Infrastructural Power, Hong Kong, and Global China

Darren Byler, October 2020

Download the English PDF version here (848KB); 点击下载电子中文版(967KB)

Note: The impetus for this essay was a recent China Made lecture by the sociologist Ching Kwan Lee, the ideas expressed, however, are those of the author.

On September 23, 2018 the Guangzhou–Shenzhen–Hong Kong Express Rail Link officially opened—linking Mainland China to downtown Hong Kong by high-speed rail. This $11 billion project, built over nearly 9 years, did more than facilitate travel. It also brought Chinese territorial sovereignty right into Kowloon. Now, there is a new Chinese border inside the wave-like steel folds of the gleaming station, where travelers are subject to Chinese laws.

As the sociologist Ching Kwan Lee argued in an September 2020 China Made lecture titled “Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier,” the past decade of Chinese infrastructure projects, such as the high speed rail station, are part of the colonial project to remake Hong Kong in China’s image. “They wanted direct access to downtown Hong Kong.” Lee noted, “As soon as you enter the custom areas inside train station you are under Chinese law.  It was the extraterritoriality of the project that caused popular outrage and protests.” Both sides of this project—Hong Kong protestors and Chinese authorities—understood something about the way power was carried by the built environment.

Listening to Lee’s discussion of the imposition of new infrastructure systems brought to mind conceptualizations of infrastructural power: the way the dispositions of built systems can enhance a state’s influence over a society (Mann 1984; Easterling 2016). By building itself into the lives of citizens and introducing a new regime of costs and benefits through this imposition, an infrastructural state begins to shape the right to the city, the right to transport, the right to work and so on. Infrastructure power—a materialist reframing of what Foucault might refer to as biopower (Foucault 2007)—announces the priorities of a state: who and what is authorized to move and act, whose lives and what materials are valued. Paying attention to infrastructural power adds another dimension to recent discussions of Hong Kong which focus on human rights, legal reform, democracy and protest (Davis 2020; Wasserstrom 2020). It opens up a materialist analytic of China’s colonial territorialization of Hong Kong.

The highspeed rail line that announced China’s intention to transform Hong Kong was also at the center of Hong Kong’s decolonial movement. Back in 2009, when the new express rail-line was proposed, thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets. It was clear to them that the project was producing redundant railway capacity, and dumping extra infrastructure from Mainland companies into Hong Kong at the expense of Hong Kong taxpayers. The protestors used many of the tactics typical of democratic protest—petitions, marches, hunger-strikes, rallies—but they also began to innovate.

Over several weekends in January 2010, they adapted a Tibetan votive practice, prostrating every 26 steps to protest each kilometer of the proposed rail line. Their protests began to mirror the built environment in other ways too. Using social media they organized a coordinated blockade of the Hong Kong Legislative Council Building trapping pro-Beijing lawmakers inside for over a day. They drew and published online maps of the locations of police and protesters. They carried plastic wrap to cover their faces against pepper spray. They chanted “shame” when the police escorted the lawmakers out and began beating protestors.

This protest, over ten years ago, inspired Joshua Wong and many other high school students 2 years later to protest the introduction of propaganda materials into Hong Kong high-school text books. This in turn inspired the 2014 Umbrella Movement which in turn inspired the Anti-Extradition protests of 2019. Each successive protest has grown in scale and become more sophisticated in its tactics. It has produced a generation of young Hong Kongers who have come of age in the midst of radical political action. Protest is now mainstream in Hong Kong—though now dangerous due to a 2020 National Security Law.

Lee argues that this history is important not only because it shows us how social movements take form, but also because it speaks to the role of infrastructural power in activating decolonial politics. It also demonstrate the limits and strategies of global China.

Global China

As Lee (2017a) has shown in a recent monograph, global China should not be thought of primarily as a geographic or regional phenomenon but as a field of power. The forms of investment and governance strategies deployed within the magnetic pull of the sphere of influence outside of China are very closely connected to systems inside China. This is not to say that Chinese state and corporate actors are attempting to replicate the systems they use in China in non-Chinese places exactly, but rather domestic strategies inform and shape Chinese power strategies in other places (Oakes 2019).

