SPOILER ALERT: You will not find the definitive answer to the question above in what follows. It’s a genuine question. If anyone knows, please tell me!

At the end of this post are two longish updates.

On September 8, 2019, 250,000 people marched to the United States consulate in Hong Kong to call on the US to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The huge numbers flooded all of the surrounding streets.1 I remember standing on a podium high above Garden Road, leading up to the consulate, and looking down on a street absolutely packed with American flags as far as you could see. Where did they all come from? I wondered. This was a new front in the freedom struggle: you could say it was the people of Hong Kong jump-starting their own foreign policy.2

A little over a month later, on October 14, 130,000 rallied at Chater Garden, just down the street from the consulate, to again call on the US to pass the HKHRDA. That was in the evening. Again, American flags as far as you could see. The CCP must be so pissed, I thought: It has so radically misgoverned this place that its citizens feel more affinity with the US, half a world away, than they do with China. Where else in the world do you see something like that, a people who would much rather identify with a distant land than with the one that they have been told is their own?

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was signed into law on November 27. The next evening, of November 28, 100,000 gathered in Edinburgh Place to hold a rally of “Thanksgiving” to the US (the 28th happened to be American Thanksgiving that year). The protests were far from subsiding and Hong Kong was in crisis: the police siege of PolyU, which started November 17, was still going on across the harbor.

The Thanksgiving gathering featured one of my favorite versions of “Glory to Hong Kong,” sung by Denise Ho, who over the years has gone from being, in my eyes, just another Cantopop singer who happened to be pro-democracy to a both an icon of the Hong Kong struggle in her strength and perseverance and a consummate artist of depth and subtlety. Her rendition that night reminded that whatever Hong Kongers think of the US and Trump, their first allegiance is always to Hong Kong.

It was understandable that Hong Kongers lobbied the US to take concrete action to support the freedom struggle and then, when it did, expressed gratitude. After all, Hong Kong is small and powerless, while China is huge and the CCP a force of totalitarian power. Hong Kongers saw we needed the support of the democratic world as a counter-balance. To call for such support was risky: one of the tropes of CCP propaganda was to blame everything on Western imperialists intent on harming China. Indeed, those American flags were like a red rag to a bull.

I worried that Hong Kongers were a bit naive, placing too much faith in the US, a country that like all others would make decisions strictly in terms of its own perceived national interest. It wasn’t going to do anything simply for the sake of helping Hong Kongers. In fact, if anything, the US regarded Hong Kong as a relatively small matter within the context of its overall relationship with China.

At the same time, it was just starting to dawn on me—all too slowly, and here I was the one who was naive—that it wasn’t just the US as a country that Hong Kongers were grateful to, but also the president at the time, who happened to be the very same person who is president now. This I found, and still find, to be highly problematic.

To put it another way, it is perfectly understandable that Hong Kongers would identify with the US, as the US has the very same things Hong Kongers were fighting for: freedom an democracy. Hong Kongers wanted Hong Kong to be more like the US and less like China, and they admired the US for what it has and what it represents.

But what does it mean if some Hong Kongers on the one hand identify with the US while on the other admire the anti-democratic Trump, who has actually tried to take from the US what Hong Kongers wanted in Hong Kong (ie, free and fair elections) and currently threatens to attempt to stay in power despite the Constitution forbidding a third term? What does that say about Hong Kongers? How to explain the seeming contradiction?

It wasn’t just older men to whom Trump appealed. Throughout those many long months of mass protests in 2019, I’d gotten to know quite a few of the young frontline protesters well, and I was surprised that several of them had a positive view of Trump.

From where I stood, it was one thing to regard the US as an ally and entirely another to see Trump as a friend of freedom. The passage of the bipartisan Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was due mostly to members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans—some of whom had worked for years to get the bill passed—, along with some pro-Hong Kong people in the administration. Trump himself couldn’t have cared less about Hong Kong. He never had a supportive word to say for the Hong Kongers fighting the regime. Behind the scenes, it was said that he pretty much had to be persuaded by his advisors to sign the HKHRDA into law, having been told that Congress had the votes to over-ride a veto. It was further rumored that, in trade negotiations, Trump had promised Xi Jinping to remain silent on Hong Kong. One of the few statements you can find that he made about the enormous, months-long Hong Kong protests is this tweet: “I have ZERO doubt that if President Xi wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it.” What, did he think, was “the problem?” And what would be the solution? There was no expression of support for the protesters.

