Reporters from our sister website chinaworker.info spoke to member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung. Today the Olympic torch will be paraded through Hong Kong accompanied by 3,000 police, according to Chief superintendent David Ng Ka-sing.

The torch relay has been dogged by protests against state repression in China and Tibet on its global relay over five continents. Worldwide an estimated 100,000 security personnel have guarded the torch in recent weeks – almost equivalent to the numbers of US troops in Iraq. What will happen in Hong Kong? We asked Leung Kwok-hung, better known as ’Long Hair’, who is a socialist member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and well-known activist.

chinaworker.info (CW): Will there be protests to coincide with the torch relay in Hong Kong?

LH: Yes, but it will be difficult. The police are very uptight about any protests. They make it very difficult for any alternative or opposition viewpoint to be heard. The torch arrived yesterday and so today [Wednesday 30 April] we had a protest but were stopped and surrounded 100m from where the official ceremony was being held, so it’s very difficult for us to express our opinion. It’s not easy either for the people who just want to see what’s going on, the police are calling out all their manpower. For Friday’s relay, there will be 10,000 supporters of the Beijing regime’s policies mobilised by pro-Beijing parties and organisations, so demonstrators with a critical standpoint will be overwhelmed. Even the Danish artist, Jens Galschiot, has been denied entry to Hong Kong, causing a formal protest by the Danish consul.

[Galschiot, who made the sculpture called ’pillar of shame’ to commemorate the June 4 1989 incident, was planning to attend a peaceful demonstration during the torch relay.]

CW: What is your position towards the Olympics?

LH: We are demanding political reform in China. The lifting of all restrictions: on the right of
assembly, expression, for the release of political prisoners and so on. We call for an international fact-finding mission to be allowed into China to investigate the human rights situation and especially labour rights in the country.

CW: What is your standpoint on Tibet?

LH: My organisation, the League of Social Democrats, has called for an end to the repression in Tibet. The Chinese regime should stop the repression immediately, and they should start negotiations with the Tibetan side. I stand for the right of self-determination for the Tibetan people, there should be a referendum, a vote, so they can choose.

CW: The Chinese regime and its supporters say the Dalai Lama and the exile Tibetan leadership are pro-US and even controlled by US imperialism, what do you say to that?

LH: Firstly, I don’t think the Dalai Lama has much weight politically these days. The young turks are already the ones making the running within the Tibetan exile movement. Yes, this leadership has strong connections to the US, and funding from CIA or US government sources, which of course I don’t support, but my perspective is that the Tibetans will begin to build their own organisations on the ground, once meaningful talks have started. They’ll be politicised and this will be reflected in the building of political organisations.

CW: What is your attitude towards the call for an Olympic boycott?

LH: Well, there’s a lot of hypocrisy on that issue. Basically anyway it’s too late now. A serious boycott campaign has to be organised by the labour movement and should in that case have been started much much sooner. They could have sent a fact-finding mission to China in 2004 to investigate the conditions of workers and human rights violations and linked that to the question of a boycott. The idea of a boycott is really not a sufficient slogan today. But for example if this idea had been taken up earlier and raised among workers in the airline industry, pilots etc., this could have been very effective. People would not have been able to go the Olympics if the airline workers internationally refused to fly there.

CW: What is your view of the protests inside China in favour of the Olympics and targeting Western companies with boycott actions?

LH: Well it’s actually very paradoxical if you look at the real role of the multinational companies in getting the Olympics to China. It is a patriotic movement in support of an authoritarian regime based on a capitalist system. It is supporting them in a fight with other capitalist countries. This is dangerous, it could be the beginnings of some kind of fascist movement in the future, based on petit bourgeois layers and lumpen proletarians around the idea of a ”strong China” and ”social arbitration”. This movement is not progressive at all.

To read other articles on the Olympic protests and Tibet on chinaworker.info:

China cools anti-Western protests and signals talks on Tibet (26 April 2008)

Tibet and the National Question (21 April 2008)

Olympic Games in crisis amid global protests (16 April 2008)

Tibet erupts! (16 March 2008)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Regional news and analysis, World news and analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.