Communists in the Closet – Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Hong Kong Vox, Video Vox — By Rebecca Valli on March 24, 2010 at 6:34 pm

Hong Kong — Like many people who grew up in post-World War II Hong Kong, Christine Loh came from a family whose relatives were divided politically. Some supported the Communist Party of China (CCP); others espoused the Nationalist cause.

For the majority of ordinary Hong Kong people, political allegiance to the CCP was — and is — a taboo subject.

It was no secret that the CCP operated out of the local branches of the Xinhua News Agency and the Bank of China before and during the countdown to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.

For years, CCP officials liaised with the colonial authorities — sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially, sometimes amicably, other times not.

One of the CCP’s most important tasks was to build alliances (the United Front), often made up of strange bed-fellows, in preparation for the transfer of sovereignty.

Yet more than 12 years after China resumed Hong Kong, the CCP remains in the shadows in the Special Administrative Region.

It’s a phenomenon that fascinated Loh so much that the former legislator researched and published a book that examines the often contradictory role of the CCP in Hong Kong — from the party’s founding in the 1920s to the present day.

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Loh describes what inspired her to write the book

“Back in the eighties, it was very difficult to talk about the Communist Party in Hong Kong”

Watch Lo, now head of the independent think-tank, Civic Exchange, discuss the conundrum of the CCP in Hong Kong at the Main Library of the University of Hong Kong on March 11. Underground Front was published by Hong Kong University Press.

On the DAB

The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Hong (DAB) has been described by commentators as
“the Communist Party in Drag”.

The DAB is the largest urban grass-roots political party in Hong Kong. It’s leaders refuse to state whether they are CPC members. Its role of supporting the Hong Kong government at all costs (which requires it to support big business, wealthy pro-Beijing tycoons and powerful rural landowners) poses difficulties for party policy members who need to reconcile opposing aspirations. A United Front conundrum.

On How CPC United Front Tactics Brought Hong Kong’s Richest Tycoons into the fold — and Keep Them Onside

“The campaign has been to bring the tycoons and other VIPs in town”

Out of the Closet?

“It is an anomaly: the ruling party on the mainland is hidden here”