Category Archives: Hong Kong

Missio: Can American Christians Support Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement?

Photo: Antonio J. Alonso

This morning, a post that I wrote for Missio, the online publication of the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture, went live. It’s titled ‘Can American Christians Support Hong’s Umbrella Movement‘?

Here’s a sample:

It’s a delicate task to write about how American Christians, especially evangelicals, can care about Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. “I shan’t get into details,” the embattled Chief Executive C.Y. Leung told a local journalist, “but this is not entirely a domestic movement.”

Leung’s sentiments echoed the insinuations being passed through the Chinese press. The details, as it was said, were that foreign (read: American) forces had allegedly funded pro-democracy groups like Occupy Central with Love and Peace, Scholarism, and Apple Daily. As the story goes, the Umbrella Movement would end just like the Maidan and Color Revolutions: the supposedly American-funded leaders would lose control of the movement, and the ensuing chaos would destroy it from within.

This is an incredibly popular narrative: when the South China Morning Post interviewed Beijing tourists visiting Hong Kong, they replied confidently that they “of course” did not support the movement: “We know that it’s because university students are stirred up by the American government to take such actions,” they said. One might think that they were channeling Ivan Illich’s 1968 excoriation of America-China relations: “In Asia, the U.S. is threatened by an established power -China. The U.S. opposes China with three weapons: the tiny Asian elites who could not have it any better than in an alliance with the United States; a huge war machine to stop the Chinese from “taking over” as it is usually put in this country, and; forcible re-education of the so-called “Pacified” peoples. All three of these efforts seem to be failing.” Who counts as an “American Christian” is quite loose: if you are “American” and “Christian,” the allegation is that you just might be an interventionist, especially if you don’t actually physically live in America right now. Don’t try to follow up with me to say that you’re actually part of the British Commonwealth; let’s admit that the American empire is really quite the leviathan.

The problem, though, is that this America-in-Hong-Kong narrative’s details don’t add up. Sure, calls for democracy sound awfully American, but the society for which the protesters call looks nothing like America. The students are calling for civil nomination – the election of candidates chosen by the people themselves – which doesn’t really resemble the primary process in the United States, not to mention that the American president is actually indirectly elected by an electoral college.

Read the rest on the Washington Institute’s blog.

As with much of the Washington Institute’s audience, the readership are mostly Anglo-American evangelicals who have a global sensibility. It’s really a pleasure to address this audience as part of my attempt to reach multiple publics with my academic work, including the academy proper, the public media in both Anglo-American-Australian contexts and in Hong Kong, Catholics, and evangelicals. I’d also be happy to explore other publics as well.

Many thanks to Laura Fabrycky for making this post happen, and to my colleague Sam Tsang for making the connection. I’m as excited about speaking to this evangelical public as I am about my academic and Catholic audiences, and my hope is that this is the beginning of many conversations to come.

UW Graduate Christian Fellowship: Two Hong Kong Umbrellas: Christian ecumenisms and democracy in Hong Kong

I spoke tonight at the Graduate Christian Fellowship at the University of Washington. My talk was titled ‘Two Hong Kong Umbrellas: Christian ecumenisms and democracy in Hong Kong.‘

Speaking at this event felt like a moment of completeness for me. Previously, I had spoken in a Catholic setting at the UW Catholic Newman Center and at a secular academic talk for the Jackson School at the UW. For the Catholic talk, I focused on the Catholic elements of the Hong Kong protests, and for the secular talk, I focused on the geopolitical imaginaries from Tiananmen that produced the sorts of grounded theologies we see emerging in the Umbrella Movement. Here at this talk hosted by InterVarsity, I zeroed in especially on the Protestants who were forming new ecumenisms, both with the state and among the grassroots people.

The talk was very well-received. While the Catholics asked about Catholics and the Jackson School audience focused their questions on China, this InterVarsity public asked much more about how the Umbrella Movement could be used to think about church-state relations in America. The discussion was very rich and included references to immigration politics, war and anti-war activisms, indigenous politics (with a shout-out to Suey Park and Killjoy Prophets), and African American and Asian American racial politics, including at Ferguson. One even asked about the connections between Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Umbrella Movement – there are many parallels to be explored there! I also got to tell the story about how UW’s Comparative Religion Unit was founded by a lawsuit.

I came away from this talk very encouraged about how my thinking on the Umbrella Movement is being received among various theological publics. I’m coming to appreciate how each of these publics contributes to our kaleidoscope of theologies here at the UW. Thanks, Geoffrey and Ashley Van Dragt, for your hospitality (as always!), and thanks to the attendees of the Graduate Christian Fellowship for making this such a welcoming space for fruitful thinking on how the Umbrella Movement matters to more than Hong Kong.

