Rebel City. South China Morning Post Team
off to head to a nearby shelter when he was dodging riot police along Hillwood Road in Tsim Sha Tsui on November 18. “The support from these middle-aged people stemmed from their sympathy toward the youngsters who had gambled away their futures,” he said. “They might not care about democracy at all.”
A joint study by Cheng, Lingnan University political scientist Samson Yuen Wai-hei and Chinese University (CUHK) journalism professor Francis Lee Lap-fung confirmed that supporters had no qualms accepting the protesters’ violence. An analysis of 18,000 questionnaires collected at protest sites from June 2019 to early January 2020 found that more than 90 per cent of respondents strongly agreed that “the peaceful faction and militant faction are in the same boat.”
The study also found that supporters who were most tolerant of radical actions were young people born after the 1980s and those now in their 60s. “The inverted U-shape suggested older people who are in a comfortable position now had a sense of guilt toward the youngsters who sacrificed themselves,” Cheng said.
A multiple-round telephone survey conducted by CUHK suggested that fewer Hongkongers insisted on peaceful methods as the protests dragged on. In mid-June, almost 83 per cent of respondents agreed the protests must stay non-violent, but that share gradually slid to 71.6 per cent in August and to 69.4 per cent a month later.
October 1 marked another turning point. As protesters declared the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China a day for mourning, clashes with police broke out in several places early on. Radicals embarked on a spree of violence, lighting fires, hurling bricks and petrol bombs and smashing mainland-linked businesses. Amid the chaos, hard-core frontliners cornered and assaulted outnumbered police officers with rods in Tsuen Wan. One of the radicals, who was battering an officer, was hit in the chest with a live round. The high school student survived but protesters were outraged by the shooting of a teenager and vowed that a “debt of blood” had to be paid.
Among those who became radicalized was a transport worker who used to keep away from the jung mou back in June. But as the clashes intensified, the 32-year-old changed his stance. He raised money online and began supplying gas masks and goggles to frontliners. At the height of some of the most violent clashes, including the siege of CUHK in November, the transport worker was in the thick of the action, ferrying supplies. “Many people changed, myself included,” he said. “I stopped caring about what the protesters did. I would have been happy to see police officers injured. I didn’t care about what happened to them.”
CUHK political scientist Ma Ngok said Hongkongers’ anger toward police and their acceptance of road blockades and vandalism snowballed as the movement rolled on. “They no longer think it’s reasonable to blindly obey the law when there is no punishment for the officers’ wrongdoings,” he said.
Self-restraint mechanism
Few cared to blame the protesters, whether quietly or openly. But the protesters did fret about their standing. Online data showed LIHKG, the Reddit-like site which became the protesters’ virtual command center, recorded the biggest bump in traffic on weekends, followed by another spike on Mondays, according to Cheng. The chatter showed protesters critiquing their actions after each weekend.
In mid-August, they apologized and promised to reflect on their strategy, after causing massive disruption at the city’s airport, leading to nearly 1,000 suspended flights and thousands of grounded travelers. “Being stranded for three days, canceled flights and forced changes of itinerary are not what you deserve, nor is this what we initially aspired to do,” implored a statement by a group of anonymous protesters. “For the sake of the youngsters’ pursuit of freedom, democracy and human rights, please understand our difficulties.”
On October 4, hours after masked radicals went on a rampage, trashing railway stations and vandalizing a large number of shops and banks perceived to be Beijing-friendly in response to the newly introduced mask ban, several posts popped up on LIHKG questioning the wisdom of such moves. Someone soon offered new “guidelines” reminding comrades to trash only businesses run by gangsters, as well as government offices and offices of pro-Beijing politicians. Shops and restaurants owned by Beijing-friendly businessmen should only be “decorated” with graffiti.
“We are largely fighting for democracy and freedom, but what we are doing now appears to be attacking those who are not with us,” a user wrote on LIHKG. Another said: “Only dictators are intolerant of dissenting views. What’s the difference between the Communist Party and us, if we ‘renovate’ the stores just because their owners have a different point of view?”
Others called for the violence to be scaled back to retain international support, particularly from the United States, whose lawmakers were then planning to pass a bill that could impose diplomatic action and economic sanctions against Hong Kong supposedly to further democracy in the city.
Observers close to the ground said there was a dynamic collective restraint mechanism within the movement, which helped preserve the unity between radicals and peaceful supporters. “It’s like a rubber band where they learn from each other. The radicals could lead the moderates to take a step further, while the moderates could also pull back the radicals each time they went too far,” said Cheng.
But the self-restraint mechanism had weakened by October and November. A 57-year-old construction worker who confronted radicals vandalizing facilities at Ma On Shan MTR station on November 11 was torched. He suffered second-degree burns to his chest and arms, as well as head trauma. Protesters were out on the streets that day to paralyze the city’s traffic after the death of student Chow Tsz-lok, who succumbed to his injuries days after he fell mysteriously from a car park near the site of a police dispersal operation in Tseung Kwan O.
By November, protesters had lost sight of their “be water” strategy too. In their clashes at Polytechnic University to bring Hong Kong to a standstill by blocking an important harbor crossing, 1,000 of them found themselves kettled on campus after a day of heavy violence.
Human rights activist Johnson Yeung Ching-yin, former convenor of the pro-democracy umbrella group Civil Human Rights Front, believed the weakened self-restraint mechanism was due partly to hardcore members moving their online discussions to encrypted channels to ensure secrecy.
“In the beginning of the movement, protesters tended to make decisions via platforms such as LIHKG and Telegram. The chosen options were bound to be relatively mild if 100,000 had voted following deliberation and compromises,” said Yeung, 28. “But by October, protesters no longer relied on these popular platforms. They had formed their own groups for decision-making and by then no longer had to care about mainstream opinion.”
Yeung’s observation was corroborated by the shrinking number of posts on LIHKG from early November.
Another reason for the increasing radicalization was the change in the ranks of the frontliners, according to Cheng. “Some newcomers decided to join because their friends had been arrested or beaten. They are more emotionally driven,” he said. Compared with earlier frontliners, they were less tactical and organized in their methods.
Victoria Hui Tin-bor, associate professor in the political science department of the University of Notre Dame in the US, said spontaneous violence was the “worst downside” of any movement lacking clear leadership.
“Spontaneous violence is really common everywhere. People get angry. It takes training to maintain non-violent discipline,” she said, noting how the Occupy leaders had spent a year training its some 1,000 core supporters on non-violence. “But beyond the core, it is never easy to stop others from acting on impulse.”
The cost of embracing violence
Even as authorities toughened their stance and meted out harsher reprisals against protesters, supporters were confident the movement would not peter out. Clinical psychologist Christian Chan, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s psychology department, said a combination of psychological factors was working to perpetuate the feeling of inter-group conflict on both sides.
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