March 25, 2016
Demonstrators held up their phones near the Hong Kong government headquarters on Sept. 29, 2014, around the start of the Occupy movement.
Dale De La Rey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Occupy Central With Love and Peace, a citizens’ movement for the popular election of Hong Kong’s leader, erupted in late 2014, Jason Y. Ng, a lawyer and writer, was in the middle of the tumult. His new book, “Umbrellas in Bloom,” offers a vivid account of the street protests that paralyzed parts of Hong Kong for 79 days.
With firsthand observations, timelines, charts and explanations of the semiautonomous Chinese territory’s arcane political system — an uneasy blend of the relics of undemocratic British colonial rule and new elements of undemocratic Chinese rule — Mr. Ng spells out what many Hong Kong people, particularly younger ones, are chafing against. In an interview, he reflected on the Occupy movement, also called the Umbrella Revolution, and what happens next.
Q. What did the Occupy movement achieve?
A. Because of Occupy, politics is now on everyone’s mind and lips, and social justice has replaced social status on our priority list. It has also engendered the so-called Umbrella generation: youth who now spend their time debating and scrutinizing every government policy on social media. Some of them are even running for public office.
But the picture is not all rosy. Social awakening notwithstanding, Occupy ultimately failed to gain any concessions from Beijing on the issue of universal suffrage. That left many Hong Kongers disillusioned and bitter. Society is more polarized than ever, anti-mainland sentiment is at an all-time high and the rise of localism is radicalizing the opposition. We are bracing for more turbulence ahead.
Q. What caused the giant outburst of public frustration?
A. I often compare Hong Kong to a house with a gas leak: All it takes for it to blow up is a single spark. Beijing’s broken promises and the tear gas crackdown at the start of Occupy were the spark that ignited the city. The gas leak, on the other hand, was a laundry list of public frustrations and social injustices that have been going on since the city reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.
Hong Kong is ranked No. 1 on The Economist’s crony-capitalism index. Rampant government-business collusion is widening the income gap and pushing property prices through the stratosphere. One in five people here lives below the poverty line, and a decent home continues to elude even the middle class.
In the meantime, Beijing’s intervention in local affairs is becoming increasingly brazen, which flies in the face of the “one country, two systems” policy. We have seen examples of targeted economic pressures on pro-democracy newspapers, cyberattacks on online media and more recently the alleged abduction of book publishers critical of the Chinese leadership. I call it the second colonization of Hong Kong. We survived 150 years of British rule, only to be colonized again by Communist China — the autocratic regime from which our parents and grandparents escaped in the 1950s and ’60s.
Q. Your book combines vivid witness accounts and precise scholarly detail. Can you expand on that?
A. I felt duty-bound as a writer and citizen to record this watershed event in our post-handover history. There was tremendous pressure to get it right. One of the things I had to do was to properly contextualize the movement, starting with a detailed yet accessible explanation of our one-of-a-kind political system.
I also wanted to humanize the movement. For readers who didn’t have the opportunity to participate in or witness the protests, I wanted to recreate the experience for them by weaving anecdotal accounts and recurring characters into the narrative.
Q. Hong Kong is a unique place: a former British colony that did not achieve independence but was handed back to a Chinese Communist state that had not run Hong Kong before. There are Hong Kongers who are uncomfortable with this and want to separate. How realistic is this?
A. Independence is a pipe dream from a geopolitical perspective. With a 2,300,000-strong People’s Liberation Army, China could and would crush the secessionists like bugs. All the chatter about an independent Hong Kong is done out of anger rather than reason.
Just the same, the separatists are giving Beijing plenty of excuses to tighten the grip on the city and to further encroach on our freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. There are whispers about renewing the discussion to pass an antisubversion law to silence the opposition in the name of national security.
Q. After about 150 years of British colonial rule and nearly 20 of Chinese rule, is Hong Kong coming of age now?
A. Hong Kong is going through what South Korea and Taiwan went through in the 1970s and ’80s. Back then, student protesters and opposition parties in those countries were highly radicalized and often resorted to violence to make themselves heard. That’s what’s happening in Hong Kong at the moment. During the so-called fishball riots on Chinese New Year’s Day about a month ago, violent protesters threw bricks at police and set fires on the streets. It’s something we haven’t seen in decades.
None of that should be surprising. After Occupy ended without achieving any political results, young people needed to get their frustrations out of their system so that the healing could begin. If South Korea and Taiwan managed to eventually reach their political maturity and blossom into full-fledged democracies, so can Hong Kong. Or so we hope.
But that’s exactly what Beijing doesn’t want to see happen. The Chinese leadership would like Hong Kong to remain an economic city devoid of ideology or a sense of identity.
Q. During Occupy, the police shocked Hong Kongers by using tear gas on peaceful protesters. Are you concerned that one day bullets will be used?
A. During Occupy, police officers were seen moving truckloads of rubber bullets and tear gas grenades into government buildings. Since Occupy, the Hong Kong government has made sizable investments in “crowd management assets,” including armored water-cannon trucks and high-power CS spray launchers. On the night of the fishball riots, police pointed guns loaded with live ammunition at demonstrators and fired two shots into the air. There is ample evidence that law enforcement will continue to up the ante in future confrontations.
I believe Beijing has given the Hong Kong government specific orders to avoid human causalities, which could spark yet another uprising and give the foreign press a story to write about. The Chinese leadership has enough on its hands these days: an epic antigraft campaign, a sputtering economy and sporadic regional insurgencies. It can’t afford to have a mini-Tiananmen Square massacre in Hong Kong.
