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.