The Power of Milk Tea: From Pacific to Punjab
The Milk Tea Alliance movement is brewing radical connections and political solidarities across Asia and the Pacific.
This article is part of Jamhoor’s special issue Borders & Border-making in South Asia.
The Great Wave of the Milk Tea Alliance. Illustration: Ishi
Tea in Asia was once a medicine, not a beverage. When the British and European colonial empires descended upon Asia and the Pacific, tea was at the forefront of commodity trade and plunder for colonial expansion. Tea was about to be turned into a colonial beverage.
However, in the 21st century, it is milk tea that has been invoked as a slogan within grassroots social and political movements across Asia. This time, tea has been energized as a drink and a symbol against Asia’s own imperial regimes: China’s New Silk Road and repression of Uighurs, India’s corporate agricultural bills, Myanmar’s military coup, Thailand’s monarchy, the Philippines’ red-tagging of activism, Hong Kong’s National Security Law and suppression of democracy, Indonesia’s imperialism and anti-Black racism in West Papua, and the list goes on.
Tea as a Colonial Commodity
Back in the 18th century, tea had become a lucrative raw commodity desired by the English East India Company for the growing middle and bourgeois classes of Europe. But while goods such as tea, porcelain, and silk from China were desired by the Company, China had little trading appetite for anything other than silver.
“Milk tea, as invoked in Hong Kong, emerged from within the working classes. ”
Thus, the Opium Wars began and with it, the colonial history of Hong Kong. Britain launched Opium Wars to force open China’s trading system, known as the Canton System, to accept opium as a trade settlement for tea. Hong Kong became a British colony and port. The opium came from Bengal and other regions of India.
Poppy, like tea, was also medicinal, used for its anti-inflammatory qualities. However, the English East India Company established intensive opium plantations, turning poppy into a cash crop, and impoverishing landless peasants.
An illustration of the Opium War between Britain and China, 1839-1842. Source: Everett Collection
When milk tea became a drink in Hong Kong, it was not merely an outcome of mixing Chinese practices of drinking black Pu’er tea with English luxuries of dip tea with milk. East did not meet West. Milk tea, as invoked in Hong Kong, emerged from within the working classes.
Fresh milk was scarce on the island colony and only afforded by the wealthy colonizers. The common people, in turn, tapped into evaporated milk and later, condensed milk, both of which came in cans. Canned milk can be stored conveniently on shelves without refrigeration. Unlike the English method of dipping a tea bag in a cup or a teapot, chefs innovated by boiling Ceylon leaves with water before adding evaporated milk. Moreover, the tea was sieved using lady’s stocking, another working class innovation of chefs in Hong Kong.
Thus, náaihchà (literally, milk tea in Cantonese) was born. It arrived on the menus of cha chaan tengs, small tea restaurants that were affordable to ordinary people across the Pearl River delta.
The extent that tea was medicinal in the Indian subcontinent is subject to further exploration. But cha - as we say it in Punjabi, or chai (Urdu-Hindi), as a beverage also came out of colonialism.
Over the course of colonialism, intensive tea estates were established in Assam, Darjeeling, and Ceylon. The British exploited the subaltern, impoverished peasants, in the Indian subcontinent while China began to lose its monopoly on tea from Yunnan.
“ Many saw it as a corruption of the culture, sometimes even as a colonial conspiracy to weaken South Asians by making them dependent and addicted to tea in place of milk and buttermilk... ”
But for the first half of the 20th century, South Asians were reluctant to take on such a drink due to the absurdity of English taste and anti-colonial sentiments. Many saw it as a corruption of the culture, sometimes even as a colonial conspiracy to weaken South Asians by making them dependent and addicted to tea in place of milk and buttermilk, popular traditional drinks before tea made inroads into the society.
Scholars trace an organized British propaganda campaign launched to popularise tea, archived in a digital repository, Tasveer Ghar. The first to indulge in the imperial drink were the Anglicized Bengali male elites of Calcutta. In the 1930s, the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board was restructured to project a national image of the drink with a gendered campaign. Advertisements instructing the “correct” way of making tea in a teapot, which would also boost tea leaves sales, went on until the 1960s.
At some point, chaiwalas (tea vendors) emerged and innovated cha—simmering in spices, boiling water and tea leaves, and brewing thick with hot milk—that eventually spread across the subcontinent from the stalls of railway stations.
Today, different combinations of spices and herbs, tea leaves, and milk types (e.g. buffalo or cow) are used. But cutting across regional variations, drinking cha is a steadfast ritual of the masses sipping endless cups in the bonds of humanity.
Milk Tea as a Protest Slogan
The invocation of milk tea, then, as a protest slogan for the rising waves of Asian social and political movements is both peculiar and provocative.
