The vast presence of tankies on social media, a key medium for Hong Kong protesters, could also help explain why so many pro-democracy Hong Kongers had shown
steadfast support for former United States President Donald Trump – because they associate the left-wing with tankies.
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“Basically, it’s very hurtful, okay,” said Moot. “I don’t want to make it sound like: ‘Oh, my feelings are hurt.’ But it’s quite invalidating, actually, when you are on the short end of the stick. When you have all these projectiles pointed at you from cops, when you have laws that restrict your freedoms.”
“So to have these people — sitting comfortably in their chairs overseas, in their own free countries — tell us, the ones who are facing this oppression, that our cause is invalid, and sometimes even that we should be shot and killed — it’s not a very good thing to be saying.”
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Sophie Mak, a pro-democracy activist and student who does work digitally monitoring human rights at the Human Rights Hub at University of Hong Kong, has, many times over, gotten caught in fights with tankies online who criticize her work as a smear campaign against China. She told The Diplomat that tankies often pose an obstacle when promoting human rights. They attack and refute even the most well-sourced claims of China’s human rights abuses — something she has had to deal with in her own work.
One accusation often thrown at pro-democracy activists that makes her particularly angry is when critics dismiss pro-democracy movements in Asia as products of U.S. covert operations to overthrow rising regimes, she said.
“Tankies like to say that they refuse to believe that these protesters can mobilize democracy movements on their own based on nonsensical reasons, like how their protest slogans are in English,” she said, in reference to some who had accused the anti-coup protests in Myanmar of being orchestrated by the United States because some protesters brought protest signs written in English. Critics denounced these accusations as patronizing and Orientalist because they insinuated that the average Burmese person would not be able to write in English.
“At best, it’s ignorance. At worst, it’s willful distortion. They live in their own fantasies and irresponsibly spout their ideology to the detriment of others and to basic humanity,” said Mak. “They think that every world issue has to do with the United States and believe that attempts in regime-change or protests are run by the U.S. government. So, in that way, [the tankies] believe they’re acting to ‘challenge imperialism,’ completely disregarding the irony behind their actions.”
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“Institutionally, they have no influence,” said Jeffrey Ngo, a Georgetown Ph.D. student, self-described “activist historian,” and pro-democracy activist from Hong Kong who is the former chief researcher for Demosisto. “But their presence on social media can sometimes shift the conversation in directions that are unpleasant to people who are actually fighting for democracy.”
Ngo doesn’t engage in debate with tankies, but often highlights tankie takes in order to criticize them on his social media.
The most pressing concern, in his view, is that tankies often distort the premise of debates around human rights in greater China by disputing well-documented claims, taking the discussion in less constructive directions. Another important aspect, he said, is the struggle over defining what it means to be a leftist: to support or to go against these regimes. If the Marxist-Leninist segment of the far-left manages to secure a monopoly on what it means to be leftists, that would make it much harder for non-tankie left-wingers to promote their cause. That’s significant because many of the people who stand up to tankies consider themselves leftists.
It has even reached a point where some Hong Kongers accuse people like Ngo — who as a member of Demosisto and a spokesperson for democracy in Hong Kong has been admired as a champion of the protest movement — of being tankies because of their left-wing views.
