Hong Kong’s Fiery Message to the World

It’s 9 p.m., Saturday November 23, at a bar called Amazonia in Wanchai, Hong Kong, the night before the port city’s much anticipated District Council elections. The house band from the Philippines is playing covers from the 1980s and is taking requests. They hammer through “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Eye of the Tiger” and some Guns N’ Roses, every time raising the expectations of my American friend visiting for the weekend. As each new song starts my friend turns to me to reveal a still greater astonishment at the range and skill of the band. He can hardly believe it’s just the house band.

He has a special ability, we call it his superpower, to remember the words to almost every song he’s ever heard. He becomes animated by music, finding it difficult not to leap up and imitate the gyrations of the lead singer. His Axl Rose is phenomenal. Then comes Deep Purple and “Child in Time”, strangely a song he’d never heard, which was so exact it transported me back to my teenage bedroom and a couple of long-forgotten episodes that made me smile.

The last song before we decamped for The Wanch to hear more music in a cooler setting was “Message in a Bottle” by The Police. Earlier that day we had been wandering around Tsim Sha Tsui East, near the epicentre of the recent confrontation between the Hong Kong Police and the youthful protesters, where we had seen closed roads, piles of bricks and some smouldering fire damage. In Wanchai later though, something about the euphoria of the moment, and possibly a little alcohol in the bloodstream, made the song seem portentous, as if the following day’s election was going to deliver a message.

Election day started bright and warm. Early reports put the turnout very high. The city was optimistic, smiling, surprisingly upbeat. At my local polling station—I can’t vote but was waiting for an Uber across the road—both local candidates wore their sashes and waved politely at the passing traffic. “Thank you for voting!” they both said. “I can’t vote, not lived here long enough,” I replied, while giving both of them the impression that I was on their side.

The contrast between the candidates was clear: an absurdly young barrister dressed in beige, and a tough, older-looking man with a crewcut. They embodied the division in Hong Kong in both age and demeanour. It was also obvious whose smile was more sincere. They were both standing the requisite distance from the polling station with their numbered banners and teams of well-wishers, the traffic snarling regularly as SUVs stopped and disgorged crowds of eager voters at the side of the road. Whatever had been disputed in the last few weeks was entirely absent from the polite ensemble of bitter opponents.

The order and efficiency that characterised the day were a throwback to the old Hong Kong, the Hong Kong where everything worked smoothly and voices were rarely raised. The new Hong Kong of torn streets and fury, of disrupted schools and cancelled meetings, of jabbing fingers and lurking violence, bodes ill for Hong Kong’s future. Election day reminded everybody of two things: of how things had been, and of how things must be again if Hong Kong is ever to get back to normal.

The Hong Kong Police have changed from a highly respected outfit who smoothly arbitrated the affairs of a broadly harmonious society, to forceful partisans of an occupying power; a colonial force which has reverted to type, only this time serving not the indifferent and distant Brits, but the thin-skinned neo-imperialists just over the border. The old Hong Kong was free to insult the gweilo while largely running its own affairs. The new Hong Kong hides behind masks and fears whispers in the wrong ear.

Yet what the protesters have also reasserted is that social peace is premised on consent. Where that consent is withdrawn, so too is the peace. The protesters cannot win against a China determined to crush them, but they can make sure that Hong Kong loses. The proof of this can be seen in the way the police are reduced to jabbing fingers, casual brutality and perhaps the most unprofessional step yet taken, routinely calling protesters “cockroaches”. To dehumanise the people you supposedly protect and serve is to flaunt your unaccountable power, while cutting away the foundation of legitimacy upon which it is exercised. Noticeably, the protesters seem now more willing to show their faces, where the police increasingly hide their own.

Before the votes were counted many imagined the increased turnout reflected the desire of Hong Kongers for a return to order. They imagined the increasing violence of the protesters would face resistance as the general population—those who need to go to work—would come out and overwhelm the increasingly fragmented and desperate campaign built around the “Five Demands! Not One Less!” As the results came in, it was instantly clear the opposite was true.

There may be little appetite for violence, but there is clearly a perception that the protests were and remain justified. There is also the widespread sense that the approach adopted by the police against the protesters is heavy-handed and oppressive. Many people I know have been tear-gassed on the way home from work, and when they get home they watch the protests screened live on Channel 331 as the uninterrupted sequence of turbulent evenings wears on, and witness the police charging recklessly down escalators, applying the full crushing force of knees to break bones, and act with increasing impunity while expecting public gratitude.

