In Conversation：In Conversation With Leung Kwok-hung

"Once I made a will for myself, just after the handover. I said: “The first thing is I will not commit suicide. So, if I am found in suspicious circumstances … Secondly, I will not go to the mainland. So if you find me being arrested in the mainland, it’s not true. There is something wrong. Thirdly, there should be a forensic check after I die.”
Leung Kwok-hung

In Conversation with Stephen Davies this week is legislator and long-time activist Leung Kwok-hung, also known as “Long Hair” a man who has equally enraged and provoked colonial governors, pro-Beijing apparatchiks, and many of Hong Kong’s democrats

Talking to Stephen, Long Hair explains some of the things that radicalised him, including the story of his own mother, who worked as an amah in Hong Kong in the colonial era.

“I was fond of the idea of Maoism at that time, since my mother was a supporter of the Communist regime. According to her own experience, I think she thought that the Communists actually were the liberators. I think she thought that she was nobody in colonial Hong Kong, but all of a sudden China stood up and Chairman Mao said that: ‘The Chinese people have stood up’.“

Long Hair has undergone shifts in his political stance over the years, from Maoist, to Trotskyist, to activist democrat, but underpinning it has always been a distrust of authority that some would call healthy, and that others do call pathological.

It’s no coincidence that the revolutionaries Leung most admires, such as Trotsky and Che Guevara, are revolutionaries who have failed. Power always has the potential to corrupt:

“They all failed. The paradox of the revolutionary hero is that when Communists succeed, they rewrite history. And then it’s all fake … Actually, there should be genuine democracy to do the checks and balances. You cannot rely on the leaders.”

There are some also hints in the conversation that some of the distrust of authority may also relate back even further than his political awakening.

“Since my mama needed to work as an amah, I was sent to a family of her relatives, and the family was big. They had seven children, so I became the black sheep. I got all the blame. That’s why I like to read a lot, because I think reading is a very, very silent world. Nobody bothers you. You betray the book, the book cannot betray you.”