It is important to understand that Chinese domestic development over the past three decades has been fueled by an anarchic system of local competition. Provincial, city and prefectural governments have competed with each other to lead in economic growth and for central state investment in infrastructural development. As Lee demonstrated in her 2007 monograph on labor struggle and the rebirth of Chinese capitalism following the decline of state socialism, the cutthroat competition between localities has led to many redundancies, or forms of overaccumulation, in a wide variety of sectors (see also Lee 2017b). When the domestic market for real estate, energy, and other products is saturated and profit rates are falling, provincial authorities, ministries, state owned enterprises and private companies all have an interest in lobbying the central government to promote outbound investment around the globe. Since cadre promotion in local divisions of the Communist Party are now always tied to growth, the outward propulsion of Chinese state and private capital has built in momentum.

As Lee noted in her talk, reiterating some of the conceptual analytic of her 2018 book, around 2008 as a recession took hold of North America and Western Europe, central leaders in China began to realize that they needed to build technological capacity in order to reposition themselves in the value chain of global capitalism. This meant that they needed to begin to position themselves to set global standards; and they saw that they had a key strategic advantage in infrastructure development—something that they had been developing throughout China over the past decade. The force of global China then is driven by a top-down need for economic growth, and an implicit drive to legitimate the Chinese political system, but it is also driven by locally positioned private and state owned companies who lobby for this outward expansion.

Hong Kong, Lee argues, has become a key site in this field of capital-driven political power. As in many locations where the global China field of power is being deployed—from Southeast Asia to Africa, a pattern of a loose set of practices is beginning to emerge. This tool box or playbook is comprised of three primary domains: economic investment, patron-clientelism, and institution building.

First Chinese state capital is invested in infrastructure projects ranging from roads and dams to “safe city” surveillance systems and internet access. This form of economic state-craft and multinational corporate development both releases an overaccumulation of capital from the sending location in China and builds a material basis from which additional relations of power or influence are solidified and, potentially, can be institutionalized.

The second aspect of the toolbox is the development of interpersonal relationships with key leaders in positions of power in the receiving locality; or in some cases with diaspora Chinese who are positioned at the grassroots of society. These relationships are cultivated in a variety of ways, but financial incentives in the form of gifts, lucrative jobs and personal investments appear to dominate this aspect of global China expansion. The third aspect is deployed largely through discourse and institutions that disseminate that discourse. Through newspapers and television, social media and films, changes to text books, and reshaping of official discourse, Chinese authorities attempt to unify thought in a way that further cements power relations.

In Hong Kong these practices can be seen more clearly than in other locations, because the Chinese state has ultimate sovereignty over the territory. As Lee noted in her talk, “exporting overcapacity to Hong Kong is much easier than to other states where they have to deal with another sovereign political system.”

The world’s longest bridge, which connects a key Hong Kong transportation infrastructure—the Hong Kong airport—to the Mainland via Macao, is another example of the way infrastructural power is used to assert symbolic material dominance into Hong Kong. The 55 kilometer bridge was built by a consortium led by the China Highway Planning and Design Institute at a cost of nearly $18 billion to Hong Kong taxpayers. As Lee noted the bridge does multiple types of global China work: first, at the level of formal politics, it symbolizes the integration of Hong Kong and Macao with the Chinese city of Zhuhai. But it also builds capacity for further development. Even before the bridge was completed the state-owned enterprises which were given contracts to build it had turned their production lines to the construction of similar bridges in Norway and elsewhere.  “Now this new generation of bridges will be built to Chinese standards,” Lee said, “This is the key.”

When Does Global China Become Colonial?

On July 1, 2020 a barge appeared in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor. On the sides of shipping containers stacked four high, government officials draped red banners with the giant yellow characters “Celebrate the National Security Law” (贺国安立法).  Overnight, on the twenty-third anniversary of the British handover of Hong Kong to China, unharmonious political views and symbols became illegal, including  support for Hong Kong, Taiwan, Uyghur and Tibetan autonomy. The announcement, projected though infrastructural power at the scale of the population, instantiated the reorientation of Hong Kong institutions and authorities away from democratic values and toward global China.

