Standing up to Beijing:
A lawyer, a legislator, an activist, a journalist and the two million people who marched on a June day to protest China’s rising influence
How one extraordinary day unfolded as two million Hong Kongers came out to protest extradition legislation
To see the most specBY SHANNON GORMLEY · tacular thing built in the modern age, deposit 2.70 Hong Kong dollars into one of the vending machines on Tsim Sha Tsui pier on a clear evening and take a ticket. You’ll find the Star Ferry, small and wooden, bobbing in the dark water: step inside, and sit beside a window on the upper deck.
The ferry will putter across the harbour to Hong Kong Island’s Central district, and as it glides along, its windows will frame the skyscrapers before you. They’re lovely, but you are here for something more.
Hail a taxi, get off at the funicular station, and take the old tram up the mountain. The city shrinks into a blur of lights reflected in its own glass. Now step off the tram, onto the escalator and out to the platform. There you are hit with it: the Peak—of Hong Kong, of everything. Beyond the lookout on the mountaintop, hundreds of towers stretch into the air like a sprawling grove of crystal trees. From the ferry, it was a few individual ones that amazed; from up high, it is their number. The city has more skyscrapers than any other. Hong Kong doesn’t have the tallest building on Earth, but that’s not the point. Anyone can take a plot of land and plant a tall building on it. Hong Kong grew itself a forest.
Now lean over the railing, look down and squint. Somewhere below are four of the city’s seven million people: a lawyer, a legislator, a reporter and an activist. Each in his own way, the men resist the law.
You’ll never see these four individuals from this height. But had you been here on the night of June 16, 2019, and had you stared hard enough at the streets below, lining the island, you might have seen the ground between the mirrored trees of this glassy forest seeming to shift, forward and backwards, rising and falling, flooding with roaring black waves.
BEFORE THE MARCH: EARLYAFTERNOON The lawyer
Philip J. Dykes, S.C., is bent over his enormous mahogany desk doing paperwork, as
he does most Sunday afternoons. Dykes will not be marching today. His knee is bad. He sympathizes with the cause, of course: absurd, that after a man strangled his Hong Kong girlfriend to death in Taiwan and then returned home to Hong Kong in 2018, the government drafted a law allowing authorities to surrender suspects to other jurisdictions without extradition agreements. The most notable of those jurisdictions is mainland China. The mainland has rather a poor track record when it comes to matters of justice, what with its tendency to detain, jail and torture people with little regard for matters of due process and the like. It is only natural for there to be concerns, and the government has itself to blame for the fact that more than a million people marched past this very building recently in protest.
When the British expatriate was an English major at Oxford, he had not thought he would become a lawyer; when he became a lawyer, he had not thought he would come to Hong Kong to work for its colonial government; when he came to Hong Kong in 1985, he had not thought he would stay long. But a tutor told him that barristers require a happily limited amount of schooling, then a newspaper jobs advertisement made Hong Kong sound interesting, then Hong Kong became home, and that is how life happened to Dykes.
There were the joys of family life: his lovely daughter Rebecca, thoughtful and full-hearted, whose generous affection became a complement to the barrister’s reserve. Then there was work, which had become rather more interesting than he had been given to expect. Britain had agreed to hand over control of Hong Kong to Beijing, effective 1997. In the summer of 1989, while Dykes was abroad in England teaching a law course, Beijing killed thousands of its own students in answer to their request for democracy in Tiananmen Square. The then-solicitor general called Dykes. “I’ve got good news and bad news for you,” he told Dykes. “Give me the good news.” “You’ve been promoted to assistant solicitor general.” “All right.” “The bad news is, you’ve got to get back here and help draft a bill of rights for Hong Kong.”
Dykes returned. He managed an international team of a dozen lawyers and judges in drafting the bill, and he was pleased with the team’s efforts. On a rainy day in 1997, Beijing’s tanks rolled into Hong Kong, tanks not altogether different looking from the ones at Tiananmen. Yet most were not terribly concerned that in this land of “one country, two systems,” one system might try to strangle the other. Dykes himself attended a party.
This afternoon is a rather quieter affair, and Dykes glances back out the window. The street in front of the legislative complex is empty but for the lines of police officers. This is meant to be the protesters’ end point, after they have marched the 3.5 km from Victoria Park—the park where they commemorate Tiananmen every year—agitating against that confounded bill that could in theory serve to legitimize Beijing’s more overt political abductions. Perhaps Hong Kongers will be mollified by the chief executive’s assurance this week that she will delay proceeding with the bill. Still, the police wait for the protesters— Dykes can see that, but he has a less clear view of what they are waiting to do.
