about

The Bauhinia Project was founded in 2019 to bring Hong Kong’s struggles to the stage of transnational activism through lyric and language. The Bauhinia Project has been featured on KPFA Radio’s APEX Express and on KTSF Television. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we have collaborated with Moe’s Books, the Center for Political Education, the Chinese Progressive Association, the Art Lab at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, the Oakland Public Library system, and student groups at Berkeley Law. We have also collaborated with organizers and exhibited in New York, Canada, and Germany.

mission statement

Hong Kong was colonized twice: first in a transfer of sovereignty to Britain in 1842, and then in another transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. In neither case was Hong Kong’s people at the bargaining table. But they were given a ridiculous token: fifty years of promised autonomy, while awaiting assimilation into the PRC’s totalitarian single-party state in 2047. We are not halfway through that period, and have already seen the successive stripping away of Hong Kong people’s liberties, resources, language, and identity.

In the summer of 2019, Hong Kong’s puppet leader proposed an extradition bill that abruptly ended any illusion of Hong Kong’s political or legal autonomy. The bill would have allowed for criminal suspects in Hong Kong to be shipped across the border and subjected to the PRC’s suspect legal system. Around the same time, the Swedish Supreme Court issued a ruling refusing to extradite a Chinese citizen to the PRC; because there were insufficient guarantees that the citizen would be afforded a fair trial, a right to an efficient defense, or protection against torture or other inhumane treatment, the Court found that extradition would thus violate the European Convention of Human Rights. In Hong Kong, the people rose in mass resistance to the bill in protests that have since exposed the illegitimacy of the city’s governance and despotic use of force.

The Bauhinia Project was founded by an anonymous Hong Kong poet in Berkeley, CA, who started distributing flash postcard-poems when it became clear that international media outlets were unable to grasp the complexities of the protests. Some poems were sent anonymously from the streets of Hong Kong to the Bauhinia Project’s encrypted email address, then translated into English, condensed into a few lines, and hand-made into postcards; others were initially collected as “found poems” from protest materials and testimonials. Cognizant of the misunderstanding and misinformation abroad, the Bauhinia Project sought not to provide more information or more politics, but rather to provide understanding, to provide emotional content. The gist of the Bauhinia Project is to release the power of the word, overcoming differences in language and culture to connect the soul of an isolated Cantonese-speaking people to the soul of the world.

For the Winter 2019 issue of The Georgia Review, we wrote: “We are suspicious when the arts consume social action, archiving or capitalizing that action while it remains ongoing and urgent. For the Bauhinia Project, art is an ordinary insight. Our work is only to underscore the elemental. We do not believe that Hong Kong is merely a flash in the news, or another notch on the gun of Western democratization. We believe it is no coincidence that, when Hongkongers rose against the beginning of a police state in 2014, people in Ferguson and Bangkok were also rising against the long arm of their respective states. We believe that families in Kashmir and Palestine are being silenced by one force that is masked by different faces and insignia. We believe that when the elders in Hawai‘i taught us to hold our hands up in a triangle and said, ‘You are all Mauna Kea,’ we were learning about much more than the politics of a science project. . . . All of this is one struggle. Real solidarity will demand that we see each other clearly through the smoke.”