Throughout her scholarship Lee has been careful to differentiate between the Chinese model of development characterized by global China and colonial or imperial projects. Since colonial systems imply a process of occupation, dispossession and domination, many global China projects do not rise to the level of colonization. Instead, Chinese infrastructure projects may begin to build forms of economic influence, and may bring groups of Chinese citizens to build and maintain them, but the forms of power they exert in the local politics and institutions of other nations are often limited. As Ivan Franceschini (2020) has shown in a recent case study of construction workers in Cambodia, both Chinese and Cambodian workers employed by Chinese companies are exploited by their employers, though Cambodian workers are paid far less than their Chinese counterparts. Yet while Chinese media, financing and corporations have begun to shape Cambodian society, they have yet to produce a feeling of occupation, domination, or even widespread dispossession. Most Cambodian social institutions—language, education, religion, police, civil service—remain intact though underfunded and often failing. Furthermore, as Miriam Driessen (2019) has shown, in still other cases, in places like Ethiopia, local workers can use local legal systems to protect themselves from Chinese labor regimes.

The case of Hong Kong is different. Here global China takes on the shape of an internal colonial project. This, Lee argues, is shown through institutional transplant and capture. This process of norms and personnel replacement is a key element of colonization by a sovereign power. Because Chinese authorities are ultimately accountable to no countervailing power, they have found ways to capture key institutions such as the police, the media, the education system, civil service sector, and election systems. “Looking at institutional transplant and capture is the key to diagnosing a colonial project,” Lee remarked.

A primary way they have done this is through a combination of first and second aspects of the global China toolbox: economic statecraft and patron-clientelism. The infrastructure of Hong Kong is increasingly oriented toward the Mainland. As Carolyn Cartier (2020) has shown, by building “cultural facilities” that sponsor investment in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Arts District, Chinese state planners are using creative industries as a tool of knowledge production which “produce[s] reality by aestheticizing it.” A quintessential example of this, Cartier suggests, is the late-stage inclusion of a branch of the National Palace Museum—placing material culture curated in Beijing on display in Hong Kong as a way of indexing center-periphery power. Similarly, as Lee noted in her talk (see also Toland 2020), an estimated $63 billion project to create an artificial island for prime real estate in Hong Kong will have the effect not of reducing housing cost pressure, but rather open up new space for Mainland investors to decenter the urban core of Hong Kong. 

To summarize, over the past decade major private institutions and development projects throughout the city have been bought by Mainland investors. Furthermore, Hong Kong elites who maintain positions of power have also been bought off by offers too good to refuse. Those that refuse have been pushed to the side. Increasingly, those in command in Hong Kong today—Carrie Lam and her supporters—now mimic the behavior and power relation of those who control them (see Bhabha 1994). Weaponized with the new National Security Law, the state has also begun to limit freedom of expression and assembly. It has also further transformed curriculum in primary and secondary schools.

Social Institutions of Anti-Politics

Yet, at the same time that all of this has been established, paradoxically Hong Kong has become the epicenter of resistance to global China. Because an entire generation of Hong Kongers have come of age in a time of protest over time they have increased their personal political capacity and their demands have been radicalized. “Hong Kong has come into itself,” Lee noted. “The idea of an independent Hong Kong has moved from the fringe to the mainstream of people’s political imagination, especially among the younger generation.”

In addiction the reflexivity that is fostered by these cascading protests leads to a capacity to correct past mistakes. While, following the passage of the 2020 National Security Law the Hong Kong protest has shifted to anti-politics and reducing casualties, under the surface in neighborhoods and behind closed-doors a radical politics is simmering. “Hong Kong is the most restive frontier of global China, because they have built the most capacity to push back,” Lee remarked. “This is in part because it is a global city. It is a structural central in global capitalism, so there are many powerful stakeholders.”

Hong Kong has information infrastructure at a level that is at the cutting edge of global capacity. As a financial center, the world’s wealthiest people, including Chinese billionaires, are forced to care about protest. As a result Hong Kong remains a key site for the way the contradictions of global private capital meet Chinese state capital. These fissures create an opening. For instance they make it difficult for Hong Kongers to be replaced. This is a marked difference from sites of Chinese internal settler colonialism, Tibet and Xinjiang.

