BOOK: Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Palgrave, 2016)

As the lead editor of Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement – a collection of essays that takes as its theological cue the 79-day protest occupations in Hong Kong in 2014 – I am happy to formally announce on this blog that I have received a hard copy of the book. The text has been available as an e-book since July, and I am now glad to see that a physical version is now available.

I think it’s incumbent on me as the lead editor to say something about how we put together this book, what the book is about, where this book sits in relation to my larger research agenda, and what the book’s limitations are in the ever-shifting situation in Hong Kong at present.

The book had its genesis in a forum that occurred during the Umbrella Movement on Syndicate Theology. In 2014, I was recruited by Syndicate‘s managing editor Christian Amondson to edit its Theology and Social Theory section – a task that included editing fora on Gil Anidjar’s Blood, Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern, and John Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order before the site’s format was radically revised – and my first initiative as this section’s editor was to put together a forum on the Umbrella Movement, which I modeled after another quite successful series of essays on Syndicate titled Ferguson and Theology. For this forum, I recruited some of my colleagues in Hong Kong such as Kung Lap Yan, Rose Wu, and Sam Tsang (there were others in the mix as well, but because it was a volatile time in Hong Kong, these three were the only ones who could find the time to write), and I also wrote an original essay for the series critiquing the way that theology in Hong Kong had been done up until the Umbrella Movement and what changes the movement might contribute to the task of grounding theological reflection in the actual material and ideological conditions of Hong Kong as a city with a rich and conflicted history of colonization.

As this Syndicate series wrapped up, Jonathan Tan approached me with an idea that had come out of a conversation with Kwok Pui-lan (who wrote our foreword) to write a book on the Umbrella Movement that would be in English for readers who might not have any knowledge of Hong Kong but could also benefit them in the task of contemporary theological reflection. I drafted and submitted a proposal to the series editors for Palgrave MacMillan’s Christianity in the Asian Diaspora series, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Joe Cheah, as well as a request to Christian Amondson to publish the Syndicate essays in a substantially revised form. Tan also brought on Mary Yuen, who substantially revised an essay she had put into AsiaNews.it on Catholic social teaching and the Umbrella Movement.

As all such writing projects go, the task of ‘substantially revising’ quite rapidly turned into ‘original writing’; indeed, Sam Tsang ended up writing a completely different essay from what he had given to me at Syndicate, and the other essays have been expanded and reworked. My own submission to Syndicate has never been republished, although I’m sure one can find the seeds of what I wrote on the forum now in the book.

When I began to receive the submissions, it occurred to me that what makes sense in Hong Kong’s local context may not be intuitive for those who have no knowledge of Hong Kong. At the same time, Tan found himself consumed by another editing project. While the original plan was for him to write an essay situating the Umbrella Movement in the liberation theologies of Asia (indeed, one has glimpses of this in Kwok’s foreword to our volume when she discusses liberation theologies and the ‘multitude’), it fell completely to me to truly lead with a vision for what this volume would be – combing through the essays with a fine toothcomb to make sure they would speak directly to English-speaking readers and thinking about the scholarly discussions to which this volume would contribute. This is to say, of course, that most of the editorial errors in this book should be attributed to me, though I am thankful to Tan for the initial idea to turn this into a book and for recruiting Yuen.

The plan of the book emerged from these editorial challenges. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I is a detailed primer that I single-authored on Hong Kong’s politics and how it can be used for theological reflection, and Part II contains the four theological reflections from Mary Yuen on Catholic social teaching and the occupy movement, Rose Wu on the queer Pentecost that gave rise to an interstitial Hong Kong identity, Kung Lap Yan on the kairos moment of opportunity and danger of the political movement, and Sam Tsang with a stunningly original account of the colonial occupation of Hong Kong and how such an understanding of occupation radically revises the liberation politics of an occupy movement in Hong Kong.

