OTTILIE TABBERER: You are an internationally wanted fugitive. How does it feel to have specified a label?
SAMUEL CHU: I’ve had quite a few opportunities to reflect on my status. It’s been almost 4 years and I think it reflects the fact that fighting and organizing for democracy works. It threatens across borders the regimes that are being targeted. I didn’t set out to be a wanted fugitive. It was never my career goal. But what I have always been, looking back on my career, is simply a serial offender erstwhile it comes to making democracy work in places where it hasn’t. And that’s actual peculiarly in the United States, where I’ve spent most of my adult life.
Does this give you a boost, a origin for hope?
I am always in this tension, I don’t necessarily consider myself an optimist or idealist, I think quite a few people think that I sound like an idealist due to the fact that I constantly see opportunities for people to get political power in ways that they didn’t have before. That’s how I specify democracy. It’s not defined by election cycles. It’s not just defined by mass large-scale street protests, but it’s about whether we can continuously make space for people to exercise their political power where it hasn’t been present. In quite a few ways, I think this goes back to my comment during the Forum (referring to the “Europe with a view to the Future” forum in Gdańsk held in June – editor’s note) about how I believe in this innate desire people have, not so much just for freedom, but for freedom to act according to their own hopes and dreams. uncovering ways to do that is, for me, what democracy is about.
This borderless, human desire for democracy is simply a powerful idea. But what about the people surviving within the autocratic regimes of this world, who are subjected to endless propaganda and brainwashing? What is freedom to the brainwashed?
My case is simply a good example. Regimes truly like accusing foreigners of inciting democratic activities in their countries. We see this abroad agent law spreading from Russia to Georgia and another countries. I went on tour with Pussy Riot for a fewer months and evidently many of them are considered abroad agents. We were talking about this idea, and I said that the Chinese government besides wants the population to think that I am the 1 who is someway planting ideas in the heads, hearts and minds of people in China and Hong Kong, erstwhile what we’re truly doing is reflecting what we have heard and seen among the people in Hong Kong and China.
But this is simply a long game for regimes like China. They begin with the schools, public commemorations and arrests. all year on June 4th, even if you just stand at the incorrect place, dressed in the incorrect colour, they arrest you due to the fact that they think you might be doing something to commemorate the Tiananmen Massacre. Those are the things that we gotta proceed to keep a spotlight on so that we can fight this erasure of history. It’s definitely a real challenge. In Hong Kong, the Communist organization understands that it will require decades of brainwashing and past rewriting for them to rewire, and that’s what they have started.
Again, I don’t see the movement as being either you take down the government or you don’t win anything. all 1 of these acts of rewriting history, erasing memory, rewriting textbooks and suppressing freedom of thought and speech creates an chance for opposition. That’s the fight that we have, the act of being able to tell the truth, to proceed to tell the truth, for any to even hazard their lives to tell the truth, is invaluable in this sense.
Chipping distant at the government can truly add up. This grand revolutionary, romanticist thought doesn’t necessarily exist…
As I said in Gdańsk, I want people around the planet to remember that the revolution in Poland started with a very circumstantial but limited right to unions, and due to the fact that that’s where it’s built, that’s how democracy is created. It’s not created by millions of people overthrowing and rushing the palace, but it’s by people who admit that they can build power. And as they build that power, they can begin to imagine what a free reality or future looks like.
You’ve worked with lots of different global movements. What are the challenges with working with those movements?
A fewer things come to mind. In the age of social media, our relationships, collaboration and solidarity are frequently superficial. Real change, peculiarly erstwhile it comes to democratization, requires quite a few resources and quite a few sacrifices. And it requires very deep kinds of relationships and knowing to build to the point where solidarity is not just clicking and retweeting somebody, but to be able to say that I’m going to hazard my own freedom for yours. That’s hard to build and make in this age. I besides think the tactics of the regimes have become much more sophisticated.
Due to technology?
Yes, but not only. There’s a reason why autocratic regimes are so willing and open to talk about how their political strategy is better; to indoctrinate the citizenry with that same mentality. The reason why Chinese surveillance works so well is due to the fact that people are part of the apparatus. You have people on the mainland who study on each other, who are holding each another accountable to what the national safety goals are. In Hong Kong, for example, right after the national safety law, they started a hotline. It would have been unheard of previously, prior to 2019 in Hong Kong, for individual to call a government hotline to study on individual they know for violating national security. It’s a sophisticated way of utilizing both technology and this unabashed way of manipulating the body politic of these countries. I don’t know, right now, if we have the adequate political culture and apparatus to counter what the regimes are doing.