The legislator
The Honourable Fernando Cheung, who is usually stalking the halls of the legislative complex in his electric-blue running shoes, is today standing on a roadside a few blocks from Victoria Park, beside a group of people in wheelchairs. They can’t march, exactly, and they can’t start with the others, but soon they will lead.
Cheung worries about what the police have done and might still do. After 72 protesters were brutalized by police, Hong Kong’s chief executive has stalled the bill but not withdrawn it. No one feels safe.
Cheung was at Berkeley in 1989, a college student himself, when the regime murdered all those students. He stayed away from Hong Kong long enough to have three children. Only when one of his daughters, severely disabled, needed more care than Cheung and his wife could give her alone did they all move back to Hong Kong, 15 years after Tiananmen. Things seemed all right. There were a couple of crises in the decade that followed, but these occurrences seemed merely to confirm that the city wasn’t in mortal danger, for the city won: when the government tried to pass a national security bill in 2003 with an ominously broad definition of sedition, 500,000 people flooded Hong Kong and drowned the bill in the streets. In the roads, in the restaurants, on the buses, everyone dressed in black.
Today, too, all is black. It’s for different reasons. Last week when the police fired on its own people, it sent Hong Kong into mourning. Cheung wonders if police will do the same today, and whether the rubber bullets will always be rubber.
The reporter
The view should be pretty good from where Lam Yin Pong is, but there isn’t much to see. The reporter climbed all the way up some
The mainland has a poor track record in matters of justice, with a tendency to detain, jail and torture people
scaffolding to get a shot of the crowd. It’s a sparse one today.
He stumbled into journalism with the vague idea it wouldn’t stick him behind a desk all day. Classes bored him. He wanted to get out there. He talked his way into an internship at TVB News, one of the most prestigious television broadcasters in Hong Kong, and then found work at a business newspaper. But while Lam was at the paper, people were more preoccupied with the bias of his former employer. Lam was working away at his desk one day in 2009 when he looked up and saw it on the television monitor above him: a shot of a man holding a banner mocking the very station broadcasting his image. The banner accused the television station, which had dramatically downgraded coverage of Hong Kong’s annual Tiananmen vigil, of peddling sloppy news. One of the most influential media outlets in Hong Kong was now widely believed to be under the stranglehold of Beijing.
Lam climbs down the tower and finishes setting up to cover a non-event. It was in this same park all those years ago that the man held the banner. Banner Man had accomplished nothing more than starting a slogan. It’s hard to see how a crowd this small could do much more.
The activist
Nathan Law is running as fast as he can, fighting against the flow of people on Hennessy Road. “Excuse me,” he says, “excuse me,” but the 25-year-old doesn’t have a loud voice. He is trying to get to a bridge in Wan Chai, a couple of kilometres away, a midpoint on the route from Victoria Park to the legislative buildings.
Law was born in China and grew up in Hong Kong, and wasn’t torn between them. Law knew that his father left China for a better life, but didn’t know what that meant. When you come from a dictatorship that kills its own people, “better” doesn’t mean only “richer.” It took a school assembly for Law, then 17, to realize that.
Though Law’s school was in Hong Kong, it was what he would later call “deep red,” a school that sang China’s national anthem often and discussed human rights never. One winter’s day in 2010, human rights activist Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize. The next morning, Law’s principal excoriated the character of the world’s newest Nobel recipient. A traitor, the principal called him. Law knew the speech was meant to stir his classmates’ patriotic indignation, but it confused him. Weren’t Nobel recipients great men? His questions led him to Google, which led him to more questions, which led him, a few short years later, to a stage in the middle of a square in front of a crowd, holding up a piece of paper in one hand and a lighter in the other. The lighter was the one he used to help his mother burn incense; the piece of paper was China’s State Council white paper that declared Beijing had “overall jurisdiction” over Hong Kong. What else to do with garbage but burn it?
This afternoon in June, he has stationed himself under a bridge and looks back in the direction of the park. He can hear shouts. He climbs onto the stage, he faces the crowd, he grabs the mic and he takes a breath.
ALONG THE MARCH: MID-AFTERNOON The legislator
It begins. Cheung hears them before he sees them: a white van that parts the black sea of people is obscuring the stream of protesters in its wake. “No extradition to China,” roars its loudspeakers. The crowd roars back. Then the van stops. The marchers stop, too. A gap is created between the van and the crowd, and it is into this gap that Cheung and the wheelchairs will funnel.
Cheung never thought he’d enter politics. He studied social work. But Hong Kong’s undemocratic democracy allocates about half of the Legislative Council’s seats to professional associations and interest groups, and the social workers needed a good representative in 2004, and he became that representative, and one of the first things he did was find ways to help disabled people like his daughter become closer to their communities.
Cheung steps forward and turns left, and the wheelchairs turn with him, and they roll into the road, and the crowd roars louder, and off they go.
“No extradition to China.”
