Umbrella Blossom: Hong Kong 2014/2019
It’s been hard watching the recent events in Hong Kong from afar. Five year ago, during the Umbrella Revolution, I was often in the thick of it, from the very first moments rushing out into the highway to the last slowly dwindling days as the protestors’ encampments were taken apart by police. To get my information today, I must rely on questionable articles from mainstream English language press, YouTube videos, and random tweets. This time too seems much bigger and more intense, more violent and more desperate than five years ago. It’s already lasted as long.
Thinking of the people I encountered back then, I imagine the protestors today as they suit up to battle the police with their hard hats, balaclavas, and gas masks. In my day — crotchety old man voice — we didn’t have no fancy gas mask, we relied on good old standard pollution/sick masks and plastic wrap! Hard hats, pah! Of course, in my day, we only got gassed once or twice, not seemingly every weekend. It was mostly pepper spray back then. There were few rubber bullets and no Molotov cocktails, but I do remember bags of shit — literal human feces. Either way, it’s a tougher road for the protestors now and I’m sorry I can’t be there to record some of that history in whatever limited way as I did last time.
This exercise, however, is not to reminisce about how much better and more authentic everything was when I was there to see it, but to try to provide some sort of link between what happened five years ago and what is happening now. I certainly believe there is a connection and a clear chain of events leading from there to here.
To briefly recap: the events of five years ago centered around the election of the Hong Kong Chief Executive and the composition of the government. It was largely about the desire for democratic procedures and the laws governing such: who can run for election, who can vote for what, and the process of electing Hong Kong’s leader. A Hong Kong leader who is now, as then, essentially China’s handpicked puppet. This puppet figure then having a major influence on the lives of Hong Kong people as relates to all matters of policy.
In spite of this (lack of) leadership, the goal of many Hong Kong people is to preserve their identity and live life in a free, self-determined way, distinct from mainland Chinese. This is a political, as much as cultural and linguistic, operation. These were the factors that led them into the street last time. To abbreviate the story that followed: they failed. Rather spectacularly. They got nothing: no concessions, no committees, nothing. Two-plus months camped out in the streets and nothing happened (aside from a few of the protest leaders later spent some time in jail and/or accumulated some political currency that has been used to varying effect).
The reasons for the failure of the Umbrella Revolution are manifold, but have to be, in part, credited to Chinese patience. The Hong Kong police occasionally swung their truncheons and fired off tear gas, rickety encampments were bulldozed, but overall it was a patient policy (no doubt dictated from Beijing). Offer nothing, the people will get tired of the streets being blocked, the students will get bored (and cold) eventually. And sadly, dishearteningly, it worked. The end was rather anticlimactic.
In the years following, perhaps as a result of the possibility unleashed by the Umbrella Revolution, China began to tighten its grip on Hong Kong in myriad ways. This meant, among other things, disappearing dissident Hong Kong booksellers as they vacationed outside of Hong Kong borders, and perhaps even covertly invading Hong Kong and discretely sweeping others away under the cover of night. This meant longer-term efforts of political reeducation (propaganda) directed towards Hong Kong’s older or more suburban populations, enlarging the already wide generational gap. Most notably, this meant the extradition treaty, which leads us to where we are today.
The (stated) impetus behind the creation of the extradition law was actually pretty damn reasonable. As I understand it, a Hong Kong man took his girlfriend on vacation to Taiwan, murdered her, and returned home, free and clear of the possibility of being extradited back to Taiwan to pay for his crime, as Hong Kong has no formal extradition treaty with Taiwan, Macau, or Mainland China (among other places). I gather, in most similar cases, the relevant police and government offices in the respective countries would just common-sensibly sort something out to prevent this type of injustice from occurring, but China, seeing the opening, pounced on the opportunity to formalize extradition into Hong Kong law.
