Socialism in Hong Kong
Following the Russian October Revolution led by the Bolsheviks in 1917, a number of Chinese intellectuals emerged from the May Fourth Movement, which saw communism as the solution to rescue China from its present plight.
[5] Having received organisational and financial support from Sun Yat-sen's left-leaning Kuomintang government in Guangzhou, the Chinese Seamen's Union led the Hong Kong strikers to victory.
The Kuomintang gave funds to the Communists, who then in turn organised the strike on 18 June, which began with the walkout of over 80 percent of the senior students from the Queen's College.
[6] The strike began to fall apart after Sun Yat-sen died in March 1925 and Liao Zhongkai, a left-wing leader within the Kuomintang, was assassinated in August.
Despite facing pressure from the colonial government, Ho Chi Minh managed to found the Indochinese Communist Party in Hong Kong in February 1930 before he was arrested by the British authorities in June.
[7] During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Communist Party set up the Office of the Eighth Route Army which engaged works for United front in Hong Kong and raising funds disguised as the Yue Hwa Company.
The Chinese Seamen's Union also organised a resistance movement by recruiting volunteers to cross over to Guangdong and wage a guerrilla war behind Japanese lines led by Zeng Sheng.
The guerrillas took control of Tai Po and Yuen Long and all other market towns in the New Territories as well as outlying islands, until the British forces arrived on 30 August 1945 and accepted the formal surrender of the Japanese Empire.
[7] The agreement between the Hong Kong-Kowloon Independence Brigade and the British was reached, as the Communists would be allowed to set up a liaison office, and its members would be guaranteed freedom of travel and publication as long as they refrained from carrying out "unlawful" activities.
A huge crowd organised by the local communist party gathered around Jordan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, with the goal of meeting with a delegation from Guangzhou to talk with the victims of the fire disaster at the Shek Kip Mei squatter area.
The pro-Communist Ta Kung Pao was banned from publication for six months after it picked up the story and reprinted an editorial from the People's Daily, which denounced the colonial government and its repressive actions.
The association became one of the three pillars of the pro-Communist faction, next to the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (HKFTU) and the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce (CGCC).
[10][11] The Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (HKFTU), which was established in 1948, has functioned as "friendly societies" based in industry and craft-based fraternities, and provided benefits and other supplementary aids to the veteran members who was under threat of unemployment and low wages during the 1950s and 1960s.
Hundreds of supporters from various leftist organisations demonstrated outside the Government House, chanting communist and socialist slogans and wielding placards with quotes from the Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong in their left hands.
The leftists retaliated by planting bombs throughout the city which began to randomly detonate and seriously disrupted the daily life of ordinary people, erroneously killing several pedestrians, which sharply turned public opinion against the rioters.
[16][17] After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, China underwent a period of radical economic liberalisation, which the Communist Party later labelled as "socialism with Chinese characteristics".
[18] To counter the growing influence of liberalism, the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (HKFTU), which was the largest grassroots organisation in the traditional pro-Communist bloc, assumed a vanguard role to resist the pre-1997 democratisation.
It joined hands with the conservative pro-business elites to oppose the direct Legislative Council election of 1988, using the slogan: "Hong Kong workers want meal tickets, not electoral ballots.
The HKFTU's devotion to Beijing and its collaboration with the conservative business interests of Hong Kong was criticised and challenged by several leftist union members.
[13] The number of eligible voters in the Labour functional constituency was reduced from 2,001 qualified union officials in 1995 to only 361 unionists on a one-vote-per-union basis for the first post-handover elections in 1998.
They harshly condemned the bloody crackdown by the CCP regime on the morning of 4 June, which led to a longterm rupture of relations between Beijing and the majority of the pro-democratic camp.
During the Democratic Party's leadership election, the Young Turks nominated Lau Chin-shek, the General Secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), to run for the position of Vice-Chairman against Anthony Cheung.
After failing to exert sufficient influence upon the party, the Young Turks formed another political group called the Social Democratic Forum, and later defected to the more radical Frontier.
On 24 January 2011, two of the three legislators of the party, Wong Yuk-man and Albert Chan, quit the LSD along with many of the League's leading figures, citing disagreement with leader Andrew To and his faction as their reasons for their departure.
Wong and Chan formed the People Power with other defected members and radical groups which left the League only one seat in the legislature, occupied by Leung Kwok-hung.
In the 2016 Legislative Council election the League formed an electoral alliance with the People Power movement to boost the chance of their candidates, after witnessing the rise of localism in Hong Kong.
In 2011, four incumbent legislators, Lee Cheuk-yan of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), Cyd Ho of the Civic Act-up and Cheung Kwok-che of the Hong Kong Social Workers General Union (HKSWGU), co-founded the Labour Party, whose core issues were labour rights, new immigrants, ethnic minorities and environmentalism, and the party has run in the 2012 Legislative Council election.
