Turning point for Hong Kong protest
After negative press about clashes at the airport, one group steps in to handle image crisis
HONG KONG— As midnight approached on a decisive evening this week, protesters had paralyzed Hong Kong’s airport, but their movement itself was encountering turbulence.
Negative headlines about the airport seizure led international news. A frenzied mob effectively took two Chinese men hostage, ignoring pleas for restraint in the crowd and then bickered among itself about what to do. Clashes with riot police left a haze of pepper spray at the door of one of the world’s most vital transit hubs.
Protesters who have carefully curated their image — they’re known for clearing pathways for ambulances and for leaving civilian property untouched — sensed a defining moment for their movement, whose adherents say they are in the fight of their lives defending Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy against the mighty Chinese Communist Party. Now, they risked being branded as extremists and radicals.
Agroup of 70 protesters, motivated by an outpouring of posts on a Reddit-like chat forum, were among the first to step in to handle the image crisis. By dawn Wednesday, they decided what was needed: They would apologize to the world.
Throughout the summer, a distinctive feature of the protests, sparked by a proposal to allow extraditions to mainland China, has been their lack of visible leadership — small factions organizing their own rallies, others setting up media groups, donating supplies, lending expertise on how to extinguish tear gas. Strategies and mobilization have been openly discussed and voted upon by tens of thousands of people on LIHKG.com, a messaging board, and Telegram chats have directed demonstrators based on crowdsourced information at rallies.
More recently, however, as protests have entered an uncertain new phase, a few influential groups of co-ordinators have emerged to subtly steer a movement that otherwise lacks a nucleus.
One of these influential groups, whose activities can be pieced together through recruitment ads, public statements and interviews with members and other protesters, comprises about 1,000 contributors who analyze popular sentiment on the forum and communicate their consensus to the world through masked representatives and social-media pamphleteering.
The result, researchers of the Hong Kong movement say, is an almost platonic ideal of an internet-driven movement: democratic, transparent, anonymous, without heroes or martyrs.
“You see the emergence of the truly decentralized, networked movement,” said Edmund Cheng, a professor of politics at Hong Kong Baptist University whose research group has interviewed 6,600 protesters this year.
“We have to invent a new word for it. It’s closer to the ideal form than anything we’ve seen so far.”
The phenomenon is characteristic of a city with 90 per cent internet penetration rate — 95 per cent of users access the web with mobile phones — but also its political dynamics, Cheng said.
Unlike the Arab Spring or Ukraine uprising, local authorities have not shut down internet access to cripple communications.
But the activists’ tactics have also fuelled a riskier approach by authorities and the police that differs from a prodemocracy uprising five years ago.
Where authorities homed in on the leaders of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, eventually jailing them, their response this time has been to treat everyone as a provocateur.
This blanket approach has led to huge numbers of arrests and the liberal use of tear gas by police, even in residential areas.
After police once again declined to authorize marches planned for this weekend, many activists say they are worried about a sharp escalation in force. Online forums, in recent days, have lit up with discussion about how to deal with the increasing numbers of undercover officers dressed like protesters, a tactic authorities have acknowledged.
Chinese state media have been baying for ever-tougher measures to quash the dissent, pointing to the assembly of armed police just across the border from Hong Kong.
Nationalist tabloid Global Times tweeted an editorial that said forceful Chinese intervention was clearly an option — though, in an unusual reference, it said any crackdown wouldn’t amount to a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
As demonstrations devolved into running street skirmishes the past two months, volunteer groups have created websites that aggregate video streams from news outlets and digital maps that show the location of police formations and exit routes, in case protesters are trapped by charging riot squads.
Large groups on encrypted messaging app Telegram issue time-stamped updates to tens of thousands of users about where police have been sighted and where they are firing tear gas.
Gigi, a protester, explained that she does not plan where she joins each protest. “Depending on the information that is given ad hoc on Telegram channels or LIHKG.com, then I decide where and what time to join.”
One of the most authoritative groups has been a secretive “citizens” club that has held several news conferences this month to speak on behalf of the movement. At each event, the group put forward a different panel of masked speakers, who would sum up the consensus opinion of what netizens were saying on LIHKG. The citizens group members were among those who issued apologies this week for “radical” actions at the airport.
Although the group tries to accurately convey the movement’s sentiments, its rotating spokespeople acknowledge that their group cannot be the definitive voice for thousands of people.
“We cannot be a representative of every protester, for example, about the apology,” said one of the masked spokesmen who gave his name on Thursday as David Ho. “It is normal to have arguments about these issues.”