Is Violence An Appropriate Strategy For Hong Kong?

This author needs to stay anonymous for the safety of herself and her family in mainland China. While her nationality comes with a natural bias on the Hong Kong issue, she strives to stay objective and consult a variety of sources when compiling this article. She also hopes to contribute some first-hand information by interviewing Hong Kong residents who’ve seen the police and protestors with their own eyes. 

The current protest is a ripple of the long-standing agony over the call for universal suffrage. However, situation quickly escalated and went out of control. A BBC comparison of 2019 to the 2014 Umbrella Movement suggests that protestors today are far more inclined to cause damage to infrastructure and use aggressive tactics against the police. More and more leaders in the democratic camp are compelled to take a stand on the use of violence in the movement they represent. Most of them chose the “no division” policy, which means they disagree with using excessive violence but decline to publicly denounce it. They believe universal suffrage is ultimately what all these protests are about and want to focus their energy on “the way forward”. Yet tolerating violence within the democratic camp could cause additional difficulties for future negotiation and fuel the mistrust between Hong Kong and Beijing. 

Besides a few peaceful highlights, such as the two-million-person demonstration in June and the orderly District Council election in November, the current movement in Hong Kong made most of the headlines by violence on the street. In the last few months, mainstream Western media provided abundant photo evidences of Hong Kong protestors and police armed against each other. Reporters also detailed a number of clashes where the protestors threw Molotov cocktails at metro stations, police stations, and perceived enemies armed and unarmed, while the officers fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons into crowds both armed and unarmed. By December 27, Wall Street Journal reported 6,000 arrests and hundreds of people injured. Police injury numbers are less transparent and reported case by case. High-profile deaths and injuries include a student, Chow Tsz-lok, who died from falling when chased by the police, three protestors shot and wounded by the police, an elderly street cleaner who died in a crossfire between pro- and anti-government forces, an old man set on fire while arguing with protestors, four “martyrs” died of suspected suicide, a pro-democracy politician, Andrew Chiu, attacked by a bite on his ear, and a pro-Beijing lawmaker, Junius Ho, stabbed in the street. Looking at these stories and numbers, one can hardly remember that the goal of the movement was still to realize universal suffrage. Violence seemed to have replaced the issue and become an issue itself. 

Yet many leaders in the democratic camps insisted on the “no division” policy, which means they admit radical protestors as allies though disagree with the approach. In an interview on Deutsche Welle, Tim Sebastian, an award-winning journalist, questioned Joey Siu, a moderate student leader in the City University of Hong Kong, as to why she would not denounce her peers for using violence. Siu reiterated the “no division” stance. She was not alone. According to a September BBC report, Yaoting Dai, a moderate leader who started the 2014 Umbrella Movement based on Gandhi’s principles, applauded young protestors today for their courage and effective mobilization structure. He did not support “physically harming people” in the protest but “would rather condemn the government”. In the same report, Aohui Cen, an influential student leader in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and a moderate himself, acknowledged violence as “an appropriate strategy” given the disproportional repression forces of the Hong Kong government. 

Both Dai and Cen mentioned two reasons that justified “no division” for moderates. First, moderates could not get what they wanted from the government. Second, radical protestors appeared reasonable enough compared to the police that they provoked more sympathy than fear. Multiple sources seemed to support the latter claim. In an interview conducted by this author, Jill (anonymous), a Taiwanese girl working in a multinational corporation in Hong Kong who did not participate in any kind of political events, said “both parties [used] violence…but police are the ones using excessive violence”. The only incident she witnessed protestors using violence involved one of her colleagues getting punched in the face for shouting “we’re all Chinese”. By contrast, she recalled seeing the police arrest a central banker in the metro station just because he swore at them, herself being tear-gassed two times when walking on the street and being chased down the street three times because the police “can’t distinguish who’s a protestor”. Jane (anonymous), a college girl in Hong Kong who has not participated in any protests but closely followed updates on social media, described the police as “less predictable” and protestors as “[minding] their own business”. For example, “protestors are just protesting peacefully… yet the police would suddenly charge… Literally the guy is just walking, and he wasn’t even a protestor, and the police would just bump into [him] or push him onto the floor… Some people are arrested and they are under total control, [but the police] would still beat them or pour water on them or pepper-spray them in the face.” During the siege of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Jane recalled that the police tried to arrest everyone on campus, without justification and abiding no law. 

