Mariske Westendorp (Macquarie U, Sydney)
Socially Engaged Religion and the Umbrella Movement
Even though the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement was mainly a political movement sparked by economic and political distress, religion played a significant factor in the event. The role of religious leaders and symbols has been discussed in different media channels throughout the duration of the protests, for example by the South China Morning Post. Overall, the comments related the prominence of religion in the Movement to contemporary relations between Hong Kong and mainland China. However, the Umbrella Movement, a large and complex social movement, had many underlying motives. What the media sources failed to take into account were religious motives for political engagements or disengagements of individual Hong Kong religious practitioners.
I focus on the role of religion during the Umbrella Movement from the viewpoints of these individuals, in this case Buddhist and Christian practitioners. I met these individuals for my PhD research, which I conducted in the Hong Kong region prior to the movement. The narratives of Christian and Buddhist practitioners show that the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement resonates with other social justice movements that have taken place in other countries and at other times. As such, the meaning of the Movement for individual practitioners has spread well beyond the context-specific political relations between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.
Christian Presence/Buddhist Absence
Some media sources assumed that for Christian organizations, the Umbrella Movement was not only about attaining universal suffrage, but likewise about securing religious freedom in Hong Kong. According to Professor Chen Yu-shek (City U Hong Kong), the Communist Party is at odds with core Christian values and “communists suppress Christians wherever they are”. Buddhism, on the other hand, seems satisfied with its status quo in China, and with recent attempts undertaken by the Chinese government to promote the religion. Consequently, media sources argued, Buddhism played a less active role in the protests. Hence, the media tended to reduce the role of religion in the protests to merely a concern with Hong Kong’s relationship with the Chinese state.Hong Kong’s Christian and Buddhist organizations adopted different approaches to the Umbrella Movement. Christian (especially Catholic)organizations, groups and leaders opened the doors of their churches to protesters and police, offered first aid, snacks, water and refuge, and organized prayer and Bible reading gro
However, this emphasis on current relations between Hong Kong and mainland China only partially explains the presence of Christianity—and absence of Buddhism—during the movement. What is missing in the media reports are narratives of Hong Kong individuals who have decided either to join in or dissociate from the protests, based on motives that are partially or fully related to their religious backgrounds and to their notions of socially engaged religion. Their perspectives challenge the media’s reductive political explanations.
Individual Narratives
In an email sent to me in November 2014, a Protestant practitioner in her early-30s wrote: “I can’t help but think that Jesus himself was defiant to the law. … What he did in the temple was destructing the business eco-system and undermining the self-interest of people who enjoyed status quo in his time. There’s nothing new under the sun.” She ended her lengthy email with a quote by Dante (“the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality”), used by Martin Luther King Jr. during his struggle for race equality in the US in the1960s.
The young Protestant woman drew parallels between the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and theologies accompanying Christian movements for social justice performed in the past. She suggested that the Christian struggle for justice started when Jesus challenged the status quo of his time. Throughout history, different social movements have tried to mirror his protest. Examples include liberation theologies in Latin America of the 1960s and 1970s, minjung theology in South Korea in the 1970s, and now in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. For the young woman, and my other Christian informants, relating the Umbrella Movement to other social movements that aimed to achieve similar goals gave the Movement more relevance than it may otherwise have achieved.
I made a similar observation when communicating with some of my Buddhist informants about the protests, even though they mainly emphasized inaction rather than action. A practitioner in his early forties asked me one day what the Buddha did when his kingdom was overtaken by foreign rulers. He also alluded to stories about the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn and the Tibetan Dalai Lama, neither of whom fought when they were expelled from their countries.
By posing rhetorical questions about these historical happenings, the Buddhist practitioner attempted to place his response to the Umbrella Movement in the broader context of Buddhist teachings towards struggles over social justice, in effect implicitly relating the Umbrella Movement to socially engaged Buddhism. Socially engaged Buddhism is a movement that emerged in different Buddhist countries during the twentieth century, with the intention “to apply the values and teachings of Buddhism to the problems of society in a nonviolent way” (King 2012:5). Among noted Buddhist practitioners of socially engaged Buddhism are Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Sri Lankan Buddhist leader Ariyaratne, and Taiwanese nunCheng-yen, who founded the Tzu Chi Foundation (Park 2010:29). While socially-engaged Buddhism is not as well-developed in Hong Kong as in other Asian countries, such discourses importantly draw parallels between the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and similar Buddhist movements in other Asian countries.
For my informants who shared their opinions with me before and during the Umbrella Movement, the protests referenced larger religious movements. Not only did they allude to the difficult relations between Hong Kong and mainland China, but also to issues extending far beyond this context-specific relationship.
Concluding Remarks
By accounting for the narratives of Hong Kong’s individual residents (rather than basing conclusions solely upon observation), I argue that the relationship between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland is not always as prominent as is to be expected. Although ostensibly a local movement sparked by context-specific political and economic factors, individual practitioners remind us that the 2014 Umbrella Movement encompasses a wide variety of other, including religious, meanings. They relate the Movement to other socially engaged Christian or Buddhist movements striving for justice.
In the aftermath of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement, theologians Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan argued for the creation of a new theology, ie, a theology of the multitude. They argue that “in the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American liberation theology, feminist theology, black theology, and other liberation theologies emerged … No doubt the world has changed, and movements and ways of analyzing the world are changing as well. But much of what liberation theology has to say is still very relevant” (Rieger and Kwok 2013:4). In the aftermath of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, one could acknowledge the emergence of a new, socially engaged theology that embraces both Christianity and Buddhism. Considering the role of religion during the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong residents have experienced the Movement as part of larger struggles for justice, an understanding that to date appears to have eluded media sources.
Editors’ note: This article is part of a series on two recent social movements: the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan and the Umbrella Protests in Hong Kong.
Mariske Westendorp (PhD candidate in anthropology at Macquarie U, Sydney) is currently researching the intricate relationships between Hong Kong Christian and Buddhist religious institutions/practices/ontologies, and urban Hong Kong’s political and social urban processes. Other research interests include urban anthropology, and the role of religion in development work and projects.
Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi K Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou(yizhou@ucdavis.edu).