Fighting global authoritarianism

Photo courtesy of Samuel Chu

OTTILIE TABBERER: You are an internationally wanted fugitive. How does it feel to have such a label?

SAMUEL CHU: I’ve had a lot of opportunities to reflect on my status. It’s been almost four 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 a serial offender when it comes to making democracy work in places where it hasn’t. And that’s true particularly in the United States, where I’ve spent most of my adult life.

Does this give you a boost, a cause for hope?

I am always in this tension, I don’t necessarily consider myself an optimist or idealist, I think a lot of people think that I sound like an idealist because I constantly see opportunities for people to acquire political power in ways that they didn’t have before. That’s how I define 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 create space for people to exercise their political power where it hasn’t been present. In a lot of 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. Finding ways to do that is, for me, what democracy is about.

This borderless, human desire for democracy is a powerful idea. But what about the people living within the autocratic regimes of this world, who are subjected to endless propaganda and brainwashing? What is freedom to the brainwashed?

My case is a good example. Regimes really like accusing foreigners of inciting democratic activities in their countries. We see this foreign agent law spreading from Russia to Georgia and other countries. I went on tour with Pussy Riot for a few months and obviously many of them are considered foreign agents. We were talking about this idea, and I said that the Chinese government also wants the population to think that I am the one who is somehow planting ideas in the heads, hearts and minds of people in China and Hong Kong, when what we’re really doing is reflecting what we have heard and seen among the people in Hong Kong and China.

But this is a long game for regimes like China. They begin with the schools, public commemorations and arrests. Every year on June 4th, even if you just stand at the wrong place, dressed in the wrong colour, they arrest you because they think you might be doing something to commemorate the Tiananmen Massacre. Those are the things that we have to continue 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 Party understands that it will require decades of brainwashing and history 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 regime or you don’t win anything. Every one of these acts of rewriting history, erasing memory, rewriting textbooks and suppressing freedom of thought and speech creates an opportunity for opposition. That’s the fight that we have, the act of being able to tell the truth, to continue to tell the truth, for some to even risk their lives to tell the truth, is invaluable in this sense.

Chipping away at the regime can really add up. This grand revolutionary, romantic idea doesn’t necessarily exist…

As I said in Gdańsk, I want people around the world to remember that the revolution in Poland started with a very specific but limited right to unions, and because 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 recognize 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 international movements. What are the challenges with working with those movements?

A few things come to mind. In the age of social media, our relationships, collaboration and solidarity are often superficial. Real change, particularly when it comes to democratization, requires a lot of resources and a lot of sacrifices. And it requires very deep kinds of relationships and understanding 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 risk my own freedom for yours. That’s hard to build and create in this age. I also 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 system is better; to indoctrinate the citizenry with that same mentality. The reason why Chinese surveillance works so well is because people are part of the apparatus. You have people on the mainland who report on each other, who are holding each other accountable to what the national security goals are. In Hong Kong, for example, right after the national security law, they started a hotline. It would have been unheard of previously, prior to 2019 in Hong Kong, for someone to call a government hotline to report on someone they know for violating national security. It’s a sophisticated way of using 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 role developed at the international level?

I’ve always been clear that my role was to amplify the aspirations, voices and experience of people in Hong Kong on the world stage. I try to stay authentic because I honestly got tired of having white men try to save Hong Kong, particularly the colonial British. I got tired of watching. So I started with an intention to create a platform where Hong Kongers could speak for Hong Kong in a way that can be translated into US and European politics, which is a tricky combination. Dissidents and opposition movements are really good at talking to their own, and that was the gap that I saw – no matter how courageous, no one in the US or Poland or Britain wakes up in the morning thinking about Hong Kong and what’s happening over there. But that’s how a dissident thinks; that’s how a protester thinks. Someone needs to help to translate that into a way that makes sense politically and culturally to the outside. We have to work hard not to be lazy and allow the propaganda free reign, because there are people in the US and Europe who, based on their own ideology would say that Russia is right, or China is right because we’re constantly battling that propaganda.

During the forum in Gdańsk, you said that the most important factor that would stop the Chinese army’s invasion of Taiwan would be Ukraine’s victory. Why?

We’re in a day and age where rarely do we have to incur real costs when it comes to our actions. The invasion of Ukraine opened the floor for international 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 some optimism to be had that after two and a half years now, there’s still 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 new to the people of Taiwan. They have been living with this for their whole lives, but I think that there is definitely renewed attention in the last three 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 really important 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 historic empire. There’s a similarity in the narrative and I think China is concerned about what the reaction from the western economies and governments would be. An unconditional victory in Ukraine is by far the best deterrent to really 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 because I really want to be in the same room. It’s really about being able to hear and learn the stories and the history 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 have to get to the roots, the roots of what motivates people to fight for what they fight for. I also find a cult of personality at the centre of movements problematic, because you’re not encouraging the kind of solidarity and relationship building from top to bottom and across a diversity of leaders. We tend to really 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 help because it’s not helpful democratically to have celebrities driving pro-democracy movements. A celebrity figurehead in a symbolic-driven movement will always have a difficult time collaborating, because 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 because we somehow believe that simply because 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 because of the political will of the people who make that happen. For there to be enough 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 rest of the world do what we want them to do for us to win. I think so often about people in anti-authoritarian movements. They are more or less screaming at the top of their lungs as much as possible because 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 upper 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 other entities – do what we want them to do. We see this in the test of Ukraine, right? I was in Berlin when 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 need to aggressively organize people to support this idea of supporting Ukraine in spite of the political and economic costs. It turns out that fighting these regimes requires really robust and strong domestic democracies. And we’re not necessarily in a great moment of history for that.

When you say “people”, who do you mean exactly?

I mean there’s a growing 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 cause 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 away people’s individual sense of agency and putting it in the centre of a centralized person or symbol. And that’s what I think we’re fighting. I also see a lot of, honestly, similarities between my work abroad with people in autocratic countries and people in democratic countries.

What about the lack 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 understanding and teaching of democracy that we’ve convinced people that you just need 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 too narrow of a definition of politics. My job to promote democracy is not about getting people to vote for me or donate to my campaigns. My job 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 person to feel that they are a participant in democracy just because 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 person who is in office, that I put in office, do something about it. And they are going to do something about it because they are accountable to me.” It is our own damn fault that we have stripped democracy down to something that is so distant, remote and somewhat disempowered. We’ve just been promoting a kind of democracy that feeds into this disempowerment and so I’m not surprised that people don’t want to vote because voting doesn’t give you any power, winning stuff does.

It takes us back to the topic of social media signalling, yet the simple black-and-white outlook is what we need to distance ourselves from.

I’ve done a lot of voter programmes. I don’t do them for specific candidates. I don’t start with, “Do you want to go vote?” I start with, “Come to a meeting 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 foreign 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 because I can influence so many more things and people. I can influence so many more elected offices. I have helped people influence government at every level from city, county, state, federal and global in ways that I would never be able to do as a single elected official, not even if I was ever 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 ever 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 potential in my work. Even if I’m not in my own country, at least I’m appreciated by the people who I think understand political power and democracy pretty well, because they’re trying their hardest to keep it from happening.

Samuel Chu is a community organizer. He is the founder and president of the Campaign for Hong Kong, which advocates for US and international 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 a master’s student in East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and an editorial intern at New Eastern Europe. Her studies and personal interests (languages, mountains, markets!) have led her to live in Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia and currently Poland.

Authoritarianism, autocracy, democracy, voting