I was one of the organisers of the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement and was sentenced to sixteen months of imprisonment for inciting people to join a seventy-nine-day occupation of some major avenues in Hong Kong.
Life in prison was difficult. Food was lousy. The temperature there was unbearably hot summer and chilly in winter. There were hundreds of rules regulating prison life. Sharing food and books or keeping an orange overnight could be punished by solitary confinement without books, snacks, radio and television. Inmates were deprived not just of freedom but also of dignity, constantly scolded by the officers and exposed naked in front of surveillance cameras.
I vowed to keep a sane mind and good spirits. I saw the courtroom and prison as a stage for explaining to the public the cause of our struggle. After all, the purpose of civil disobedience is to arouse public awareness of an unjust situation through self-sacrifice. I trust that a ‘community of suffering’ can become collective resistance to dictatorship.
The anti-extradition protests changed the course of Hong Kong history. But they were part of the long struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. I will compare it with the older democracy movement that started in the mid-1980s and the Umbrella Movement of 2014 in terms of leadership styles, strategies and the framing of local identities.
The author Kin-man Chan released from jail on March 14, 2020 (photo credit: Stand News)
Leadership: from collective actions to connective actions
In the 1980s, the movement for direct election of the Legislative Council was organised under a centralised leadership with the school principal and politician Szeto Wah, himself a member of the Legislative Council from 1985 to 2004, at the core. The first rally for democracy featured a ‘chairperson panel’ 主席台 on the stage with representatives from different civil society groups – including the Professional Teachers’ Union, Christian Industrial Committee and others – was not much different in style from the formal meetings held by the Communist Party of China (CPC).
As a student, I was stunned by this scene. Mr Szeto, as he later wrote in his autobiography, was once a member of Hok Yau Club (revealed in his book as a subsidiary group under the CPC) but was not admitted to the party.[1] He later established the most powerful teachers’ union in the territory, Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union. He adopted communist organisational tactics to fight for democracy by building strong central leadership, establishing branches and cells in different districts and schools, and recruiting members through services and material benefits.
Younger generations of social activists attacked this leadership style as the movement evolved following the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. They criticised the rigid organisational hierarchy as discouraging individual initiative and being incapable of reaching people who were not members of civil society organisations.
From 2003 to 2019, the Civil Human Rights Front had organised marches for freedom and democracy on 1 July, the day of the handover from British to Chinese sovereignty. The massive turnout of 500,000 people that year, in response to proposed anti-subversion legislation, demonstrated the effectiveness of mixing organisational and network mobilisations.[2] According to a survey, only 34.3 percent of participants were drawn in by appeals from groups they belonged to. Most of them joined the march with family members (26.6 percent) or friends (45.2 percent) after hearing about it on radio or receiving emails from colleagues or friends. Only 4.7 percent marched with other members of the same civil society groups.[3]
During the mobilisational period of the Occupy Central Movement in 2013, the leaders of the ‘Occupy Trio’ – Professor Benny Tai, the Rev. Chu Yiu-ming and myself – attempted to incorporate some bottom-up initiatives such as ‘Deliberation Day’ (a series of forums discussing democracy and related issues) and a ‘civic referendum’ (an unofficial referendum organised by the Occupy Trio to let people choose a constitutional reform package to be submitted to the government). But when the occupation erupted to support the student strike and became the Umbrella Movement, student leaders took over the leadership with the Occupy Trio and opposition party leaders providing support. Internal splits between the Occupy Trio and student leaders regarding the duration of occupation and negotiation tactics became so serious that they ended in deadlocks. The protesters who occupied the site for seventy-nine days were left confused by the lack of coherent leadership.
In the 2019 anti-extradition protests, participants demonstrated a much higher degree of flexibility in terms of leadership and strategies, as reflected in their motto: ‘Be water’. Rejecting the notion of centralised leadership, they formulated their goals and strategies through an internet forum. The decisions were made and disseminated through Facebook, Telegram channels and other apps.
Instead of occupying a specific place for a long time, people organised human chains, singing the newly written protest anthem ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ in places like shopping malls, and staging unadvertised protests during lunch breaks in different business districts. These diffused mobilisations turned out to be extremely effective and hard to suppress, given that no prominent leaders could be identified.
Strategies: from legal, peaceful protest to mixed strategies
Before the Umbrella Movement, the pro-democracy movement organised protests only within legal boundaries, seeking permission for rallies and marches from police.
The Umbrella Movement was a watershed in adopting the idea of civil disobedience, involving violations of law while upholding the principle of non-violence. Although some of participants advocated more confrontational tactics during the seventy-nine-day occupation, this ‘militant faction’ 勇武派 was marginalised by the dominant faction of peaceful demonstrators known as the ‘peaceful, rational and non-violent’ faction 和理非.
The ‘militant faction’ came to the fore during the ‘Fishball Revolution’ 魚蛋革命 of 2016 when Hong Kong Indigenous, a group promoting Hong Kong independence, confronted the police when they went to support some illegal hawkers on Lunar New Year’s eve. While there was widespread sympathy for the hawkers, and condemnation of police violence, there were mixed reactions to the violence on the part of the protesters.