How has your function developed at the global level?
I’ve always been clear that my function was to amplify the aspirations, voices and experience of people in Hong Kong on the planet stage. I effort to stay authentic due to the fact that I honestly got tired of having white men effort to save Hong Kong, peculiarly the colonial British. I got tired of watching. So I started with an intention to make a platform where Hong Kongers could talk for Hong Kong in a way that can be translated into US and European politics, which is simply a tricky combination. Dissidents and opposition movements are truly good at talking to their own, and that was the gap that I saw – no substance how courageous, no 1 in the US or Poland or Britain wakes up in the morning reasoning about Hong Kong and what’s happening over there. But that’s how a dissident thinks; that’s how a protester thinks. individual needs to aid to translate that into a way that makes sense politically and culturally to the outside. We gotta work hard not to be lazy and let the propaganda free reign, due to the fact that there are people in the US and Europe who, based on their own ideology would say that Russia is right, or China is right due to the fact that we’re constantly battling that propaganda.
During the forum in Gdańsk, you said that the most crucial origin that would halt the Chinese army’s invasion of Taiwan would be Ukraine’s victory. Why?
We’re in a day and age where seldom do we gotta incur real costs erstwhile it comes to our actions. The invasion of Ukraine opened the level for global bodies and countries both in Europe and North America, to be able to say that we actually do value what we say and are going to do what we say we will. That’s important. Even with all the struggles along the way, and is it perfect? No. But I think that there’s any optimism to be had that after 2 and a half years now, there’s inactive a commitment, even if it’s costly.
My point at the forum was that the Taiwanese people see what China has been doing. It’s not fresh to the people of Taiwan. They have been surviving with this for their full lives, but I think that there is definitely renewed attention in the last 3 years on what China has been doing. It is not something that China can ignore. The degrees in which NATO, the European Union, and the US have been willing to both proactively support Ukraine and have these primitive sanctions, which, again, are not perfect, but it’s a truly crucial way of making China think twice about any military aggression. I think the parallel has always been there, that both Xi and Putin have this worldview and propaganda that this (Taiwan and Ukraine – editor’s note) has always been part of their historical empire. There’s a similarity in the communicative and I think China is afraid about what the reaction from the western economies and governments would be. An unconditional triumph in Ukraine is by far the best deterrent to truly any kind of aggression from China outside of its border.
Freedom isn’t a monolithic concept, and it has different layers and interpretations for different movements. How do you work with those cross-country movements? How do you build trust?
I travel a lot. I travel a lot due to the fact that I truly want to be in the same room. It’s truly about being able to hear and learn the stories and the past and the motivations.
For me, it’s not about “I believe you on social media, and I agree with what you said and what you posted in 144 characters.” I gotta get to the roots, the roots of what motivates people to fight for what they fight for. I besides find a cult of personality at the centre of movements problematic, due to the fact that you’re not encouraging the kind of solidarity and relation building from top to bottom and across a diversity of leaders. We tend to truly want, and I think media contributes to this, to simplify movements into a singular personality. We want to have faces and figureheads. At the end of the day, that doesn’t aid due to the fact that it’s not helpful democratically to have celebrities driving pro-democracy movements. A celebrity figurehead in a symbolic-driven movement will always have a hard time collaborating, due to the fact that the skills, the relationships, and the trust are not reflective and not transferable or reliable.
What about in democratic countries…?