These two parts are sandwiched between two pieces on liberation theology, an introduction and an epilogue, that I took the liberty of single-authoring as lead editor. Thinking through Tan’s original plan to situate the Umbrella Movement in the context of theologies of liberation in Asia, it occurred to me that what was awkward about the Umbrella Movement’s relation with the notion of liberation theology is that it wasn’t a straight-forward application of models advanced in the past; indeed, our authors – disagree as they might about every other aspect of the movement – agree on this one point. My introduction thus outlines the contours of the liberation theology that has gone before and how using the ‘see-judge-act’ analytic lens of theologies of liberation in Hong Kong will yield some surprising results. This transformed the primer that I wrote in Part I into an argument that demands for ‘genuine universal suffrage’ during the Umbrella Movement wasn’t a vacuous ideological slogan but came out of the actual material conditions of Hong Kong. In turn, the epilogue became about the relationship between the concept of conscientizaçao as understood in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and how the Umbrella Movement played out. In other words, my vision as the lead editor was not so much to fit the Umbrella Movement into a model of liberation, but to situate the Umbrella Movement as a contemporary challenge for how to do theology in solidarity with the materially oppressed in both Hong Kong and around the world. Each of the authors contributes to this vision by showing how their vastly different Christian traditions shaped the Umbrella Movement’s theological challenge to reflections on liberation, and my job as the lead editor was to fine-tune these four distinct voices as they made their original arguments to a readership that may not even be familiar with Hong Kong. As I made my way through these tasks, I received constant encouragement from my friend and colleague (and now Patheos Catholic editor) Sam Rocha, a philosopher of education who has thought a lot about liberation theology and who exhorted me to keep in mind the pedagogical aims of the volume.

Leading this editorial work (which included single-authoring about half of the book) forced me to think about what doing all of this work had to do with my larger scholarly agenda. I came to understand working on this volume as a sort of pivot point between my first and second projects and as the culmination of my Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington. The first project (which became my PhD dissertation and on which I am still generating publications) was my attempt at an ideological map of Cantonese-speaking Protestant engagements with Pacific Rim civil societies, especially Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. While the research for this project ended before the Umbrella Movement, it can be said that the lead-up to the protests, the protests themselves, and the aftermath has been fascinating to watch in light of this research, especially because Cantonese Protestants (and Catholics) are key to understanding the Umbrella Movement, both its supporters and detractors. This topical interest has led to a broader thematic inquiry that is becoming my second project, which is on the relationship between the theological underpinnings of some of these contemporary occupy movements and the intriguing ideology of ‘capitalism with Asian values’ (which, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, has very little to do with persons whose bodies are marked as ‘Asian’). Some of my new interests – Asian Americans getting involved with Black Lives Matter, the rhetoric of the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv around ‘Eurasia,’ and protests in Vancouver’s Chinatown that bring together issues of housing and indigeneity – might seem to have only a tangential connection to Hong Kong, but what holds this together are the inquiry into what forms liberation, solidarity, and occupy movements take – which are precisely the concerns of the book. In this way, I’m thankful for the task of leading the editing on this volume, because it pushed me to think about why I do what I do.

This book has been described as ‘timely,’ and I take that as a compliment. However, I of all people am deeply aware of how timeliness can hardly describe any book about Hong Kong because political developments in Hong Kong have always moved quickly. The book was written in 2014, substantially revised and edited in 2015, and touched up in 2016. The last reference to an actual event in Hong Kong is the Fishball Revolution that took place in February 2016. The book came out around the lead-up to the Legislative Council elections of 2016 and doesn’t include much about the emergence of youth political parties such as Demosistõ and Youngspiration. It certainly does not contain any information about the assassination threats made against Eddie Chu Hoi-dick.

My hope, then, is that the ‘timeliness’ of this book is a reference to the themes of the book, that people both inside and outside of Hong Kong want to read the events of contemporary occupy movements closely and judge them theologically before making the next move. That is why what we have offered are reflections and why we are so pleased that Benny Tai’s endorsement of our book also speaks about this book perhaps being able to help with writing Hong Kong’s next chapter. Certainly, we expect criticism for what we have written, but we hope that that process of critique will not be about us, but for the good of Hong Kong as a city that is wrestling with questions of justice and peace. This book is an offering to readers who want to join us in that task of reflection. May our conversation be lively!