Not only that, but he frequently expressed admiration for Xi Jinping. In the above tweet, he called him “a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a ‘tough business.’” On another occasion, he said Xi was “a very good friend of mine” and “smart, brilliant, everything perfect.” When Xi abolished term limits, signalling he intended to rule indefinitely, Trump’s response was, "He's now president for life, president for life. And he's great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday." And it wasn’t just Xi he liked; he’d said similar things about Putin.

How could someone like that, I wondered, possibly appeal to Hong Kongers?

When Trump started a so-called “trade war” with China in 2018, some Hong Kongers as well as some Chinese dissidents thought, Finally, someone who’ll get tough on China. They’d been calling on the West to do so forever. For them, he was a contrast to previous presidents and Western leaders who were soft on China. More generally, they noted how a more hardline position on China was becoming the reigning paradigm in Washington, DC, and this after decades of what I call “engagement-think”—just trade with China and it will become wealthier and more liberal and everything will be great. The Hong Kongers who looked more favorably on Trump gave him credit for the political establishment’s general shift in attitude.

I agreed with these Hong Kongers and Chinese dissidents that US policy on China had been far too in hock to business and trade interests to the detriment of just about everything else, from national security to human rights to labor and the environment, and that it had been based on the self-interested fairy tale the US business and political leaders told themselves that somehow an increasingly prosperous China would become a friendlier China. That showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the CCP, whether the ignorance was willful or genuine.

But that Trump was somehow going to bring about a harder line on China let alone stand up for freedom and democracy was, to me, utterly preposterous, and the idea showed just as great a misunderstanding of US politics as the “engagement” people in the US had shown of China for decades. If anything, Trump wanted to be more like Xi, and just about everything he’s done since then bears that out.

I wondered why these Hong Kongers and Chinese dissidents didn’t see that far from being a champion of freedom and democracy, Trump was an authoritarian threat. I guess you could say they were no more blind than American voters, especially American voters of 2024 who had already seen him try to overturn a free and fair election and goad his supporters to trash the Capitol and yet went right ahead and elected America’s very own strongman. Some Hong Kongers could see that Trump didn’t have much if any commitment to democracy itself but they thought his role as disrupter might help to destabilize the CCP. (And those who still like Trump would see his recent 150-percent tariffs on products from China as vindication, conveniently overlooking all the ways Trump is undermining the US and making it more authoritarian. For more on this, see below.)

But even if you looked at things in these strictly Macchiavellian terms, I couldn’t quite get what they thought Trump would do for Hong Kong, even indirectly. I just found it hard to get my head around the idea that people fighting for freedom and democracy couldn’t see who their true allies and adversaries were. I had an almost Manichean view of the world as divided between democrats and authoritarians: it was in our interest to stand side by side with the democrats, to call on them for support when we needed it, and to support them in turn. It was as simple as that. But not everyone had such a cosmopolitan or universalist way of looking at things.

It didn’t help that prominent and influential people in the pro-democracy movement, first and foremost then-Apple Daily owner and current political prisoner Jimmy Lai, were outspoken in their enthusiasm for Trump. I respect Jimmy: he was the only Hong Kong tycoon to throw his weight behind the pro-democracy movement when every other Hong Kong tycoon either supported the CCP or tried to remain as silent and invisible as possible. He stuck his head out when he could have kept it down, when he knew the regime would target him. His commitment was steady, consistent, solid. And he’s been mercilessly persecuted and demonized for that now. In fact, in keeping with its propaganda methods, the CCP has constructed a whole false narrative that portrays Jimmy as the “black hand” behind the movement, manipulating it like a puppet in cahoots with the US. That, essentially, is the fantastic tale prosecutors have told at his trial. He’s in the dock for “collusion with external forces” and names in Trump’s first administration like Pence and Pompeo have come up at his trial. But despite my respect for him, I also think Jimmy had spent relatively little time outside of Hong Kong and Taiwan and didn’t have a very solid understanding of geopolitics. He wouldn’t be the first tycoon to see what he wanted to see in Trump.

