I went to Admiralty last night, to be with my students, after the Hong Kong Federation of Students called for an escalation of protests. I went because the police have on occasion been behaving like barbarians, and I wanted to witness what would happen. Unwittingly, I also wound up protecting my students, only because when I was there, they felt a need to protect me rather than to charge to the front lines confronting the police.
The news tonight is full of claims by police and Hong Kong government figures that protestors had become violent. Perhaps a few somewhere were—but overwhelmingly the violence was committed by police beating students with their batons with great force. Now, the protesters were indeed engaged in illegal behavior—they were occupying roads around the Central Government Complex, in an expansion of their earlier protest zones. Some force was probably needed to clear the roads. But many police were behaving in an out-of-control way, as dozens of videos on TV and YouTube attest. This does not compare to police brutality in the United States: we have had no shootings, and, I pray, this will continue. Hong Kong is still more civil in its behavior than almost anywhere else in the world. But the police have become politicized, largely because of Hong’s political leaders hiding from sight, and a generation of Hong Kong youth has emerged that see the police as their enemy.
The Occupy Central movement will end very soon, although many more demonstrations will take place in the coming months and years. The long-term legacy of the movement will be a vast generational chasm. On Hong Kong university campuses, the overwhelming majority of students support Occupy Central and its civil disobedience, think that the Hong Kong government is run by incompetents who have no understanding of how ordinary people live, and see the mainland as a foreign dictatorship rather than a motherland. This is totally different from what Hong Kong and Beijing pundits envisioned twenty years ago, and was not even fully imaginable twenty months ago. A generation has been radicalized. Will this generation be running a new, more democratic and open Hong Kong in the future? Or will it suffer a sterile, plutocratic, authoritarian Hong Kong? I feel so proud of Hong Kong students, and so full of a bit of hope and a lot of fear about the future of my city.