With the new law, if one were to be arrested in Hong Kong, one could be swept off to China, no questions asked. The unlucky offender likely to inhabit some dark Shenzhen dungeon, in the company of disaffected Uighurs and harmlessly nutty Falun Gong practitioners, subject to waterboarding and whatever other fingernail-pulling horrors. This, of course, would be really bad for people like Joshua Wong, the young Umbrella Revolution hero, who spent some time in jail recently for his role in the 2014 protests.
This summer’s protests began about this law, which has since been retracted by Chief Executive Carrie Lam (deputy in 2014), but the protestors’ list of demands and grievances has grown. They want apologies and investigations into the police brutality that has accompanied the protests, a complete removal of the possibility of the extradition law, and have resurrected many of their desires related to democratic self-determination from the first time around.
Also like 2014, the greatest (physical) threat to the protestors is that China could grow impatient with the ongoing protests and, instead of relying on the Hong Kong police, could send in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who conveniently have a garrison in the city, to effectively, dramatically, end dissent.
This brings us briefly to a discussion of tactics and some small reminiscences of the old days (forgive me): I remember one night in October 2014 standing in front of the PLA barracks, and the protestors were thinking about blocking the highway that leads to the tunnel to Kowloon from Hong Kong island. This is a major thoroughfare in a highly visible spot. I was standing there with another expat guy and we were watching some young students sort of tease out the idea. A couple of kids would run out in the road, stop a couple of shrilly honking cabs, then chicken out. The guy next to me looked very concerned. I said, “They should totally do it.” He looked at me like I was some bloodthirsty creep, “Can you imagine what would happen?” “Yup,” I replied. “I sure can.”
Had the PLA shock troops come streaming out on the road, I reckon a lot of kids would’ve gotten hurt, and Hong Kong might look very different today. Instead, China kept their cool, waited out the protestors for literal months, and almost exactly nothing changed.
The protestors today seem to have less fear than their 2014 counterparts. They not only will block the highway, but the whole fucking airport! Viewed from afar, and with my cynical lens that everything has to have been better five years ago, it seems that in learning from these old mistakes, the Hong Kong protestors may have overcompensated a bit, turning from civil disobedience to active confrontation. Instead of long-term occupations of public or commercial spaces, it’s weekend marches and forced bursts of violence. Then again, it seems to working: they are getting larger numbers involved, causing more havoc, and generally getting a bigger reaction. One thing I am fairly certain of however, judging by the chilling tweets of Chinese State media, it could all end very quickly.
Even before these recent events started, I had toyed with the idea of pulling together the articles I wrote for Guernica, Hong Kong Free Press, and Asian Review of Books, in time for the five-year anniversary of the Umbrella Revolution in late-September and reposting or republishing them in some form. But, as they do, events have moved past that and I’ve decided to quickly put together a compilation now.
What follows* is my articles (sometimes in different form), notes, and impressions from those few months of the Umbrella Revolution, and a discrete (related) event afterwards. Hopefully this added context will be helpful to understand what is happening today.
Most of all, I hope and pray for the safety of the protestors and for the freedom and self-determination of the Hong Kong people. I loved living in Hong Kong and, if it wasn’t for the profound indignity of the NYC-expensive, rabbit-cage apartments, I would love to go back. I often browse Hong Kong job listings and see what’s available (and if they are offering housing) — housing’s a big problem in Hong Kong if you hadn’t noticed, and another root to the young people’s dissatisfaction.
Aside from my shitty apartment, I never felt more connected to Hong Kong than I did during the Umbrella Revolution. By devoting myself to documenting the cause and trying to spread the word, I was not just another economically-self-motivated expat, but was making an investment in the city’s future side-by-side with Hong Kong people. It is a great world city, filled with a unique culture and history. Depending on what happens, how this all ends, perhaps I’ll be able to return to add another chapter to the story, or what I fear is more likely, a brief, sad coda.
Erik Wennermark
August 12th, 2019, Tokyo, Japan
*I will shortly be posting an ebook to Amazon with this essay serving as the introduction.