It’s strange to think that Jimmy’s become something like the poster boy of the freedom struggle in the eyes of the rest of the world. No other political prisoner is better known outside of Hong Kong. No one else even comes close. This too is a matter of money. Jimmy’s money. It has funded an organization and an international legal team. The Wall Street Journal has been a stalwart supporter of Jimmy while shamelessly ditching one of its own reporters in Hong Kong who stood up for press freedom, which has drastically deteriorated. While I wish Jimmy the very best and will always fight against the gross injustice he’s endured—having Apple Daily stripped from him, being imprisoned for years, perhaps for life—, I find it a bit discouraging that our best known political prisoner is a billionaire Trumpist. Then again, who knows: Jimmy’s views on Trump might have changed in prison. I’ve often wondered what Jimmy would say about January 6. I can’t help but think of the irony: Trump should by all rights be in prison for trying to subvert democracy; instead, it’s Jimmy for fighting for it.

Perhaps some Hong Kongers’ attraction to Trump was an effect of Hong Kong having always in its modern history been a colonized society—first by the UK, then by the CCP—and having been in the orbit and, more recently, under the control of the biggest dictatorship in the world. As other colonized peoples, Hong Kongers have had to work to overcome their own colonial mentality, including the inbuilt expectation that great powers elsewhere will determine our fate. Perhaps some wanted a strongman to “save us.” I had thought of the 2019 mass protests as a significant step in Hong Kongers throwing off their colonial mentality, becoming agents of their own destiny, and fully seeing that only they and no one else could save Hong Kong because Hong Kong was their home and only theirs, but perhaps I was wrong: the residues of the psychological complexes associated with the double-whammy of colonialism and authoritarianism lingered.

My family and I fled Hong Kong and arrived in the US in 2020. At the time, researchers Victoria Hui and Maggie Shum were conducting a survey of the political views of Hong Kongers in the US. It found that Hong Kongers in the US were overwhelmingly supportive of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and wanted tougher US policy toward China. Of Hong Kong American respondents who were registered voters, 55 percent supported Trump while 34 percent preferred Biden. Of course, these voters had to be US citizens, so the result does not necessarily reflect the views of Hong Kongers in Hong Kong or even Hong Kongers in the diaspora more generally, but it is quite striking nonetheless. That poll was taken in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.3 Since then, now nearly five years ago, no other survey of the political attitudes and allegiances of Hong Kongers in the US has been published.

I wonder whether the events of January 6, 2021 changed the views of Hong Kong Trump supporters. To me, even if you had supported Trump prior to his attempt to overturn election results, what he did, culminating in that historic day of infamy, surely had to disqualified him in the eyes of anyone who understood how precious democracy is. To reiterate, it obviously wasn’t a disqualifying action in the eyes of the majority of the American electorate in 2024, but I expect that anyone who has had experience of dealing directly with tyranny, as Hong Kongers have, would recognize its warning signs and not take them as lightly as it appears Americans have. (This is why I always appreciate the voice of Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist who lived under Putin for years.)

Since 2019, I’ve managed to stay in contact with many of the young frontliners I was on the streets with during the mass protests, though we have all gone our separate ways, and like Hong Kongers in general, find ourselves scattered all over the world. Most of the young frontliners I’m in touch with now are in Taiwan and the United Kingdom. Life has not been easy for them. Exile has not been easy for them. They have no savings and few if any connections in their new home countries. Finding education and employment and some way to fit in to their new society—all of it has been hard.

Hong Kongers in general can be somewhat reserved if not inscrutable, reluctant to share their thoughts. As a rule, they are not loudmouths, not the sorts who talk because they like to hear the sound of their own voices. But these young frontliners have always been ready and willing to express their views, usually have strong political opinions, and enthusiastically debate with me. I definitely know what they think.

