairos, and biblical exegesis. ¹⁹

In terms of the steps of see-judge-act, we are reflecting retrospectively on an action that has already been taken, which means we are seeing and judging again afresh. We contend that this mode of place-specific theologizing is valuable even for readers without a dedicated interest in Hong Kong, because our thick description advances an approach to theology that is emerging directly out of the Umbrella Movement. In this new method, the thick details of the political apparatus, the economic system, the sociological conditions, and the local culture matter a great deal for the task of doing theology in any place. To put it another way, we are mapping the “grounded theologies”—the “performative practices of placemaking informed by understandings of the transcendent”—emerging out of Hong Kong, describing the geographies of the Umbrella Movement through a variety of theological registers. ²⁰ One could advance our approach in other new protest cultures in the world, be it the global Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring with its unintentional geopolitical production of the Islamic State and the tragic refugee crisis in Syria and Iraq, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli occupations of Palestinian territory, the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine and the subsequent tensions on the Russia-Ukraine border, the African American #BlackLivesMatter movement in the USA, the Idle No More indigenous protests against settler colonialism in Canada, the Taiwanese Sunflower Movement against regional integration with the PRC, the Bersih movement in Malaysia calling for clean government, the protests in Caracas against Venezuelan economic policies and state-sponsored gendered violence, and the Mexican protest against state collusion with narcotics ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: The Umbrella Movement and Liberation Theology
• 1. A Primer on Occupying Hong Kong
• 2. Theological Reflections on the Umbrella Movement
• Backmatter