ABC Religion and Ethics Report: The role of religion in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution

I was recently on the Australian Broadcasting Company’s (ABC) Religion and Ethics Report with Andrew West talking about ‘the role of religion in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution.’ The other guest on the show, Professor David Palmer, is a sociologist of Chinese popular religions who chairs the University of Hong Kong’s sociology department. They told me that they found me because of my interview with Jennifer Ngo on the South China Morning Post on religion in the Hong Kong protests.

Andrew West asked some very good questions during this show. He began with my comments on Religion Ethnicity Wired and on Ethika Politika (parts 1, 2, and 3), on the Catholic Church in Hong Kong. We then moved into a clarification of how Protestant denominations and ecumenical alliances have been at work on the ground, and we had an extended discussion on the controversial role played by Hong Kong’s Anglican primate, the Most Rev. Paul Kwong, in opposing the demonstrations. Finally, West asked about the connection between the protests and religious freedom in China, to which both Palmer and I emphasized that the Umbrella Movement has little to do with ‘religious freedom’ per se, but that does not mean that people like Joseph Cardinal Zen might not have it in the back of their minds.

I’m very thankful to Andrew West and Scott Spark for an excellent interview and for this chance to meet David Palmer on air. I’m also thankful to Jennifer Ngo for creating this opportunity to speak more about the Hong Kong protests. I’ve actually regularly podcasted ABC Religion and Ethics Report during my commutes, and I was thrilled to be on this show that provides such consistently good religion reporting.

TALK: Passive Compliance to Occupy Central: Catholicism, Democracy, Hong Kong | UW Catholic Newman Center

I will be giving a talk at 4 PM today at the University of Washington’s Catholic Newman Center. The talk is entitled Passive Compliance to Occupy Central: Catholicism, Democracy, and Hong Kong. It will be in the Siena Room.

jkhtse_hkcath_poster

The talk is propelled by the recent Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. As we saw over the last week, the retired Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong, Joseph Cardinal Zen, has come out swinging for the students — and sometimes even at the students. While the press has picked up that many Christians have led the recent democracy movements in Hong Kong, this talk will focus on the specifically Catholic elements of the democracy movements. This does not mean that the Roman Catholic Church as a whole has been supportive of the democracy movements; it means rather that we need to understand some of the history of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong to understand some of its current participation in the Umbrella Movement. Here’s the abstract:

With the takeoff of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, it has been revealed that the Roman Catholic Church, especially retired bishop Joseph Cardinal Zen, has played a big role in inspiring the student protests and democratic movements in Hong Kong, as well as criticizing them. This talk will give some background into what the Church has done in relation to Hong Kong democracy movements. It focuses on the practice of ‘passive compliance’ in the Hong Kong Catholic Church’s role in Sino-Vatican relations in keeping with John Baptist Cardinal Wu’s 1989 pastoral letter, March into the Bright Decade.

I hope to have this recorded so that I can get some public feedback for this talk. I’m hoping to rework this talk into a paper for publication, so I will need all the feedback that I can get. I’m thankful that the Catholic Newman Center at the UW has agreed to host this talk at such short notice, and I look forward to the conversation that it will produce.

SOUNDCLOUD: Here’s the talk itself. Apologies for the sound cutting in and out. This is my first recording and was done on my phone — I have learned that to do these more effectively, I will need to wear a mic. Also, the approach I adopt is more like that of a classroom, so there is some audience conversation and informal language.

PhD Defence and Program Completion

With the successful completion and defence of my doctoral dissertation, I am pleased to announce that the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies has sent me a note to tell me that I have completed all of the program requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Geography.  This means that I officially have a PhD in hand.  The degree will in turn be formally conferred at the next Spring Convocation in 2014.

I am happy to share the link for my dissertation, Religious Politics in Pacific Space: Grounding Cantonese Protestant Theologies in Secular Civil Societies, from cIRcle, UBC’s online repository of theses and dissertations. I am in the process of finalizing the details as I start a postdoctoral fellowship externally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. This will take place at the University of Washington in Seattle under the direction of Professor James Wellman, Jr. I will be starting on a new postdoctoral project there (details forthcoming), and I will also be trying to turn this dissertation into a book while generating academic journal articles from it.

