Six years before the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong began reshaping the city’s political and social landscape, Pankaj Mishra wrote in a travel essay for The New York Times that “Hong Kong is a great clamor.”
That became the title of his latest book, published in 2013, which collects his recent writings on China as well as Chinese societies outside the mainland. For his reporting, Mr. Mishra, an Indian author who lives in London, traveled to far-flung parts of Asia — taking the high-speed train to Tibet shortly after it opened in 2006, for example. His interviews with intellectuals in China reflect not only his interest in the debates taking place at the heart of that nation, but also the changes occurring at its peripheries that have become central to questions of China’s identity and the narrative of control by the Chinese Communist Party.
Although Mr. Mishra has written more on India than any other country, he has had a long-running interest in China and in particular its intellectual history. “From the Ruins of Empire,” the book that preceded “A Great Clamour,” is an ambitious historical account that links the works of several Asian intellectuals who were critical figures in forming nationalist identities that responded to Western colonialism, including Liang Qichao, who pushed for new models of Chinese governance in the late Qing dynasty. In an interview, Mr. Mishra shared his thoughts on capitalism and politics in China, and on Hong Kong’s relationship to the mainland:
In your book and in an earlier travel essay in the Times, you write that the logic of Hong Kong is based on the “immemorial human need to make — and squander — money.” Yet, you also conclude that “a society of such material plenitude would eventually foster spiritual longings that could not be appeased by the mere accumulation of goods.” Are the student-led protests we’re seeing now one manifestation of that?
“Spiritual” is not a word generally used in mainstream discourse, but I think we should pay more attention to it. I used it here to define aspirations for dignity and recognition, or an end to humiliation — desires that often lie under even demands that are explicitly political and economic. Hong Kong came into existence as a hub of global capitalism, and that is what it has remained, under two regimes. But that cycle of materialism could not go on forever. A new generation is always likely to have a different sense of its place in the world, or what the good life consists of, especially if it has been exposed to the wider world.
Then there is also the cycle of modern capitalism, which doesn’t distribute its benefits evenly and in fact dispossess many. It began to seem oppressive to a substantial number of people who have neither the means nor the desire to join it — actually, the anxiety that your prospects and sense of possibility is shrinking can be more intense on a small island that is increasingly subservient to a big country.
Should Chinese leaders, who have encouraged the capitalist consumer culture so common for so long in Hong Kong, be greatly concerned about what is happening there?
Beijing’s view of Hong Kong as an exclusive node within the wider world of capitalism, and the general Chinese view of Hong Kong as an extended shopping mall or a place to enjoy consumerism without the mainland’s restrictions, did not take into account what its residents thought or felt about being defined in this way. This indifference, which often seemed to border on contempt, was always going to turn into a problem, and it has.
The protesters are calling for full and open elections, or Western-style democracy, something that the Chinese Communist Party has rejected as a path for either Hong Kong or the mainland. You’ve written that Western empires also discouraged any democratic yearnings among people in the colonies, and Britain certainly never gave Hong Kongers a real say in determining the city’s leaders. Yet, to what degree are the aspirations of Hong Kongers rooted in their identification with Western society? Do the current events have any roots in the colonial past?
I think the East-West, or the Chinese authoritarianism versus Western democracy, distinction can be overused in this context, and it of course flatters many people to think of it in this way. But it doesn’t begin to cover the many ironies and paradoxes of this situation.
The protesters are asking for something much bigger than Western-style democracy, which we know is pretty dysfunctional right now, whether in Europe or America, where voters are angry with established political parties and their institutionalized corruption by big money. You could argue that they are arguing for social democracy — from a nominally Communist regime! Whose representative in Hong Kong is complaining about the poor having too much power! Not to mention the irony that the country that denied them democracy for more than a century is making some supportive noises.
I think we ought to see the protests in the larger context of the revolt of the unrepresented against a mode of global capitalism and alliances of politics and business that create intolerable amounts of socioeconomic inequality and existential uncertainty — and you see it everywhere, from Gezi Park in Istanbul to São Paulo, with complex manifestations ranging from the rise of the far-right in France and Britain and India to the victories of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Joko Widodo in Indonesia.
