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A boycott is an organized campaign to deprive a business of revenue in an attempt to influence how the business operates. As people in the US recently learned (or were reminded of) during the NBA strike in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a boycott is different from a strike, which is a refusal to job by employees as a strategy to pressure employers to comply with certain demands Boycotts and strikes are both important forms of organized political action. So what does all this have to do with Mulan, Disney’s new live adaptation of the Chinese legend? #BoycottMulan is an online campaign to, well, boycott Mulan. It started as a response to comments from social media. Mulan Star Liu Yifei stood in support of the Hong Kong police in their (sometimes violent) crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, and it has grown into something even bigger.
Hong Kong protests
Tensions between pro-democracy activists and the Beijing-backed Hong Kong police have been high since June 2019, when the Hong Kong government proposed an extradition agreement that would have allowed those from Hong Kong to be sent to China. continental to stand trial. Thousands of Hong Kong residents took to the streets in protest, concerned that such an extradition agreement would allow the Chinese government to circumvent Hong Kong’s independent legal system on its own (which has no judicial independence from the Communist Party), and as an invasion. of the semi-autonomy that Hong Kong has. The extradition proposal has since been dropped, but in April 2020, the Hong Kong police arrested many high-profile pro-democracy activists and on June 30, the Hong Kong government passed a law of national security which, as the New York Times put it, “instantly altered the lives and freedoms of Hong Kong residents, criminalizing words and images that just hours earlier had legally protected free speech.” In the wake of this, some in Hong Kong are considering leaving home for good.
The protests against the proposed extradition treaty and national security law are part of a much larger ongoing fight that pro-democracy activists have been waging since Hong Kong became a semi-autonomous region in China in 1997 after 99 years as a colony under British rule. rule. Many in Hong Kong want a democratic and independent Hong Kong free from the rule of mainland China or, at the very least, they wanted the preservation of existing rights and freedoms Hong Kong residents had prior to the implementation of the recent national security law. The passage of the law, according to the NYT, has already led to companies replacing pro-democracy messages with Communist Party propaganda posters, changing textbooks to avoid the appearance of criticizing the Chinese government, and / or remove mention of Tiananmen Square from 1989. crackdown on demonstrators for democracy, removal of books from libraries and 20 arrests.
What does it mean that Hong Kong is semi-autonomous? Since 1997, Hong Kong has been a “Special Administrative Region” of the People’s Republic of China, with a “one country, two systems” agreement that grants Hong Kong residents the right to vote as well as freedom of expression. , press and assembly. The agreement legally grants Hong Kong residents additional freedoms to those found in mainland China, where the legal system is often used to punish those who speak out against the state. (In theory, that shouldn’t happen in Hong Kong, although the new national security law actively threatens this freedom.) This “one country, two systems” agreement will be in effect for 50 years, until 2047, at which time Hong Kong will become part of China entirely.
