Hong Kong in Revolt. Au Loong-Yu
where they were no longer satisfied with the pan-democrats’ call for her resignation. Having subsided after the defeat of the Umbrella Movement, the call for universal suffrage was increasingly raised again. From that moment onwards, the movement evolved from being defensive to one which was more offensive. When July ended, the movement had evolved far beyond its two demands of early June, adding another three to make up its ‘five demands’:
• Withdraw the extradition bill
• Stop labelling protesters as ‘rioters’
• Drop charges against protesters
• Conduct an independent inquiry into police behaviour
• Implement genuine universal suffrage for both the LegCo and the CE elections
It was these five demands, not the call for independence, as Beijing claimed, which united millions of people. In fact, a random telephone survey in October 2019 showed that only 11 percent of the population was for independence from China while 83 percent opposed it.14 In contrast the five demands had won the support of the vast majority of the population by the end of 2019.15
With the advance of the movement, even Carrie Lam’s ‘sincere apology’ on 18 June and her further announcement that ‘the bill is dead’ on 2 July could no longer satisfy the protesters.
3. The Climax (August and September)
These two months saw the greatest number of big protests. A report by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute found that there were only 4 and 7 protests involving more than ten thousand people in June and July, respectively, while there were 22 and 9 in August and September, respectively. In terms of protests involving between 100 and 10,000 people, while in June and July these only numbered in the single digits, in August there were 19 and in September there were 46.16 (The report only recorded data until 22 October, but judging from other sources it is unlikely that the number of protests between October and December exceeded those during August and September.)
On top of these statistics, there was also one single event which defined this period: the political strike. Back in the middle of June, the young had already called for saam baa (‘three suspensions’) – a strike, a class boycott, and a shut-down of shops. This had however been unsuccessful.
On 5 August, for the first time in many decades, there was a successful political and general strike. The HKCTU estimated that 350,000 workers took part in the strike, and mass meetings were convened in seven districts. One sector of the Hong Kong economy defined the strike movement: the airport and airline industry employees, which half-paralysed the city’s international flights. On 12 August, there were huge occupations of the airport.
The last week of August was busy with preparations for the class boycott and general strike on 2 September. On 31 August, a Saturday, there were protests in Kowloon as usual, and some went to the Prince Edward station of the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway (MTR). The police followed and attacked passengers inside without announcing what crime had been committed. A lot of people were severely injured. Hearsay began to spread that the police had killed someone. The fact that the police had sealed off the station after their action and that the MTR Corporation refused to release all the video records made many people believe that this story was true. This would become one of the watershed moments in stimulating more anger from the yellow camp. Meanwhile, it was enough to encourage further radicalisation on the last day of August, and protesters agitated for another round of ‘three suspension’ when September arrived.
The airport was occupied again on 1 September and was paralysed. The next day schools started again but both university and high school students decided to greet their new semester with a class boycott. All ten universities and more than two hundred high schools had students on the streets. Seeing no sign of the movement receding, Carrie Lam finally announced her decision to withdraw the bill on 4 September. It was too late. This failed to appease the protesters. Instead the latter began to revise their five demands to ‘five demands, not one less’. From that moment onward, the movement also evolved from being an ‘anti-extradition bill’ movement into the ‘great battle to defend Hong Kong’s autonomy’.
The 2 and 3 September strike call was not very successful, however, as working people and the unions feared retaliation from Beijing. The latter had already shown its claws after the 5 August strike by first forcing the resignation of Cathay Pacific’s chief executive officer, followed by its chairman, John Slosar. The new management soon fired the chairperson of its employees’ union and more than thirty employees. Both the students and the unions could find no way to protect strikers from dismissal. Also because of the police ban on demonstrations, there was less of a chance that the so-called cin wong (‘light yellow’) camp would come out to the streets in great numbers. This was to some extent compensated by the high tide of the student movement, heartily supported by hundreds of thousands of sam wong (‘dark yellow’) supporters. (These two terms had been in use since the movement started. While ‘light yellow’ protesters were likely to be non-violent, the ‘dark yellow’ protesters were either tolerant of, or practitioners of, physical resistance to police violence.)
Even if the September strike was not very successful, two new developments, for the moment at least, compensated for the unfavourable situation of the strikers. The early-September class boycott was very successful. Along with college students, even high school students organised and boycotted classes. The latter had come out to the streets in the preceding months, but the summer holiday had made their organising impossible. It only became possible when schools restarted in September, and from then on high school students constituted one of the most important components of the movement.
The second new development was that the movement was broadening to the community level. There were community actions in the first stage, and the core activity was the making of the ‘Lennon Walls’ – first invented during the Umbrella Movement (and probably inspired by the original in Prague). People posted colourful notes to express their aspirations for the democratic change that was under way. In July this spread like wildfire. Following the great strike, polarisation between the blue and yellow camps now reached a red-hot level. Not only did the police tear down posters which targeted them, but the blue camp also now confronted the yellow camp and sometimes assaulted them around the Lennon Walls in different districts. This escalating confrontation led to the broadening of the movement to the community level, as the yellow neighbourhoods would always be on guard to protect the young people. According to one college student activist, ‘C.N.’, in all eighteen districts of Hong Kong, there were corresponding Telegram channels for exchange of information among yellow neighbourhoods. The group around the channels for Tin Shui Wai and Wong Tai Sin were the strongest; ‘if any young guy was being harassed by police within five minutes there would be two hundred neighbours coming down to the street to help’.17
A second issue was that since September the police were less and less likely to approve demonstrations in busy areas. As a result, many more local-level actions took place. When the police came and teargassed the demonstrators this always affected the neighbourhood as well, and so the angry residents would come out to confront the police; and when the police tried to break into residential buildings without a warrant, they rushed out to try to stop them. Many ‘light blue’ people evolved into being neutral or even ‘light yellow’ because of this (see below).
4. A Stalemate (October to December)
From October onwards, the movement entered its fourth stage, which I will describe as a deadlock situation. On the one hand, while the government was able to suppress protest actions, it was unable to suppress the movement as a whole. On the other hand, the movement was in a bottleneck as it found it hard to mobilise a labour strike again, and in the face of the government continuing to resort to banning demonstrations altogether the movement increasingly found it difficult to draw the same numbers of protesters again after the big illegal march on 20 October. Although whenever there was a chance for legal marches the masses’ enthusiasm was still high, as was shown by the 800,000 marchers that took to the streets on 8 December.
On