Among Chinese citizens who are well educated and well traveled, nationalism runs at a fever pitch.
........ I was once a Chinese nationalist with similar proclivities. Hong Kong — with its rule of law, vibrant free press, and freedom of association and assembly — changed my mind. ......... Having emigrated from China to the United States at age 10, I was a proud U.S. citizen. But my Chinese nationalism ran deep........ A couple of years before moving to Hong Kong, I had written an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times titled, “We Ask, ‘Can One Eat Liberty?’” Much of China barely had enough to eat, I argued. ........ Hong Kong has long nourished the seeds of spontaneity that an authoritarian government cannot control.
A Bubble Tea Summit brings together pro-Hong Kong and pro-China protesters in Vancouver The rivals sat together for almost three hours, trying to understand how the other came to such wildly different views about Hong Kong’s protests to their own...... Their conversation shows how personal and family histories cast the same events during the unrest in very different light ............... this Canadian city that has 188,000 mainland-Chinese immigrants, more than 71,000 from Hong Kong........ They were met by large crowds of pro-China counterprotesters, including Feng, who works in finance. He paid for Chinese flags waved at a series of events that weekend.......Feng, 34, tells us of the death of his great-grandfather at the hands of Japanese occupiers, and his pride in the rise of China that has paralleled that of his own family, from poverty to prosperity. “We’re proud that we stood up again,” he says. ........ Sung, a former RTHK journalist, tells of her family’s suffering under the Cultural Revolution and Communist rule, and their subsequent flight to the British colony. “As soon as my parents moved to Hong Kong, they made a very definite decision to separate themselves from that China,” she says. She feels not a speck of patriotism for Communist China.......... They discuss various incidents during the unrest – the attack on protesters in Yuen Long by men in white shirts, the police storming of a train at Prince Edward MTR station.
They agree on the basics of what they saw, but never come close to consensus on the context or implications.
........ The South China Morning Post invited Feng and Sung to sit down together last week in the wake of a series of flashpoint protests and counterprotests in Vancouver – at Broadway station, outside the Chinese consulate and, most controversially, outside a church hosting prayers for Hong Kong. All took place on the weekend of August 17 and 18........... Sung, who moved from Hong Kong to Vancouver in 1991 and is convenor of the group Canadian Friends of Hong Kong, has helped promote protest events but prefers to call herself an “active supporter” rather than an organiser......... Feng likewise denies organising the pro-China protests, although he paid for flagpoles and flags waved by his camp, distributed bottled water and spoke to police and the media on the group’s behalf.........He immediately harked back to “racial slurs” used by Hongkongers to describe mainland people when he was a child.
........ His patriotism towards China grew after arriving in Canada in 2004, to study business at Simon Fraser University..........“Before I arrived in Canada I’m one of those people who love China, but I don’t love Communist China. That’s [the same for] a lot of people I talk to one our side, before they came out to Canada,” he said............ He says negative news and views about China in Canada had aroused in him concerns about bias, that in turn reinforced feelings of patriotism. “There’s a lot of misinformation about China that goes around,” he says. ..... I say it seems ironic that the longer he has spent in Canada the more patriotic towards China he has become, and that might surprise non-Chinese Canadians. “But that is correct” and quite typical, he says. .......... For the record, Feng says he is not a Chinese spy.....Nor is his family being threatened back in China, and nor is he being paid by the Chinese consulate, he says. All are allegations made since Feng took on a public role in the counterprotests.......... He also denies having ever communicated about the protests with the consulate – which last month issued a statement in support of the counterprotesters for targeting the “sin of Hong Kong independence”.......how do two intelligent people see events in Hong Kong in such starkly different ways?
....... Picture-taking has emerged as one of the bigger points of tension between the two camps in Vancouver. What is its purpose? And, more broadly, what is the purpose of the pro-China counterprotest movement? ......“I had conversations [at the protests] with the other side and I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
We’ve been sitting here …” he looks at his watch “ … and I don’t see it going anywhere.”
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