48 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
occupation, and the Communist Party.
And the Communist Party is by far
the worst.” Lee, now in his early eight
ies, began his career more than sixty
years ago, and for almost three de
cades he was the editor of an influen
tial news monthly, which he founded,
and which is sharply critical of Bei
jing. “I am very ashamed,” he said.
“I think if we’d had the courage of
young people now back in the eight
ies, Hong Kong might not have its
current problems.”
He told me that, during the hand
over negotiations between Britain and
China, there had been a complacent
assumption that China’s economic lib
eralization would somehow cushion
the worst of its hardline politics. The
optimism, he felt, as naïve as it’s turned
out to be, was bound up with the fact
that his generation had always been
able to express its political views freely;
it was only natural that a generation
deprived of such liberties would opt
for protest.
Still, when I’d last talked with pro
democracy leaders in Hong Kong, in
2018, nothing like what has occurred
since then was imaginable. Many of
them were tied up in seemingly in
terminable legal battles relating to
their roles in the 2014 protests. Their
focus was on finding ways to achieve
incremental progress by working
within the existing political system,
and even these modest ambitions
seemed likely to be thwarted. But no
one I was meeting with now in Hong
Kong claimed to have seen the events
of 2019 coming.
The fact that the authorities in Hong
Kong and Beijing were caught off guard
is no secret. Bruce Lui, who for years
covered the opaque world of Commu
nist Party politics for Hong Kong Cable
TV, described the sheer level of unpre
paredness. There’s a saying in Chinese
politics—Fengjiu biluan (“Encounter
nine: turmoil for sure”)—reflecting a
belief that the country often experi
ences its worst turbulence in years thatend in 9. (Since the fall of the Nation
alists, in 1949, years ending in 9 have
brought, successively, the Great Fam
ine, an armed conflict with the Soviet
Union, another with Vietnam, the Tian
anmen Square protests, and the Falun
Gong crisis.)
At the start of 2019, Xi Jinping called
on cadres and provincial leaders to focus
on “preventing and resolving major
risks.” Yet, of all the potential head
aches that were considered—from un
rest in Xinjiang to a trade war with
America—Hong Kong was nowhere
on the list. The Party anticipated a year
in which, having successfully contained
the prodemocracy movement, it would
see its favored candidates sweep No
vember’s District Council elections,
setting up proBeijing parties for an
overwhelming victory in the 2020 Leg
islative Council elections. In fact, the
result was a landslide win for oppo
nents of Beijing, in which prodemoc
racy candidates won more than eighty
per cent of seats, up from around thirty
per cent. As the year’s unrest spiralled
out of control, the four characters spell
ing Fengjiu biluan were used in sar
donic hashtags on social media, usu
ally featuring Xi’s name or face.
No one can resist trying to predict
the future, both short term and long.
Forebodings about a Tiananmenstyle
crackdown have eased. Although Bei
jing has moved troops into neighbor
ing Shenzhen, it seems more like a case
of bracing for the worst than like a sig
nal of intent. Meanwhile, attendance
at demonstrations has dropped since
October 1st, leaving crowds that are in
creasingly composed of disparate groups
voicing their factional differences.
Benny Tai, an Umbrella Movement
leader who served a prison term ear
lier this year for his activities in 2014,
noted the recent appearance at protests
of the flag of Catalonia, which has long
agitated for independence from Spain.
He also thinks that people who might
have been amazed at a concession on
universal suffrage a few months ago
would not be content with anything
less than independence.
This sense of mission creep is strik
ingly similar to what happened earlier
in the year: when demonstrations against
the extradition bill went unheeded, the
other demands appeared, and the feel“That’s just more snow.”