Hong Kong Protests - Inside The Chaos - The Atlantic

12/12/2019 Hong Kong Protests: Inside the Chaos - The Atlantic
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e Hong Kong Protesters Aren’t Driven by Hope
“We might as well go down ghting.”
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI NOVEMBER 12, 2019
THOMAS PETER / REUTERS
HONG KONG—For months now, I’ve been told that Hong Kong’s protests
would end soon. ey’ll end when school starts, I heard during the summer. School
did start, but the protests wore on, only now I saw high-school students in crisp
school uniforms joining the protesters’ ranks. Next, the mask ban of early October
was supposed to slow protesters down, but the very rst day after that ban, I
watched streams of protesters in masks and helmets make their way to their usual
haunts on Hong Kong Island.
e government shut down many of the subway lines that day, a practice that has
become a de facto curfew, because Hong Kong’s über-efficient subway system is the
way most people get around. No matter; the protesters ended up walking,
sometimes a lot, and I walked with them, asking some of the same questions I had
asked for months: Do you think you will continue protesting? What would it take
for you to stop?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/escalating-violence-hong-kong-protests/601804/ 1/7
One of the most popular chants in Hong Kong is “Five demands, not one less.”
ese include the full withdrawal of the anti-extradition bill, which originally
sparked the protests in June; an independent commission to investigate police
misconduct; retracting the riot charges against protesters; amnesty for arrested
protesters; and, crucially, universal suffrage.
Nothing animates the Hong Kongers I’ve been talking with as much as that nal
demand. Yesterday, the police shot one protester in the stomach at point-blank
range, and another police officer drove into the protesters with his motorcycle,
weaving into the crowd to circle back again. Later in the day, Hong Kong’s chief
executive, Carrie Lam, gave a press conference and, in chilling language, called the
protesters the “enemy of the people.” She was voted into office by 777 people from
the 1,200-person “Election Committee,” many of whose members are
businesspeople with close ties to mainland China. It’s fair to describe her as
handpicked by Beijing. Polls in October showed her popularity around 22 percent,
with just over one in 10 Hong Kongers saying that they would vote for her
voluntarily. No wonder the protesters want the right to elect their own leaders.
It’s not that the protests haven’t taken a toll on the protesters. Many are tired. Some
surveys suggest that more than 80 percent of the people of Hong Kong may have
been exposed to tear gas—an astonishing gure. Some neighborhoods close to
protest sites have been so repeatedly drowned in the noxious clouds that the
protesters held a rally on behalf of their pets. “I can’t put a mask on my dog,” one
resident tearfully explained to me, as others distributed posters of puppies and
kittens in protest gear: wearing helmets and masks, and holding bottles of Pocari
Sweat, the electrolyte mixture that has become the unofficial drink of the protests.
(Electrolyte drinks are great if you are walking long distances in humid weather, as
so many in Hong Kong do almost every weekend.)
Almost every protest results in videos of protesters being beaten by the police.
Many are live-streamed, to horri ed viewers. ousands have been arrested. Fearful
accounts are coming out of the police stations, alleging torture, sexual assault, and
rape. On Telegram, many protesters claim that some recent suicides are actually
murders by the police that have been disguised as suicides. (It’s not clear whether
these claims are anything more than just rumors, misinformation, or a tendency to
believe the worst.) When being arrested, it is not unusual for protesters to shout
their name, in the hopes of lawyers and family being able to reach them, and some
yell that they are in no way suicidal. If they aren’t heard from again, they want to
make sure it’s clear who’s to blame.
[ Read: e rising costs of protests in Hong Kong ]
I often ask protesters whether they fear the consequences of showing up to these
protests. Many of my interviews are interrupted: by tear gas and pepper spray, by
police lines marching toward us, by the water-cannon truck. e seasoned
protesters are less and less afraid of the tear gas. Some wear tear-gas masks, but risk
a year in jail just for that, or even a riot charge, which carries a potential 10-year
sentence. Some wear imsy surgical masks, which may help conceal their identity,
but don’t do anything for the burning sensation in their eyes, throat, and lungs.
ey cough, they run, they wash their eyes with saline or water, and they go on.
ey do, however, fear being kidnapped or killed.
