Editor’s note: In the summer of 1986, Hong Kong witnessed a groundbreaking protest that combined global and local mobilisation\u2014the movement against the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant. With over one million signatures in support and 116 groups forming a cross-sector alliance encompassing trade unions, neighbourhood groups, environmental organisations, and district councils, this society-wide movement was unprecedented in scale. Yet, despite its momentum, the political demands of the protest ultimately fell short, and the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant was completed as planned. As a result, the anti-Daya Bay movement has been historically labelled a \u201cfailure\u201d and has gradually faded from collective memory and Hong Kong’s historical narrative.<\/p>\n\n
Marcus Yee, currently a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University, recently published an article in the Journal of Asian Studies<\/em> titled \u201cMobilizing Hong Kong: Nuclear Anxiety and Mass Protest against the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant (1979\u20131986).\u201d In this article, Yee recontextualises and reinterprets the significance of this environmental movement. Drawing on official archives, corporate records, newspaper reports, and oral histories, Yee situates the local anti-nuclear campaign within the broader framework of global environmental history and the history of science. He illustrates how this nuclear energy project, entangled with multinational interests and geopolitical considerations, saw Hong Kong\u2019s activists and political figures navigating transnational networks of expertise in nuclear science, negotiating answers to the concerns of governance and public anxiety.<\/p>\n\n The global spatiality of nuclear controversy and the antinuclear movement lead us to disassemble what we mean when we refer to \u201cHong Kong,\u201d referring not just to a geographical territory but also a global topology of porous borders.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n More importantly, Yee offers a new perspective on revisiting this \u201cfailed\u201d movement. On the surface, the anti-nuclear campaign indeed failed to prevent the construction of the power plant. However, it revealed how the social foundations for mass mobilisation were being laid in Hong Kong. During this period, anti-nuclear activists collaborated closely with trade unions and the working class, while central leadership worked in tandem with grassroots anti-nuclear neighbourhood organisations and district councils. A diversity of mobilisation scales, tactics, and alliance-building strategies flourished. Although the movement did not achieve its immediate goals, its practices during this period enabled districts and district councils to shed their original colonial intention as instruments of micropolitical control on the kaifong <\/em>level, carving out a tangible space in Hong Kong\u2019s electoral history.<\/p>\n\n This so-called \u201cfailure\u201d was generative: activists channelled disappointment and experience into the nascent democracy movement.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n What motivated you to explore the anti-Daya Bay movement, and how does it situate within the broader context of Hong Kong\u2019s political, environmental, and social history?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The contingent explanation is that the article was first written as a final project for Frank Dik\u00f6tter\u2019s class based on his most recent book, China After Mao<\/em>. Ingeniously, the class was a historical methods class for undergraduate students, where we were encouraged to feel what it is like to be in an actual archive. In Hong Kong\u2019s Public Records Office, I found an abundance of records on the antinuclear movement\u2014including weekly reports written by colonial district officers, many of which have not been analysed within the already sparse secondary literature on the movement. One archive led to another. Interlocutors were mostly forthcoming in sharing their memories. The article was an exercise in practicing history from the bottom-up, beginning with the sources.<\/p>\n\n I had two other intellectual motivations. First, being trained in history and Earth systems science at the University of Hong Kong, I wanted to write an environmental history of Hong Kong that brought the two disciplines together. Influenced by the work of Timothy Choy and Ackbar Abbas, I wanted to employ environment, nature, and landscapes as prisms to unsettle an ossified notion of \u201cHong Kong.\u201d[1]<\/a> The antinuclear movement\u2019s archives lent themselves to this purpose. The other reason was my witnessing of the 2019 Hong Kong protests which fundamentally transformed my intellectual and existential formation, growing up in Singapore. I studied very little history in high school, opting instead for anthropology, but my being alongside the protests made real for me the condition of living in what Ann Laura Stoler calls, imperial debris.<\/em>[2]<\/a><\/p>\n\n Your article positions the anti-Daya Bay movement as a pivotal moment that catalysed Hong Kong\u2019s democracy movement. What do you see as the enduring legacy of this movement, both for Hong Kong and for the global environmental movement?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The antinuclear movement has largely been forgotten within both Hong Kong\u2019s political and environmental histories\u2014although not for the activists and environmentalists who have been organising since the 1970s. Part of this forgetting, I argue in my article, is due to the perceived failure of the movement. When contracts for the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant were signed in September 1986, what was essentially a short-lived, five-month-long campaign fizzled out. However, this so-called \u201cfailure\u201d was generative: activists channelled disappointment and experience into the nascent democracy movement.<\/p>\n\n This re-reading of \u201cfailure\u201d within Hong Kong historiography implicitly stems from a playful reading of \u201cfailure\u201d within queer theory, in Jack Halberstam\u2019s elaboration of \u201closing\u201d as an imaginative and antidisciplinary modality or Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s hopeful union of queer temporalities, virtuosity, and failure.[3]<\/a> Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s reading of J.L. Austin\u2019s speech acts is particularly enduring for me: all felicitous speech is doomed to fail or infelicity, but \u201ceventual disappointment of hope is not a reason to forsake it as a critical thought process, in the same way that even though we can know in advance that felicity of language ultimately falters, it is nonetheless essential.\u201d[4]<\/a> To be blunt, there\u2019s a lot of intellectual and cultural capital to be gained from being a hater, there\u2019s less to be gained from imagining, building, and cooperating. Still, we must risk the latter.