“Milk Tea Alliance weaves together the political struggles against this continued imperialism. ”
British and European colonizers were driven out by the power of peoples who fought against oppression. However, neo-imperial and capitalist regimes emerged and took hold in the post-colonies with the nationalism of Asian colonizers: China in Xinjiang, India in Kashmir, and Indonesia in West Papua, to name a few.
Milk Tea Alliance weaves together the political struggles against this continued imperialism. Each place—from the Philippines to Punjab, from West Papua to Kashmir—is entangled in resisting some remnant of colonialism, structural state violence and brutality, and capitalist wealth accumulated by “nationalist” elites on the ruins and labour of common people.
What is the Milk Tea Alliance? It is a grassroots transnational solidarity movement that began with Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. It made its claim on social media in April 2020. It formed when China’s trolling on Twitter went wrong, losing to witty activists who were steadfast at criticizing governments and state power regardless of their nation.
Since then, it has generated waves from the Pacific Ocean across the Asian continent, and beyond to Belarus.
Milk Tea Alliance comes out of leaderless, spontaneous, decentralized, and dynamic tactics of street protest from Hong Kong’s 2019 Be Water Movement, more commonly known as anti-ELAB (Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill).
Oct 2019 - Police clash with people protesting against extradition law on China National Day in Hong Kong. Image: Isaac Yeung
Several Milk Tea Alliance rallies have taken place in the streets of Yangon, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. In addition to that, activists continually use social media channels, such as Twitter (e.g. @MilkTea_India), and hashtags, #MilkTeaAlliance, to amplify dissenting voices, pledge solidarity, and expand resistance and protest in the cyberspace globally, especially in light of the pandemic restrictions and lockdowns. Following the military coup in Myanmar in 2021, the movement generated even stronger worldwide ripples: Twitter created an emoji.
Milk Tea Alliance, India
The visibility and relevance of the Milk Tea Alliance in India and the subcontinent is less known, partly because of state attempts at hijacking the movement.
In India, BJP (Bharatiya Janta Party), the current fascist regime, framed Milk Tea Alliance under state-centric and nationalistic parameters—India versus China. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leveraged such a position by offering diplomacy to Taiwan, while suppressing discontent within India. Pro-Taiwan posters were put up at the Chinese embassy in New Delhi by the right-wing ruling party in October 2020. In turn, Taiwan Digital Diplomacy Association designed a graphic showing Narendra Modi toasting and cheering a cup of tea with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.
“The timing of such a problematic Indian state allegiance to the Milk Tea Alliance suggests an organized attempt to co-opt the growing grassroots movement.”
News picked up on the story, and soon the narrative was established on how Modi stands up to Chinese authoritarian power, especially considering India-China border skirmishes in 2020. The timing of such a problematic Indian state allegiance to the Milk Tea Alliance suggests an organized attempt to co-opt the growing grassroots movement.
Current media portrayals and circulations in India reveal right-wing infiltration and cooptation of resistance movements to effectively dictate activism narratives that favour the State. Furthermore, these narratives attempt to fragment, compartmentalize, and decouple actual protest struggles in India from their neighbours.
This essay unsettles Modi’s hijacking, and instead aligns milk tea as a slogan of solidarity with real radical fronts and protest movements.
(i) Kisan Morcha - Farmers Front
Around the same time as the cooptation of the Indian state in the Milk Tea Alliance, a rural mobilization was brewing across India.
Farmer unions were coordinating a nationwide agricultural front against the corporate agrarian acts, collectively called the FTPC Act, instated by the BJP in August 2020. In September 2020, Rail Roko strikes took place. The agitations later developed into a larger descent on Delhi. Farmers and labourers came from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and other states, first arriving on 30 November 2020 in their Delhi Chalo front. The multi-month protest camp is still holding on strong on the outskirts of the capital. Regional rallies also took place locally in other states like West Bengal, Bihar, Maharashtra, and Kerala.
The farmers protest in India is being called the world’s largest protest. According to some estimates, upwards of 250 million participated in a 24-hour general strike in November last year. Illustration: Desipun
The agricultural front of the protesting farmers has a well-communicated demand: to repeal the FTPC Act. The bills were propelled in June 2020, and enacted as acts in September 2020 by the Central government, without due democratic process, and despite the discontent of farmer and labour unions. Under the guise of modernization of agriculture and technology, the Act seeks to initiate a corporate restructuring of India’s agricultural sector. The restructuring begins with deregulation and liberalization of the market, and privatization of the agricultural sector, to ultimately favour and promote large agribusinesses and corporate entities.
The 2020 Farmers Protests stem from a larger socio-economic alienation within corporatizing India that has left peasants and labourers in many parts of the country riddled with debt and dispossession.