I defended the dissertation on 3 December 2013. My supervisory committee consisted of Professor David Ley (UBC Geography; my advisor), Professor Henry Yu (UBC History and Principal, St. John’s College), Dr. Claire Dwyer (University College London, Geography), and Professor Rudy Busto (UC Santa Barbara, Religious Studies). Of this committee, David Ley and Henry Yu were present. The departmental examiner was Professor Dan Hiebert (UBC Geography). The university examiner was Professor Don Lewis (Regent College, Church History). The external examiner was Professor Paul Cloke (University of Exeter, Geography). Chairing the proceedings was Professor Leanne Bablitz (UBC, Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies).

The defence took place at 9 AM on 3 December. After the chair read the rules (including the very ironic statement that ‘latecomers will not be admitted’), I gave a 25-minute presentation on my dissertation. This was followed by almost two hours of questions from each of the examiners; David Ley voiced the questions from the external, Paul Cloke. I passed the entire ordeal with minor revisions, which were completed in one day and then submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies with the approval of the committee. The dissertation was archived today.

The defence covered many of the fundamental points of the thesis’s overall argument. The dissertation set out to answer the question, What are the imaginations and practices that constitute the engagements of Cantonese Protestants with the civil societies of Metro Vancouver, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region? The argument was that most Cantonese Protestants unintentionally but inadvertently reinforced the secularization thesis as a theological practice when they engaged in such public activities because they tended to reinforce the privacy of religion while leveraging an essentialized ethnicity to maximize their impact on secular public spheres. Accordingly, most of the questions addressed this central question. Many asked me to defend my view that secularization and ‘religion’ are not binary opposites but fall under the rubric of ‘grounded theologies.’ Others poked into whether my assertion that transnational linkages between Hong Kong and the North American sites were sparse could be generated from the empirical material (it can, if one takes a grounded public/private split seriously, which forms the basis of my argument about secularization). Still others interrogated my spatial re-orientation of terms like ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ to signify how congregations relate spatially to their civil societies.

I am very grateful to each of the committee members for reading the thesis with such care. I am also extremely thankful for my friends who attended the defence and critically engaged me during the public discussion. I am told that few candidates have so many friends who attend, let alone ask such pointed–yet supportive–questions. These were from members of the community, one of which asked me to point hopeful ways forward for Cantonese Protestant theologies (revealing my very open positionality as a confessing and practicing Christian) and another of which asked me to relate my findings to parallels and contrasts with the black church (speaking into very interesting emerging conversations in theology about race and theology). For more about my personal theological practice, including my strange connection with the black church, see here.

I will emphasize that what it means that I have a PhD in hand is that now I am recognized by the academic community as someone who has demonstrated that I can do research and teach in my field. In other words, I am now officially qualified to learn more. This does not signify the end of things; it means that I’m at the very beginning of a very long journey. I have a lot more to learn, a lot more to think about, and a lot more to stay in conversation about. That I am revising the thesis into publications suggests that I will do much more thinking about the topic in addition and connection to my postdoctoral project, and for that, I will appreciate the chance to remain in conversation with those who are interested. The program is completed, but the conversation is just starting. I am grateful and excited.

POSTSCRIPT: for those who want to read the periodic updates I had on my program, they can be found here:

HKReporter: 天外有天 第19集 [The Sky Beyond the Sky, Ep. 19]- 快必、David、偉業、大曹 / 嘉賓: Justin [Fastbeat, David, Wai Yip, “Big Cho” / Guest: Justin]

I should have posted this earlier. On 5 April, at the tail end of my field work period in Hong Kong, I was interviewed by a bunch of people I had interviewed for my PhD project. They had all finished theological training at Chung Chi Divinity School (崇基學院神學院) in Sha Tin, Hong Kong and were mostly associated with a progressive church movement known as Narrow Road Church (路小教會). I made most of my interviewees, including the theologically and socially conservative ones, aware that I had this interview in my schedule, and most were fine with it, which speaks to a good level of civil discourse among Christians who might disagree otherwise on various issues.

I went to their studio at HK Reporter in Wan Chai, where they interviewed me for about an hour on my PhD work. We talked about practicing cultural geography, social conservatism among Chinese Christians, and the idea that Chinese Christian activism might take place along multiple subjectivities.

The interview is in Cantonese.  You can hear it here. (Note: there are two parts.)

The comments are fun to consider too. The most frequent comment was that my accent is Singaporean and that the hosts had mistaken me for a joksing (“flying bamboo”) North American Chinese. They need to read my post with Schema.

I am open to engaging people from a variety of perspectives about these interviews that I’ve done, and I am happy to be corrected or given alternative perspectives as I develop my thoughts and write them up.