<\/p>\n\n Mu\u00f1oz again: \u201cWe must vacate the here and now for the then and there.\u201d This has everything to do with Hong Kong historiography. The mobilisation efforts of antinuclear activists embodied this utopian futurity. They were striving for a nonnuclear future that was simultaneously a future autonomous from British and PRC interests, and we see apparitions of these aspirations in the subsequent democracy movement even as the antinuclear movement dissolved. Comparatively, political elites involved in nuclear power negotiations\u2014Margaret Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, and Lawrence Kadoorie were committed to entrenching their hegemonic visions of the here and now. Thatcher thought nuclear collaboration could be played to Britain\u2019s advantage for keeping Hong Kong under continued colonial rule after 1997; Kadoorie wanted to preserve his vision of Hong Kong as a \u201cthree-legged stool\u201d balancing between British, Chinese, and Hong Kong business interests, and Deng saw nuclear energy as a means to bring Hong Kong closer into mainland China\u2019s orbit after 1984.<\/p>\n\n If I could elaborate with Mu\u00f1oz, the antinuclear movement recasts Hong Kong as an unsettled spatiality, highlighting the thereness <\/em>of \u201cthen and there.\u201d My article could be read in the convex mirror as a global history of Chernobyl meltdown of April 1986 as much as a global history of Hong Kong\u2019s antinuclear movement. Notwithstanding the British, PRC, Hong Kong, French and American interests involved in the nuclear power project, activists and politicians in Hong Kong travelled around the world to find answers to raucous scientific controversy surrounding nuclear safety back home. The global spatiality of nuclear controversy and the antinuclear movement leads us to disassemble what we mean when we refer to \u201cHong Kong,\u201d referring not just to a geographical territory but also a global topology of porous borders, as scholars such as Helen Siu, Elizabeth Sinn, John M. Carroll, John D. Wong, Denise Ho, and Philip Thai have consistently shown. Beyond a global scale, we see the district scale starting to gain momentum at this time, foiling their original colonial intention as instruments of micropolitical control on the kaifong <\/em>level. Districts and District Councils, as we know, would go on to become salient to Hong Kong\u2019s electoral history. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n Beyond a reading of this history as global environmental history, I venture to say that Hong Kong\u2019s antinuclear movement is also a global history of science that relates to a broader question of the possibility and potentiality of \u201cHong Kong science,\u201d in my reading of Tim Choy\u2019s ethnography of environmentalism in Hong Kong. We see in my article that all parties appealed to scientific modernity to make claims on nuclear safety. Pastor Fung Chi-wood was selected to lead the Joint Conference for the Shelving of Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant (JOCNE) due to his training in physics at HKU and his political moderation. Hong Kong science here emerges as a counterhegemonic science. This is not simply a dualistic formation that pits Hong Kong\u2019s scientific modernity against the PRC\u2019s, but one that emerged out of intercalating \u201cecologies of comparison,\u201d as Hong Kong activists grappled with the vagaries of nuclear expertise across the world.<\/p>\n\n Failure can be historiographically blinding and misleading, yet the same failure carries within it a kernel of Blochian hope. Historical research affords us to dwell on the arrhythmic temporalities and geographies of \u201cfailure.\u201d To step back and consider the lines of flight in Hong Kong political history, the antinuclear movement demonstrates how Gramsci\u2019s dialectic of a \u201cwar of manoeuvre\u201d and \u201cwar of position\u201d flits quickly between each other, often in contingent and unexpected ways. Recall that the antinuclear movement \u201cfailed\u201d not once, but twice\u2014this has not stopped the inexorable potential for mobilisation.<\/p>\n\n What impact do you hope this article will have, both in academic discourse and in raising public awareness about the intersection of environmental issues and grassroots political mobilisation?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n In the course of my research, I was impressed by the coalitional tactics employed by antinuclear activists. Single-issue activism emerged only very recently, with the growing institutionalisation of the democracy movement and the Hong Kong environmental movement\u2019s turn towards \u201clifestyle\u201d concerns in the 1990s. After presenting this article in a conference connecting Hong Kong and Shenzhen studies, organised by Denise Ho, historian Gina Tam provided the insight (and I paraphrase) that this antinuclear history demonstrates how the social infrastructure of mass mobilisation emerged in Hong Kong. Indeed from an early stage, antinuclear activists worked closely with unions and the working class, resulting in a coalition of 116 groups at its peak. Centralised command operated alongside the flowering of organising from kaifong <\/em>antinuclear organisations and District Councils. The antinuclear movement was cross-coalitional, tactically multipronged, and multiscalar.<\/p>\n\n This history offers a topology for crossing the siloes of sociopolitical issues, histories, and geographies, even if temporarily. One of the most pressing environmental issues of our time, the climate crisis, is a wicked problem that requires a cross-coalitional and tactical imagination along a similar vein. In the face of climate crisis, this history demonstrates the potentiality for moving beyond the sole remit of climate activism and seeing this planetary crisis as a simultaneous crisis encompassing Big Tech, Gaza, Hong Kong politics, and other pressing concerns. This is a pluripotency of mass mobilization that we must recover.<\/p>\n\n I am humbled to be able to make this small contribution to what Jeffrey Wasserstrom calls, \u201cthe very first true boom in Hong Kong studies.\u201d[5]<\/a> This surge in Hong Kong history is a necessary existential anchor, but I wonder too, and this is a question I often ask myself, how to observe, or better yet, operationalise the illuminations of hope embedded in an unresolved and flickering history, in an expanded conception of \u201cHong Kong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n [1]<\/a> Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Timothy Choy, Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).<\/p>\n\n [2]<\/a> Ann Laura Stoler, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).<\/p>\n\n [3]<\/a> Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity<\/em> (New York: New York University Press, 2019).<\/p>\n\n [4]<\/a> Mu\u00f1oz, Cruising Utopia<\/em>, 10\u201311.<\/p>\n\n\n
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