The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019 BriefingHong Kong’s turmoil 252
1government, courts, free press, trade rela-
tions, financial system and way of life
should remain unchanged for 50 years:
“one country, two systems”, in the phrase of
Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader.
Though some of the territory’s autonomy
was eroded in the 2000s, China largely kept
to the deal, its concerns over excessive
freedoms offset by a thriving economy and,
to some extent, the opprobrium it would
face should it break its word.
But around the time that Xi Jinping,
China’s current leader, came to power in
2012, the rate of erosion quickened. The
government in Beijing pushed for a highly
unpopular programme of “patriotic educa-
tion” at schools to engender loyalty—a
push that did not succeed, but still self-de-
featingly contributed to the radicalisation
of some of the territory’s young people.
Proposed reforms that would have let Hong
Kongers choose their chief executive, but
in effect restricted the choice to a slate
picked by Beijing, led to the Occupy Central
protests of late 2014.
This year the issue originally at stake
was a bill which would have allowed any-
one in Hong Kong accused of a crime in
mainland China to be tried there—which is
to say, in a system Beijing controls. Outrage
at this new erosion brought 1m people on to
the streets. Carrie Lam, the territory’s chief
executive, ignored them. Her intransi-
gence led to even larger protests. Organis-
ers claim that a demonstration on June 16th
brought 2m on to the streets—a turnout al-
most ten times larger than Martin Luther
King’s March on Washington provided by a
population less than a twentieth that of
America in 1963. Civil servants, church
groups, executives and the staff of Hong
Kong’s biggest employers all joined in, as
did teenagers, children and babes in arms.
The heart of the protests, though, was to
be found among young, well-educated
Hong Kongers fighting for their city’s
democratic autonomy. For most of them
that fight was, to begin with, metaphorical.
For some—those now known as the fron-
tliners—it was not. They looked back on
the non-violent protests of Occupy Central
when, as Joshua Wong, one of Occupy’s
leaders, put it, the police had arrested “any-
one with a megaphone” and learned their
lesson: they would be leaderless, anony-
mous and comfortable with violence.
In “Longstreet”, a 1970s television pro-
gramme, Bruce Lee tells his student “to be
formless, shapeless—like water”; to take
whatever form the circumstances require;
to flow, creep, drip or crash. “Be water” be-
came the movement’s watchword, votes on
encrypted messaging apps its leaderless
model of co-ordination.
The frontliners’ early forays beyond
previous norms—blocking roads with
pavement railings and shouting taunts at
the police—now seem, by their own admis-sion, almost quaint. Direct clashes were
few. The storming of Legco on July 1st, and
the subsequent daubing of its chamber
with slogans, shocked the authorities and
some of the populace. But the writing on
the walls was in paint, not blood.Boiling point
Other symbolic gestures were more aes-
thetically pleasing. A remarkably catchy,
crowdsourced Cantonese anthem, “Glory
to Hong Kong”, first heard at rallies, ended
up sung by flash mobs of office workers
during lunch breaks. A moment when a
young girl and boy, forming a human
chain, found themselves too shy to hold
hands and instead gripped the two ends of
a biro took flight on social media; within a
day it had been mashed up with Michael-
angelo into memes showing the spark of
life, or freedom, flowing from one to the
other. The “Goddess of Democracy” who
graced the Tiananmen Square protests—
herself a repurposing of the Statue of Liber-
ty—appeared again, now known as “LadyLiberty” and kitted out with the practical
but now also iconic appurtenances of prot-
est: hard hat, gas mask and umbrella.
The police met the water’s rising tide
with what in retrospect seems like toler-
ance. When, three weeks after the storming
of Legco, the frontliners painted slogans on
the Liaison Office, symbol of the Chinese
Communist Party’s authority over Hong
Kong, the police were furious at having
been outwitted. Yet when The Economist
asked one officer what he and his col-
leagues near the office intended to do in the
face of protesters barricading the road, he
replied, with a wry smile: “Wait till the mtr
[the underground system] closes and prot-
esters take the last train home.”
Elsewhere on the mtr, though, that
night saw a decisive escalation. Men with
triad links and metal staffs entered the
Yuen Long station in the New Territories
looking for democracy protesters on trains.
They laid into passengers indiscriminate-
ly; local police, apparently turning a blind
eye, failed to respond. That incident did
more than any other to discredit a policeforce that used to be called “Asia’s finest”.
Today, only Mrs Lam uses the phrase.
Since then protesters have vandalised
(or, in protest slang, “renovated”) state
banks, Hong Kong’s biggest bookseller
(which is owned by the Liaison Office) and
restaurants with sympathies assumed to
lie with the Communist Party. Rioters now
set fires not only on the streets but inside
buildings. On November 6th a pro-estab-
lishment politician with known links to
the triads in Yuen Long was stabbed in
broad daylight. People fear being attacked
simply on the basis of being Mandarin-
speaking mainland Chinese. Nihilism is
trumping romanticism: “If we burn, you
burn with us”, a rebel slogan from the cli-
max of the Hunger Games saga, has gained
currency. Earlier this month it was given
awful form when a bystander confronting
protesters was doused with something
flammable and set on fire (he survived).
Police commanders express bewilder-
ment that the mass of ordinary, peace-lov-
ing Hong Kongers are not repelled by such
scenes on the streets. Many are. But they
are repelled yet more by the police. A sur-
vey published on November 15th by the
Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Insti-
tute found that 83% blame the government,
and especially the police, for the increase
in violence. In a separate poll, 51.5% report-
ed zero trust in the police force, up from
just 6.5% before the protests began.
Hong Kongers are appalled that police
have lined uniformed schoolchildren
against walls for random searches and have
arrested 11-year-olds. Reports are growing
of physical mistreatment in detention.
Rules of engagement that in July were con-
sistent with best international practice—
rubber bullets fired only below waist
height, tear-gas used to disperse not to ket-
tle—have been thrown out of the window.
Beatings at the time of arrest have become
commonplace, sometimes escalating to
frenzy. On November 11th an unarmed prot-
ester was shot in the stomach at point-
blank range. And all this with impunity. Of-
ficially, only one officer out of over 30,000
has as yet been suspended for any action
against a protester.
It is possible to see a terrible symmetry
at work, with frontline ninjas in helmets
with camera mounts uncannily resem-
bling the black-clad police of the rapid-ac-
tion unit known as the Raptors. Each side’s
epithets dehumanise the other—“dogs” for
the police, “cockroaches” for the protes-
ters. The litanies of brutality they recite
match each other crime for crime. But a
large part of the public, from taxi drivers to
secretaries, sees no such balance. On Octo-
ber 1st, China’s national day, residents of
high rises in Wanchai concealed hundreds
of protesters suddenly cornered by riot po-
lice. Crowds scream at riot police in shop-
ping malls and housing estates. Asia’s fin-10 kmHongKong
IslandNew TerritoriesKowloonLantau Island WanchaiShenzhenHONG KONG
Hong Kong
airport
HK Polytechnic
University
Legislative CouncilLiaison OfficeYuen Long stationBeijingHong Kong