Many protesters believe that people were killed by the police on the night of August
31 in Prince Edward station, when the police shut down the subway station with
protesters trapped inside. Videos emerged of young people cowering on the oor, as
they were pepper-sprayed from a close distance and beaten. Medics weren’t allowed
in, though, and the police whisked away the injured to other stations while many
people waited outside, in vain, to receive the wounded. We know that there were
serious injuries, because those people were hospitalized, but the protesters believe
that the police killed at least a few people, and closed the station to erase the
evidence. No official evidence of missing people has surfaced, but in this
environment of mistrust, seriously injured protesters have started going to “hidden
clinics”—underground hospitals—rather than regular hospitals.
Almost every night now, protesters show up at the entrance of the subway at Prince
Edward, right next to the Mong Kok police station. ey bring owers, candles,
and other offerings. ey demand that the CCTV footage from that night be
released. ey shout slogans and obscenities at the police. Often they get tear gas
and rubber bullets in return. e police sometimes remove the owers. e next
day, the protesters are back with more.
Hong Kong’s government, backed by mainland China, has responded to this with
all the nesse of a control freak who has lost control. It seems to have decided that
the best way to reestablish control is to crack down even more. Meanwhile, about
half of Hong Kongers say that, on a scale of zero to 10, they would rate their trust
in the police at zero. Before this current wave of protest, in June, just 6.5 percent
picked zero on the same poll. Whatever else might be happening, this unelected
government isn’t winning any hearts and minds. Maybe outright intimidation will
work instead.
[ Read: Are China’s tantrums signs of strength or weakness? ]
Last week, I headed to Victoria Park, where pro-democracy candidates for the
upcoming elections in Hong Kong announced that they would be holding
meetings. e legislative council doesn’t have full powers or true universal suffrage,
and candidates deemed unacceptable can be “disquali ed” and prevented from
running, as happened to Joshua Wong, a high-pro le leader of the 2014 Umbrella
Movement. (Wong is a widely recognized gure especially for international
audiences, though he is not a leader of this round of protests, which is deliberately
leaderless.) But there are still these pro-democracy candidates and their voters, and
people seem eager to make a statement. I chatted with two young women, of the
many thousands of people who had shown up, right before the police teargassed the
park and arrested many of the candidates, beating them up in the process.
One of the women who chatted with me had baby-blue drawings of stars and the
moon on her ngernails. e other had a fashionable hat that matched the color of
her surgical mask, her animated eyes shining in the small opening between them.
ey didn’t have helmets or goggles, and weren’t carrying backpacks with such gear.
Aren’t you afraid? I asked, gingerly. “We are afraid,” they quickly admitted. ey
even giggled, but it got serious quickly. is is our last chance, they said very
matter-of-factly. If we stand down, nothing will stand between us and mainland
China, they said. ey talked about Xinjiang, and what China had done to the
Uighur minority. I’ve heard about the fate of the Uighurs from so many protesters
over the months. China may have wanted to make an example out of the region,
but the lesson Hong Kongers took was in the other direction—resist with all your
might, because if you lose once, there will be a catastrophe for your people, and the
world will ignore it.
e two women weren’t sure whether they would win. at’s also something I’ve
heard often—these protesters aren’t the most optimistic group. No rose-colored
glasses here. “But we cannot give up,” one insisted, “because if we do, there will be
no future for us anyway. We might as well go down ghting.”
One of the young women gave me an umbrella: a tool protesters use to shield
themselves from the sun, from CCTV cameras, from overhead helicopters, from
the blue water laced with pepper spray and red from water cannons, from tear-gas
canisters. ey had noticed I didn’t have one, and were worried for me. ey had
brought extras to share. “You might need this,” one of them said as she handed it to
me, and wished me good luck. And then the clouds of tear gas drifted in our
direction, as they so often do in Hong Kong these days, and we scattered.
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12/12/2019 Hong Kong Protests: Inside the Chaos - The Atlantic

THOMAS PETER / REUTERS

[ Read: e rising costs of protests in Hong Kong ]

[ Read: Are China’s tantrums signs of strength or weakness? ]

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