Through 2020, quite a few of them retained much enthusiasm for Trump and Republicans in general. Among other things, they saw Republicans as pro-gun-rights, and they thought guns were what Hong Kongers needed to free themselves from the CCP—one of the many debates we had. But for them, January 6 was a defining moment. They had nothing but scorn for the people who stormed the Capitol, seeing them as wishing to overthrow democracy. And they were also critical of Trump’s role in this. They thought Trump had the right to contest in court any results he regarded as suspect, but saw his refusal to ever accept the results of the election even after he had pursued all legal avenues as unacceptable. Since then, they’ve rarely had a good thing to say about him, and not a single one of them supported his candidacy in 2024 (though they didn’t support Biden or Harris either and would have preferred to see another Republican run).

What about other Hong Kongers? Since Trump returned to office, I’ve asked many from many different backgrounds about this. Almost all of the Hong Kongers I associate with are strongly opposed to Trump and see him as a threat to democracy. So I reached out beyond this circle, and I got virtually the same response from everybody: they don’t know. Most would hardly even hazard a guess; those who did imagined the proportion of Trump supporters has held more or less steady or perhaps somewhat decreased, but they didn’t seem very confident of that.

The lack of a clear view of Hong Kongers’ opinions on Trump is partly because people are not sharing their political opinions in fora where disagreement can be expected. And because the Hong Kong situation has fallen into stasis, with little change and little prospect of improvement in the near term. In such circumstances, the question of which Western leader you support or think would be best for Hong Kong comes to be seen as less pressing. And because Hong Kongers’ hope that anyone else might do something decisive for Hong Kong has been disappointed: they’ve come to see that what the world can or will do for freedom in Hong Kong is quite limited.

The lack of knowledge of each other’s political views reflects the general malaise of Hong Kongers regarding our current “stuck” political situation and the diaspora’s lack of political development. This in turn has to do with the generally downbeat sentiment globally when it comes to the struggle for freedom and democracy. The overthrows of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh and Assad in Syria in the past year are both very significant, first and foremost for the peoples of those places, but they are also rather isolated instances of successful uprisings. Meanwhile, Trump getting elected again has been enormously demoralizing for those fighting for democracy, freedom and human rights both in the US and around the world.

In some respects, maybe Trumpist Hong Kongers could only express their enthusiasm for Trump as long as they were reassured that, whatever else may happen, the US would continue to be a strong democracy, giving the global struggle for democracy an anchor and point of reference in spite of the many reports of democratic regression in recent years. Without the US, whatever its deficits and failings, as its democratic north star, the future of democracy worldwide looks more uncertain than at any other point in most people’s lifetimes. And that means the grim outlook for Hong Kong has turned even grimmer.

From the point of view of today, Hong Kongers calling on Trump to liberate Hong Kong in 2019 look downright quaint; the most pressing matter now is to liberate the US from Trump.

Coda: Just as I was about to publish this came Trump’s announcement that he was “pausing” so-called “reciprocal” tariffs (a misnomer) on most countries in the world for 90 days, except for China. Tariffs on goods from China have now been raised to 125 percent in total, the latest 50 percent of that in retaliation for China’s retaliation against Trump’s initial “reciprocal” tariffs on China. Trump is little short of a madman who so far in his second term appears to specialize in threats and destabilization. He has made mince meat of the federal government, including gutting its support for freedom in Hong and China. He has threatened to take over the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada, all associated with governments that are long-time allies of the US. He has proposed ethnically cleansing Gaza and building a “riviera of the Middle East” there. He has threatened to abandon Ukraine, a democracy fighting the invasion of a dictatorship. He has placed almost entirely indiscriminate tariffs on goods from most countries in the world, including from countries which have for decades been among the US’s closest trading partners. All of these extreme shifts in US policy have been undertaken in consultation with almost no one except a close circle of like-minded advisers.

