The Guardian view on the final dispersal of the Hong Kong protests
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Version 0 of 1. The last protesters in central Hong Kong this week rolled up their banners and furled the umbrellas which they had famously used as protection against tear gas and pepper spray. Some prominent members of the umbrella movement were arrested in the final police sweeps, but the majority of those who had stuck out the demonstrations to the end then drifted off to their homes, some disconsolate, some sad, most still defiant. Many had come to feel, in fact, that the often wet, uncomfortable, and occasionally dangerous streets of the Admiralty district, where they made common cause with other young people, were more like home than the apartments and student dormitories to which they now return. Leaders emerged, friendships were forged, love affairs were begun, political possibilities were intensely debated, in a process familiar from street politics in many countries. The protesters did not succeed in changing the minds of the Hong Kong authorities or the Chinese government in Beijing on the issue of greater democracy, but they changed something else. They changed themselves, and they changed Hong Kong. A society which had a reputation for political inertia has been transformed. The battle for “civil nomination” for the chief executive has been lost, but other fronts, on education, housing, the legal system, and labour rights, for instance, are now likely to open up. That is the good news. The bad news is that this is the kind of active polity with which the Chinese Communist party finds it extremely hard to deal. And that will cut both ways. The protesters came of age as a generation. But they are a generation of men and women who will now almost certainly live out the rest of their lives with, at best, a wary relationship with the country of which they are citizens. It did not have to be this way. Hong Kong people knew there was no alternative to the territory’s incorporation into the People’s Republic in 1997. Some were convinced communists or “patriots” who embraced the change enthusiastically. Others were acquiescent, while hoping that the promised autonomy would prove substantive rather than cosmetic. China could have built on that autonomy, but chose to restrict it. The danger now is that the Chinese will set out to undermine the new political energies coursing through society in Hong Kong, pursuing tactics of intimidation and infiltration they have not so far much employed. Activists could soon find it difficult to keep their jobs or achieve advancement in their professions. Academic appointment committees, newspapers and broadcasters and the courts could find themselves under additional pressures. It is hard to know whether Beijing really understands the aspirations and anxieties of Hong Kong, but chooses not to admit it, or whether it is locked into a black-and-white version of the situation there. Either way, to conceive of the government of Hong Kong as being an exercise in the identification and neutralisation of dissidents or all those deemed to be “unpatriotic” would be profoundly counterproductive. Yet, unhappily, that is what may be in prospect. |