The Anti-Extradition Movement, however, demonstrated an unprecedented tolerance within the movement towards different protest strategies, including violence. Besides massive rallies and other peaceful protests in schools and shopping malls, young protesters also set up roadblocks to block police deployment. When police used tear gas, pepper spray and even bullets to disperse protesters, they returned fire with Molotov cocktails. They took justice into their own hands by beating up antagonists when the police themselves were not respecting the law.
Although the majority of protesters supported peaceful struggle, surveys found people were sympathetic to violent demonstration.[4] Around 40 percent of the interviewees in a survey done from June to October in 2019 by the Chinese University of Hong Kong believed that the extent of violence on the part of protesters was excessive, but 56 percent indicated their understanding of why people had to resort to violence. Some 72 percent believed that police had used excessive force, and half of the interviewees maintained that the government was responsible for the escalation of violence.
More and more people believed that the protesters’ physical violence was a response to the structural violence of an authoritarian regime.
Identity framing: from Hong Kong Chinese to Hongkongers
As Hong Kong was a British colony populated mainly by ethnic Chinese for more than a hundred years to 1997 and is currently a Special Administrative Region under Chinese sovereignty, its people have long possessed dual identities. For a long time, Hong Kong people saw themselves first as Hongkongers but did not see that as being in conflict with the Chinese identity. However, after the 2014 Umbrella Movement and especially during the Anti-Extradition Movement, the younger generation in particular showed a strong sense of local identity. They increasingly saw themselves purely as Hongkongers, refusing to identify as Chinese.
Leaders of the pro-democracy movement in the mid-1980s held a banner with the words ‘I love China, I love Hong Kong and I love democracy’. The sense of patriotism demonstrated by this generation of democratic leaders could be seen as defiance to colonial rule. ‘Democratic reunion with China’ 民主回歸 was the dominant discourse within the pro-democracy movement. Even the organisation holding the annual candlelight vigil commemorating the Tiananmen Square crackdown bears the word ‘patriotic’ in its name.
The Umbrella Movement was also careful not to denounce Chinese sovereignty. The Occupy Trio and student leaders simply urged Beijing to honour its promise of giving Hong Kong universal suffrage as stipulated in the Basic Law. The failure of the movement to achieve democracy after such a massive showdown created a moral vacuum in the community. In an extremely depressing atmosphere, the strategies and goals of the movement were debated. We saw the rise of localism in the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement. More young people argued that for Hong Kong to become a sovereign state was the only hope for democracy, which was not possible under the present arrangement within China of ‘one country, two systems’.
While people were still debating the ideas advocated by the localists, the government attempted to impose the Extradition Law on Hong Kong, creating tremendous fear among people. The law, once passed, would enable criminal suspects to be sent from Hong Kong to China for trial, which has no rule of law in the eyes of most Hong Kong people. Overstepping these legal boundaries would render the ‘one country, two systems’ formulation meaningless. The growing Beijing-directed repression of protests by Hong Kong police further eroded people’s already faint identification with China. People therefore felt more comfortable chanting the slogan ‘Hong Kong is not China’, which is not necessarily equivalent to ‘Hong Kong independence’.
According to a survey conducted by the Hong Kong Public Opinions Research Institute during the high tide of the protest in late 2019, 67 percent of Hong Kong people still did not support Hong Kong independence.[5] But another survey conducted by Gary Tang found that more than 60 percent of protesters on the front line of the extradition movement believed that ‘Hong Kong independence was the only way out’.[6] I believe that truly reflects the sentiment of the younger generation.
Strengths and weaknesses of networked movements
The Anti-Extradition Movement, as a classical case of a ‘networked social movement’, achieved remarkable results despite the huge costs paid. A ‘networked social movement’ is a movement mobilised through new information and communications technologies. According to Manuel Castells, in networked social movements, the internet not only decentralises our communication routines but also liberates individuals to shape a new autonomy as people no longer need to rely on traditional political parties, civil society organisations or media to advocate their ideas and mobilise others for support. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram and self-media such as YouTube provide convenient channels with which to shape people’s mindsets. Since communication is power, acquiring this power by ordinary people will shake the political scene and lead to social change. As Castells argued: ‘Power is more than communication, and communication is more than power. But power lies on the control of communication, as counterpower depends on breaking through such control.’[7]
After reviewing a series of networked social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring/Jasmine Revolution and even our Umbrella Movement, Castells found that this kind of movement was usually powerful in creating social and cultural change but not systematic political change.[8]
Yet the Anti-Extradition Movement succeeded in many fronts. It forced the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government to withdraw the bill, persuaded the United States Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and helped pro-democracy candidates to win a landslide victory in the District Council election in late 2019. Unlike the Umbrella Movement, which experienced internal conflicts regarding goals and strategies, the networked protesters were able to settle on their Five Demands: withdrawal of extradition bill; retraction of the word ‘riot’ to describe rallies; release of all arrested demonstrators; an independent inquiry into perceived police brutality; the right for Hong Kong people to choose their own leaders democratically and other specific goals through online deliberation.
