Many in Hong Kong have been thinking a lot about the idea of 'development' lately, perhaps-- hopefully-- questioning the word's supposedly inherent links to the glass and metal monoliths in the shadows of which we make our livings.
Specifically, the questions seem to be- who defines what the hell 'development' means? Who decides what is needed, what is built, and for whom? More fundamentally, whose city is this?
Lung Ying-tai recently and famously posed these questions through an emotive piece in the HK newspaper Apple Daily (her piece wonderfully translated here by ESWN).
"Why does the government have the right to hand them [historical artifacts of Hong Kong] over to real estate developers to 'handle'?" Lung asked. "Would you auction off your grandmother's handwritten diary?"
Thursday-Friday this week will be the 20th anniversary of one of the worst corporate crimes in recent history. On Dec 2-3 1984, thousands of people were killed when the Union Carbide chemical fertilizer plant, owned by today's Dow Chemical and built inside the city of Bhopal, leaked 27 tons of methyl-isocyanate into the air due to faulty construction. negligence, and cutbacks. Between Dec 2-3 1984 and Dec 2-3 2004, thousands of other people have suffered the lingering effects of contamination: the premature deaths, the birth abnormalities, cancers, brain damage, the mental illnesses, and the "menstrual chaos."
As Lung would perhaps pose the question- what is the relationship between these seemingly unrelated points, cities, events?
Well, I would say that tragedies like Bhopal are perhaps the most extreme, most tragic, most horrifying, yet inevitable result of the rule of what Lung called "Central District values":
"[These values are] the Hong Kong the world sees, and this is what Hong Kong is happy to present: the impressive buildings, the elegance of the stores, the fluency in English language, and the middle-class people walking quickly between buildings in Central District in their sparkling white collars. That is to say, the Central District represents Hong Kong. The Central District values monopolized and represented the values of Hong Kong: within the operational logic of capitalism, people pursue individual wealth and emphasize commercial competitiveness, and they use "economics", "wealth", "efficiency", "development", and "globalization" as the standards of social progress."
It is a rule and a dominant logic where, as Lung writes, ordinary people have no control. Not only do they not matter, but they do not matter to the extent that they do not exist, nor ever existed, and live out their lives as utterly disposable. It is a rule where all that does exist about us-- our only history, our only present, our only future-- is a function of our value as tools in the process of profit-making for political and economic elites. It is a rule where 'freedom' does not mean control over our lives, but an appropriate obedience to the control of the powerful.
"[but] they won't see the sad-looking and depressed faces of the unemployed workers of the Shamshuipo streets, nor those new immigrants who live in Kwun Tong and Yuen Long and who have never even been to the Central District. Outsiders wait on the Avenue of the Stars for the amazing fireworks show to commence but they do not know that 1,450,000 of the seven million people in Hong Kong live below the poverty line, with many single senior citizens living in cages like chickens and ducks. They cannot imagine that this, Asia's World City, ranks number five in the world in terms of economic inequality alongside Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Uruguay."
It is the overriding enforcement of these values that I would call state-corporate rule.
And it is, indeed, a rule which we have exemplified in Hong Kong, with our physical and political environments governed by a ruling class of unrepresentative, unaccountable bureaucrats, and the overriding economic decisions controlled by corporate giants with names like Hutchison, Cheung Kong, and Sun Hung Kai, organisms that will live for decades longer than you and I could ever dream.
In Bhopal, the slum dwellers died, poor and breathless in the night, and were not and are not seen as human. To save US$40 a day in freon costs, Dow-Carbide took their lives in the thousands, those thousands of people who had no idea of what hit them, let alone any say in matters relating to their city. "$500 is plenty good for an Indian", a Dow-Carbide representative concluded in 2002, referring to the meagre compensation handed out to each of the Bhopal victims.
In our Hong Kong, too, some humans rule and others are invisible. The demolitions continue, the harbor 'reclamations' continue, West Kowloon is commercialized in the name of culture, Mong Kok is smashed for yet another mega-shopping mall, the land and the people are erased until neither land nor people matter, and until... until what, then?
Will our continuing histories continue to be paved over, only to be replaced by this?
Or this?
The International Committee for Justice in Bhopal has not only called the 20th anniversary a day to mourn the victims of that tragedy and support their continuing struggle for justice, but a Global Day of Action against Corporate Crime, wherever we may be.
Because as different as these places, these cities, these events seem, they are inevitably linked...
And what we all need is another kind of reclamation.
A reclamation of that control over the political and economic decisions that affect our lives-- that is, control over the future and its 'development'-- which is at the very core of democracy.
That is why we should remember this Thursday-Friday as a tragedy of the past, but also as a sign of the dangers in our present, and as a future we must fight like hell to prevent.
Because as different and distant ourselves and our struggles might seem sometimes, we have days like this to stop to think about our links to each other, our many, yet common fights for justice, for democracy, and to reclaim control of our lives and our futures.
"We all live in Bhopal."
