As well as having a psychological effect on those being gassed, tear gas also has a psychological effect on those deploying it and those looking on, either in person or through the media. By creating a scene of violence and chaos, tear gas works to objectify the crowd, turning it from a group of human beings into a seething, writhing mass. Tear gas also helps to turn a protest into a riot—and therefore makes it a legitimate target for further state violence.
‘Identity must be lived in day-to-day life,’ Fong explained to me’…
Yet it seems to say something about the nature of Hong Kong that the police should so assiduously keep track of, and faithfully update the public on, these numbers. It also says something about the nature of Hong Kong that one of the greatest outrages, from the public’s point of view, arose when it was discovered that at least some of that tear gas had been used beyond the latest date recommended for use by the manufacturer. The idea that police were tear gassing them was bad enough, but that they were doing it with expired tear gas just seemed to add insult to injury.
[T]he protesters made themselves effectively immune to clearance or arrest: with no entrenched positions and adopting an unpredictable and constantly mobile presence, they would simply disperse and regroup elsewhere later if they met with police opposition.
This very characteristic might explain another term that police and the pro-Beijing press soon developed for the protesters: ‘cockroaches’.
As the early summer afternoon blazed hot and humid, throngs of protesters, all dressed in white—the colour symbolising mourning in Chinese culture—descended upon Hong Kong Island.
Unlike during the Umbrella Movement, the protesters had two advantages that increased their chances of success. In 2014, they were trying to push the government to adopt a ‘genuinely democratic’ means of electing the territory’s chief executive—although specifically which model of genuine democracy, the protesters could not quite agree upon. In 2019, their request was simple: they wanted the government to drop the extradition law. And it is a truism in politics that it is easier to oppose than propose.
And yet, if there were no leaders, how did we all come to be here? Where did those supply stations come from? It was as if the lessons of the Umbrella Movement had been built into the collective muscle memory of the city: all it took was a flex, and all of the tactics and infrastructure, the shape of protest as a way of being, unconsciously emerged.
Even in the rare moments of conflict in 2014, the music was playful. When pro-government antagonists entered the occupied areas and began haranguing the crowd, protesters would surround them and sing ‘Happy Birthday’, a practice that began thanks to a well-timed accident when one such antagonist in mid-tirade accidentally pressed a button on his megaphone, which triggered a grating electronic-beeped rendition of the song, prompting the surrounding crowd to sing along. The cheerful collective singing of that universally known song during such moments of conflict would serve both to drown out the attacks and to defuse a potentially violent situation with humour and absurdity.
Indeed, instead of the term ‘leaderless’, some preferred the term ‘leaderful’: everyone had a part to play in this protest movement. Volunteers with megaphones or walkie-talkies may have helped to announce and coordinate, but they were not ‘leaders’. As a result, the movement avoided the disillusionment that the strong, centralised leadership of the Umbrella Movement ultimately engendered. Every participant in the 2019 movement felt invested, felt that they had their own contribution to make. Professor Francis Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong called it open-source protest. To use another analogy, one might think of it as a WikiProtest: everyone could make their own contributions to an integrated whole that the entire community then benefited from.
In the hours after the attack, renowned Hong Kong author Dung Kai-cheung wrote:
True, they destroyed things, but they were not rioters. They destroyed things in an orderly way, in a controlled way. Their destruction was a symbolic act, a means of stating their position, a means of expressing their righteous indignation. In the course of doing so, they did not harm a single person … On the contrary, they were prepared to sacrifice themselves. Should we not reflect upon our understanding of violence? Damaging the inanimate objects inside LegCo, is that violence? This is an expression of anger against a useless government, the shameless proestablishment political parties and an undemocratic system.
The period following the Umbrella Movement saw numerous localist-inspired protests, some of which ended in violent clashes. The most violent of these would come to be known as the ‘Fishball Revolution’…
As the tightly packed crowd of protesters tried to flee down the narrow, winding Sheung Wan streets, the risk of the crowd panicking—and a stampede occurring—was acute. In response, the protesters seemingly instinctively developed a protocol to prevent that occurring: as the tear gas shells popped and smoked around them, the retreating crowd began to chant in unison, ‘One, two, one, two!’ (‘Jat, ji, jat, ji!) and to march in time to the count. It was a brilliant use of the herd mentality—that natural tendency to act as one with a crowd—to positive effect and to avoid what could otherwise have become a deadly crush.
For too long, Hong Kongers had been objects of the history of others: whether that was British colonial history, in whose narrative Hong Kong was the ‘barren island’ (in the words of Lord Palmerston in 1841) turned by the British into a global financial centre, or whether it was communist China’s history, in which Hong Kong was one more example from the century of national humiliation that the party increasingly used as part of the narrative to legitimise its rule. What Hong Kongers were reclaiming was the subjectivity of their own history.
It was a position that Beijing and the Hong Kong government went back to again and again: the discontent in Hong Kong was all about the economy. The protesters were just young people frustrated that they couldn’t get a foothold on the housing ladder. It was a convenient, self-soothing narrative that seemed to completely miss the point.
By offering economic sweeteners to protesters demanding democracy, the government was offering precisely what they had not asked for. Or, as a protester put it to me one evening in Mong Kok, neatly skewering two Beijing narratives—that foreign forces were organising and funding the protests, and that the protests were all about housing affordability—in one acerbic line: ‘Are you here to pay me? I’m only protesting until I’ve saved up enough money to buy an apartment.’
