Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong

"In Chinese studies the first subject that I was really interested in, and have stayed with, is the study of mass protests—especially ones in which students and other youth play a leading role. My dissertation was on pre-1949 student movements on the mainland and then I was also very interested in Tiananmen , which happened just as I was finishing my graduate work. I had gone to Hong Kong regularly since 1987, but I had never thought of it as a place that I was studying until 2014, when it was the site of the biggest protest movement in which young people took a leading role than had happened anywhere in the People’s Republic of China since 1989. This was called the Umbrella Movement and it tried to bring democracy to Hong Kong, which has never been democratically governed but has had semi-democratic institutions. It was a drive to try to bring in real, open elections for the chief executive—the most powerful person in the territory—but it quickly became a struggle to defend the right to protest itself. The movement grew when police in Hong Kong, who had tended to treat protest very gently compared to any place else in China, used tear gas against protesters. That brought a lot of people out on the streets and the movement became a fight to defend the things that made Hong Kong different: a more vibrant civil society, greater freedom of speech and the right to protest. That struggle ended without a change in the voting system to universal suffrage, but it was an important move to defend local rights. Then, during the next five years, there were a variety of events that local people saw as Beijing encroaching on Hong Kong, trying to make it more like a mainland city and being aided in this by the chief executive and other proxies of the capital. There were sporadic protests to push back against that, to try to defend Hong Kong’s differences. “It’s clearly a personalistic form of rule that we don’t yet have a clear sense of, in part because it’s a change from what we’ve grown used to” Hong Kong, since 1997, has had a ‘one country, two systems’ framework where it’s supposed to be part of China, but have certain things that are done differently. To put it really simply, Beijing and its local proxies have wanted the ‘two systems’ part to just mean economic systems while local people have been fighting to have it mean the cultural and political systems as well. So, there has been a back and forth with protests and then moves of repression. Then, in 2019, a new protest wave broke out, this time against an extradition bill that was seen by local people as doing away with the rule of law in Hong Kong. The Umbrella Movement had been the biggest, longest-lived urban protest movement in the PRC since Tiananmen. This movement in 2019—which again became largely a movement for the right to protest itself and against police brutality—became much bigger. It drew bigger crowds, it lasted longer and was clearly the first really giant sustained urban-based mass movement in the PRC since Tiananmen. So that’s the context behind this and that’s why there have been books coming out, including one that I wrote. Vigil was my effort to write a very short book in a series of very short books called Columbia Global Reports . These are in between really extended magazine pieces and fully-fledged books and are either by journalists who have a scholarly bent or scholars who have a journalistic bent. Yes, I was a fan of the series as a reader before I got to write for it. I wanted to include reportage and some of my experiences spending time in Hong Kong, meeting some of the activists, including Joshua Wong. I combined that with a brief history of the city and an effort to connect the events in Hong Kong to the history of protest in China as well, because I really got fascinated by the Hong Kong protests because they felt in part like a continuation, in a new setting and register, of the tradition I had been studying on the mainland. That tradition had been suppressed on the mainland but had taken on this new and different life in Hong Kong, ironically at the very moment when Hong Kong people were becoming more and more concerned with having an identity separate from China. The protesters were also drawing on international currents of youth activism. In the book, I bring in comparisons with protests in China’s past and comparisons with other places as well, such as the Eastern European protests against Soviet rule. I think of Hong Kong now as being, in some ways, like countries that were part of the Soviet empire, but not in the Soviet Union, before 1989. I see parallels between the Hong Kong protests and the Prague spring and the Solidarity movement in the late 1970s, early 80s in Poland—protests that were suppressed the way the Hong Kong ones were. I thought I would end Vigil with the 30th anniversary of the June 4th massacre . I knew I would be in Hong Kong for that and thought I would end up wondering how much longer that kind of event—which is so different from what can happen on the mainland—could continue happening in Hong Kong. But then, when the protests exploded right after that, the book became as much about the 2019 protests that I saw the beginning of, but watched from afar. I wrote the book over the summer of 2019 and it became very much a first draft of history. It’s just a moving book to me. It’s beautifully written. It’s made up of personal essays by journalists, some of whose reporting I was reading regularly to keep up with the news from Hong Kong. One of them, Elaine Yu, who is now writing for the New York Times , I got to know well between 2015 and 2019 when I was traveling there. We co-wrote a piece together once. Both her chapter and those by the other journalists who contributed are heartfelt pieces that wouldn’t have fit in newspapers because they are so personal, so emotional, so raw. They deal with issues of fear and hope and the ethical struggles they faced covering, as news, something that was happening in a city they loved, in the city they had grown up in. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Most of the essays are by Hong Kongers. There is one by a mainland journalist who has been living in Hong Kong and writes anonymously. There’s one chapter by a journalist from Taiwan. It’s a very small book, almost pamphlet-like. Each essay is different, but each of them links up in the sense of being by a journalist writing in a mode that journalists are usually steered away from writing in. It’s more like the way columnists sometimes write, but we don’t usually get columnists right in the thick of something that’s a fight for their own city. It has an immediacy and a power that I just find deeply moving. They’re very young, but some of them are writing about people even younger than they are. They’re in their 20s, but as the movement has gone on even younger people have taken to the streets. The authors are roughly the same age as some of the key figures from the Umbrella Movement, like Joshua Wong , Agnes Chow and Nathan Law. I couldn’t think of a book that came out about Tiananmen that was comparable, but the text that I thought about was the interviews in the Gate of Heavenly Peace documentary, which has some very powerful interviews with students and also some workers who were in their 20s. Aftershock has that same feel. Some have gone to Taiwan, as well as to Germany, the UK and Canada. But, as far as I know, most or all of the journalists who contributed to Aftershock are still in Hong Kong. I really admire their bravery because it’s a very challenging time to be a journalist. December 8th was the day of the last really big protest of 2019 and it was a legally authorized march. I happened to be in Hong Kong for a week then, so I attended it. Over 100,000 people took to the streets in a legally authorized march, singing “Glory to Hong Kong”, which you could be arrested for singing now. There has been no authorization of marches for months and it’s not clear if there ever will be again. There was a big march on New Year’s Day, but for most of 2020 Covid has been used as the reason not to allow gatherings. There was also an election cancelled in September, with Covid given as the reason. But there are ways to hold elections during Covid times, as we’ve seen. The vigil was not allowed to take place on June 4th and again Covid-19 was used as the reason. People still turned out on June 4th. They socially distanced themselves for the most part but it was considered illegal and people were arrested. “I think of Hong Kong now as being, in some ways, like countries that were part of the Soviet empire” There were still some protests early in the pandemic, in part because the local government wasn’t listening to experts. They were taking their cues from Beijing on how to respond. They were allowing the border with the mainland to stay open, when the mainland was the epicentre for a while, but immediately closed the border to South Korea when South Korea became the epicentre. For locals, that meant it was only the ‘one country’, not the ‘two systems’, that matters now. Then Beijing took advantage of the global distraction of the pandemic to impose a very harsh new law against sedition. It’s a national security law that carries very strong penalties for anything deemed to even gesture vaguely toward separatism, even moves that in the past would be seen as just expressing love for a locale. All sorts of things that used to be fine to do are illegal. That was imposed on June 30th and there’s been a rollout of arrests. Clearly discontent will continue and resistance will continue, but it’s going to have to take a different form. It’ll take subtler forms. Again, I think of Eastern European parallels, when Poland was under martial law in the 1980s, and what happened in Taiwan for a long period when it was under martial law after protests there were repressed in 1947."

"Much of the recent English-language writing on Hong Kong has come from foreign journalists, authors and academics, including myself. That’s what makes Aftershock so refreshing. It’s a short collection of essays from young Hong Kong journalists who were on the frontlines of the recent protests and it is a bracing introduction to how it feels to have your home pulled apart in front of your eyes. Outside observers pride themselves on their cool analysis. By very deliberate contrast, this is writing that lives, breathes, cries, screams and bleeds. For these writers, Hong Kong is not a story or a portent of the coming Cold War between China and the West. It is their home, their family, their fight, their future. Holmes Chan, the editor, says that these reporters are united by their “choice to care: not just as a matter of professional interest, but in a way that opens themselves up to the risk of loss and heartbreak”. In focusing on feelings rather than facts, Aftershock reveals how a strong sense of shared identity has been forged in the flames of political conflict. Frances Sit says that while the protests are ostensibly about freedom and democracy, they are “also about protecting strangers who have come to recognise each other as brothers and sisters”. But one Hong Konger’s unity is another’s division, as Sit admits when she falls out with her aunt after she endorses the police beating up “cockroaches”, as they called protesters. “The more Beijing has squeezed the city in recent years, the more it has hardened the opposition” This is not a book about movements but people. Elaine Yu is taken aback by the youth of many activists. There are the kids holding hands outside their school with placards quoting a Song dynasty poet who said “I’d rather die than live in silence”. Then there are the Molotov-throwing front-liners, who embraced unprecedented levels of violence as they clashed with the police time and again. She writes: “from afar, it was easy to call them a black bloc; but up close, they were teens barely old enough to be sent to prison”. Like their counterparts covering the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, some of these reporters feel a tension between their editors’ desire for objective journalism and their own political sympathies. Jessie Pang describes it as a “tug of war between the search for truth and personal feelings”. While reporting on the “siege of Polytechnic University”, when students barricaded themselves inside the campus and police surrounded them, Pang relates how one activist asked her for a pen before surrendering to the authorities. Fearing that the police might attack him in custody (or worse), he wanted to write a note declaring that he had no injuries and would not commit suicide. It is a dark read in many places. But Pang argues that “there will be light in the darkest hours”. She concludes: “Both as a Hong Konger and a journalist, I want to report until the end. This is the only thing I know and can do for Hong Kong.”"