Variations of Canadian External Support for Pro-democracy Movements in Hong Kong

• In Event: Emerging Scholars Lightning Round: Graduate Student Research: Contemporary Issues in (Non)Democratic Governance

Abstract

What factor affects democracies to support foreign pro-democracy movements? The answer is critical for protestors in autocracies as they know that increasing domestic pressure is less likely to force the government to concede due to weaker institutional constraints. Therefore, attracting external support is an alternative strategy. Inviting foreign countries to exert pressure enables protestors to increase their voice, and arousing foreign countries' sympathy to relax the immigration policies lowers the exit cost by ensuring protestors’ safety.

To understand what factors are more likely to facilitate external democratic support for pro-democracy movements, this paper uses Canadian Members of Parliament (MP)’s support of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movements in 2019 as a case study as a positive case. Huge protests were staged in Hong Kong after the local government introduced a bill that allows the extradition of Hong Kong citizens and foreigners who reside in Hong Kong to China. As crackdowns by the authorities became increasingly frequent, it made Canadian politicians concerned about the rights of Hong Kong citizens, particularly 300,000 Hong Kong Canadians residing in the city. Ultimately, after the Chinese government introduced a draconian national security law to prosecute pro-democracy activists and effectively outlaw all organizations and expressions of political dissent in June 2020, the Canadian government introduced a special immigration program for Hong Kong students, who formed the bulk of the protestors, in November 2020 to allow them to move to Canada and ultimately acquire Canadian citizenship legally. While support for the pro-democracy movement and immigration program is universal among all parties along the left-right Canadian political spectrum, there are variations among the individual MPs’ vocal support on these issues. This paper aims to find these patterns of variations and provide plausible explanations.

By analyzing extracted speeches by dictionary-based text analysis from Hansard and Committee Evidence of the House of Commons from 2015 to 2023, the temporal trend shows apart from the discussion of the special immigration program, human rights violations due to the introduction of national security law led to an increasing number of speeches, while protests were ineffective. Moreover, negative binomial regression results show that the effect of the percentage of Cantonese speakers, the first language of Hong Kong immigrants, at the federal constituency level, is only statistically significant in the legislative term between 2019 to 2021, when the topic of Hong Kong pro-democracy movement was most heatedly debated, suggesting that the frequency of foreign politicians’ vocal support of movement depends on the geographical variations of the immigrant community.

The research findings indicate there is a potential link between formal law change to erode human rights and attracting external foreign support. Similarly, protestors should target foreign politicians who represent areas that have sizable immigrant communities, as they face stronger pressure from their electorate to voice out.

Author

• Kelvin Chun-Man Chan, University of Texas at Dallas