Former President of China Jiang Zemin is often rumoured to be dead, so the nonagenarian can make news simply by appearing. By contrast, young veterans of Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement such as Agnes Chow, Nathan Law, and Joshua Wong are more likely to make news now by disappearing. On August 7, an October 2019 shot of Mr. Jiang standing with another past head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hu Jintao, and current leader Xi Jinping topped an article in the Nikkei Asian Review on the declining role of retired elders in meetings presided over by Mr. Xi, a go-it-alone strongman. A shot of Ms. Chow appeared in the same publication in an August 10 article on her arrest the same day, as one of the first high-profile targets of the harsh new National Security Law that Beijing has imposed on Hong Kong. As a 94-year-old man who used to head a venerable party that is still in power, Mr. Jiang currently has little in common with Ms. Chow, a 23-year-old woman who helped found an opposition party that recently disbanded. But things are different when we place his youthful experiences in Shanghai in the mid-to-late 1940s beside hers in Hong Kong in the 2010s. He, too, spent his late teens and early twenties alternating between attending classes and going to pro-democracy demonstrations.
A tale of two protests
What makes this parallel between Shanghai then and Hong Kong now interesting is that the CCP has long rooted its legitimacy, as organisations that rise to power via revolutions do, in the idea that it has nothing in common with the government it toppled. There are, however, not just similarities between what Mr. Jiang did three-quarters of a century ago and what Ms. Chow has done in the last few years, but also similarities between the causes and course of protests in Shanghai then, when it was under autocratic Nationalist Party rule, and in Hong Kong now. And the strategies that the authorities used to try to discredit and suppress dissent in Hong Kong during the anti-patriotic education drive of 2012 (which Ms. Chow, then in her mid-teens, helped lead), the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and last year’s anti-extradition bill and anti-police brutality struggle often echoed those that the Nationalist Party used to try to discredit and suppress dissent when Mr. Jiang was a young member of a Communist Party that was an opposition group rather than a ruling one.
Also read | Joshua Wong calls his disqualification from Hong Kong poll “invalid and ridiculous”
I’ve never found a detailed account of Mr. Jiang’s college days, but while working on a book about Shanghai student movements decades ago, I read many memoirs by people who moved in the same circles that he did. And last year, I kept coming across things that brought those memoirs to mind. Student activists in Shanghai then, as in Hong Kong now, spearheaded protest drives that brought members of many social groups to the streets, while the authorities ginned up much smaller pro-stability “protests” to try to show that the people were on their side. In Shanghai then, as in Hong Kong now, protesters criticised the police for working with thugs and scoffed at the official media for dismissing widely supported protests as the work of small bands of troublemaking malcontents manipulated by foreign hidden hands.
Of course, not everything lines up, as each city has a distinctive political history and the Nationalist Party’s position decades ago was different from the Communist Party’s position now. Issues of local identity have been more central in the movements Ms. Chow has helped lead than they were in the ones that Mr. Jiang joined. And Shanghai protests then took place in a Republic of China over which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party had only tenuous control, while Hong Kong protests now unfold in a People’s Republic of China (PRC) over which the CCP has a firm grip.
Problems in the fairy tale
Still, the parallels are striking — and create problems for a legitimating fairy tale that generations of CCP propagandists have trotted out. This fairy tale holds that the bad old days of the pre-1949 era were nothing like the glorious era that began when the Nationalists were defeated. Events in many parts of the PRC contradict this story, including Hong Kong. Many of the same issues that made people chafe at Nationalist rule in the Shanghai of Mr. Jiang’s youth, from limits on freedom of speech to anger at how tightly linked the government was to the richest families in the city, have triggered protests in Hong Kong recently. And in responding to the Hong Kong protests, the CCP and its local proxies have been using a mix of new methods and old techniques that were part of the Nationalist playbook.
Comment | The dimming of a Chinese strongman’s aura
The parallels between the periods are even more notable if we bring in events of the 1940s in other places. Consider, for example, one thing that protesters at a Kunming campus did during that decade: created a space called a Minzhuqiang or Democracy Wall on which they put up posters expressing their grievances and aspirations. That term has since been used for many spaces on many campuses, with different generations of activists making creative use of them. On recent trips to Hong Kong, one place I went to periodically to get a sense of what was on the minds of current students was the Democracy Wall at Baptist University, Ms. Chow’s alma mater.
It is also worth bringing in what happened in Taiwan during the years that Mr. Jiang was studying and protesting in Shanghai. The Nationalists in the 1940s, like the Communists once in power, were fond of presenting themselves as liberators. They claimed that they should be credited with having freed both parts of the Chinese mainland that been incorporated into the Japanese empire during World War II and also Taiwan, which had been under the control of Japan for a much longer time, from oppressive foreign domination. After Nationalist forces gunned down and arrested protesters in 1947, however, during a wave of ‘White Terror’ repressive actions that was followed by a decades-long martial law period, local activists insisted that Taiwan’s people had gone from being under one form of colonial control to being under another form of it.
Replug | Shanghai at heart of battle for control in China
Some Hong Kong residents now similarly claim that they are still waiting for — and fighting for — a true liberation. The 1997 Handover, which took place when Mr. Jiang was in power and Ms. Chow was an infant, ended a period of British colonial rule. But in light of how local officials have been dependent on and deferential to CCP leaders hundreds of miles to the north, it can seem that all that the Handover really did was change Hong Kong from being part of an empire whose capital was London to being part of an empire whose capital is Beijing. And some find it fitting now to use an old term, ‘White Terror’, to describe actions such as the massive use of tear gas by local police last year and this year’s political persecution of figures such as Agnes Chow.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of ‘Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink’ (2020)
