Tag Archives: democracy

David Kwok Kwan Tsoi: ‘Lifeboat’ Campaign for Hong Kongers: Why is Capitalistic Agenda a Mandate for Democratic Intervention?

Image 1: Photo taken by author in 2019 at one of the Anti-Extradition Law Bill demonstrations

Since 2021, along with the British and Australian governments, the Canadian government has relaxed immigration policy for Hong Kong immigrants. This policy offers an unconventional path with lowered barriers for Hong Kongers to apply for permanent residency in Canada. Popularly framed as ‘lifeboat’ campaigns, these immigration policies directly respond to the post-2019 political situation in Hong Kong. This political contingency was instigated by the tumultuous 2019-2020 Anti-Extradition Law Bill Movement, and the subsequent implementation of National Security Law in June 2020. Against this background, the Canadian government has combined an economic narrative, i.e., Hong Kongers being economically productive, with a political narrative, i.e., human rights concern, to legitimise this ‘lifeboat’ scheme.

The Canadian ‘lifeboat’ scheme includes two pathways: Stream A and Stream B. Stream B requires candidates to have post-secondary education qualifications and one year of work experience within Canada before they apply for permanent resident status. Interestingly, the government cancelled the requirement on education qualifications on 15 August 2023, further lowering the barrier. Following Canadian activist Harsha Walia’s writing about borders (2021), I illuminate the way a democratic logic intersects with a capitalistic logic to control border mobility under the state’s purview. I seek to problematise this naturalised connection. Under the benevolent notion of democratic intervention, how does the state deploy the notions of human rights and humanitarian care to serve an economic purpose? Why do these migrants have to be first taxonomised as productive labouring subjects in order to be considered “worthy” of democratic intervention? Further, what does democracy mean within this existing liberal democratic regime?

Under the “lifeboat” policy, it is stated that “Canada shares longstanding ties with the people of Hong Kong and is concerned with the deteriorating human rights situation there. […] Canada has put in place a number of facilitative measures to help Hong Kong residents come to Canada” (Government of Canada 2021b). Clearly, human rights concern is identified as a key component to this policy. Paradoxically, it considers economic contribution rather than political risks at home as a legitimizing clause for permanent residency. In the policy, under the section “Public policy considerations”, it is stated that: “[The policy] recognises the contributions made by Hong Kong residents to Canada’s economy and social-cultural landscape through human capital, while also promoting democratic values” (Government of Canada 2021b). In another government press release issued on 4 February 2021, similar language was adopted: “The first Hong Kong residents arrived here over 150 years ago, contributing immensely to Canada’s economic, social and political life” (Government of Canada 2021a).

Border regimes serve to create differentiated entry of migrants in order to protect public interests within the border, such as job availability and welfare system. As Walia (2021, 19) suggests, borders ‘buffer against the retrenchment of universal social programs.’ In a liberal democratic regime with strict border control, citizenship is granted based on one’s expected contribution to the national economy. It is therefore not surprising that a neoliberal state rationalises immigration policies under the premise of economic calculations (Xiang 2007). Still, in this case, the economic logic is weaved into a democratic intervention in a language that renders this intersection rational, natural, and reasonable. In other words, democratic intervention is about human rights concerns—so long as it is also generative of economic benefits. To do so, the Canadian government racialises a history of Hong Kong diaspora; this taxonomises incoming Hong Kong migrants as productive labour, which becomes a strange but also naturalised prerequisite for democratic intervention.

Scholars have examined the way the global north extracts labour from the global south while imposing militarised border regimes to deter immigrants (Besteman 2019), resulting in ‘coloniality of migration’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Nevertheless, the emigration of East Asia migrants, particularly the middle-class and the upper-middle-class, has complicated the way coloniality of migration is configured. In the case of Canadian ‘lifeboat’ campaign, I suggest that the Canadian government uses a democratic narrative to add moral fervour as they extract both skilled and unskilled labour from Hong Kong. There are two sets of repercussions. First, the democratic intervention is only enjoyed by those who are considered economically productive. Borders continue to facilitate accumulation of capital within a sovereign state. At the same time, borders preclude universal access to political refuge. Second, the democratic intervention becomes a rationalised labour extraction from East Asia to the global North.

In sum, political discourses about human rights and democracy are instrumentalised and repackaged by the West (by which I refer to as anglophone-speaking countries) to solidify their image as the global protector of human rights, while benefiting materially from westward movement of labour and capital from the global East, which sustain their roles as the civilised Man and a civilizing force in the unfinished project of modernity (Wynter 2003).


David Kwok Kwan Tsoi is a DPhil student at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. His research examines the relationship between housing, class, and migration amid political changes in Hong Kong. He also writes about informal economy and queer politics in Hong Kong.


References

Besteman, Catherine. 2019. “Militarised Global Apartheid.” Current Anthropology 60 (19): 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/699280.

Government of Canada. 2021a. “Canada Launches Hong Kong Pathway that will Attract Recent Graduates and Skilled Workers with Faster Permanent Residency.” Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. 4 February 2021. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2021/02/canada-launches-hong-kong-pathway-that-will-attract-recent-graduates-and-skilled-workers-with-faster-permanent-residency.html

Government of Canada. 2021b. “Temporary public policy creating two pathways to permanent residence to facilitate the immigration of certain Hong Kong residents.” Public Policies. 8 June 2021. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions-agreements/public-policies/hong-kong-residents-permanent-residence.html

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2018. “The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism.” Canada’s Journal on Refugees 34 (1): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.7202/1050851ar.

Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.


Cite as: Tsoi, David Kwok Kwan 2024. “‘Lifeboat’ Campaign for Hong Kongers: Why is Capitalistic Agenda a Mandate for Democratic Intervention?” Focaalblog 6 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/06/david-kwok-kwan-tsoi-lifeboat-campaign-for-hong-kongers-why-is-capitalistic-agenda-a-mandate-for-democratic-intervention/

Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber: “A Matter of Priority”: The Covid-19 Crisis in Indonesia

Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber, University of Cambridge

COVID-19 is wreaking havoc in Indonesia. The government ignored the crisis for too long, relying on a dubious religious discourse of divine protection. When it finally reacted, its response was unsystematic and favored economic stability over health and welfare measures. Although the government has neither imposed a strict lockdown nor the state of emergency, it is clamping down on critics during the crisis.

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Alan Bradshaw: On the prospect of a Tory majority!

This post is part of a feature on the 2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (SOAS, University of London).

As an Irishman living in England, I am struck by the total difference between how Brexit is discussed in both countries. In Ireland, it is clear that Brexit will bring economic disaster, but this can be mitigated against by significant planning and coordinated response by government and business. That even at this late stage, the form of Brexit is unknown is a source of great anxiety in Ireland. By contrast, in Britain to have any discourse of Brexit as impending economic ruination is simply unacceptable. Those who dare to utter prophecies of economic trouble are bullied into silence by a raging right-wing media. Brexit can only be allowed to be framed in the positive.

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Bruce Kapferer: Ideas on populism: The paradox of democracy and the rise of the corporate state

“All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.”
— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

“The power of the people is always greater than that of the people in power.”
— Wael Ghonim, a Google executive at the time of Egypt’s popular uprising against President Hosni Mubarak

When Hillary Clinton attempted to counter Donald Trump and his supporters’ populist attacks by explicitly branding them a “basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it,” she was hoist on her own petard. The chant “Lock Her Up” drew its enormous potency from her alleged corruption and from her being a figurehead of the ruling Washington elites who have leached the American state’s democratic egalitarian idealism. Calling Trump and his followers racist and sexist was waving a red rag to a bull. She played on a negative view of populism, an immanent antidemocratic elitism, which elicited outrage, making a mockery of her own populist appeal. The occasionally rank dominant-class prejudice that accompanies antipopulist sentiments (including those that assume it is a working-class phenomenon, when it is frequently cross-class) was egregiously apparent in a CNN pundit’s observation that Trump “was throwing red meat to the base” in his highly controversial travel bans.

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Marc Edelman: The nastiest candidate won: Now what?

In the end it was filmmaker Michael Moore who got it right. It wasn’t Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, with his sophisticated polling models, or Nobel Prize winning economist and liberal pundit Paul Krugman, who confessed on election night that “I truly thought I knew my country better than it turns out I did.”
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Joe Trapido: Elections, politics, and power in central and southern Africa

The conference “Elections in central and southern Africa, dynamics of exclusion and participation,” at SOAS on 26 June 2015, prompts me to some personal reflections. Elections in central and southern Africa are marked by a paradoxical dynamic of participation and exclusion. Ostensible rituals of mass participation and of legitimation by civil power, electoral processes in the countries of the region have often made recourse to forms of exclusionary violence during campaigns. This is not, of course, unique—elections in Africa should not be seen as sui generis events. This exclusionary dynamic is well understood as a regional variant on a wider theme.
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Nicolas Martin: Democracy subverted: Inequality, liberalism, and criminal politics in the Indian Punjab

A number of liberal scholars of India, ranging from Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze to James Manor, all broadly view democracy as the solution to a variety of social evils including poverty, inequality, corruption, crime, and even violent conflict. They all acknowledge that Indian democracy is at times a messy affair, but they share a common faith in its self-correcting potential. As they see it, democracy has fostered a more assertive citizenry that no longer accepts traditional hierarchies and that is less tolerant of abuses of power.
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Steve Reyna: Bloat and tents: Further thoughts on Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy

This brief note suggests some directions that a rising Marxist anthropology might consider taking. Sandy Smith-Nonini and Donald Nonini have done a wonderful job explaining why Carbon Democracy is a “brilliant” book that is “essential reading for anthropologists” (2014), especially for those concerned with the political economy of fossil energy. Elsewhere, I have reviewed Timothy Mitchell’s book (Reyna 2012) and offered some suggestions concerning an approach to the anthropology of hydrocarbons (Behrends, Reyna, and Schlee 2011), so I do not propose to discuss here either the substance of Mitchell’s argument or the emerging literature on the anthropology of oil. Rather, I will explore two implications of Mitchell’s work for the very nature of the anthropological project. These implications deal with bloat (conceptual) and tents (pup and big top).

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Sandy Smith-Nonini & Donald M. Nonini: Fueling the Neoliberal Turn: Why We Need to Engage Timothy Mitchell’s “Carbon Democracy”

A central, perhaps the central, question in political economy today is how forces of democracy, including organized labor and its allies, can regain a degree of control over corporate capitalism in the neoliberal era. Equally pressing (and related) is our need to confront climate change and replace fossil fuels with alternative energy resources. While the silos of academia have splintered political economy from studies of energy, the beauty of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy lies in his eloquent and comprehensive study that merges these two essential aspects of industrial production and modern society into an integrated analysis.

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