The colonization of those locations began too with economic investment in infrastructure. As Emily Yeh (2013) has shown, in Tibet the largely unwanted gift of infrastructure development is what began the process. Similarly, in Xinjiang, the hard infrastructures of roads, rail and pipelines is what first bought settlers from other parts of China into Uyghur majority areas in the 1990s and 2000s (Byler 2018). Yet it  was the replacement of indigenous political leaders and educators at the grassroots level with loyal Chinese citizens from elsewhere in China, coupled with the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of native peoples from their families, that has pushed Tibetans and Uyghurs toward forms of what Patrick Wolfe (2006) refers to as social elimination. With new leaders in place at the level of neighborhood watch units or work brigades, a system of human and technical surveillance is able to enact a new regime of truth (Byler 2018).

In Hong Kong however communities at the grassroots level remain intact even as they are targeted through patron to client relations, and those in higher levels of command are often coopted. Drawing on his work in Jakarta the scholar AbdouMaliq Simone (2016) argues that intersubjective relations are what make human communities resilient in midst of dramatic changes in infrastructural power. He found that although changes to urban space and livelihoods can narrow the possibilities for community organizing, “processes of taking care” can still survive through forms of strategic invisibility, or anti-politics as Lee put it. Such acts can refuse colonial and capitalist frontier making because they operate out of an interpersonal ethnics of care at least partially outside of the gaze of the state. The cold logics of infrastructural power—geared toward extraction and efficiency—can be turned against themselves as long as families and communities remain intact.

At its core Hong Kong is a cosmopolitan international city. Transforming it may come only at the cost of destroying this ethos. Even coopted authorities such as Carrie Lam must understand this. In order to understand the future of Hong Kong and the future of global China, it is important to develop careful analytics that see relations of power and strategies of adaptation of resistance. This means thinking deeply about global China, not as a homogenous colonial project but one that deploys particular strategies with uneven results. Moving to the scale of global internationalist movements of solidarity, it also means developing a critical awareness of the strategies of other global states in deploying infrastructural power, replacing institutions, and projecting symbolic dominance onto less powerful states. There is a lesson to be learned about infrastructural power—whether projected by global China or global United States—in the communities of Hong Kong.

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基础设施的力量，香港与全球性中国

2018年9月23日，广深港高速铁路正式通车，将中国内地与香港市区紧密相连。这个耗资110亿美元，历时近9年的项目所促进的不只是旅游业。它同时也将中国政府的领土主权带达香港九龙。在这个闪亮车站的波浪形钢结构内，旅客们必须遵从中国法律。

正如社会学家李静君在中国制造2020年9月名为“香港：全球性中国的不安前线”讲座中所指出，在过去10年中，类似于高铁站的中国基础设施是重塑中国印象中香港的殖民项目的一部分。李静君表明，“他们（中国政府）想要对香港市中心有直接的控制和介入。一旦你进入火车站内的海关区域，你将受到中国法律的约束。正是这个项目（广深港高速铁路）的治外法权引起了民众的愤怒和抗议。”该项目的双方–香港示威者和中国当局–都对人为修建环境所承载的权势有所了解。

聆听李静君就新基础设施系统所强加的控制的讨论，我想到了基础设施的力量的概念化：人为建造系统的布局可以增强国家对社会的影响（Mann 1984； Easterling 2016）。通过使自己融入公民生活并通过这种强加实行新的成本和收益制度，依赖基础设施的国家开始塑造城市权，交通权，工作权等。基础设施的力量–一个对福柯可能称为生物力量的唯物主义重新定义（Foucault 2007）–宣布了国家的优先事项：谁或哪些事物被允许移动和采取行动，谁的生命和哪些材料被许与价值。关注基础设施的力量为最近有关香港的讨论增加了另一个维度，这些讨论的重点是人权，法律改革，民主和抗议（Davis 2020；Wasserstrom 2020）。它为中国对香港的殖民地领土化提供了社会技术分析切入点。

