In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Myanmar were each shaken by youthful pro-democracy protest movements that converged in curious ways. Each was marked by a similar symbolic vocabulary – the umbrella, the three-fingered “Hunger Games” salute – and a common struggle against authoritarian rule and the growing Chinese influence that was believed to be emboldening it. This loose transnational partnership came to call itself the Milk Tea Alliance, in reference to the fact that unlike China, these nations each habitually drank their tea with milk.
The phrase originated as a social media hashtag designed to express solidarity for those who took to the streets of Hong Kong in 2019, a solidarity that would henceforth be extended to the Thai protesters who took to the streets in 2020 and the youth that faced down Myanmar’s military after the coup of February 2021. In the early 2020s, the Alliance would welcome several new “members”: Taiwan, Indonesia, even India.
In a new book, “The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing,” historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom charts the rise of the Alliance through interviews with dozens of its participants and leaders, some of whom have since been driven into exile.
Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, spoke to The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio about the genesis of the Alliance, the cross-cultural political pollination that it facilitated, and its likely long-term impacts on Asia’s youth protest movements.
To start with, tell us a bit about what the Milk Tea Alliance is, and how it came about in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
The Milk Tea Alliance is a loose confederacy of like-minded youths in places that are often seen as distinctive regions: East Asia and Southeast Asia. The name was first used in 2020, when nationalistic netizens on the Chinese mainland criticized a Thai celebrity for social media activities that went against the grain of some official Beijing lines, such as by treating Taiwan as a “country” rather than a part of the People’s Republic of China. They called on him to apologize for allegedly “hurting the feelings” of all Chinese people, threatening to try to get his shows banned on the mainland, an important market for many forms of popular entertainment. Some of the celebrity’s many fans in Hong Kong and Taiwan went online to urge him to do nothing of the kind. They were tired of seeing these sorts of moves lead to apologies and shifts by not just individuals but companies, including ones who had been criticized for supporting the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the even bigger Hong Kong protest wave of 2019. These Hong Kong and Taiwan netizens, joined by progressive-minded Thai compatriots of the celebrity, said they would support him in standing up to this kind of bullying.
As a way of coming up with a playful way to draw a line between the Chinese mainland and the places they were all from, the supporters of the celebrity hit on the fact that Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand all had a different iconic tea drink that included milk, while the people criticizing the celebrity came from a place where the traditional way to drink that beverage was without any form of dairy added. Soon, there were memes circulating showing cups of Boba tea, Thai tea and Hong Kong milky tea swearing allegiance to one another in “Three Musketeers” fashion. There were no formal institutions created for this “Milk Tea Alliance,” which drew together people who shared not just a concern with how Beijing’s official lines were being promoted but also broadly democratic convictions. Membership was not limited to the original three places. Any group in a part of Asia where tea was drunk with milk who spoke out against or held protests related to the Chinese Communist Party’s influence, domestic autocrats, or both, or simply expressed solidarity with struggles such as the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and the Thai ones of 2020 were welcomed in. The most notable group welcomed in were activists in Myanmar (aka Burma) who took to the streets following the February 2021 coup.
Even though I use the Milk Tea Alliance in the title of my book, I want to stress that I am thinking of more than just what has happened since the term was coined. What interests me is how it captures a sense of people in two regions often thought of as adjacent but separate in cultural and linguistic terms, working together, influencing each other, expressing solidarity for their individual and collective struggles, and often interacting virtually but sometimes in person, too. I bring up at the end of the book a time this happened long ago, back in the days when Sun Yat-sen and Philippine insurgents collaborated circa 1900. But I am mainly interested in examples in the recent past, particularly the Milk Tea Alliance-like ties that developed between Thai students at Chulalongkorn University and some Hong Kong activists in the middle of the 2010s. I also mention the way that participants in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement were keenly interested in what Taiwan youths were doing during the slightly earlier Sunflower Movement.
I focus on three specific places in the book: Hong Kong, Thailand, and Myanmar. I did this in part because of wanting to use the life stories of a handful of extraordinary people to help readers get a feel for and care about struggles in places they might not have thought about much before, to give them a view beyond the headlines of settings that rarely get sustained attention. I see my project as potentially at least helping shed light on other kinds of linkages that connect people across standard divides. As I was writing, for example, some Hong Kong activists in exile began to be more connected to their Tibetan counterparts, feeling a kinship with their efforts. That is sometimes seen as part of the Milk Tea Alliance story but sometimes as something separate. In either case, though, I see it as a new chapter in the tale I’m telling. The same goes for the dramatic things that began happening in South Korea just after I finished work on the book. South Korea is not a “milk tea” setting (though obviously many youths there, as on the Chinese mainland for that matter, like Boba and so on). When the main Thai activist I write about, Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, posted support for protesters in Seoul when martial law was briefly declared, though, I felt that was like saying that in his eyes they were honorary members of the MTA.
You note in your book that the political conditions in Myanmar, Thailand, and Hong Kong were “radically different,” but that “many young pro-democracy activists in and exiles from these three places routinely refer to a sense that their struggles are related.” What common elements did these groups identify? And is there any rallying symbol that ties their struggles together other than milk tea?
There is no formal ideology, but there is a generalized sense of fighting comparable forms of oppression. Milk Tea Alliance activists either want the communities they love to finally get past a long period of authoritarian rule, protect and expand fragile liberties that exist in those communities, or keep the communities from sliding back to a dark period that preceded a democratizing one. They also often see the PRC as an obstacle or threat, due to Beijing’s direct actions in Hong Kong’s case or support for domestic autocrats in Thailand and Myanmar – though this is less central an issue to the exiles from Myanmar I profile than the others who interest me.