Relative outsiders like me have watched something familiar become strange. The motivations for the protests are obvious, yet tangentially expressed, as if everyone knows the truth is outlandish and provocative; that it runs up against the adamantine will of Beijing. They know no one is coming to their rescue, but their autonomy is precious to them, and they won’t quietly surrender it. In refusing to accept the Extradition Bill they have both drawn a line and exposed the current executive as mere pawns. Now, with no mechanism to express their frustrations save these District Council elections they have advertised their disregard for China by endorsing political aspirations that have been explicitly ruled out. By so doing, they are guilty of the one thing Beijing cannot publicly tolerate: not revolution, nor even rebellion, but disobedience.

Now, it seems, everyone waits. The Hong Kong government has lost all authority. Beijing is apparently rethinking its approach. And Donald Trump has signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law, which applies a supervisory constraint on the behaviour of the Hong Kong government at a potential cost of their special trade status with the US. The removal of this status would be devastating for Hong Kong, and for China, which would lose its chief capital and foreign exchange hub. It would be damaging for the interests of multinational companies who base their regional operations here. It would be destructive for the value of Hong Kong property, much of which is owned by well-connected mainlanders. It would close the gate on the main economic and cultural conduit between China and the rest of the world since the end of China’s civil war in 1949. And all because the people of Hong Kong insisted China adhere to the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which guarantees Hong Kong’s autonomy until 2047.

In 1997, at the handover, I was here to witness events. What was striking was the level of optimism most people had for the future. They were convinced that China was opening up and would become more liberal as it developed and became richer. Indeed, they wanted to help. That remained true for a long time, but with the elevation of Xi Jinping to the leadership of the Party, China took an authoritarian turn. There followed the bitter protests of the Umbrella Movement in 2014, which kindled a new spirit of resistance in this fragile city between East and West. More importantly, as the relationship between China and the West has deteriorated in recent years, the various friction points that have emerged include trade, security concerns in the South China Sea, and China’s willingness to live up to agreements of any kind. When any country, or indeed company, raises a protest or criticism, China’s response is always hard-line. Hurt the feelings of the Chinese people? Feel their wrath with a trade embargo. Arrest a Chinese citizen? Say goodbye to these two citizens of yours. Raise questions about Xinjiang detentions? It’s all lies and you are stirring trouble. In Hong Kong, however, it’s not just the foreigners who speak.

Such is the growing influence of China, many companies mute their concerns over the theft of intellectual property and arbitrary legal rulings, and nothing is done. Faced with an embargo, most countries look for the positives in their relationship with China, speak in terms of dialogue and a process, and nothing happens. The US, however, has started to push back, and as these tectonic plates of international politics and economics have shifted, the most obvious fissure has emerged where the plates meet, in Hong Kong.

Since the protests began, the chasm has widened, into which the voices of the protesters have echoed louder, until the huge numbers of peaceful marchers have made everyone take notice. Then as the police have cracked down, the violence has intensified into vandalism, roadblocks and chaos around the city. In the last few weeks, as the numbers of tear gas canisters used has increased, the protesters have answered with Molotov cocktails, closing roads and tunnels with destroyed toll booths and burning cars. Each Molotov cocktail launched at police lines is just one more bottle containing a message of opposition and fire: “If we burn, you burn.”

As suddenly as the protests began, they ended in a last-ditch siege of the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. As I write they are still clearing that site up, but the election which followed has shown emphatically that the public, despite the fire and the violence, support the central message of the protesters. That message has been heard around the world, such that the passing of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was finalised this morning with the stroke of Donald Trump’s pen. Even to ask the question of whether this bill would have become law without the protests, is to answer it.

The Wanch is a wonderful old bar, known for its excellent music and cosy atmosphere, incongruously located within a tear-smoke grenade’s range of the main Police Headquarters on Hong Kong Island. The bands there also seem to play mainly cover versions but at a high standard and more often in their own style. The musicians on the evening before election night were regulars, and stunningly good. The female lead spoke to the audience, introducing the rest of the band as, in turn, her husband, her boyfriend and her ex-husband. I think she was joking, that it was some kind of metaphor of inclusion, but I may have been imagining things.

During the day, walking around Hong Kong, I’d worn a hat to keep off the sun, and had put it down somewhere in the bar. I couldn’t find it, but it didn’t matter. As the set came to a close they finished with a long and emotional rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” that had us all on our feet. Maybe it was on their regular playlist, but Neil Young’s anthem for freedom, composed soon before the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, couldn’t have been more apposite. And everyone in the bar knew why. Only then did I notice the guitarist was wearing my hat.

That was an unforgettable night of 1980s musical splendour, in which the warrior poets of Wanchai sent out an SOS to the world, prefiguring the following day’s vote with a more intense and vigorous assertion of their place in the free world than I have seen in decades anywhere else. Singing while they still can. The next day voting while they still can. And putting the rest of us to shame if we ignore them.

Stan Masters is a British writer and former academic resident in Hong Kong who writes here under a nom de plume due to the increasingly fraught political atmosphere there.