My Story (this person has requested to remain anonymous)
I came from Hong Kong and have lived in Lancaster for many years with no religious affiliation. I first learnt about the Palestine issue when I was an undergraduate. I subsequently came across the literature on 'settler colonialism' that examines the Israel-Palestine (and other) struggles that involve removing native inhabitants, bringing in settlers, occupying land, and dispossessing inhabitants as second-class citizens, migrants and refugees. The politics of occupation, erasure and displacement in Israel's colonial-settler project echoed for me in two ways: the refugee issue and the 'Two-State Solutions' in the Palestine-Israel struggles.
The first related to my family's refugee history of my grandfather's escape to Hong Kong at the beginning of the Chinese communist revolution in the 1920s. As a child, I heard repeatedly his traumas of swimming across the border river from China to Hong Kong. This river was patrolled by soldiers stationed in guard towers using searchlights and machine guns in the evening. If they saw any movements in the water, they fired indiscriminately. After many dangerous attempts, my grandfather finally made it to Hong Kong and survived on boiled tree bark during his hiding period.
This family refugee history re-entered recently via a second way where there was some parallel between the Israel-Palestine 'Two-State Solution' and the Hong Kong-China one of 'One Country Two Systems'. When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it was based on the 'One Country Two Systems' solution which meant that Hong Kong could keep its own system and ways of life for 50 years. After the handover, China unilaterally pushes for the 'One Country' side of this solution by imposing its top-down 'Greater China' populist nationalism and civilization-ism. This emotionally-charged authoritarian push was/is feared and resisted by a sizeable number of the Hong Kong inhabitants (HongKongers) who advocated more the 'Two Systems' side of the solution by giving greater negotiation space for a more democratic and cosmopolitan future.
This resistance led to the 2019-2020 Umbrella Movement with millions of HongKongers marching and advocating a system with greater autonomy and freedom. This movement was repressed since 2020 with the Chinese authorities using 'national security and unity' as pretexts to impose legal-administrative changes, criminalization/prosecutions, imprisonments, re-education, deportations and displacement of some HongKongers to different parts of the world as migrants and refugees. Hong Kong's past identity as an 'international commercial and financial centre' is erased and re-narrated as part of China's 'Greater Bay Area' to be unified with the 'motherland'. This new socio-economic and political-spatial imaginary enables China to subordinate Hong Kong's land/resources by de-bordering, erase HongKongers' political demand and move in new Chinese settlers. This version of Chinese settler colonialism is changing Hong Kong from a British colony into a Chinese one serving the 'motherland' as its 'super-ordinating' “financial and trade hub” in its pursuit of its ambitious 'One Belt One Road' worldwide expansion. The latter stretches across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America in the China-US imperialist rivalries in searching for new markets and grabbing land/strategic ports, manpower/resources (including hearts and minds) in the recent development of the global political economy.
In face of the loss of hope for a 'Two Systems' compounded with the fear of being prosecuted and imprisoned, 500 000 HongKongers were displaced as migrants and refugees to different parts of the world between 2021 and 2024. This recent Hong Kong development echoes with the colonial-settler politics of erasure, occupation and displacement by Israel on Palestine. When our PSC group chants 'We Are All Palestinians', it plucks my heart strings every time as I empathize with their plights even if I come from a different time-space location. Nonetheless, the traumas and sufferings of migrants and refugees in escaping from wars/repressions, resisting land-resource grabs, and experiencing effects of (ultra-)nationalisms (and racisms) are common challenges to the humanity of our times across different sites and scales. We stand together in solidarity and resilience as 'We Are All Palestinians'.