Read the preface from Stay Alive: “If we burn, you burn with us”
A flag reading "If we burn, you burn with us," erected outside Hong Kong's legislature, July 1, 2019.
In July 2019, a new theme park opened in the People’s Republic of China. Located in Hengqin, Zhuhai, in the Guangdong- Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, Lionsgate Entertainment World is a movie-themed “vertical theme park” spanning 22,000 square meters of indoor space. Designed to appeal to the “young adult dating crowd,” it features attractions based on franchises owned by the major American media corporation. These include The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ hugely successful future dystopian fiction series about a totalitarian regime and its annual state-sanctioned child murder pageant.
As described by Forbes magazine, “With an entire level devoted to The Hunger Games, visitors will be immersed in the wealthy Capitol City with a gold and marble streetscape, a themed gourmet restaurant, a bakery, and a hair salon inspired by the outrageous styles in the film.” Inadvertently echoing the desperate enthusiasm of Effie Trinkett (a character from the series), Selena Magill, General Manager of Lionsgate Entertainment World, exclaimed that: “We expect guests in China and all around the world to enjoy sensational experiences here that they won’t soon forget.”
For a more authentic experience, fans could travel just an hour away to Hong Kong, where the Beijing-backed government was clamping down on the protest movement led by young people against very real encroaching Chinese tyranny. At times the streets of the city resembled scenes from the films, with Hong Kong police, acting like The Hunger Games’ perversely named Peacekeepers (state military police), beating young people in the streets and firing tear gas indiscriminately into crowds, while protesters brandished bows and fire-dipped arrows.
The loosely coordinated but often highly disciplined protesters, drawn from the self-described “cursed generation,” used social media savvily, often employing tropes from popular culture, including spray painting one familiar (to Hunger Games’ fans) slogan on walls and subways: “If we burn, you burn with us.” The protesters wore black, like the forces of the Mockingjay revolution (the rebellion in The Hunger Games), while pro- government agents and Triad thugs wore white, like President Snow (the dictator of the series’ fictional country of Panem) and his brutal army of Peacekeepers.
This wasn’t the first time protesters had drawn on the series. In 2014, during the Umbrella Revolution, they’d used the three- finger salute from the story, a symbol of solidarity and defiance. After the failure of their first rebellion, the protesters left signs reading “We’ll be back.”
They kept their promise. The year 2019 saw months of sustained protests and mass marches. But the Hong Kong and international business community largely looked on, while investors only fretted about the impact on China’s plans to turn the region into a financial and technological hub to rival Silicon Valley – a gleaming twenty-first century Capitol (the wealthy ruling city of Panem), surrounded by servile industrial districts and factories with “suicide nets” to stop workers killing themselves.
The protests were for freedom and democracy, a last chance for basic rights. But they also represented anger at Hong Kong’s largely unregulated capitalism, with young people priced out of the most expensive housing market in the world and seeing few opportunities in their future, all the while being ordered to act as “patriotic citizens” by the super-wealthy political-business elite who run the city.
An uber-rich ruling class gorge themselves in a futuristic playground, while working people struggle to survive in exploited rural areas. The possibility of revolution is only a distant memory, a forgotten hope kept at bay by brutal policing, aching poverty and a rigidly segregated class system. The Hunger Games could be seen as a critique of states like China – an authoritarian, propagandized, militarized, state capitalist economy, which runs prison camps for political dissidents, including using forced labor to supply goods for Western corporations. But that wasn’t the series’ aim. Its setting is a post-collapse North America. It’s both a warning about the near future and a cutting critique of the present-day United States, of reality TV politics, the demonization of the poor, state violence and oligarchy.
When The Hunger Games began in 2008 – it’s since become a defining story for a generation that’s grown up with economic crisis and never ending war – many commentators lumped it in with other young adult genre fiction such as Twilight and Divergent. But The Hunger Games is political. It’s about an elder elite that uses state power, a compliant media and violent spectacle to pacify its population. It’s about how a rebellion is sparked by defiance and spreads through subversive symbols, while the regime responds in the only way it knows.
The year 2019 saw youth-led revolts in other countries as well, from Chile to Lebanon, Thailand to Columbia. Despite different local flashpoints, underlying all of them were extreme inequalities which especially disadvantage young people, and the willingness of elites to crush any challenges to their power. The world hadn’t seen a wave of street protests like this since the late 1980s, surpassing the scale of the Arab Spring protests of the early 2010s.
In an important sense, The Hunger Games predicts how regimes around the world are likely to respond to increasing youth-led protests against their power. It’s about collapse, war, rebellion, trauma and recovery. It’s dark, emotionally and politically truthful, and while it doesn’t flinch from the horrors of its setting, it’s also ultimately, eventually, realistically hopeful. It’s a story about how regimes fall, but how the revolution against power and exploitation can never end. And with the climate crisis and environmental disaster, it’s about a coming future of enforced scarcity and segregation, and an emerging form of authoritarian statism we’ll call capitolism. It’s the story of our times, and most likely of our future as well.
The real hunger games are just beginning. We need to return to Panem.
Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in paperback and e-book in April/May 2021 by Zero Books and can be pre-ordered from the following places now: