Hong Kong in Revolt. Au Loong-Yu

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СКАЧАТЬ building to stop the tabling of the bill (although by then the speaker had already postponed the meeting). This time it was chiefly their show. The same CCPOS survey showed that 68.4 percent of the siege participants were below 29 years old (see below). They tried to charge through the police barricades but were driven back with tear gas and rubber bullets, one of which blinded a teacher. Commonly, the yellow camp had never been supporters of physical clashes with police. Carrie Lam probably counted on this. The next day, however, it was obvious that the public was on the protesters’ side. Many people were angry about the police violence and the official characterisation of the ‘6.12’ action as a ‘riot’. This was also the time when the movement began to raise its second demand: to stop labelling protesters as ‘rioters’.

      Carrie Lam felt the heat of the furious public and on 15 June she conceded by announcing that the extradition bill would be temporarily suspended. The next day two million people took to the streets, in effect telling Lam they wanted the bill gone for good, and that they were ready to tolerate low-intensity violence from the radical youth. Their reasoning went as follows: now that both Lam and her police force had become the puppets of Beijing and had violently cracked down on the people, wasn’t it logical and worth supporting when the young people, on their behalf, hit back at them? This strong sympathy again reasserted itself very soon after, when the radical youth broke into the LegCo building on 1 July and as Lam continued to refuse to have dialogue with the protesters. The ‘Yuen Long incident’ on 21 July, where members of organised crime syndicates, with the tacit consent of the police, attacked train passengers whom they believed to be protesters, hardened the yellow camp’s support for radical actions against the government. Now they thought that the young people were right from the very beginning when they repeatedly sent out warnings that Hong Kong was dying and that drastic measures had to be taken.

      On the night of 21 June, radical youths went to the Liaison Office to spray graffiti on its wall. Some painted the derogative term for Chinese, Zi-naa, which Beijing would make use of in depicting the whole movement as anti-Chinese.

      Lam had become the most hated person in the city, but the people’s consciousness now rose to a level 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 СКАЧАТЬ