昭示中国政府想要重塑香港意图的高速铁路也同时是香港去殖民化运动的中心。上千名民主运动示威者早在该铁路被提出的2009年就走上大街进行了抗议活动。他们清楚的明白这个项目会产生多余的铁路运力，还会牺牲香港纳税人的利益去承担大陆公司倾销到香港的额外基础设施。示威者采用了多种民主抗议的典型战术， 例如请愿，游行，绝食和集会，但是他们也开始创新。

在2010年1月的几个周末中，他们采用了藏族奉献的习俗，每走26步就以五体投地形式卧拜，以抗议拟建铁路的每一公里。他们的抗议活动也开始以其他方式反映以修建的环境。他们使用社交媒体组织了对香港立法大楼的封锁，将支持北京的立法者困在里面一天。他们绘制并在网络上发布警察和抗议者所在地的地图。他们用保鲜膜包住脸防止胡椒喷雾。当警察护送立法者出去并开始殴打示威者时，他们集声高喊“羞耻”。

十多年前的这场抗议活动激发了黄之锋和其他许多高中生两年后的抗议活动，他们反对将北京政治宣传材料引入香港高中教科书中。该抗议进一步激发了2014年的雨伞运动，进而激发了2019年的“反送中”抗议活动。每一次后续的抗议活动规模都在扩大，其战术也变得越来越复杂。它催生了一代在激进政治运动中逐渐成熟的香港年轻人。由于2020年颁布的《国家安全法》，抗议活动虽然现在已成为香港的主流，但也变得危险起来。  

李静君认为香港这段抗议历史是具有重要性的，不仅因为它向我们展示了社会运动如何形成，还因为它证明了基础设施在调动去殖民化政治中的角色。不仅如此，它同时也阐释了全球性中国的限制性和策略性。

全球性中国

正如李静君在她近期的专著中所言，全球性中国应该主要被看作一个权力领域而非地理或者区域性现象。中国在其势力范围以外的投资和治理策略部署与中国内部的体系非常紧密地联系在一起。这并不完全是说中国政府和公司行试图在非中国的地方复制其在国内使用的系统，而是说明其国内战略为中国在其他地方的权力战略提供了信息和影响（Oakes 2019）。

了解中国国内过去三十年的发展是由无政府体系的地方竞争所推动的是非常重要的。省，市和县级的政府一直都在相互竞争以取得经济增长和中央政府对基础设施发展投资的领先地位。正如李静君在她2007年关于劳工斗争和国家社会主义衰落之后的中国资本主义复兴的专著中所表明的那样，地方政府之间的残酷竞争导致了许多领域的资本重复或过度积累（另见李静君2017b ）。当房地产，能源和其他产品的国内市场饱和并且利润率下降时，省级领导，各部委，国有企业和私营公司都有兴趣游说中央政府在全球范围内促进对外投资。由于现在共产党地方部门的干部晋升始终与经济增长息息相关，中国国家和私人资本外向推进的势头强劲地蓄势待发。

李静君在讲座中重申其2018年著作的一些理论分析。李指出在北美和西欧陷入衰退的2008年之际，中国中央领导人开始意识到加其强科技能力对重新定位中国在全球资本主义价值链中地位的重要性。这意味着中国需要开始将自己定位为制定全球标准的国家。同时他们发现中国各地在过去十年间的发展成果让其在基础设施开发方面具有关键的战略优势。因此全球性中国的力量不仅是由自上而下的经济增长需求所驱动的，它同时也是推动中国政治制度合法化的隐性驱动力。但是这股力量也同时被国内私有与国有公司为了向外扩张而进行的游说所推动。

李静君认为香港已经成为了由资本驱动的政治力量的关键阵地。一套松散的实践模式已经开始在很多受全球性中国影响的地区–例如东南亚和非洲–出现。这个工具箱或者用户手册是由三个部分组成：经济投资，庇护主义和制度构建。

