Hong Kong in Revolt. Au Loong-Yu
later.
Beijing has always insisted that mainland China remains ‘socialist’, while only Hong Kong is ‘capitalist’. In essence, both are capitalist, although in ways that are quite different from each other. The former is a kind of state capitalism, while the latter is a form of laissez-faire capitalism. The two capitalisms complimented each other for a while: while state capitalism protected China from predatorial global capitalism, Hong Kong’s free port status allowed China’s capitalism to ‘walk on two legs’ and gave Beijing a ‘window’ to the global market. With the help of Hong Kong (and Taiwan), Beijing has been hugely successful in engineering China’s rise. Yet the asymmetry in size between the two sides determined that Hong Kong would gradually be integrated into ‘Greater China’. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, China’s supporters have been telling us that Hong Kong’s importance to Beijing has been diminishing. This has the appearance of being true. Whereas in 1983 Hong Kong’s GDP was 13.1 percent of China’s, in 2013 it had fallen to 3 percent.3 In light of this, Beijing’s supporters have concluded that Hong Kong’s usefulness to China is finished, and that the ‘Hong Kong goose’ should behave itself. Gradually Beijing began to impose an ever more hard-line policy in Hong Kong. It wants to keep Hong Kong’s capitalism but not its autonomy and its political liberties.
That is why, when Beijing designed the Basic Law in 1990, it included Article 23 on national security, which aims at restricting the city’s political liberties and requires the HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) government to enact local laws accordingly. In 2003, Beijing tried to push through a bill on Article 23 (whose purpose was to ‘prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, or subversion against the Central People’s Government, and to prohibit local organisations from establishing ties with foreign political organisations’), but was defeated by a big protest in which 500,000 people took to the streets.
The Basic Law did vaguely promise that universal suffrage would be implemented step by step after 1997, but with no explicit timeline. Furthermore, it only stipulated the arrangements for the elections of both the chief executive (CE) and the Legislative Council (LegCo) in the first ten years after the handover. Hence, after 2007, the arrangements for the CE and LegCo ‘elections’ have had to be promulgated by Beijing anew.
The local liberals (not to be confused with the Liberal Party, a business-class party), also known as the ‘pan-democrats’, have benefited from this partial form of direct election. Their agenda has always been to work within the constraints of the Basic Law to achieve the expansion of direct elections. We shall see how the liberals’ plan has been shattered to pieces since 2012, when Xi Jinping took power in China.
The Rise of a New Generation
Ten years before the Umbrella Movement in 2014 there were already signs of a new generation in Hong Kong with very different perspectives and expectations – social and political – when compared to previous generations. It was the collision between Beijing’s policies and Hong Kong’s new generation which gave rise to the Umbrella Movement.
In general, Hong Kongers, including the young, have tended to be apolitical and conservative. The 1997–8 Asian economic crisis marked the beginning of a new period, when thousands of civil servants came out to the street to protest privatisation. The protests coinciding with the 2005 World Trade Organization Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong, especially the radical actions of a group of South Korean farmers, inspired many young people. From then on, one witnessed a continuous radicalisation of the youth. The founding of the League of Social Democrats (LSD) in 2006 drew support from a thin layer of young Hong Kongers. This was followed by the 2007 Defence of the Queen’s Pier campaign, a conservationist movement, which drew hundreds of young activists. In 2009 the Hong Kong government approved the Vibrant Express high-speed rail project to promote even closer integration between Guangdong and Hong Kong; this was followed by the Moral and National Education Project designed to promote ‘patriotism’ in education in Hong Kong. These developments were met with immediate resistance from young Hong Kongers, first in 2010 and then in 2012. The 2012 protests were more of a success because of a greater level of civil disobedience, signalling that a young, radical generation had finally arrived on the scene and were prepared to take over leadership from the pan-democrats for a new round of struggle.
Meanwhile, Beijing began to target the culture and language of Hong Kong. Prior to this, Hong Kongers had never made an issue of their mother tongue. Beginning in 2008, the Hong Kong government began to promote the replacement of Cantonese with Putonghua as a teaching medium in the city. This angered local people, especially since they had witnessed what had happened to the people of nearby Guangzhou city in China. For more than two decades the CCP has been pushing a campaign to ‘promote Putonghua and abolish Cantonese’ in Guangzhou, not only in schools but also in radio and television broadcasting, resulting in the young generation no longer being able to speak their mother tongue. Eventually this triggered a ‘defend Cantonese movement’ in Hong Kong and a protest on 25 July 2010.4 It died out with the increasing repression since 2012. Hong Kong people saw their future in this case and therefore resisted the policy of replacing Cantonese with Putonghua. Forced assimilation over language is always a sign of colonisation. But even the British colonial government never attempted to eliminate Cantonese from schools, let alone the media.
Occupy Central
In 2014, Beijing began to roll out a package of reforms targeting the upcoming 2017 CE election. In exchange for granting universal suffrage in the election, Beijing would retain complete control over the nomination of candidates, to the extent that even moderate liberals would stand no chance of election. This so-called ‘31 August 2014 decision’ was met with widespread discontent in Hong Kong, to the extent that it antagonised even the pan-democrat parties. But it first and foremost angered the youth. The stage was set for a confrontation between Beijing and a young generation of Hong Kongers. The HKFS (Hong Kong Federation of Students) and Scholarism were the two main student organisations which took bold actions that triggered off the Umbrella Movement in September 2014.
There was a prequel to the Umbrella Movement. In March 2013, two well-known academics, Dr Benny Tai and Dr Chan Kin-man, along with Reverend Chu Yiu-ming (whom I collectively call the ‘occupation trio’) proposed the Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) movement, whose main purpose was to conduct a civil disobedience action the following year to demand genuine universal suffrage.
It was the occupation trio, not the pan-democrats, which initiated the occupation appeal, showing the latter’s increasing irrelevance as a force for social change. After years of participation in elections for a semi-legitimate representative government in Hong Kong, the pan-democrats had become increasingly conservative. They usually won one-third of the seats on the LegCo through winning 55–60 percent of the vote in the direct elections. This should not lead us to believe that they ever possessed organisational strength, however (though this weakness on the part of political parties is also shared by civil society in general, for instance the trade unions). Fragmented into pieces, even the largest party, the Democratic Party, claimed to have only seven hundred members, and even fewer active members.5 The liberals believed Beijing’s promise of universal suffrage for so long that they were among the last to realise that it was wishful thinking.
But the occupation trio’s credibility quickly eroded due to their unwillingness to go ahead with their plan for the occupation. This compelled the HKFS to go ahead with their own plan to occupy the downtown Central district of Hong Kong Island on 2 July 2014, during which 511 protesters were arrested but not charged. The occupation trio and the pan-democrats refused to take part in this event and were deeply discredited as a result. Angered by Beijing’s 31 August decision, the occupation trio did later plan to hold a three-day occupation starting on the National Day of the PRC, 1 October.6 But the students were sceptical of their call to action. Again, it was the HKFS who took the initiative and launched a one-week class boycott on 22 September. The movement began to gather momentum.
During the class boycott, the HKFS and Scholarism decided to stage a rally on 26 September, outside of Civic Square, where the Hong Kong government headquarters is located. During the night, they suddenly