For years this seemed like a pipe dream. The Umbrella Movement, so-named in reference to the umbrellas used by protesters in defense of police pepper spray, changed Hong Kong forever.
Now, four years, eight months and 12 days after the Umbrella Movement ended, ongoing protests have surpassed it in duration and massively overtaken it in terms of disruption and political turmoil — and they show no signs of stopping.
The roots of the current unrest can be traced back to that summer five years ago, both in the radicalizing effect it had on a whole generation of young Hong Kongers and in the government’s failure to do anything.
With the collapse of the protest movement in December 2014, a lid was placed on the disruption, leaving the underlying frustrations boiling and ready to explode.
The political roots of the current unrest
As the protests enter their twelfth week, overtaking the Umbrella Movement in duration, the complete withdrawal of the bill remains a key priority, but protesters have also expanded their demands to include the driving issue of the 2014 protests: Genuine universal suffrage in how the city picks its leader.
In the more than two decades since 1997, reform has been slow coming. Carrie Lam, the current chief executive, is the fourth person to hold that office, none of whom were elected by universal suffrage.
In the interim, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers occupied parts of the city for 79-days, demanding Beijing withdraw its decision and allow the chief executive to be elected by “genuine universal suffrage.”
After the use of tear gas in the early hours of the protests backfired spectacularly, bringing more people to the streets, authorities took a largely hands-off approach, and the Umbrella Movement had gradually fizzled out by the time police cleared the last dedicated protesters in December 2014.
Hong Kong’s wealth gap is a major cause of protests
While the movement did not achieve its main goals, the influence of the protests was massive. Legislative elections in 2016 returned the youngest, most politically radical parliament the city had ever seen — though several lawmakers were later ejected from office — and the protests are also widely credited with hastening the end of former Chief Executive CY Leung’s career.
Inequality is linked to the desire for greater democracy, which is driven in large part by an understanding that the city’s leader and legislature — where around 50% of seats are appointed by industry bodies and other non-democratic groupings — are more responsive to the whims of Beijing and local elites than they are to the wider public.
Protesters changed their tactics, officials are stuck in the past
In retrospect, a storm was clearly brewing. While Lam has so far failed to alleviate Hong Kong’s yawning inequality, she has also continued her predecessor’s policy of cracking down on Umbrella Movement leaders and moving closer to China.
On the other side of the border, the situation continued to worsen, as Chinese President Xi Jinping secured power for life and cracked down on dissent. In the far-western region of Xinjiang, millions of Muslims have reportedly been detained in “re-education” camps, and numerous activists have been jailed or disappeared.
All of this tension and anger was a tinder box waiting to be lit by the extradition law. When the government failed to respond to a huge protest march on June 9 and pressed ahead with a second-reading of the bill days later, it exploded. Attempts by Lam to get the genie back in the bottle have proven unsuccessful, as the protests have outpaced her.
Unlike the government, protesters have learned from 2014. Rather than an exhausting, drawn-out occupation requiring people to camp out in the streets for weeks, making them vulnerable to police, counter-protesters and Hong Kong’s often miserable weather, they have instead adopted Bruce Lee’s slogan “be water.” A variety of protests, marches and strikes have taken place in the past months, evolving with the police and government response and impacting neighborhoods some of which had never seen a major protest before.
“If this was an occupation on the streets every day it wouldn’t have lasted anywhere near this long,” Wong told CNN this week.
Following a rare tear gas free weekend earlier this month, Lam gestured towards future reconciliation, saying she would launch an “important fact-finding study” into the causes of the protest.
“I hope that this is a very responsible response to the aspirations for better understanding of what has taken place in Hong Kong,” she said. “And most important of all, it is not just fact finding to provide the sequence of facts. It also will provide the Government with recommendations on how to move forward and also to avoid the recurrence of similar incidents.”
For many Hong Kongers, the problems the city suffers were clear before the 2014 protests brought them to the attention of the world, and were even clearer afterward. That Lam’s government still does not apparently understand, or have any plan to address them, could mean the current unrest continues another 79 days.
Source : Nbcnewyork