The reporter
In his reflective yellow press vest, Lam bobs along the street like a little dinghy in an ocean of black. It’s hard to know where to point his camera. Streams of people gush in from that road, other streams from this one. Lam chases the truck, managing to keep up with the legislator in the blue sneakers and the wheelchairs moving alongside him.
In 2013, Lam was ready to do more than run after politicians and shout at the back of their heads for the television station he had interned at. TVB wanted him back. It offered him a reporting position.
The job gave him the status he’d wanted and the responsibilities he’d earned. The only downside was Lam couldn’t breathe. Once, he told a colleague he needed a political scholar to comment.
“You can’t talk to those scholars,” Lam’s
colleague said, when Lam told him who he was thinking of. “The company won’t let you.” “Why?” Lam asked. “Those scholars are pro-democrats.” But few things were as bad as the Umbrella Movement. (Today’s Water Movement may take its lead from an expression Hong Kongers are using: “Be water, my friend,” they say. Water doesn’t have a weak point the enemy can target.) As they were assaulted for 79 days, these students were also building some kind of anarchic utopia under their umbrellas and tents. They established a recycling system, they stocked the bathrooms, they set up study rooms. Forget all that, his editors and his colleagues told him. Find stories about how the kids were hurting the city. Business was suffering, drivers were annoyed—that sort of thing.
Today, as police are forced to open up new roads to make room for the thousands of people circling the protest, Lam runs with the crowd, recording their shouts. This is a solemn procession, but it is not a slow or silent one.
The activist
Law has 10 seconds, maybe 20, to speak to each protester as they pass by. He and a few others on stage have written spiels that take them about that long. He has experience giving stump speeches.
By 2016, Law had helped found a party that stood for achieving Hong Kong’s self-determination and had become the youngest legislator in the history of Hong Kong. When he was sworn in, he and five others personalized their oath of office in such a way as to promise their true allegiance to the people they represented and not, perhaps, to Beijing.
In early 2017, he flew to Taiwan to help its pro-democracy legislators. He’ll never know how his flight information was discovered. He spotted the man right away though, the one with the sly eyes leading a group of more than a dozen people at the Hong Kong airport in shouts. “Traitor!” the crowd called out. “Get out of Hong Kong and don’t come back!” When Law landed in Taipei, a second crowd was there to greet him. This group followed him around for days, hurling rocks and eggs. He wasn’t hit there, either. That happened back in Hong Kong.
Out of arrivals, he saw yet another crowd coming toward him. Some security officials mobilized to protect him, surrounding him in a circle. More assailants surrounded the officials. Law was punched, kicked, scratched. He wasn’t ready to throw a punch back just yet. He was looking for the man with the sly eyes. Where was he?
There. In front of him. Their eyes locked, so close to each others’ that Law didn’t even have to shout over the fists pummelling him. “It’s no use,” Law said. “You’re not going to intimidate me.”
He got away from the crowd that day, but Law couldn’t escape the establishment. Later that year, he, along with other pro-democrats who had sworn their own creative interpretations of the oath of office, was stripped of his legislative duties; Dykes defended but could not save him. The oath was Beijing’s excuse to kick him out of the Legislative Council, ensuring that the pro-democrats lost their majority.
A month after being expelled from the legislature for standing on a stage and telling people to take back their square, Law was sentenced to two months in prison.
Today, two years later, he stands on another stage and asks protesters to fill the box with whatever they can afford. The money will go to help people the police have injured and arrested. “We have to support them,” Law tells the crowd. “They’ve sacrificed more than we have.”
“I voted for you!” some of his supporters call back. He knows it’s not his fault, but he fears they wasted their votes on him.
The lawyer
Something is happening down there. Protesters have begun to trickle into the street. They are all in black. Last Sunday they wore white. Dykes wonders what else is to be different this afternoon. Well, there’s no harm in having a closer look-see. He shuffles to the mirrored elevator and pushes the button with the arrow pointing down.
Life has a way of complicating itself. His daughter Rebecca, for instance, elected to assist people—refugees—as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, in places such as Lebanon. Meanwhile, Dykes had taken on the case of Law, one of those young legislators who had all made a bit of a song and dance, if you asked him, of the oath for political office. What was of gravest concern to Dykes is how this judgment was rendered. It ought to have been the business of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, but it was the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Beijing that ultimately gave legislators the boot. This was terribly inappropriate, Dykes thought.
The elevator doors open and Dykes exits to the street. The lines of police have moved back, pushed by a public that has by now resolved to defend itself.
THE PEAK OF THE MARCH: EVENING The legislator
The people of Hong Kong are everywhere. In the shadow of apartment blocks and shopping malls and skyscrapers, they have come together to tower over their own city and say they will not be taken down without a fight.
