Hong Kong’s protesters’ wallets employed to empower cause
HONG KONG — The Hong Kong protesters formed a line, patiently waiting their turn to buy sweet milk and tea drinks from a store that advertised ardent support for their cause with a banner declaring, “If you set off a nuclear blast, we’ll stick by you.”
For quicker service, they could have quenched their thirsts at an adjacent store that also sells bubble tea. It had no customers.
Which is exactly as the protesters intended.
Digging in for the long haul against Hong Kong’s government, protesters are expanding their struggle from the streets to their wallets, weaponizing their spending power to punish businesses they deem hostile to their cause. The aim: to drive some firms under in the deepening recession gripping the crisis-hit city.
Guiding the consumer choices of tech-savvy protesters are apps that increasingly are color-coding businesses — everything from dentistry clinics and toy stores to dumpling restaurants and sex shops — into two categories: yellow for protest-friendly, blue for suspected opponents.
The protests started in
June to voice opposition to now-withdrawn extradition legislation and have morphed into what demonstrators say is a full-blown fight to safeguard Hong Kong’s freedoms, unique among China’s cities. Months of clashes with riot police who have fired 26,000 tear-gas and rubberbaton rounds and arrested more than 6,100 people are radicalizing legions of youths, upending the city’s economy, and splitting families, work colleagues, friends and citizens into two entrenched camps.
Even employees of the supposedly “blue” bubble tea store, wearing face masks like many of the demonstrators, advised them not to shop there, saying the company wasn’t sympathetic to the protest movement.
Protesters believe that by boycotting supposedly proestablishment businesses, they can help shift the balance of power and wealth in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
Much of the city’s $345 billion economy and political influence are concentrated in the hands of magnates and enterprises linked to or supportive of mainland China and its Communist Party-led government — the ultimate boss of Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam.
Protesters also say that shopping “yellow” is another way to make their voices heard in the absence of direct elections for government leaders. Protesting with their wallets also enables people who can’t always join street rallies, including those who fear being fired by proChina employers, to otherwise contribute to the movement.
In the opposing camp, Phyllis Li, a systems analyst who believes protest violence has gotten out of hand, says she now deliberately chooses to eat at restaurants that protesters boycott “because it is not fair to them.”
“And because it’s safe for us too, because they don’t go,” she said.
The developer of one of the apps, which uses crowdsourced information to distinguish supposed blue businesses from yellow ones, says he fears he is contributing to a politically motivated witch hunt — like those the Communist Party has unleashed repeatedly across the border in mainland China.
“I’m very, very worried,” said the developer, Chi Ho Leung. “It’s like the Cultural Revolution.”