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I was researching a story about Hong Kong and found this great graphic by @adolfux from 2014, when people were occupying roads to demand freer elections. The protester may look familiar at first. But there's something off about his look if you compare him to protesters today. 
The umbrella part about him is the same today, but a few other things aren't, and the differences are revealing. Let's start from his head.
Most protesters we saw on Wednesday outside the government HQ, the same main site of the 2014 and 2019 protests, did not show their faces.
Most protesters we saw on Wednesday outside the government HQ, the same main site of the 2014 and 2019 protests, did not show their faces.
They wore masks not because of the tear gas (they didn’t help much anyway). Many of them didn’t want to be filmed at all. And they were reluctant to say things on the record or use their names.
This is significant. They didn’t want to be tracked down by the authorities and get punished somehow.
But they weren’t like that in 2014. Something changed in the last five years, and we’ve seen that happen before:
But they weren’t like that in 2014. Something changed in the last five years, and we’ve seen that happen before:
In mainland China, people from ordinary folks to scholars have become a lot more reluctant to speak on the record when it comes to politics or the government. Sometimes the topic isn’t even sensitive at all.
This acute wariness in China hasn’t quite infected everyone in Hong Kong yet. And unlike China, there remains plenty of civil space and room for dissent here.
But Hong Kong has a free press and people can see what happens when a state has almost unchallenged power to record its citizens in every imaginable way and actively use it to impose social control. They don’t want that.
I mean, Hong Kong’s protesters lined up to buy train tickets like the bad ol' days in order to avoid leaving a digital footprint! On normal days, you’d get murdered if you’re slow at the turnstile.
But who can blame them? One of the first people to get arrested in the protests this week was a moderator of a chat group on Telegram.
It doesn’t help that the police’s “video team” has become omnipresent at protests. They swing video cameras in protesters’ faces as though they’re weapons. Hong Kong police also explicitly said they would scour news media footage to gather evidence of crimes.
Now let’s look the skateboard helmet, it’s a privilege few people could have then and now. But helmets were hardly at the top of the list of gear protesters needed in 2014. On Wednesday, seemingly everyone had a hard hat.
They knew the demonstrations could get ugly because ugly was the point and ugly could be useful. Back in 2014, there was a lot more ambivalence about storming government buildings, not to mention clashing with police officers head-on.
That brings us to @jeffielam’s piece about how protesters with different views managed to come together this time around instead of fighting each other. scmp.com/news/hong-kong…
In 2014, I saw people hesitate to throw EMPTY water bottles at the police. But today, even though most protesters still wouldn’t hurl pavement bricks at the police, they might pass them to people who would.
The reason for this increased acceptance of the use of a degree of violence is multifold and impossible to ascertain. But few things enraged protesters more than videos of the police using excessive violence against other protesters.
And when you managed to get hundreds of thousands of folks from all walks of life to show up at a protest march backing your cause, all protesters, including the most aggressive of them, effectively have a mandate.
Now let’s move on to the next part of the protester, the cargo pants. Sorry but they’re not acceptable for any occasion.
Seriously though, the article I wrote today is mostly about the police officer on the right. It looks at the police’s arsenal and how protesters tried to beat it, sometimes creatively. The police haven’t really brought out the big gun, though. inkstonenews.com/politics/hong-…
And don’t miss this thread by my tireless @inkstonenews colleague @violazhouyi:
Lastly, if you find these informative, I think you’ll enjoy the 6 stories we publish at Inkstone every day on the greater China region. Please check out our newsletters too, since I really like the kind of convos I've been able to have over good ol’ email inks.tn/newsletters
Want to know more without leaving Twitter? Fine!
I explained how protesters organized themselves without a clear leader in an earlier thread:
And why people are protesting in the first place here:
Thanks for reading!
I explained how protesters organized themselves without a clear leader in an earlier thread:
And why people are protesting in the first place here:
Thanks for reading!