At every corner and turn, the BJP and Godi-media apparatuses have deployed divisive and defaming strategies, mislabeling the struggle for livelihood and tagging farmers as Khalistani separatists or Naxalite/Maoist insurgents. To further prevent the farmers’ agitation from gaining urban youth support on social media, the police has arrested and charged many activists, journalists and allies, like Disha Ravi, a Bengaluru climate activist, on sedition charges, and continue to enforce colonial-era laws on Indians (including the UAPA).
In this regard, the Kisan Morcha is facing similar challenges as faced by the diverse Left-leaning movements of the 21st century. In the Philippines, red-tagging blacklists a range of dissent and activism. In Hong Kong, under the National Security Law of 2020, arrests and charges have been made against even moderate pro-democracy positions.
Transnational circulations (e.g. @MilkTea_India) have aligned milk tea as a solidarity slogan for India’s farmers and agricultural labourers.
Farmers protesting at Sirsa Haryana, Kisan Morcha, Feb 2021. Image: Im_rohitbhakar
(ii) Discord Against Modi’s Empire
Prior to the farmers' agitation, India witnessed several radical protests in 2019, catalyzed by different laws, and expressing disharmony with Modi’s empire built on the right-wing Hindutva ideology.
The discords consisted of: (1) protests against the scrapping of Article 370, which took away the limited autonomy of Kashmir and made way for formal occupation of the state by India, and (2) demonstrations against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the intertwined issue of the National Register of Citizens (anti-CAA-NRC protests), from December 2019 until the pandemic lockdown in March 2020.
The states of India, Pakistan, and China have had a vested power and resource interest in the Kashmir region for a long time. In August 2019, Modi rescinded the semi-autonomous status of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir by revoking Article 370. To manage and curb demonstrations in Kashmir, communications blackout and military roadblocks and lockdown were enacted.
The constitutional coup of Kashmir by Modi was followed by other geopolitical social engineering acts, one of which was the CAA. CAA was an arbitrary law that was passed in 2019 without due process. It offers asylum passage to India for persecuted religious communities from neighbouring South Asian countries, except to Muslims. The CAA is not only Islamophobic and exclusionary for those Muslims experiencing persecution, like the Ahmadiyas in Pakistan or the Uyghurs in China, but it also institutionalized the increasing violence against the Muslim minorities of India.
A range of motivations and tactics - from Delhi to Assam - fueled the anti-CAA-NRC protests between 2019-2020 before Modi enforced a lockdown in light of the global COVID pandemic.
It is not only the restricted movement of refugees that is of concern here, but the manipulation of population migration and resettlement for the nationalistic agendas and territorial expansion of the State. The Chinese state has been actively engineering the settlement of Han Chinese to Tibet and Xinjiang and suppressing Uighur Muslims. The Belt and Road dubbed the New Silk Road is a logistics empire through Xinjiang. More recently, China is using transportation infrastructure, language, and cultural imperialism in the mainlandization of Hong Kong.
The Modi regime of India has a similar geopolitical agenda. It is leveraging greater state power of a right-wing Hindutva state by polarizing differences and marginalizing Muslims and Kashmiris.
Radical Interconnections of Left Struggles
The Kashmir discord and anti-CAA-NRC movements took place in 2019, prior to the formalization of the Milk Tea Alliance. By charting parallels to Hong Kong’s unrest and milk tea as a creative mediator, I draw nearer proximity for learning, not cause-and-effect relationship, as the different Asian struggles have their own contexts and catalysts.
During the anti-CAA-NRC protests, a peaceful sit-in had been staged and led by women at Shaheen Bagh. Across the spectrum, gatherers mobilized tea to boost humanity’s common bonds, from Sikh langar to the women’s communal kitchen. Street art, mural paintings and poetry infused Shaheen Bagh in similar ways as the 2019 Be Water Movement and 2014 Umbrella Movement deployed creativity in urban civil disobedience. While Hongkongers made paper rivers, Shaheen Bagh artists made paper boats to imagine an ocean for all.
At Shaheen Bagh, a young protestor communicates that humanity (insaniyat) will prevail despite all the monstrosities (haiwaniyat). Image: Im_rohitbhakar
However, soon the state forces of Hong Kong and India took control of the streets, under the guise of Covid lockdown. Furthermore, over the course of the pandemic, Hong Kong and India passed laws and rulings to the disadvantage of activists, and sentenced and arrested increasing number of activists, students, journalists, and common people.
But these mass movements were not shaken easily. The defamation techniques employed by the State also remained the same: both the Kisan Morcha and the anti-CAA/NRC protestors faced defamation and blacklisting by media apparatuses, tagged as “Khalistani” and “Pakistani” respectively, characterizing protesters expressing dissent and discontentment with the State as anti-nationals and unpatriotic.
