One veteran activist says optimism has given way to “a sense of hopelessness, helplessness and fear”
The organisation was the largest single-profession union in Hong Kong and a stalwart of the city’s pro-democracy movement. Its dissolution is a landmark in the party’s relentless dismantling of civil society. On August 15th the Civil Human Rights Front, a group that has organised many of the city’s biggest pro-democracy marches, also said it could no longer soldier on. In recent years fury at Hong Kong’s government had led to a surge of enthusiasm for organised labour.
Anti-government protests in 2019 brought hope of a fresh start. In August of that year workers took part in Hong Kong’s first general strike in half a century. Accountants, civil servants, engineers andworkers started new unions. Bartenders, bus drivers and make-up artists did as well. The founders of these new groups were generally younger and better educated than those who had previously led the labour movement.
The idea was also that new unions would come to influence politics directly. A share of seats in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, known as Legco, are reserved for “functional” constituencies, namely business, professional and civil-society groups with a pro-government bias. Three of these seats are returned by a vote among the unions. In theory registering lots of new organisations gives the pro-democracy camp a bigger say.
The party is hitting back. Winnie Yu, a nurse who led the strike by medical staff, was arrested in January . Carole Ng of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, which encompasses some 90 independent unions, faces the same charge. Her colleague Lee Cheuk-yan is serving 20 months in jail for participating in protests in 2019. Many think their confederation will become the party’s next target, now that the teachers’ union has put down its chalk.
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