19 October/20 October 2019 ★ FT Weekend 17
Spectrum
among protesters. “A lot of the actions of
the protesters now are quite similar
to what Edward and his followers did
in 2016.”
Voices suggesting restraint were
mostly silent this year after hundreds of
protesters stormed Hong Kong’s legisla-
ture on July 1, destroying symbols of
China’s central government and briefly
occupying the chamber. (The demon-
strators also put up signs cautioning
against shattering treasured artefacts
and paid for drinks they took from a
canteen fridge.)
“It was you who taught us that peace-
ful protests don’t work,” read one piece
of graffiti, a reference to a comment
made by Hong Kong’s chief executive
Carrie Lam when she admitted she was
suspending the extradition bill not
because of the biggest peaceful protest
in the city in three decades but because
of the violent protests that followed. As
the movement continues, increasingly
violent actions have grown more accept-
able to a broader cross section of partici-
pants, according to a survey from the
Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Opinion polls also show the number
of people identifying as Hong Kongers
rather than Chinese has hit record
highs. “This movement is about being
faceless, about being anonymous, about
not taking credit for what you have done
— it’s about being a part of a bigger com-
munity,” Brian Leung, 25, told the FT.
The only protester who took off his
mask inside the legislature on July 1, he
has since returned to studying authori-
tarianism in the US and is considering
whether to seek political asylum over-
seas or return to face imprisonment.
“The people around you at a protest
are strangers but you trust them so
much you will risk your life for them.
Given this experience is repeated again
and again... it is natural our [Hong
Kong] identities are becoming stronger
than before.”
Summer has turned into autumn the
next time I meet Wu. “We have a new
anthem,” he says. “Have you heard it?”
How could I not have? Since the start of
September, “Glory to Hong Kong” has
rung out across the city, at football
matches and in shopping malls.
Anorchestral rendition ith musiciansw
clad in gas masks and yellow hard hats
has been viewed more than two million
times on YouTube. “I never used to
understand why people could get so
emotional singing their national
anthem,” Wu says, as the rain hammers
down. “Now, for the first time, I get it.”
Allusions to a budding independence
movement are now pervasive — in slo-
gans chanted, songs sung and even the
type of demonstrations staged. Nora
Lam is stunned at howLost in the Fumes
is resonating with protesters. “What I
was trying to portray in the film was
[that] Edward was just another young
person in Hong Kong who has the
same problems as us growing up — chas-
ing your dreams and having them
crushed, not knowing what to do after
graduation, suffering from depression,”
she explains.
Despite playing to packed houses in
arts centres, museums and schools, no
commercial cinema was willing to
screen the documentary when it was
released in late 2017. “Executives don’t
want to get into trouble. Maybe they
aren’t against you or the whole move-
ment in general but they are too scared
to do what should be allowed in a nor-
mal society,” she says. “I think I’d be less
upset if the film had been banned out-
right by the government. Fear among
ourselves plays a far more important
role than actual control from the
regime.”
A poster for the film hangs on the door
of the student union at Hong Kong Bap-
tist University, alongside A4 printouts
calling for independence. For Keith
Fong, the union’s president, Leung
embodies traditional Chinese virtues
such as sacrificing for the greater good.
“The sense I get is most people our age
support independence but people in
their thirties and forties don’t. There are
two overwhelming emotions among our
generation — helplessness and this
sense of ‘if we burn, you burn with us’,”
Fong tells me.
In 2017, just over 10 per cent of Hong
Kongers supported independence,
according to a surveyby the Chinese
University of Hong Kong. Academics
estimate this number would be higher if
another poll were conducted now.
At high school, Fong’s history teach-
ers told him about the Tiananmen
Square massacre and as troops massed
on the mainland border of Hong Kong
this summer, it was impossible not to
draw parallels between then and now.
“All the virtue and history embodied in
traditional Chinese culture has been
destroyed by the Chinese Communist
party,” he says with a shrug. He has been
arrested twice, including for possession
of offensive weapons in August after he
Continuedfrompage 16
purchased 10 laser pens, popular
among protesters who use them to
disorient police and deter passers-by
from taking photographs that might
identify protesters.On October 1, as Beijing staged its
grandest ever military parade to mark
the 70th anniversary of Communist
China, Wu and his newly formed team
of 20 front-linersbattled police n cen-i
tral Hong Kong. A helicopter circled
overhead. Tear gas filled the air. Having
lost his teammates in the chaos, Wu hid
behind a concrete block by a construc-
tion site. Suddenly, an officer raced
towards him, smashing a baton on to the
left side of his frame. “At that moment, I
thought to myself ‘this is it, this is the
day I am arrested’,” he recounts, a few
days later.
Instead, he managed to hoist himself
out of danger, rolling four times before
dragging his aching body away. The pro-
tester behind him was arrested. A few
blocks further on, Wu huddled inside a
church, a space off limits to police with-
out warrants. Other protesters, dashing
through a middle-class neighbourhood,
were amazed when residents opened
their grilled gates, ushering them inside.
After they changed out of their black
outfits, middle-aged locals offered to
stash their gear and venture out first to
make sure the coast was clear.