State response to both these Indian protests expose a regime deploying the classic divide-and-rule strategy, inherited from colonialism.
A similar strategy was deployed in Hong Kong in 2019 to break down the street protests. The State attempted to pit South Asian Hongkongers against Chinese Hongkongers. I happened to be in Toronto when I received an urgent message from a comrade asking for solidarity statements from South Asian communities in Hong Kong. This was because online posts, likely by police infiltration, had called for protest activity to attack Chungking Mansions (a South Asian and African marketplace), the Kowloon Mosque, and Sindhi tailoring shops in Tsim Sha Tsui.
South Asians, Africans, and Chinese Hongkongers quickly counter-mobilized to prevent racial, ethnic, and religious violence. They first gathered to distribute refreshments, on 20 October 2019. Subsequently, on 26 October 2019, Chungking Mansions hosted a cultural tour inviting Chinese Hongkongers to experience South Asian spiced tea, sweets, and snacks.
Solidarity rally in Hong Kong in support of the Farmers protesting in India. 5 December, 2020. Image: Punjabi Youth of Hong Kong
When the Kisan Morcha front formed in Delhi, global solidarity rallies took place. One stood out for me: the rally held in Hong Kong on 5 December 2020, to bring awareness to the agricultural agitation.
The fact that they gathered at Chungking Mansions demonstrated the bond and power of milk tea in weaving together the many political struggles of Asia.
Outlook: Is Asian Spring on the Horizon?
Milk Tea Alliance is bringing out new pan-Asian solidarities and a political awakening. But can it transform and usher in a different world?
Recall: Tea in Asia was once a medicine. Brewing tea in a hybrid sense opens a different understanding, which refute the conception of tea as a colonial beverage and re-claim it to build larger solidarities against imperial states. In her book, Elsewhere, Within Here, theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha speaks to the transformative power of tea and water to dissolve the “wall”. The wall is real. It refers to 21st-century militarized borders and boundaries being enacted to keep certain peoples out. The wall is also the psychic wall, which creates us-versus-them identities and egotistical mentalities.
And it is tea that can dissolve that psychic wall, that ego. Trinh spoke of that power in the ancient folk tales of love and longing. I further weave that transformative power of cha inherent in langar at Sufi and Sikh spaces and to the borderless mediators in Milk Tea Alliance.
Undergirding the Milk Tea Alliance currents is the power of collective struggles and recognition of humanness—to reflect, share, and make world a better place without hierarchies and borders.
Cha at Kisan Morcha, Delhi. Image: PradeepGaurs
“The inter-circulations of Milk Tea Alliance—from Hong Kong to India, from Pacific to Punjab—is putting on the horizon an Asian Spring.”
In Myanmar, anti-coup demonstrators protesting against the military junta issued a regretful apology to the Rohingyas. In Hong Kong, introspective accounts, such as in Lausan, are calling for engagement on the classed and gendered struggles of foreign domestic workers, who are predominantly from the Philippines but also from Indonesia and Sri Lanka. In the Kisan Morcha, newly forging Shudra-Dalit alliances speak to the plight of Dalits, landless peasants, and agricultural labourers, not just small-scale farmers. Women at the frontlines have brought out the gendered struggles in agriculture and in India.
For the Milk Tea Alliance movement, activists need to further consider the larger economy of tea trade. Afterall, the labour of plucking tea leaves in Northeast India and other South Asian regions continue to be carried out by landless women in tea plantations built on British colonialism.
The online space of Milk Tea Alliance has been generated by the young educated classes in urban Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Deploying activist art, they have put forth a globalizing map of Milk Tea Alliance members across Asia. Western media is excited to cover stories expressing a clear angst against China. But more effort is needed to learn of each other’s movements and contexts.
Women making communal meals at the farmers protest at Delhi Border. Image: Im_rohitbhakar
This learning is especially crucial where struggles are led by and constituted of rural communities who do not use social media or employ English language to the same degree, such as in the Indian agricultural agitation.
Milk Tea Alliance is not an anti-Chinese position. It is a peoples’ movement. It is Asia and the Pacific rising up against different authoritarian undemocratic regimes, centralized power, capitalist imperialism, and the police state - all leftovers of colonialism.
The inter-circulations of Milk Tea Alliance—from Hong Kong to India, from Pacific to Punjab—is putting on the horizon an Asian Spring.
Amardeep Kaur is a Hongkonger with Punjabi roots living in Toronto. She holds a PhD in Geography and a diploma in Asian Studies. She has taught courses in Introduction to Sikhism and Canada-Hong Kong Migration at University of Toronto. She also writes poetry; her latest “Late Night Conversations with a Cockroach” appeared in Ricepaper Magazine.