Seldom do I feel such passion and urgency for politics. I can still recall those memories: 1989, my family stayed up all night watching the horror in Tiananmen Square; 2003, a few international students and I marched in Madison, WI from the top of Bascom Hill into the Capital Building demanding the US government to not invade Iraq; 2008, watching Obama become the US president and his inauguration.
For the first time, I am boiling inside for an issue that is right here at home. The Hong Kong SAR government has managed to completely ignore its people, remaining stubborn in building the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link (XRL). There already have been tragedy after tragedy in mainland China about constructions that have commenced or completed. It’s the same story everywhere: poor folks are forced to move away from their meager homes, receiving dirt for compensation, only to find their homes replaced by new trains that they can never afford, and expensive office buildings, condos, and commercial areas from which they are forever banned. Disguised under the banner of “progress”, “modernization” and “development”, the China Railway High-speed is the crystallization of greed, the materialization of under-the-table trades between the government and corporates, built not only with people’s money but also their blood.
Hong Kong–a Special Administrative Region under the so-called “One Country, Two Systems”–is slightly different from other Chinese cities. Unlike them, it is actually possible for us to stop ourselves from getting into this mess. So how can some of these legislators pretend that the rail is good? How can they dismiss those people who are about to be evicted, just to provide the illusion that Hong Kong will magically merge with nearby Chinese cities? How can we, Hong Kong citizens, stand our grounds to call our home “free”, when in fact we are losing our freedom to know and contribute to what the government is doing, and how our lives are being literally thrown in front of a rail for the rich?
Wasting HK$66,300,000,000–to wipe out a village, destroy a redwood swamp, extinct a few species of wildlife, erase the local culture and memory of several older districts and cursing downtown Kowloon to a hell of forever traffic jam–is a simple reason we should stop this from happening. Regaining our principle to be a society that will take care of people as human beings, and not commodities, is even more important. We must take action, and reaffirm Hong Kong’s status as the last defense of human rights, of democracy, of culture, of freedom in China.
Tomorrow, please support the campaign to #stopxrl! If you are in Hong Kong, show up at Legislative Council at 9am, when the hearing resumes. If you can’t go, or if you aren’t in Hong Kong, send your best wishes, and talk to everyone about it. It’s not only money we are talking about–it’s a matter of freedom, morals, and most of all, people.