Such shows of solidarity have
recurred throughout the movement.
Impromptu crowdfunding campaigns
have sprung up whenever activists see a
need with about $15m worth of dona-
tions raised so far. After one weekend of
violence in August, people donated $1m
in an hour to take out advertisements
promoting the protesters’ cause in inter-
national newspapers. A separate fund
helps withlegal fees nd medical bills.a
Never in Hong Kong’s history has a
protest movement enjoyed such wide-
spread support from different socialidentities and professional groups. Pop-
ular mottos include “Don’t distance
yourself, don’t snitch” and “Together we
climb the mountain, each in our own
way,” conveying solidarity between rad-
ical front-line protesters and moderate,
peaceful ones.
The movement is largely leaderless by
design, after several Umbrella leaders
were sentenced to prison. Fearful of
China’s rapidly expanding surveillance
state, demonstrators mostly mobilise
anonymously online. Doctors, nurses,
accountants, lawyers, family members
of police, teachers and civil servants
have all protested against the govern-
ment. Thousands of high-schoolers
have also organised since school
resumed in September, belting out
“Glory to Hong Kong” over the national
anthem during school assemblies, boy-
cotting class and organising human
chains. At a Saturday rally arranged by
and for high-school students, protest
songs ripple through the humidity as
students wheel out Lady Liberty, a hulk-
ing statue with a school backpack wav-
ing a flag which reads “Liberate Hong
Kong! Revolution of Our Times!”
For Moke Cheung, 15, it has been a
busy few months. Not only did he help
organise the rally but he has also helped
craft the election strategies of pro-de-
mocracy candidates in upcoming dis-
trict elections. “I’m notpsychologically
tired but I am physically tired because
I’m not getting enough sleep,” he says.
His gruelling schedule starts with get-
ting ready for school at 6am and ends at
2am, after he watches live feeds of the
nightly protests and holds meetings on
Telegram to prepare for the next ones.
He was one of 120 students at his
school who participated in a class boy-
cott until his teacher called his father
who, vehemently opposed to the pro-
democracy movement, forced him to
return to class. “I generally try to stay at
school until 6pm or hide in my bedroomto study, play computer games or sleep
just so I don’t have to talk to my dad,” he
explains.
As the movement evolves, so too has
Cheung’s attitude towards Edward
Leung, the imprisoned independence
advocate, whose violent actions he
didn’t initially agree with or under-
stand. “The first step on the path
towards Hong Kong independence is
having more localist lawmakers,” he
says, arguing that the disqualification of
elected lawmakers with localist views
was one of the crucial catalysts for the
unrest. “It feels like no one can truly
represent young people’s views now.
“When the time is right to fight for
independence, we should go for it, but
no one has persuaded me that inde-
pendence is practical or workable right
now,” he says. “It is much more impor-
tant Hong Kong becomes a democracy
than China becomes a democracy.”
This attitude, common among many
young people in the territory, worries
Pun Ngai, 49, a professor at the Univer-
sity of Hong Kong. Three decades ago
she was one of about 30 students from
Hong Kong who travelled to Beijing in
solidarity with mainland Chinese stu-
dents and was at Tiananmen Square
during the crackdown. When the colo-
nial government sent a plane to take all
its students home, she refused to board.
Instead, she and some friends spent
months travelling back home overland,
hosted by sympathetic Chinese.
“How can you change Hong Kongwithout changing China? In terms of the
economy, political influence, every-
thing is interconnected,” she says. At
her request, her students have taken her
to the front-line protests. “Back in my
day when we were students, our slogan
was ‘rooted in the community, facing
China, opening ourselves to the whole
world’,” she explains, in an office filled
with books on labour movements in
China and elsewhere. “But now, my stu-
dents tell me, ‘You’re out of date Profes-
sor Pun, go home, it’s not safe for you to
come out with us, you run too slowly,”
she chuckles.
The protests haven’t just divided dif-
ferent generations of activists. As I
reported this story, I grew increasingly
conversant in the strategies young peo-
ple across Hong Kong have deployed to
tackle conflicts with their parents about
the protests in a society where it isn’t
uncommon to live at home until mar-
riage. Screaming. Silence. Sharing
heart-warming animal stickers in
WhatsApp family chat groups in
response to relatives calling protesters
“cockroaches” and other names. Fight-
ing “bullshit with bullshit” when logic
doesn’t work. Moving out.Looming over the current unrest is
the question: what happens next? China
promised Hong Kong a high degree of
autonomy until 2047 but fears are grow-
ing that the “one country, two systems”
framework will soon become “one coun-
try, one system”. “2047 is a metaphor.
2047 may well happen in 2025 or 2030,
it could happen this year if the [Chinese
military] marched over the border,”
says Samson Yuen, a political scientist at
Lingnan University. As Chinese troops
mass on the border, it is possible that
Beijing willdeploy its army n theo
streets of Hong Kong.
More likely, the protests will eventu-
ally simmer down but the underlying
discontent will continue to pile up, wait-ing for another opportunity to explode,
Yuen argues. “Hong Kong has a long his-
tory of protests, with each bigger than
the previous one. Protests won’t die
down in Hong Kong and you now see a
whole generation of high-school stu-
dents mobilising, they are now the peo-
ple with the momentum to carry on the
movement.”
