Hong Kong in Revolt. Au Loong-Yu

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ second new development was that the movement was broadening to the community level. There were community actions in the first stage, and the core activity was the making of the ‘Lennon Walls’ – first invented during the Umbrella Movement (and probably inspired by the original in Prague). People posted colourful notes to express their aspirations for the democratic change that was under way. In July this spread like wildfire. Following the great strike, polarisation between the blue and yellow camps now reached a red-hot level. Not only did the police tear down posters which targeted them, but the blue camp also now confronted the yellow camp and sometimes assaulted them around the Lennon Walls in different districts. This escalating confrontation led to the broadening of the movement to the community level, as the yellow neighbourhoods would always be on guard to protect the young people. According to one college student activist, ‘C.N.’, in all eighteen districts of Hong Kong, there were corresponding Telegram channels for exchange of information among yellow neighbourhoods. The group around the channels for Tin Shui Wai and Wong Tai Sin were the strongest; ‘if any young guy was being harassed by police within five minutes there would be two hundred neighbours coming down to the street to help’.¹⁷

      A second issue was that since September the police were less and less likely to approve demonstrations in busy areas. As a result, many more local-level actions took place. When the police came and teargassed the demonstrators this always affected the neighbourhood as well, and so the angry residents would come out to confront the police; and when the police tried to break into residential buildings without a warrant, they rushed out to try to stop them. Many ‘light blue’ people evolved into being neutral or even ‘light yellow’ because of this (see below).

      4. A Stalemate (October to December)

      From October onwards, the movement entered its fourth stage, which I will describe as a deadlock situation. On the one hand, while the government was able to suppress protest actions, it was unable to suppress the movement as a whole. On the other hand, the movement was in a bottleneck as it found it hard to mobilise a labour strike again, and in the face of the government continuing to resort to banning demonstrations altogether the movement increasingly found it difficult to draw the same numbers of protesters again after the big illegal march on 20 October. Although whenever there was a chance for legal marches the masses’ enthusiasm was still high, as was shown by the 800,000 marchers that took to the streets on 8 December.

      On 11 November there was another strike call, but it was once again unsuccessful. The class boycott was more successful, and this evolved into fighting between the students and the police between 11 and 14 November at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), drawing thousands of young people to come to occupy the campus and its surrounding main roads and railway. This was because many students from other universities or other members of the public also flocked there to help and made the resistance to the police attack on the night of 12 November possible.

      However, the lack of organisation and coordinating bodies within the occupation magnified the differences over tactics between CUHK students and those from outside the campus. The former were angry over some outside students’ reckless behaviour (destroying facilities). Eventually, the management of the university closed the whole campus down on 15 November, and the occupation ended. Yet just when the big show at CUHK was over, the students at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) took over their campus, and on 16 November they practically stopped all traffic in a nearby tunnel which connects Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. The police then besieged the campus for twelve days until most of the occupants either ran away, were arrested, or surrendered themselves.

      During the two great actions at the universities there was a third strike call, but it was not very successful either. It was true that many people could not get to work, but this was not because they were striking but because the students, through occupying campuses and the surrounding main roads and railways, practically paralysed half of Hong Kong’s busiest area. But these were actions that common folks with a job could not join or were not ready to join. Increasingly there was now a danger of the narrowing of the mass base for radical actions.

      Although the radical youth still enjoyed popular support, most of the yellow camp were still reluctant to either go on strike or to fight with the police. If that had happened, then a revolutionary situation might have set in. Increasingly it was clear that this was not happening. The common protesters should not be blamed for a lack of bravery; the asymmetry of forces between Hong Kong and the Chinese state would make any sensible person rethink the idea of a revolution within one city. Hong Kong could only win if mainland China was also ready for a mass upheaval. Yet, this was not in sight.

      On the other hand, there were also signs that the support for the five demands of the movement was broadening as well. The defeat of the occupation at the two universities was soon compensated by the landslide victory of the opposition in the 24 November District Council elections. The people’s voice was a clear and loud ‘no’ to Beijing’s hard-line policy.

      In general, the party-political opposition to Beijing in Hong Kong (consisting of the pan-democrats and the ‘localists’ or ‘radical democrats’) has enjoyed 55–60 percent support in the LegCo elections, but in District Council elections this had previously dropped to 40 percent. However, in the 2019 elections the opposition garnered 57 percent of the vote (or 1.67 million votes) as opposed to the pro-Beijing parties’ 41 percent. This was surely a big victory. In terms of seats, it was an even bigger victory. The opposition won 388 seats in total, an increase of 263 seats, while pro-Beijing parties lost 240 seats and were only able to retain 59 seats. The popularity of the yellow camp, despite the record of violence on their side, was already evident in a November poll before the election: 83 percent of the population laid the blame for violence at the door of the government, while only 40 percent thought that it was also the protesters’ responsibility (the two questions were asked separately and were not exclusive of each other).¹⁸ In relation to the three main demands of the movement, a late-September survey showed that they had the support of 80 percent of the interviewees.¹⁹ There was fluctuation over the support rate between June and December, but different surveys showed that the movement’s main demands had the support of 70–80 percent of the interviewees. In contrast, after the end of the Umbrella Movement, 33.9 percent of interviewees supported the occupation.²⁰ In terms of mass base, the 2019 revolt had witnessed a great advance.

      The District Council elections were a second major victory, on top of the first, when Carrie Lam withdrew the extradition bill. With these, the great revolt will go down in history as a major achievement for the people, even if it was only a partial victory. In contrast to the defeat of the Umbrella Movement in 2014, which resulted in a long demoralisation, the 2019 revolt will surely continue to encourage activism, even if there will certainly be ups and downs.

      Meanwhile, there have been more and more young activists who have realised the importance of labour struggle and who are now calling for joining unions or forming new ones. This was also a response to the traditional unions which were slow in reacting in such a period of turmoil, although credit is due to the CTU for their support for the 5 August strike. Without this strike, it would not have been possible to prove to Hong Kongers the relevance of labour, and to attract a new generation of labour supporters. At the end of December, forty new unions were being formed. At the top of the list is the Hospital Authority Employee Alliance (HAEA), which claims to have recruited one-quarter of the total employees of the Hong Kong Hospital Authority. Thus the 2019 revolt began with great spontaneity, but when it was close to its end its participants became more and more active in organising unions. What a great change indeed.

      By December it was clear that neither side of this great contest between the government and the people could decisively win. With more than seven thousand people arrested, a great blow was dealt to the vanguard of the youth, the ‘braves’ (see below and Chapter 2), and the intensity of radical actions was СКАЧАТЬ