This is fairly amorphous, but there are patterns that show up in the varied settings. Generational anger is often a factor, a sense that older people have been too complaisant and now youths are having to face the consequences. This provides a sense of kinship between them and climate activists around the world, and some express admiration for Greta Thunberg. There is an interest in making political use of songs and symbols, particularly meaningful to late millennials and Gen Z youths. Young women have been playing particularly prominent roles in some of the movements in question, and support for same-sex marriage and LGBTQ issues generally shows up more often than in anti-authoritarian struggles in those settings in the past.
Two kinds of symbolism that complement the milk tea memes that I bring up in the book help make all this seem a bit less vague. One example comes via Hollywood, the other via rap music, but despite these ties to America, both involved distinctively local creations. Many activists in the region have made use of “The Hunger Games” novels and films, which center on efforts by teenagers from different districts to topple an autocrat – and they ultimately succeed against all odds. The three-finger salute of defiance, taken from that epic contemporary reworking of the David vs. Goliath notion, was used a bit in Hong Kong and Thailand in 2014 and has been ubiquitous in Bangkok and Yangon in the 2020s. The Hunger Games phrase “if we burn, you burn with us” has also shown up in different places, especially in Hong Kong in 2019. The Hunger Games is globally popular, and it began with novels by an American author, Suzanne Collins, that became Hollywood blockbusters. Only in Southeast Asia and to some extent, Hong Kong, though, have symbols from it become central to movements. Only there have crowds working to end real-life autocracies held up three fingers routinely.
As for rap, there is a Thai hip hop collective called Rap Against Dictatorship that began making waves – and getting into trouble with censors – late in the 2010s. In the early 2020s, a Burmese group inspired by them called themselves Rap Against Junta. Soon after the coup, it pulled together rappers from across the region to create a sort of Milk Tea Alliance counterpart to the classic “We Are the World,” a music video called “Dictators Must Die” with verses taken by groups in different parts of Asia. There were lots of shots of three-finger salutes, a cameo by Xi Jinping, and more images of autocrats from other places, images of police using tear gas against crowds, and rhymes in English or local languages that denounced corruption, censorship, all sorts of oppressive policies. When a member of Rap Against Dictatorship took his turn, he rapped “Get retired old men/It’s time for the new gen/Watch now, the game is on/Dictators, move along.”
As you note, the Milk Tea Alliance began online – particularly on social media. How did this alliance manifest in the real world?
Social media was crucial, but it mattered that some participants from different places met up in real life. There were also some touching gestures, like one involving a group of Hong Kong activists who were linked to Bangkok ones via Joshua Wong’s friendship with Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal. That friendship was forged through the former going to Hong Kong to meet the latter during the first half of 2016. It was deepened by Netiwit inviting Joshua to come to Thailand to speak during the second half of 2016, and then the Hong Kong protester being detained at the airport in Bangkok and sent home. In 2020, partly due to this friendship and the other connections forged between activists in Bangkok and Hong Kong, some members of the latter group sent goggles and other protective gear to the members of the former group saying they could no longer use them to mitigate the effects of tear gas as demonstrations were took risky, so they wanted them used on the streets of Thailand. A real world counterpart running the other direction came when a Bangkok youth went outside the Chinese Embassy in his city on the PRC’s National Day and sang “Glory to Hong Kong,” a song beloved in Hong Kong but now illegal to sing there.
In your conversations with young leaders and political activists in these countries, did you identify a particular ideological orientation to the Milk Tea Alliance? Did it have a discernible sociological or class base within or across countries, or was it more heterogeneous?
A lot of the activists are relatively well educated and often comfortable using English, so there is a sense in which the main figures in the Alliance are at the fringes of the elite at least, and sometimes in it. Support for the actions that fall under the umbrella of the Alliance can be more heterogeneous. In terms of ideological orientation, there is a lot of variability, so I sometimes think it is more comparable to refer to it as analogous to the counterculture in the West during the 1960s than to liken it to the New Left during that era.
As the milk tea metaphor suggests, the Alliance arose in opposition to the PRC’s growing influence in their nations, and the deleterious impacts that this was having on their societies and political systems. Did the group or its members ever articulate a plan on how their nations should relate to the PRC?
Not really. It is more about encouraging those encountering pressure from Beijing. It matters in those situations to not feel that you are alone.
The Milk Tea Alliance seems to have faded from the headlines somewhat over the past couple of years; at least, its iconography is not as prominent in online spaces as it once was. What explains this, and do you foresee a revival? Was the movement a result of a unique convergence of social, political, and foreign policy currents around 2019-2020, or does it reflect deeper structural conditions in Asia today?
Its brief flourishing was due to a unique convergence of factors, but I see it as having a broader relevance. Some of the networks established during it remain, and it maintains some presence in online spaces and real-life ones, too, in part via activities such as talks and film showings. I see it as adding to the repertoire of activist possibilities, in the same way that struggles within a single locale can. And I see it as having been both shaped by events that came before it and then in turn helping to shape events that have happened in the original Alliance sites and other places since then. In seizing on Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Myanmar as places to devote chapters to, I thought a lot about having had a sense that a baton had been passed between these places in 2019, 2020, and then 2021 in a kind of anti-autocratic relay race. We can think of South Korean runners, including again groups in which young women play important roles and pop culture symbols associated with recent generations, taking up the latest leg. And in their case, in contrast to the others, they have carried the baton across an important finish line.