Backlash from China and the future of Hong Kong’s democratic movement
Perhaps the success of the Anti-Extradition Movement in mobilising such a huge proportion of the population provoked Beijing’s ruthless crackdown. Some 10,000 protesters were arrested and prosecuted, accused of participating in riots. Blatantly violating the Basic Law, which specifies that Hong Kong should make its own national security laws, Beijing imposed China’s National Security Law directly on Hong Kong on 1 July 2020. Many pro-democracy leaders for example Benny Tai was prosecuted for conspiracy to commit subversion by organising the primary and vowing to veto the government budget if the prodemocracy law makers secured a majority in the Legislative Council. Tonyee Chow was prosecuted for refusing to provide information on the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. She was also charged for inciting subversion as the alliance was responsible for organising the annual candlelight vigil commemorating the 4 June crackdown. Many political groups were forced to close. Their leaders were either arrested or escaped into exile.
Independent mass media such as the Apple Daily 蘋果日報 and Stand News 立場新聞 were banned, and their owners and chief editors were arrested and charged with collusion with foreign forces or incitement. The authorities revised the school curriculum to eliminate a compulsory course Liberal Studies and make National Security Education mandatory at all levels of schooling, including university.
Elected pro-democracy district councillors were disqualified, and the rules of election were amended so that only pro-China candidates would be allowed to be nominated for the election.
Human rights–related civil society groups, including some prominent trade unions and university student unions, were forced to dissolve. Some international NGOs such as Amnesty International decided to leave because they found Hong Kong was no longer safe for their staff to carry out their mission.
Everyday resistance: from a community of resistance to a community of suffering
Open opposition has become impossible in Hong Kong unless you are willing to face the repercussions, which could mean long imprisonment. This does not mean that people’s level of rage and their urge for freedom and democracy have died down. But they can express their grievances only through subtle resistance in everyday life. ‘Yellow Economic Circles’ emerged to provide people with an arena to express their political stands through daily consumption, by patronising restaurants or shops that supported the movement, including by hanging pro-democracy posters on the wall or protest slogans printed on the receipts during the protests.
A group of dedicated Hong Kong citizens spent many days a week in court giving support to defendants charged for political reasons. When the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to jail, these citizens would chase the prison van taking them to prison to bid them farewell. Early in the morning, they waited in the queue outside the prison to visit the political prisoners. Many also wrote letters to them. We call these people ‘professional’ court auditors, van chasers, prison visitors and letter-writers owing to their exceptional devotion.
By sharing the pains of these political prisoners, people are morally and socially connected in a community of suffering. Hong Kong has thus turned from a community of resistance to a community of suffering.
The authorities are aware of the power of this moral force. They forced NGOs providing support to political prisoners such as letter-writing to dissolve. Two ‘professional’ court auditors were charged for chanting slogans in a courtroom and for making ‘inciting’ statements with ‘seditious intention’ online.[9] People were worried but still attended courtroom hearings. They were encouraged by exemplary figures like Jimmy Lai and Tonyee Chow, who stood firm to defend their rights and challenge the legitimacy of the court. However, these ‘professional’ court auditors now refrain from making noise during trials and avoid being followed when leaving the courthouse.
Faced with diminishing freedoms, people of Hong Kong still uphold their free minds. They shunned the 2023 district council election, with voter turnout sharply dropping to 27.5 percent compared to 71 percent in 2019, despite relentless efforts by the government to boost the numbers.[10] Courageous individuals still quietly brought flowers to commemorate political victims in some particular dates. This form of covert resistance will continue to inspire people to maintain rage and hope until darkness falls to dawn.
Notes
[1] Szeto Wah, The Great River Flows East: Memoirs of Szeto Wah 大江東去: 司徒華回憶錄. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2011.
[2] Chan Kin-man, ‘Civil society and the democracy movement in Hong Kong: Mass mobilization with limited organizational capacity’, Korea Observer 36, no. 1 (2005).
[3] Joseph Man Chan and Robert Ting-yiu Chung, ‘Who could mobilize 500,000 people on the streets? The paradigmatic shift of public opinions politics’ 誰能發動五十萬人上街? 民意政治範式的改變, in Interpreting July 1七一解讀, ed. Joseph Man Chan, Hong Kong: Mingpao Press, 2004.
[4] Ma Ngok, ‘The community of resistance: The 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement in Hong Kong’ 反抗的共同體: 2019年香港反送中運動, New Taipei: Left Bank Publishing, 2020, pp. 129–30.
[5] Ibid., pp. 313–14.
[6] Gary Tang’s study quoted in ibid.
[7] Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 3.
[8] Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.
[9] Kevin Yam, ‘“Decolonising” Hong Kong by embracing colonialism’, China Story, 17 June 2024, https://www.thechinastory.org/decolonising-hong-kong-by-embracing-colonialism/
[10] Kenji Kawase, ‘Hong Kongers shun patriots-only polls as turnout plummets to 27.5%’, 11 December 2023, Nikkei Asia, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Hong-Kong-security-law/Hong-Kongers-shun-patriots-only-polls-as-turnout-plummets-to-27.5
