I have been following the protests obsessively. It's such a foreign idea to me that an entire society can all immediately agree that police violence is bad, and also give enough of a shyt to put themselves in harms way to stop it. In the US, if a cop shoots an unarmed 10 year old, a third of Americans are like "YES! Cops should be shooting MORE 10 year olds!" And another third will ask, "Well, was he a nice 10 year old? Was he getting good grades?"
The Hong Kongers have chipped away a little bit of the shell of cynicism I've developed about global politics. Their cohesion is baffling to me. At one point, someone decided they needed a national anthem, so they wrote one, and two weeks later, all of Hong Kong was singing it. Comparativist has a fascinating essay about how and why the violent (i.e. property damage to pro-Beijing businesses and direct confrontation with police) and non-violent factions of the protest came to cooperate and support each other:
A History of Hong Kong’s Contentious Politics: “It was you who taught us…”
A lot has happened since that was posted, but it still offers more insight than I've seen in mainstream press.
I worry for them, though. Another Tianenmen Square would be sufficiently financially disastrous for China that I feel like a better outcome is at least possible. But China has so much on the line...if they cede much to Hong Kong, their strangle-hold on Xinjiang and Tibet could begin to slip. But it's also shocking to me how ineptly Beijing has handled things so far. I never liked the PRC government, but until now, had never thought of it as stupid. If they had simply rescinded the extradition bill 2 months ago, and pretended to have an inquiry into the police violence, the protest never would have gained any momentum. Deng Xiaoping would have been smart enough to make that concession early on, and probably smart enough not to have never pushed for the extradition bill in the first place. But Xi Jinping seems to have grown so accustomed to getting whatever he wants, he's unable to accept any sort of compromise, and now he is on the verge of a full-blown separatist movement.
Similar to 2014, quality of news coverage in the US has been generally abysmal, but if you're interested, here are some good accounts to follow that explains the significance of what is happening day to day in English.
The first (@pinboard) is Maciej Ceglowski. Some background there: he's a Polish immigrant to the US that buiilt a bookmarking service (
https://pinboard.in) that is largely self-sustaining at this point. He used his financial freedom and copious free time to become something of a gadfly in the Silicon Valley tech scene, and was trying to get tech workers to unionize before the HK protests. I think he took an interest because the Hong Kongers were so much better at community organizing than anyone here, so he spends most of his time in Hong Kong trying to make sense of it. Even if you disagree with the specifics of some of his politics, he's worthwhile just for all the people in Hong Kong that he retweets.
Pinboard (@Pinboard) on Twitter
Xinqi Su (@XinqiSu) on Twitter
Mary Hui (@maryhui) on Twitter
Rachel Cheung (@rachel_cheung1) on Twitter
dr. trey (@Comparativist) on Twitter
