HK’s spirit of resistance

Photograph: Jonathan van Smit, via Flickr

The most surprising aspect of the protest movement is simply how long it has lasted—how determined Hong Kong’s people have been to show that the Lion Rock spirit, as devotion to the city is sometimes described in honour of a beloved natural landmark in Kowloon, remains strong. Why continue to protest, when it seems so incredibly unlikely that the authorities would be willing to budge on the issues that have become most central to the struggle?

There is no easy answer to this question that is being asked now, in the fall of 2019, almost as often as the ‘will there be a replay of the June Fourth Massacre’ was during much of the summer. The not strictly accurate notion that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled alive, provided that a pot’s temperature is turned up slowly, can help us understand the phenomenon. The idea was employed effectively recently by Canny Leung in an editorial in the Apple Daily, the most daring of Hong Kong’s major Chinese-language periodicals, that was then translated into English by Geremie R. Barmé for publication on the excellent China Heritage site in New Zealand. ‘The Frogs of Hong Kong have all been in one big pot and the water temperature has gradually been rising. Early on, some Frogs jumped out of the pot; others have struggled to cope with the increasing heat; and then there are those Frogs who have gone mad in their death throes,’ Leung wrote. ‘We’ve all been in that pot of hot water for twenty-two years. Now and then, they suddenly turn up the heat to see how the Frogs will react. If we don’t struggle too violently they know they can apply more heat next time around. That’s why it’s been getting hotter and hotter and the heat has been turned up with ever greater frequency.’

The extradition law was yet another click upward of the flame, but one that was even more noticeable than some of the others. People are protesting—and continuing to protest—because they feel that the pot is close to the final boiling point.

One activist recently interviewed in the New Yorker referred to a doomsday clock reaching its final minute in Hong Kong. Countdown clocks have long figured in the Hong Kong story. Before 1997, the CCP put a large one up in Tiananmen Square, ticking off the seconds until the colony returned, in official parlance, to the embrace of the ancestral homeland. From the time of the Handover, Hong Kong has been promised a fifty-year grace period until full integration, with 2047 now the endpoint. A doomsday clock takes that idea and gives it a dramatic dark twist. The idea now is that Hong Kong as it has been will disappear well before 2047. Protesters can dream about reversing the trend, but all they can realistically expect to be able to do is throw themselves onto the gears of the machine to slow its progress …

The current crisis hitting Hong Kong is unique. History does not repeat itself—and one reason is that both protesters and the authorities are influenced by past occurrences they have lived through or learned about. Their interest in avoiding replicating past outcomes alters equations, and the other variables involved are never quite the same as during a previous crisis. There are, however, always imperfect but useful analogies that can help place a new crisis into perspective. Some posters referred to the August 5 general strike as a ‘triple stoppage’ (sanba in Mandarin), meaning that students stopped going to classes, workers stopped working, and merchants stopping selling. The first important ‘triple stoppages’ took place in Shanghai in 1919 and 1925 to protest both imperialist actions and police brutality against protesters, and the first important Hong Kong general strike, partly inspired by the second Shanghai one, took place in the latter year. In the 1940s, when Shanghai was controlled by the Nationalist Party, the authorities mobilized thugs to attack protesters, claimed that large demonstrations supported by the Communist Party were solely the work of foreign agents and did not reflect true popular sentiment, and ginned up pro-stability ‘protests’—all tactics that supporters of the Communist Party have used in recent weeks in Hong Kong …

Carrie Lam’s position in the current crisis is comparable in some ways to that of leaders of East Germany and neighbouring states decades ago when they were confronted with popular protests. She claims to represent the people of Hong Kong, just as leaders of East Germany and Poland, for example, claimed to represent the people of those lands, but her actions have been shaped, as those proxies to Moscow were then, by signals sent from a capital hundreds of miles away. One reason there was no crackdown on protests in Leipzig and East Berlin thirty years ago was that Mikhail Gorbachev had made it clear that he was not in favour of East German leaders employing what was sometimes then called a ‘Chinese Solution’ to the problem—meaning, in the wake of the June Fourth Massacre, using deadly force. The result was an end to Communist Party rule in East Germany during a year that also saw dramatic changes in many neighbouring countries. This kind of result has never been in the cards for the Hong Kong crisis, as Xi Jinping, like his immediate predecessors, views Gorbachev as someone who took the wrong course of action.

Overall, Hong Kong is in a far more chaotic and fraught state than it was at any point during the Umbrella Movement. Indeed, things are more on edge than they have been at any moment since the Handover. What the current movement has achieved is to put Beijing on notice, to show that if Hong Kong’s autonomy is wilting so, too, is the grand experiment of ‘one country, two systems’ dying …

Will China ever genuinely keep its promise of implementing actual democracy in Hong Kong? Can Hong Kong’s discontent convince China to give in to calls for universal suffrage? I don’t think that’s even the question to ask anymore. Rather, will the resistance be able to stop the erosion of Hong Kong’s hopes and liberties? Years of Beijing moving the goalposts make it seem unlikely. What is clear is that ‘liberty without democracy’ has torn Hong Kong apart, and that this Special Administrative Region cannot survive in its current state. China might not occupy the territory as it did in Tibet, or send in tanks as it did in Beijing. It’s become clear, however, that there is little stopping Beijing from destroying many of Hong Kong’s institutions, even if it continues to be frustrated, as other colonisers in Ireland and many other places were in the past, in its inability to stamp out attachment to signs of local identity and crush the Lion Rock spirit.