Cheung wants to say the same of the people’s
Lam runs with the crowd, recording their shouts. This is a solemn procession, but not a slow or silent one.
representatives. But they banned political parties that call for the end of one-party rule, disqualified elected representatives, messed around with filibuster rules, and now this bill. It’s too much.
“My friend,” Cheung would say to an old disabilities ally in the Legislative Council hallways after the extradition bill was introduced. “This isn’t good for Hong Kong.”
Cheung thought his friend agreed. But it didn’t stop the man from trying to sabotage a meeting about the extradition bill held by the pro-democrats. In May, Cheung’s friend led the pro-Beijing camp in an obstinate attempt to hold its own event in the same room at the same time.
So how could Cheung stop what happened next? Pro-democrats circled the man, trying to physically prevent him from entering the meeting room; pro-Beijing politicians circled them. By the end, one legislator went to the hospital on a stretcher, and another had his arm put in a sling.
Cheung pushes on through the streets of Hong Kong, the people’s representative disappearing into the people as they walk toward the legislature. These are people. This house belongs to them. For now, anyway.
The activist
By 9 p.m., Law has spent 6½ hours asking everyone passing by to please donate so that the people who have been arrested and beaten by police won’t feel so alone. Suddenly there’s no one left to ask. The last marcher has marched. It’s just Law and the police officers now.
Last year he was nominated for the same prize that awakened him to the petty hatreds of dictatorships: the Nobel. When the extradition bill came along, he didn’t try to lead the movement against it. He didn’t want the movement to have a leader.
Law exits the stage, and he steps into the black river of people that funnels into the streets around the legislature, a furious current circling the place that is theirs.
The reporter
Lam has reached the end of the road. Last night he stood near this very spot in the hours before it happened, that thing the whole city is talking about, and now he has to report on why Hong Kongers have cleared out flower shops and walked for miles to mark it. Everyone is grieving, but Lam is here to record others’ grief at the terrible death, not his own feelings about it.
The man last night was standing on top of a piece of scaffolding that surrounded a shopping mall one block from the Legislative Complex. His only weapon was a banner: “No extradition to China.”
Lam filmed the protester for hours, wondering what the guy thought he was doing. He’s just standing there, Lam thought. What’s he accomplishing with this? Lam packed up his things and went home. By the time he walked through his door, the man in the raincoat had smashed into the pavement. When Lam cried that night, it was in anger at the government for bringing its own people to the brink, and for his own inability to bring his city back from it.
Lam keeps recording. He couldn’t save the man yesterday; maybe he can’t save his city. Still he records, so that the world might have a clearer view of the people who die in their own streets, but will not do so quietly.
The lawyer
The young people have planted their signs in front of the Legislative Council. As night falls, the protesters will raise their mobile phones, beaming stems of light into the air.
When Dykes’s own mobile rang those 18 months ago, he was occupied with important matters at a British embassy located far away.
“We know this is a difficult time for you,” said the caller, another barrister. “But will you do it?”
He was asking Dykes to run for chair of the Hong Kong Bar Association. Dykes was widely respected, had succeeded in the job before, and was regarded as partisan to the law, not a political party. Dykes would, however, have but 24 hours to decide whether to run.
The tricky thing was, Dykes was rather engaged at present. He was in Lebanon to collect the body of his daughter. Rebecca had been killed.
An Uber driver; a piece of rope; a ditch.
There was much paperwork to be done that week, many tasks to be completed. Dykes released a statement saying he trusted the courts would protect the legal rights of his daughter’s murderer. He ensured the safe passage of her body. And he gave the caller his answer. He was running.
Under his watch, the bar would become another ring of defence surrounding the Hong Kong people: condemning police brutality, insisting on the rule of law, and certainly not dissuading 3,000 lawyers from marching in the streets in their own protest against the bill, all clad in their suits.
And that is why, on this scorching afternoon, several protesters, then several dozen, recognize Dykes and thank him one by one for what he has done for Hong Kong.
Dykes cannot see this, but on the opposite side of the block where he stands, thousands more approach another roadside where another body was found, that of the felled protester. They pour their bouquets of flowers out onto the street, then slip away, leaving the ditches of Hong Kong spilling over with roses.
The police stood down on the evening of June 16, 2019, but the government did not. It wouldn’t kill the extradition bill, investigate police violence or offer resignations. Protesters still made history. After another march on Monday, July 1, on the 22nd anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China, protesters took over the legislature. They were kicked out, but it’s difficult to imagine their eviction that night will be their last.
Get back up on that mountaintop and look again. You might have a clearer view this time. Hong Kong isn’t a grove of delicate shards of mirror and glass. It’s a valley of geysers shooting high in the air.
Cheung pushes on through the streets. These are people. The legislature belongs to them. For now, anyway.