With the prospect of democracy
unlikely, the best-case scenario for
many is that the “one country, two sys-
tems” framework continues beyond- Protesters fear a worst-case sce-
nario, in which Hong Kong becomes a
newXinjiang, a high-tech surveillance
state where at least one million mostly
Muslim minorities are held in intern-
ment camps. It is also possible that in
the future, Hong Kongers will be so thor-
oughly indoctrinated by patriotic edu-
cation that the fight for democracy will
eventually fizzle out.
“For the past 22 years, we didn’t pay
enough attention to the underlying sen-
timents in Hong Kong society but [over
this summer] we’ve learnt our lesson,
we’re now watching and studying very,
very closely,” the Chinese government
official who spoke to me on condition of
anonymity said.
Beijing has clamped down on compa-
nies and organisations it accuses of
showing sympathy to the protest move-
ment, including Cathay Pacific and
America’sNational Basketball Associa-
tion. It is hard to envisage this trajectory
reversing in the near future. Pro-de-
mocracy advocates also fear Beijing’s
insidious intrusion into the institutions
— the civil service, academia, the media
— that distinguish Hong Kong.
“If China moves towards a greater
degree of democratisation — which is
quite unimaginable at this point in time
— then Hong Kong’s autonomy may be
more sustainable in the future,” said
Brian Fong, a professor at the Education
University of Hong Kong. “But we can’t
even predict what will happen next
week, how can we predict what will hap-
pen in 2047?”
In Hong Kong, anxieties are also
growing about theinflux of mainland
Chinese weeping through the city. Ones
hundred and fifty are granted residency
every day. “The conflicts between main-
land Chinese and Hong Kongers are
becoming more widespread... the
worst thing is we don’t have a popula-
tion policy, we can’t control how many
people come from China,” argues Au
Nok-Hin, a pro-democracy lawmaker
who was recently charged with assault-
ing police officers’ ears because he
talked too loudly into a loudspeaker.
Samantha Zhang, 25, is one of those
granted residency. She moved across
the border when she was 20 and now
sells insurance. “To be honest, I really
understand the protesters. If I had been
born and raised here, I’d also be on the
streets,” she tells me over curry in an
upmarket shopping district popular
among Chinese tourists. “A lot of us
came to Hong Kong from the mainland
because we wanted freedom, I don’t
want Hong Kong to become more and
more like the mainland, I really like my
life here.”
But she believes the protesters’ turn
to violence — smashing the subway sys-
tem and attacking businesses that have
ties to the mainland — has gone too far.
She also admits she’s confused about
what to believe. Beijing has embarked
on an aggressive, multipronged cam-
paign to portray Hong Kong’s protesters
as thugs sponsored by foreign actors,
which is sowing doubt in the minds of
many mainland Chinese. “My mother is
always warning me to make sure I don’t
hang out with any pro-independence
supporters,” she says, dropping her
voice to a whisper in the rowdy restau-
rant when she utters the word “pro-in-
dependence”.
In early October, Wu and I meet by
the harbour, a day after Hong Kong’s
government invokes colonial-era emer-
gency laws to an protesters from wear-b
ing face masks —the first time the rules
have been used in more than half a
century. I’ve never heard Wu so furious,
as he rages about the first protester
shot by police four days earlier. “The
extradition bill, the emergency law
both threaten our freedoms in Hong
Kong so much,” he says, from behind a
dental maskthathe has donned as an
act of protest.
Wu has a supportive boss who, after
seeing him hobbling at work after his
police beating, suggested he take a cou-
ple of days off by pretending to be out at
client meetings. Still, he wants to go
back to university to study to become a
social worker. “But I hate loud, arrogant
people so maybe I won’t be very good at
dealing with all the different types of
people you come across in that job,” he
says. “I will just have to learn to smile
and stay silent.”
He has no plans to give up fighting for
the revolution of his time. “If this time
we fail, before 2047 we must have
another fight, a real fight. But it’s a good
sign that this time more people are will-
ing to stand up. The seed has been
planted.” He looks around to make sure
no one else is listening: “We’re heading
towards civil war.”Sue-LinWongistheFT’sSouthChina
correspondent.Additionalreportingby
NicolleLiuandQianerLiu.Somenames
havebeenchangedtoprotectidentities‘It is much more important
that Hong Kong becomes
a democracy than China
becomes a democracy’
Moke Cheung, schoolboy
‘I really understand the
protesters. If I had been
born and raised here, I’dalso be on the streets’
Samantha Zhang, who moved to
Hong Kong from mainland ChinaAbove:
protesters are
targeted with
tear gas in
Admiralty,
duringa general
strike, August 5;
From left: Nora
Lam, director of
‘Lost in Fumes’,
a film about
activist Edward
Leung;activists
attempt to block
CCTV at the
police HQusing
an umbrella in
Wan Chai, June;
Pun Ngai, 49, a
professor at the
University of
Hong KongOCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201918/ - 13:55 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WIN17, Part,Page,Edition:WIN , 17, 1