The response to the 1967 riots was also a defining moment in the formation of a distinct Hong Kong identity. In order to win public support for their actions to quell the 1967 unrest, the colonial government appealed to a sense of community and citizenship among the local populace, encouraging people to think of Hong Kong as home. For much of the population who had fled hardships in the mainland and seen Hong Kong as only a temporary refuge, this came in parallel with a growing realisation that a return to the mainland was either impossible or unattractive. At the same time, the post-war baby-boom generation born in Hong Kong were coming of age, and had only ever known Hong Kong as home. All of these forces came together at this moment in Hong Kong’s history to forge what would become a distinct people: the Hong Kongers.
On the Tuesday night, the airport protesters turned on two mainland Chinese men in the crowd, who, they alleged, were government agents. One of the men was carrying a mainland security-service ID card bearing a name that protesters said matched a name appearing on a database of Shenzhen police officers. They beat him senseless and dragged him, disoriented, around the stifling hot crowds in the departure hall for hours before first-aiders were able to extract him from the crowd.
The second man said he was a member of the media; but after arousing the suspicions of the crowd, he was searched and found to be carrying in his bag a blue T-shirt with an ‘I Love HK Police’ logo, an identical T-shirt to that worn by pro-Beijing thugs who had threatened protesters.
By pushing back against Beijing’s rule in Hong Kong, the protesters were calling into question what China had been touting as a kind of ‘Beijing Consensus’, or ‘China Model’: that idea that people would willingly trade political rights and live under authoritarian rule in return for economic development, prosperity, and stability. In showing that this was not a deal they were willing to accept, Hong Kongers were laying down a fundamental challenge to Beijing’s view of the world.
National Day presented exactly the kind of splitscreen moment for global television that Xi had no doubt been hoping to avoid. While rigid rows of PLA soldiers marched in front of flag-waving crowds at Tiananmen in Beijing, black-clad protesters skirmished with police on the tear gas-filled streets of Hong Kong.
In May 2019, before the protests had even begun, Dr Brian C.H. Fong, a comparative political scientist at the Education University of Hong Kong, published an academic paper that now seems startlingly prescient. In it, Fong positioned Hong Kongers alongside the Catalans, Scots, Quebecois, and Kurds as members of ‘stateless nations’—political communities that, while not having a state of their own, self-identify as a distinct people with aspirations of self-government.
Many of these community efforts revolved around the idea of providing mutual support against a common enemy. Before protests began in remote suburbs, the door codes of housing estates in the area would be circulated on chat groups to facilitate protesters’ escape. After a protest, the ticket-vending machines at the MTR stations were piled high with coins to enable people to purchase single-use tickets rather than use their stored-value Octopus cards, which protesters feared would enable their movements to be tracked. Bags of coloured clothing, often neatly marked by size, would be left at station entrances to enable protesters to change out of their telltale black outfits and travel home safely. And down in the streets, as the police raised their black warning flags, protesters would shout up to the residents in the apartment buildings above: ‘Saan coeng! (‘Close your windows!‘)
The disciplined nature of this vandalism, the lack of looting—and the fact that it was violence against property, not violence against persons—may have been the reason why it attracted little criticism from supporters of the protesters. After all, referring to property damage as violence may ultimately say more about how we view property than how we view violence. So it was that even those law-abiding citizens who supported the protests tended to express a view along the lines of: ‘I don’t agree with it, I wouldn’t do it myself, but I understand why they are doing it, and forgive them for it.’ It would take more than smashed Starbucks stores and graffitied Chinese banks for these radical protesters to lose their support base.
As the protests turned violent, and took on an increasingly anti-China bent, this community began to feel nervous. At a protest in Central, a mainland employee of JP Morgan became embroiled in a confrontation with protesters outside his office, and when he said in Mandarin to the agitated throng around him, ‘We are all Chinese!’ (‘Women dou shi Zhongguoren!), one black-clad protester leapt in and punched him.
It is interesting to pause on this statement: it may well have been intended as an attempt to voice solidarity, as an expression of fraternity. However, carrying as it did the political baggage of not just ethnicity but citizenship, nationhood, and therefore rule from Beijing, it was not an uncontroversial statement, especially when spoken in that context—and in Mandarin. It could have been understood by some in the crowd as an assertion of colonial rule, spoken in the language of the coloniser. But such were the complexities that mainland residents in Hong Kong increasingly found themselves having to navigate.
When the liminal experience of a significant group of individuals overlaps with a liminal experience for society as a whole, this can result in the development of a generational consciousness, the identity-forming process of a generation with particular sociopolitical characteristics. Hong Kong’s 2019 generation was formed by their shared experiences of these protests. Eve and her peers are a generation who, when the fifty-year guarantee of rights and freedoms under the Basic Law expires in 2047, will be in their middle-aged years, at the height of their careers, with children of their own. The 2019 generation will be the leaders of Hong Kong when it comes to face the moment that will be decisive to its future.
Beijing and Hong Kong have two precisely opposite understandings of the one key phrase: One Country, Two Systems. For Beijing, as it has repeatedly stated, the One Country is the precondition to the Two Systems: Beijing is only willing to suffer the separate Hong Kong system on the condition that Hong Kong accepts it is part of the One Country. But for Hong Kongers, the exact opposite is true: they insist upon having the Two Systems as the precondition for them accepting the One Country.
However, the destruction of institutional trust in 2019 coloured reactions to this success, for which Hong Kongers overwhelmingly credited themselves rather than the government.