But but but…I must admit part of me smiles with glee at the tariffs on China, especially as tariffs on most other countries (except for the 10-percent baseline tariff) are paused. And in this sense, I can understand where the Hong Kong and dissident Chinese supporters of Trump are coming from. On the one hand, this is little more than Trump and Xi posturing as tough guys. By contrast, the Biden administration if anything erred on the side of caution in attempting to maintain stability in its relations with the CCP. This is because it saw that rash actions in one area, such as trade, could have knock-on effects, including unintended ones, in other areas, such as Taiwan. Seen from this angle, Trump’s rash actions are potentially downright dangerous. On the other, the US and other Western countries have been in a very unhealthy relationship with China for decades, allowing the biggest dictatorship in the world to get rich producing a huge percentage of the goods they consume even though there are virtually no labor rights in China and the CCP has been responsible for one human rights catastrophe after another in East Turkestan, Tibet, Hong Kong and China itself, not to mention the fact that China’s gotten away with living by its own rules when it comes to global trade. The fact that Western economies have become so intertwined with the Chinese economy means that Western governments have constantly found themselves hemmed in i their actions in other areas. The process of de-linking/de-coupling from China had already begun, and many countries began to see the serious downsides of economic dependency on a dictatorship after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s current actions, if he follows through on them, would terrifically speed up that process. It definitely should not be done in the blind, impulsive way that Trump is doing it, but it’s something that needs to be done. The Biden administration’s approach to China was “speak about cooperation in areas where we can cooperate and ‘managing’ the relationship while all the while seeking to contain and deter China.” Trump’s is “beat your chest like an orange gorilla and when Xi beats his like Winnie the Pooh on steroids, beat yours harder and bellow louder.” I prefer the Biden approach, with a bit less caution and a bit faster.

April 15, 2025 UPDATE: Below, I cite a survey of Hong Kongers in the US conducted by Victoria Hui and Maggie Shum in 2020 and mention that no survey of Hong Kongers’ views on US politics has appeared since then. Maggie Shum has since informed me of a follow-up survey she conducted in 2024. She stresses “…both surveys recruited respondents via convenience sampling method, thus it is impossible to conclude a particular trend from 2020 to 2024.” In other words, the people surveyed in 2020 may or may not be the same people surveyed in 2024. That said, she reports that in the 2024 survey, 50 percent of respondents supported Kamala Harris, 31 percent supported Trump, and 19 percent said they didn’t know. Breaking that down by voting eligibility, of those who were eligible to vote, 58 percent expressed support for Harris, 26 percent for Trump, and 17 percent said they didn’t know. Among non-citizens, 41 percent supported Harris, 37 percent supported Trump, and 22 percent said “don’t know.” While Shum cautions against comparing the surveys, even taking the 2024 survey alone would seem to indicate that enthusiasm for Trump among Hong Kongers in the US has substantially cooled, and he was significantly less popular in 2024 than his opponent. The reasons respondents gave for supporting one candidate or another were the following: Trump supporters cited disillusionment with “woke” culture, simply leaned more conservative, or believed Trump would be tougher on China. Harris supporters had an anyone-but-Trump stance, supported Ukraine, preferred pro-LGBTQ and pro-choice policies, and worried about democracy if Trump won.

April 16, 2025 UPDATE: In response to the above survey, scholar Kennedy Wong believes there may have been a sampling problem because the results don’t match his field observations, which indicate more consistent support for Trump across time, though he adds some people did switch their support to Harris because they considered the Biden administration’s China policy to be quite strong. Wong has co-authored a forthcoming research paper with Maggie Shum called, “Resisting China, Supporting Trump?” It’s based on studies of three different Hong Kong groups in the Los Angeles area. It notes that while 72 percent of Asian Americans were inclined to vote for Biden in 2020, Hong Kongers’ predilections in terms of US politics were shaped primarily by their opinions about geopolitics and which party would be tougher on China, so they saw their interests as Hong Kongers as less well aligned with the Democratic Party. Overall, these perspectives from the scholarly world largely reinforce my impression that Hong Kongers’ views on US politics are in flux. There are people like myself who view Trump as abhorrently anti-democratic and as lacking in a clear strategy on China or Hong Kong, even if he may sometimes do things that rattle China. There are others who may be ideologically aligned with Trump (not much different from Americans ideologically aligned with Trump) or view him as the great disrupter who, while he doesn’t really care about Hong Kong or democracy, will take actions against China that may align with Hong Kongers’ interests. Then there are a fair few somewhere in the middle, who may be confused by the current geopolitical situation and US politics or find none of the political options on offer very appealing or working much in favor of the Hong Kong freedom struggle.