As you’ve pointed out, many Western intellectuals have argued that nations around the world are on a linear route toward transforming themselves into both neo-liberal economies and democracies. In recent years, the path of China has presented one of the strongest rebuttals to this. Where do you think China is heading, and how does Hong Kong fit into that?
China has had a very clearly defined aim and trajectory since the 1949 revolution, and though its means were interpreted differently by Mao and Deng, it was the realization of a dream of national power and wealth, or the China Dream, as Xi Jinping calls it. For many people in China this dream has been fulfilled in their own lifetimes, and this is a great achievement for them personally after the violence and chaos their fathers and grandfathers suffered. The promise of a more redistributive economy or a crackdown on official corruption continues to preserve the hopes of many who have still to make it, and though there are dissenters and rebels all over China they are not numerous or concentrated or organized enough to break the old national consensus or fracture the intensely nationalist consciousness that underpins it. This makes for a different kind of national imaginary altogether.
Hong Kong has not featured a great deal in this mainland vision of itself, and Hong Kong Chinese have always had their own identity and culture, often defined in contra-distinction to the mainland, whether during the Cultural Revolution or after Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is what makes the uprising in Hong Kong such a challenge to Beijing. Their usual means of securing ideological consent — through indoctrination and promises of prosperity and stability — don’t seem to work in a small city-state, which has already gone through a dizzying cycle of growth and has become restless and disaffected.
We see large nations in Asia trying out their own forms of democracy, most notably India and Indonesia. Is this having an influence on other nations or city-states in Asia?
Democracy in city-states will always work differently since these are not attached to a vast hinterland. In fact, it would work much better than in large centralized nation-states like India and Indonesia. I don’t think places like Hong Kong have much to learn from these countries where venal party machineries controlled by corporate interests and vote-bank politics — playing one community against another — have undermined democracy. In an ideal world, a small place like Hong Kong has the option of trying out the original and best version of democracy which, whether in ancient Greece or India, was built upon face-to-face contact and consultation between citizens, and there was no great gap between the rulers and the ruled.
You’ve written about the peripheries of China and their importance to Beijing. We’ve seen strong rebellions in Tibet and Xinjiang, and now in Hong Kong. What is your take today on how China is managing the aspirations of people in its far-flung regions? Are the problems China is facing the same ones that empires had before? Do you see potential political solutions to these problems that would be consistent with the ethos and behavior of the Communist Party?
I don’t think it has been sufficiently recognized that the C.C.P. has been incredibly adaptive since the days of Mao. The fact that it has not only survived great disasters but also grown and strengthened itself by including people from all sections of Chinese society shows that it has the capacity to absorb and defuse many apparent contradictions. But it has yet to demonstrate that it can deal with challenges from outside its circle of influence — the ethnic minorities and, now, Hong Kong. The usual method of incorporating local elites through bribery and coercion into the network of capitalism and modernization doesn’t work. The Tibetans, for instance, still feel trampled upon, their dignity defiled, their identity dishonored. I am still waiting to see a new initiative from Xi Jinping in this regard. And this is a bigger problem for Beijing than the ones faced by empires like the Qing or Ottoman. The latter were not asking their minorities to radically overhaul their societies and lifestyles or forcing changes in their identity. Even British and French imperialists left many minorities alone for the most part.
In “A Great Clamour,” you write that your explorations of China and Chinese societies outside of the mainland are, in fact, one way for you to examine India. Do the ferment and unrest on the edges of China give you any new insight into India?
Yes, it has made me see that in many ways the Cold War binary of authoritarianism and democracy doesn’t help much while looking at India and China. It cannot account, for instance, for the presence of a major Maoist insurgency in India — the biggest in the world today — long after Maoism faded away in China. In many ways, the indigenous peoples or forest-dwelling communities in India that resist dispossession by the nexus of the state and multinational business share their plight with the Tibetans. We have to look at the two countries not so much through their political systems as through the economic imperatives that bind them to a mode of uneven growth and expansion, which then creates certain nexuses of power, and losers and winners and also-rans across a broad social landscape. We have to assess the strength of their nation-states, and their nationalist ideologies. Are they strong enough to withstand challenges from the periphery, whether from Kashmir or Xinjiang? I think looking at China has allowed me to pose correctly some questions in India. And that is more important than coming up with the answers, which are always contingent on events.