首先，中国国有资本投资的基础设施项目包括道路，水坝，“安全城市”监视系统与网络连接。这种国家经济建设与跨国企业发展的模式不仅释放了中国境内过度积累的资本，更是创建了一个让多余权利关系与影响力被巩固甚至是制度化的物质基础。其次是中国资本与被投资地区掌权领导和本地华裔人际关系的建立与发展。虽然这些关系是通过不同的方式而建立的，但是以礼物，可观的工作和私人投资形式的经济奖励机制是全球性中国扩张的主要因素。第三个方面–制度构建–主要通过话语和传播该话语的机构来实施。中国权威尝试通过新闻与电视，社交媒体与电影，改变课本和重塑官方话语来统一思想，从而进一步巩固这些权力关系。

因为中国政府拥有对香港领土的绝对主权，全球性中国的实践手段在香港比在其他地区更加显而易见。正如李静君在其讲话中所谈到，“相比较出口到需要与其他政治主权打交道的国家，中国资本向香港出口其过剩的产能明显更加简单。”

港中澳大桥通过澳门将中国大陆与香港关键交通基础设施–香港机场–连接。作为全世界最长的桥梁，它提供了另外一个证明基础设施被北京用于宣誓其在香港实际与象征性主导地位的例子。这条全长55公里的大桥是由中交公路规划设计院有限公司（中国交通建设股份有限公司全资子公司） 领导的集团花费约180亿港元所承建。李静君认为这座桥梁发挥了几种全球性中国的作用。从官方政治而言，这座大桥将香港和澳门与中国珠海紧密地联系起来。其次，港珠澳大桥为全球性中国的未来发展奠定了基础。中交公路规划设计院有限公司早在完成港中澳大桥的建设之前就已经将其桥梁生产线转移到挪威和其他地方。对于这一事实，李静君评论道：“这个时代的桥梁都将按照中国标准所修建，这才是关键点。”

全球性中国何时具有殖民性

2020年7月1日，一艘驳船出现在香港维多利亚港湾。五面写有“贺国安立法”黄色大字的政府红色横幅紧贴在集装箱侧面。在香港移交主权23年后的纪念日，一夜之间，与北京不同的政治意见与象征性符号被非法化，例如支持香港，台湾，新疆和西藏独立的运动。国安法通过基础设施将香港政府与当局从民主价值观重新定位到全球性中国。

在其学术著作中，李静君很小心的区分具有全球性中国或帝国主义/殖民性特征的中国发展模式。因为殖民主义意味着占领，剥夺和统治，许多全球性中国的项目并不能被称之如此。相反，中国基础设施项目更容易形成经济上的影响，或需要一群中国公民进行修建于维护。但是他们在其他国家本地政治与机构里施展的权利往往是很局限的。正如Ivan Franceschini (2020)在其对柬埔寨建筑工人的案例研究中所证实，即使柬埔寨工人的工资远比中国工人的少，他们都受其中国公司雇主所压榨。同时，虽然中国媒体、资本与企业已经开始影响柬埔寨社会， 有关占领、统治或是被广泛剥夺的现象还暂时没有出现。即使缺少资金资助且常常失效，大部分柬埔寨的社会基础–语言，教育，宗教，警署，公务系统–仍然保持着原状。其次，如Miriam Driesssen (2019) 所证实，在某些案例中，如在类似埃塞俄比亚等国家，面对中国劳工制度时，当地工人可以借助本地法律系统保护自己的利益。

香港提供了一个截然不同的案例。在这里，全球性中国的呈现方式是内部殖民项目。李静君认为北京在香港的内部殖民是通过制度移植和捕获来实行的。

这种更换规范准则和人员的过程是主权国家殖民化的关键要素。由于中国当局最终不需要对谁负责任，因此他们找到了捕获警察、媒体、教育系统、公务员部门和选举系统等关键机构的方法。对此，李静君评论道： “研究机构移植和捕获是诊断殖民项目的关键。”

北京主要是通过结合经济投资和庇护主义–全球性中国工具书中的第一和第二点– 来实施其内部殖民的。香港的基础设施越来越面向内地。Carolyn Cartier (2020) 证实，通过修建赞助西九龙艺术街区投资的“文化中心，”中国政府城市规划员实际上正在将创意产业作为知识生产的工具，“通过审美化来生产现实。“ Cartier认为最典型的例子是香港近期纳入的故宫博物院分馆–在香港展出于北京策划的物质文化是暗示中心–外围权力的一种方式。李静君也在她的讲座中提到类似的项目（同样见于Toland 2020）：为香港精品地产打造人工岛，预计耗资630亿美元的项目。李静君认为该项目不仅不会降低香港住房成本，反而会为中国大陆投资者让香港城市中心去中心化化提供新空间。

