Kent Ewing
Asia Times
December 15, 2014
This city’s so-called Umbrella Revolution – later downgraded to a movement and later again to a mere nuisance in the eyes of many – is now only a memory.
On Thursday, Hong Kong police began clearing the main protest site in the city’s Central district of the hundreds of die-hards who remained 10 weeks after thousands had first taken to the streets demanding democracy. By the end of the day, some 247 people had been arrested in what was a remarkably peaceful and orderly operation.
A smaller protest site in the busy commercial area of Mongkok was cleared more than two weeks ago, and a third site in Causeway Bay is scheduled for clearance this week.
As the protests started in late September, much of the world watched in sympathy with the demonstrators – most of them young, many of them university and secondary-school students – as Hong Kong police fired 87 blasts of tear gas at unarmed crowds in a failed attempt to clear the streets.
Many of the demonstrators used umbrellas to shield themselves from both the scorching sun and the heavy downpours of Hong Kong’s changeable weather – and at times to ward off rounds of tear gas, and thus a movement was defined.
The police action failed to dissuade those protesters already in the streets; it also prompted thousands more to join them in their outrage and in their demands that the central government in Beijing withdraw its suffocatingly restrictive blueprint for democratic reform in Hong Kong and that Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, derided as a Beijing puppet, resign.
By Thursday, however, that blueprint – which would require a 1,200-member nominating committee largely controlled by Beijing to select two to three candidates who would then run in a general election to determine the city’s next leader – remained unchanged, as did Hong Kong’s chief executive, whose popularity, although still abysmal, actually increased during the prolonged protests.
The angry masses have folded their tents and umbrellas and gone home, none of their demands met and few of their goals achieved, and Hong Kong is left to ponder the futility of a movement that, although buoyed by youthful idealism and determination, never had a chance to succeed in the first place.
Initially, the ideals and perseverance of the students who led the protests won the hearts of many of this city’s 7.1 million people, and the movement appeared to gain credibility and momentum.
In the long run, however, a government strategy of avoidance and retreat following the tactical and public relations disaster of the tear-gas blitz proved effective enough: the police mostly backed off, ceding large parts of the three occupied sites to the protesters. Meanwhile, traffic backed up, retail shops and taxi drivers complained of lost revenue, and frustration grew as the weeks and then months of protest-induced inconvenience passed.
Indeed, as the police retreated to the fringes of the occupied areas, masked men with triad links attacked protesters in Mongkok and Causeway Bay, and scuffles broke out between protesters and a growing group of counter-protesters who gathered at the same sites to oppose them.
In the end, it was not the Hong Kong government that forced demonstrators off the streets last week; rather, it was court injunctions sought by businesses in the occupied areas and bailiffs of the court, aided by thousands of police officers, who carried out the clearance.
The two-month, do-nothing strategy of the Hong Kong and central governments may have been a cynical abdication of responsibility that greatly exacerbated tensions and divisions in the city, but it worked as more and more people realized the students’ uncompromising stance was unrealistic and turned against their stubborn occupation.
The high point in the movement for the students came on October 21, when five Hong Kong officials, including Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, the city’s second-ranking politician, agreed to take part in a live, two-hour televised debate with five student leaders of the movement.
The two sides mostly talked past one another, but the unsmiling Lam and her underlings appeared stiff and off balance, while the secretary general of the Federation of Students, Alex Chow Yong-kang, and his deputy, Lester Shum – as well as other student leaders – argued clearly and passionately for their democratic ideals and against the “fake” democracy on offer from Beijing.
The symbolism of the event – with the wooden, besuited officials old enough to be the parents of the dishevelled students clad in black t-shirts – was powerful enough, but by most accounts the students also won the debate.
At that point, it was hard to remember that the protest movement, initially dubbed Occupy Central, had been the brainchild of Benny Tai Yiu-ting, associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, more than a year earlier. Impatient and disillusioned with Tai and his associates, the students had seized control of the movement from their elders, rendering them irrelevant.
Without any adult leadership, however, the students began to lose their way. The more their demands for public nomination of candidates for the 2017 chief executive election were shot down or ignored, the louder they repeated them. They produced no new ideas, no attempts at compromise and, unsurprisingly, the public lost faith in their cause and patience for the two months of frustration and inconvenience their occupation had caused.
Recent opinion polls show overwhelming support for ending the occupation of the protest sites and returning the city to normal life.
But what is normal in Hong Kong after two months of bitter argument and division? The streets may once again be clear, but the collective mind of this city remains occupied by conflict and distrust, and that is not going to change any time soon. Indeed, the protesters final message in Central, printed on banners and scrawled on the pavement, was: “We’ll be back.”
Other forms of flash-mob-type protests are already cropping up – such as so-called “shopping trips” in Mongkok that quickly transform into rowdy mobile group protests.
Moreover, the argument over Hong Kong democracy continues online, with those in favor of the occupiers adopting a yellow ribbon for their Facebook profile picture and those opposed a blue ribbon symbolizing their support for the overworked Hong Kong police, whom protesters accuse of unwarranted use of force and brutality over the last two months.
Police defend their actions as justified, especially on the night of November 18, when they were called on to prevent a group of masked men wielding bricks and metal railings from storming the Legislative Council building.
Considering the potential for violence at the protest sites over the past two months, both the police and the demonstrators behaved for the most part with restraint, but there is nonetheless a widespread belief that the police department has been politicized by the Leung administration and is no longer an objective law-enforcement agency.
Leung himself has marginally gained in popularity, but he remains largely discredited as a leader who takes his marching orders from the north and ignores the hopes and dreams of the people of Hong Kong, who overwhelmingly support a more democratic political system if not the manner in which the students tried to achieve it.
The reputation of the city’s pan-democratic politicians has also been tarnished by a 75-day occupation during which they offered little in the way of leadership but grabbed on to the tails of a student movement founded on naive idealism that has left the city more divided than ever.
For now, there are no winners in this battle and, 17 years after the city’s handover from British to Chinese rule, Hong Kong’s dysfunctional relationship with the motherland continues.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer.
