The latest mobilization in Hong Kong’s ongoing popular insurrection against Beijing’s steady encirclement began in the most unlikely way, on Tuesday evening, just before midnight. Roughly 2,000 people showed up outside the Legislative Council headquarters in the Admiralty District. Some were singing Christian hymns. Others broke out into what has become something of an anthem among Hong Kong’s brave democrats, from the musical Les Misérables: Do You Hear The People Sing?
Tuesday night’s protesters were surrounded by police in riot gear, and there were no major disturbances, but by early Wednesday morning tens of thousands of protesters had streamed into Admiralty. They rushed onto Lung Wo Road, then onto Harcourt Road. They built makeshift barricades from the metal barriers police had laid out in advance around the Legislative Council in order to corral them. By rush hour, much of Hong Kong’s core was paralyzed, and the day’s drama unfolded in clouds of tear gas and baton charges, pepper spray and water cannon, rubber bullets and bean-bag volleys.
Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men? It is the music of the people who will not be slaves again. In the Cantonese version, which rose in popularity during the failed 79-day Occupy Central “umbrella revolution” of 2014, the lyrics are a bit different: Who wants to succumb to misfortune and keep their mouth shut? May I ask who can’t wake up?
By rush hour, much of Hong Kong’s core was paralyzed, and the day’s drama unfolded in clouds of tear gas and baton charges, pepper spray and water cannon, rubber bullets and bean-bag volleys.
You can see why that song, set in the revolutionary tumult of 19th-century Paris, has lately vanished from playlists in the People’s Republic. The lengths that Xi Jinping’s regime will go to in order to censor news of Hong Kong’s resistance, and to shroud the recent uprising in propaganda, beggars belief. This week in Hong Kong, Beijing’s “Blue Ribbon” operatives have been circulating photographs of caucasian faces in crowds, identifying them as provocateurs dispatched by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Sean Tierney, an American expat, film studies lecturer and Hong Kong permanent resident for the past 15 years, found himself depicted that way in a collage of photographs in the lead-up to Wednesday’s confrontations. Tierney’s image was cut from a news photo of an incident involving a street assault committed by pro-Beijing activists in 2017. “Blue Ribbon racism being what it is, foreigners obviously must be spies bent on destroying China’s peaceful rise,” Tierney told me.
Hong Kong’s most recent eruptions are occurring in response to an extradition law currently being rammed through the formally gerrymandered Legislative Council in a bill devised by Beijing puppet Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive. The law would subject Hong Kong democrats, Chinese citizens who have fled the mainland, or even anyone who simply happens to be passing through the former British dependency, to arrest and deportation to mainland China. On even the most obviously spurious, trumped-up charges.
The bill is widely understood as the final breach of the 1997 British handover firewall that was supposed to keep Hong Kong safe from Beijing’s arbitrary, despotic reach until at least 2047. Last Sunday, upwards of one million Hongkongers gathered in a mass demonstration against Lam’s bill, the largest protest in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover.
Beijing’s persistent and accelerating abrogation of 1997’s “one country, two systems” guarantees has reduced the ostensibly autonomous city-state to a shadow of the freewheeling, rule-of-law open society it had once been. The beacon of hope for Chinese democrats, human rights defenders and religious minorities persecuted by China’s hyper-authoritarian rulers is being quickly swallowed up by Xi Jingping’s police state.
Last week, Reporters Without Borders and 22 other human rights organization protested Lam’s extradition bill, pointing out that Hong Kong would be required to hand over journalists and their sources along with any critic of the Beijing regime to face arbitrary charges in a judicial system wholly controlled by the Communist Party, which boasts a 99 per cent conviction rate. Over the past seven years, thanks largely to Beijing’s tightening stranglehold, Hong Kong has dropped from 18th to 73rd on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. China ranks 177th out of 180 countries ranked in the index.
By the reckoning of Kong Tsung-gan, author of Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong , 298 pro-democracy leaders and activists have been prosecuted since the Occupy Central uprising of 2014, which was intended to force the authorities to fulfil Beijing’s 1997 promises of universal suffrage (one person, one vote) and the direct election of the Hong Kong executive. Kong counts 162 convictions in the crackdown.
The latest demonstrations have been huge – an April 28 protest called by a group of jailed pro-democracy leaders drew 130,000 people into the streets, as large as any of the gatherings during the 2014 Occupy Central protests. Last Sunday’s marches against the extradition bill were even larger than the half-million-strong demonstrations in 2003 against a sedition law that eventually went down to defeat.
The Occupy protests, sparked by a proposal to vet candidates for the Legislative Council to ensure only “patriots” would be permitted to stand for election, failed to achieve the youthful leadership’s goals. On Wednesday, however, protesters could at least chalk up a tactical victory, having shut down the Legislative Council, thus delaying the progress of Lam’s extradition bill. But there are quite a few differences between the autumn months of 2014 and the summer of 2019.
The 2014 umbrella protests were in the cause of a truly representative democracy in Hong Kong, answerable to a local electorate rather than to the Communist Party bosses in Beijing. This time around, the insurrection is a last-ditch, rear-guard action. It may be Hong Kong’s last stand.
In 2014, the protests were largely confined to students and pro-democracy activists. The business sector more or less sat things out. Lam’s extradition bill has provoked a hostile response from just about every sector of Hong Kong society, including judges, lawyers, business tycoons, academics, labour unions and the commercial sector. More than 100 businesses closed to allow workers to attend Wednesday’s protest.
In 2014, protesters mostly ran from the tear gas. On Wednesday, protesters picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back at police. They came prepared for a confrontation, with supplies of bandages, helmets and goggles, and bottles of water, and cling wrap, sodium chloride and masks to dull the effects of tear gas and pepper spray. Making their way across Hong Kong to Admiralty, they avoided using their rechargeable transit passes so as to withhold evidence of their movements. In 2014, protesters readily gave their names during interviews with journalists. This week, that was a rarity.
But one thing hasn’t changed. You can still hear Hongkongers singing. When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums, there is a life about to start when tomorrow comes .
While the free world looks on stupidly, and Hong Kong steadily slips into the orbit of the megalomaniac Xi Jinping, that is another thing that hasn’t changed.
Hongkongers, unlike the rest of us, are not going down without a fight.
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
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