We tend to be overly reliant on democratically elected governments due to the fact that we someway believe that simply due to the fact that they are democratically elected, they will do the right thing in the fight against autocratic leaders. That is not true. It’s not inherently in the interests of any government “to fight the dictators”, they do so due to the political will of the people who make that happen. For there to be adequate power for the people who are indigenous to the country where they are fighting back against the authoritarian regime, there needs to be an equally strong force to make the remainder of the planet do what we want them to do for us to win. I think so frequently about people in anti-authoritarian movements. They are more or little screaming at the top of their lungs as much as possible due to the fact that they feel like they’re morally right, and they are, and they’re on the right side of history. But to balance the actual scale and to be able to take advantage and get an advanced hand requires us to have real political power, not just being right. I think that was always my aim, I wanted to change the way pro-democracy movements see themselves and how the equation is created. It shouldn’t be the American government and politicians, protesters in jail against dictators, it needs to be pro-democracy people, both abroad and in those countries, making as many of them – not just governments, but businesses and all of these another entities – do what we want them to do. We see this in the test of Ukraine, right? I was in Berlin erstwhile the invasion happened on February 24th and you can tell that people immediately felt a shift. Almost immediately, you begin to see that it’s not something that just happened in a country far from you… but you request to aggressively organize people to support this thought of supporting Ukraine in spite of the political and economical costs. It turns out that fighting these regimes requires truly robust and strong home democracies. And we’re not necessarily in a large minute of past for that.
When you say “people”, who do you mean exactly?
I mean there’s a increasing fringe ideology that doesn’t see democracy abroad as being a priority, and you see this in the US now, along with the worries about the nationalist, extremist growth in Europe. I see the root origin being that people simply don’t feel like they have political agency anymore. I don’t blame the people who are manipulated to vote for extremist candidates and parties. Again, there’s a similarity between the way that power and democracy are experienced and understood by the nationalists, extremists and autocratic regimes. It’s about taking distant people’s individual sense of agency and putting it in the centre of a centralized individual or symbol. And that’s what I think we’re fighting. I besides see a lot of, honestly, similarities between my work abroad with people in autocratic countries and people in democratic countries.
What about the deficiency of voters, especially young people?
This is an unpopular view of mine. I think we did it to ourselves. We have been so narrow and superficial in our knowing and teaching of democracy that we’ve convinced people that you just request to go and vote. But what I tell people is that – and this is actually why I never ran for office – I find elections and political offices to be besides narrow of a definition of politics. My occupation to advance democracy is not about getting people to vote for me or donate to my campaigns. My occupation is to teach people to see an issue that they face in their lives, to make them feel like they have the ability, the relationship, the influence, and the direct power to make a change about it. It’s not for a individual to feel that they are a associate in democracy just due to the fact that they voted in the last election. What I want them to feel is that this is happening in their community, to make them feel “I’m going to go make that individual who is in office, that I put in office, do something about it. And they are going to do something about it due to the fact that they are accountable to me.” It is our own damn responsibility that we have stripped democracy down to something that is so distant, distant and somewhat disempowered. We’ve just been promoting a kind of democracy that feeds into this disempowerment and so I’m not amazed that people don’t want to vote due to the fact that voting doesn’t give you any power, winning stuff does.
It takes us back to the subject of social media signalling, yet the simple black-and-white outlook is what we request to distance ourselves from.
I’ve done quite a few voter programmes. I don’t do them for circumstantial candidates. I don’t start with, “Do you want to go vote?” I start with, “Come to a gathering with your representative. Let’s ask for something that you want.” I want people to aspire to more than just voting. I want people to aspire to run for office themselves. I want people to aspire to defeating a political officeholder who didn’t do what they wanted them to. And I want more people to aspire to become fugitives from and dissidents to abroad governments. All of these things, I think, are what makes democracy workable.
You inspire people to run for office, and yet you don’t want it for yourself – why?
I don’t want to run for office due to the fact that I can influence so many more things and people. I can influence so many more elected offices. I have helped people influence government at all level from city, county, state, national and global in ways that I would never be able to do as a single elected official, not even if I was always going to be the president of a country. That is again a misconception of how democracy works. I look at my 20-plus years of doing this and see I have created more political agency and power than anybody can always do in a political office. So that is how I see my work. I’m actually glad that the Chinese government at least recognizes the possible in my work. Even if I’m not in my own country, at least I’m appreciated by the people who I think realize political power and democracy beautiful well, due to the fact that they’re trying their hardest to keep it from happening.
Samuel Chu is simply a community organizer. He is the founder and president of the run for Hong Kong, which advocates for US and global leadership and policies that advance democracy and human rights for Hong Kongers and works at the nexus of anti-authoritarian and pro-human rights movements globally.
Ottilie Tabberer is simply a master’s student in East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and an editorial intern at New east Europe. Her studies and individual interests (languages, mountains, markets!) have led her to live in Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia and presently Poland.
