44 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
and told me it was very possible. Still,
could the police successfully silence
the family and friends of three peo-
ple indefinitely? No Name looked at
me hard under the dim lamplight. “Do
you know how easy it is for the po-
lice to just disappear people?” he said.
“You have no idea what they are capa-
ble of.” Distrust of social institutions
had spread like a contagion among the
young. “On some level, it doesn’t even
matter if the deaths are true,” he said,
with a shrug. “The possibility of these
deaths gets people riled up and will
keep them coming out.”
“The truth doesn’t matter?”
“The system is rigged,” he said. “The
truth is that the government doesn’t
give a shit about exercising brutality
against unarmed citizens.”
It was late and beginning to rain.
We had wound our way back to the
restaurant where we’d met. A few men
remained, smoking and swigging beer,
their shirts rolled up, revealing slack,
pale bellies. Now, five hours into our
conversation, No Name told me that
this neighborhood was where he’d
grown up: “Many people here still want
to live the way they lived in their home
villages—they haven’t assimilated to
Hong Kong life.”
And yet wasn’t life in Hong Kong
about a sense of upward mobility? I
suggested that, whatever his reserva-
tions about his father, the man had
done something impressive in coming
to a foreign place and raising six kids
who graduated from college. And all
of them were fluent in four languages:
Cantonese, Mandarin, Southern Min
(the local dialect of their parents’ home
village on the mainland), and English.
No Name was in no mood for gener-
osity. “When he was in his twenties, he
risked everything to go to a strange
place to find a better life,” he said. “How
can he not understand that I’m fight-
ing for a better life now?”I
thought of No Name a few days
later, during a conversation with a
pro-democracy activist and prominent
businessman, Jimmy Lai, who came
up with a familial analogy for Hong
Kong’s struggle. The Communist Party,
he said, saw the insurgent territory as
a bratty child bringing shame on thefamily name; Hong Kongers saw main-
land China as an abusive parent. In
1989, when Deng Xiaoping ordered the
Army to put down the Tiananmen up-
rising, the Communists were able to
mete out punishment behind closed
doors, just as No Name’s father had
done. But concealment is impossible
in an age of smartphones and social
media. “Now the door is open,” Lai
said. “The neighbors can hear what’s
going on. China has to find a way to
pinch them hard but secretly.”
In Beijing-influenced media outlets,
it’s become common to paint the pro-
testers as a fringe group of disaffected
youth; they are described not as ideal-
ists but as people merely frustrated by
Hong Kong’s declining economic sta-
tus relative to that of the booming main-
land. When China took over, in 1997,
Hong Kong’s G.D.P. accounted for 18.4
per cent of the country’s total, a num-
ber that, within two decades, had shrunk
to 2.8 per cent. Still, survey data show
that, while more than fifty per cent of
protesters are younger than thirty, a no-
table number are in their fifties and
older. But the Confucian parallel be-The decentralized structure of this year’s protests has helped demonstrators thwart the efforts of police.