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Letters | Hong Kong protesters want social transformation, not to be stakeholders in a prosperity machine
- Carrie Lam’s description of protesters as having “no stake in society” casts Hongkongers’ relationship with the city purely in economic terms
- The protests are a call for transformative change in Hong Kong’s legal, social and political system
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Why you can trust SCMP
At a press conference on August 9, Mrs Carrie Lam said of the protesters: “They have no stake in society which so many people have helped to build.” Even though I am considered a doubting voice among friends who are wholly dedicated to the recent protests at the expense of their future prospects, I must say the current society is not the society we want. It is a society whose inequality and power imbalance have been painfully and perpetually exposed, yet also continually ignored. And many of my friends are glad we are now antagonistic towards such a society, and not subsumed by it.
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As a sociology major, Mrs Lam should remember that the material conditions of society are but one of its many possible representations. There is a more general society for which we all have the utmost respect and which, for the moment, exists only in Hongkongers’ hopes, motivating the people on the streets. It is not a society in which a “stake” is as easily transplanted as a casino chip, and in which residents are alienated by low pay and hostile work conditions, working for the “prosperity” of the city.
Mrs Lam should consider our society from the point of view of the God she worships and the people she admires: the personal sacrifices of those who contributed to the prosperity that is now corrupted and of those who died defending Hong Kong. These sacrifices should be shown genuine respect economically and politically, and not be reduced to sermons that anaesthetise the people. They are a reminder of the sacred link – not stake – people should have with society that cannot be severed.
This link is the foundation of the material conditions for which ownership or a stake can then be claimed, and the lack of ownership should not be mistakenly diagnosed as the problem. Only when this link is emphasised will we have a more equal society, a happier society, a society of organic beings – not cogs in an economic wheel.
Having recognised this primary link with society, we have no interest in what we can own if we have to own it under predetermined conditions. Our action is a call for transformative change, a call to revise the laws and social contexts which control all of us and which, in particular, concern whether political power is to be shared among us, ideally peacefully, according to the popular will.
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