Ethnocratic localism and affective politics:unmasking right-wing imaginaries in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movements

Within the dominant framing of geopolitics as a democratic-authoritarian binary, scholarship on anti-authoritarian movements in non-democratic contexts such as Hong Kong often adopts familiar tropes. These include depictions of progressiveness, pro-civicness, and a bottom-up yearning for egalitarian freedom. Hong Kong, in particular, is positioned as a democratic West-loving bulwark against authoritarian China. This paper explores how, aside from groups that use notions of democracy in good-faith, these liberal tropes form a deliberate communicative strategy that subsumes racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic discourses. Using historical and sociological scholarship, I trace how anti-Chinese and colonially nostalgic worldviews are woven into certain local Hong Kong subjectivities, against the backdrop of its historical relationships with the Chinese state and Britain. I analyse the (re)fashioning of right-wing ideas within ethnocratic localism during and after the 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement (Anti-ELAB). Embedded within ethnocratic sentiments are linkages to global reactionary discourses, denouncing a West weakened by progressive politics. Using audiovisual analytic methods, this paper examines textual examples from forum threads, including memes, video clips and discussions, highlighting the affective use of indirect violence. This paper concludes by demonstrating how intra-movement solidarity is weaponised by right-wing facets to silence internal dissent, reinforcing what proves to be an illusory democratic-authoritarian dichotomy.