Violence seemed to have replaced the issue and become an issue itself.

There are good reasons to believe that the protestors, despite using violence, caused far less harm than the police, which explains why most Hong Kong people support them morally and emotionally. Yet moderates should notice that protestors naturally adopt a different set of tactics and language than the politicians. Their violent encounters with the police revealed the malfunctioning of the police system, which was not the center of democrats’ agenda before 2019. Their reliance on social media encouraged all participants to upload footages and stories and as a result directed lots of attention to daily maneuvers on the street. Though not uncommon in other modern social movements, these tactics still need more tests on their justice and effectiveness in Hong Kong. 

For example, Jill recalled seeing several videos gone viral on social media recording horrible actions such as protestors setting an old man on fire and police rape. However, she could not track the source of these videos and suspected some sensational ones to be propaganda materials. In fact, a handful of Instagram accounts and local media uploaded hundreds of short footages about police brutality. Most are poorly sourced and some interviews are conducted wearing masks for safety reasons. Mainstream western media could only verify and cover a small fraction of the overwhelming local news feed. Other tactics with a strong guerilla flavor involve two mobile apps designed by the opposition. One app could rate the political leaning of restaurants, and users have reviewed more than 1250 stores on it, sometimes citing private speech of restaurant owners in the review. Another could track police crackdown 24 hours on a map. It claims to receive financial sponsorship from a small-brand browser, a VPN, and crypto donations. Users can submit “intelligence” to the app, whose operators promised to verify and provide a credibility rating for all posts. 

Despite its creative tactics and popular support, the opposition campaign never catered to Beijing as an important stakeholder but rather confronted it as a rival. Such an approach could not yield a viable solution, implied Richard C. Bush from the Brookings Institute. In his 2016 policy brief, Bush identified the radicalization of the democratic camp as a major obstacle to Hong Kong’s democratic transition. Beijing and Hong Kong should meet in the middle, which could mean creating “pre-candidates” for Chief Executive nomination, allowing popular moderates to win publicity and get on the final ballot. However, this proposal, submitted by the Hong Kong government to the Legislative Council (LegCo) in April 2015, did not enlist the support of radical democrats in LegCo and therefore failed to reach Beijing, which was then ready to compromise. He characterized the radical wing as “rather fight than win” and called for one moderate voice to represent the democrats in future negotiations with Beijing. Cen, who officially took the “no division” stance, also confessed that the decentralized organization structure in this protest made it harder for both sides to negotiate and to arrive at a transition-phase settlement. 

These tactics are not uncommon in other modern social movements, but their justice
and effectiveness in Hong Kong still need more tests.

In the meanwhile, protestors seemed patient with the outcome. “We protestors found that the routine demonstrations cannot effectively exert pressure on the administration. Since the administration still remains a haughty attitude towards the opposition, I think that this standoff couldn’t have a final solution in the short term. To ease social schism, the very only solution is that the government should reply to the demands, or at least make some concessions”, said Jess (anonymous), a mainlander schooling in Hong Kong who “[joined] every peaceful protest on the weekend as possible as [she] can” since August.  

On the way forward, Beijing’s judgment of the situation is key. Cen criticized Beijing for holding the bias that democracy necessarily means a coup or Hong Kong independence when in fact democracy would improve the legitimacy of the government and ease social conflict. Bush also called Beijing “paranoid” about “imagined threats”. These words are reassuring, and with all good intentions, one should hope everyone in Hong Kong holds such an educated view on democracy as Cen does himself, or leaders in Beijing as innocently misinformed as Bush described. However, seeing all the Molotov cocktails, police brutality, and inflammatory videos online, this author imagines both parties will have a hard time staying rational, united, and willing to cooperate.