总的来讲，香港过去10年间的主要私人投资与发展项目均来自于中国大陆。其次，香港掌权精英都被好到无法拒绝的提议所收买。那些拒绝这些提议的精英已被孤立。香港当局–林郑月娥和她的支持者–逐渐开始模仿用来控制他们的权利关系于行为（见Bhabha 1994）。香港政府也开始将新的国安法作为武器来限制言论自由与集会。政府还进一步改变了小学与中学的课程设置。

反政治的社会机构

矛盾的是，在这一切被建立起来的同时，香港已经成为了反抗全球性中国的中心。因为老一代香港人成长于抗争年代，他们的自身政治能力不断增强，诉求也变得更加激进。李静君认为，“香港已经成为有独立意识的领地，香港独立的想法已经从边缘地带转移到主流人群–特别是年轻一代–的政治想象中。”

其次，这一连串的抗议所培养的反思性导致了纠正过去错误的能力。随着2020年国安法的通过， 香港的抗议宗旨转变成了反政治化以及减少伤亡。在社区表面和紧闭着的房门背后，激进的政治正在酝酿中。李静君评论道，“香港是全球性中国最动荡不安的前端，因为他们炼就了最强的抵抗能力。这部分是因为香港是一个全球性的城市：它在全球资本主义制度中占据着中心的位置，因此有许多强大的利益相关者。”

香港的信息技术基础设施在全球都处于领先地位。作为一个资本中心，包括中国亿万富翁等全球最富有的人都被迫关注着这些抗议。这使得香港仍然是矛盾的全球私人资本与中国国有资本相遇的关键地。这些裂缝创造了一个开口。例如它使得香港人难以替代，也使香港不同于中国国内的其他殖民主义地–西藏与新疆。

对西藏和新疆的殖民也是从投资基础设施开始。正如Emily Yeh （2013）所证实，西藏的殖民主义开始于大量不被期望的基础设施投资。相似的是，在20世纪末21世纪初的新疆，类似于道路，铁路和管道的硬性基础设施将殖民者从中国其他地方带到维吾尔族聚集地（Byler 2018）。然而，将维吾尔族和藏族人推向Patrick Wolfe （2006）所描述的社会消除的原因有两点：一是将草根阶级的本土政治领导人与教育者替换成对政府衷心的外地中国公民；二是将成千上万的本地人从他们的家庭中抽离。随着邻里监视单位或工作队级别的新领导人到位，人力和技术监视系统能够制定新的真相制度（Byler 2018）。

然而，在香港，基层社区仍然完好无损，即使他们通过保护客户关系成为目标，而且那些指挥级别较高的人经常被笼络收买。基于其在雅加达的研究调查，学者AbdouMaliq Simone (2016) 认为互为主体性使人类社区在基础设施的力量发生巨大变化时变得坚韧。他发现即使城市空间和生计的变化能减小社区组织的可能性，“关照的过程”仍然可以通过战略隐形存活。这也是李静君所谓的反政治。该种行为可以拒绝殖民与资本主义的前沿开拓，因为他们遵循的人际关怀理论的一部分至少是在国家视线以外的。只要家庭与社区保持完好无损，基础设施力量的冰冷逻辑–开发与高效–就能被逆转。

香港的核心是国际大都市。改变它必将以销毁该特质为代价。即使像林郑月娥这样被笼络的当局也意识到了这一点。发展仔细研究权力关系和适应与反抗战略的分析方法对于了解香港与全球性中国未来至关重要。这意味着深入思考全球性中国，将其看待为采取特定战略但结果不平等的项目，而非一个同质的殖民性项目。转向全球国际主义团结运动的层次，这也意味着培养对其他全球国家在采用基础设施力量、更换政府机构和将象征性支配地位投射到较弱国家的战略的批判意识。无论由全球性中国还是全球性美国投射到香港社区的基础设施力量都值得学习。

(朱琳的中文翻译)

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