International Journal of Sociology

ISSN: 0020-7659 (Print) 1557-9336 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mijs20

Be Water, My Friend: Hong Kong’s 2019 Anti-

Extradition Protests

Heike Holbig

To cite this article: Heike Holbig (2020) Be Water, My Friend: Hong Kong’s 2019 Anti-Extradition
Protests, International Journal of Sociology, 50:4, 325-337, DOI: 10.1080/00207659.2020.1802556

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207659.2020.1802556

Published online: 04 Aug 2020.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
2020, VOL. 50, NO. 4, 325–337
https://doi.org/10.1080/00207659.2020.1802556

Be Water, My Friend: Hong Kong’s 2019 Anti-

Extradition Protests
Heike Holbiga,b
a
Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Germany; bInstitute of Asian Studies,
German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The 2019 wave of protests in Hong Kong, while reproducing the pat- Hong Kong; People’s
terns of earlier social movements against perceived political pressure Republic of China; anti-
from the Chinese mainland, spiraled into an unprecedented escal- extradition protests; social
movements; National
ation. This paper investigates the political, socio-economic and cul- security law
tural factors that triggered the anti-extradition protests in 2019 and
generated an environment in which participants appeared to deliber-
ately accept the risks of violent confrontation. In particular, it analy-
ses the movement’s symbolic repertoires, organizational features and
resistance techniques, which responded to increasingly sophisticated
techniques of authoritarian surveillance. Based on readings of the
wider social movement literature, the paper juxtaposes global and
local perceptions of protest events on the ground.

Introduction
Between June and December 2019, over more than half a year, a massive wave of pro-
tests in Hong Kong attracted international media attention. In order to contextualize
and offer an interpretation of the protest movement, this discussion paper provides a
rough timeline of events and elaborates on the political, socio-economic and cultural
factors that shaped the protests’ environment and agenda. Against this wider back-
ground, the analysis then focuses on the protesters’ symbolic repertoires of social mobil-
ization as well as on the practices of resistance. It will argue that the strong pressure to
maintain anonymity resulting from the early criminalization of protesters and the step-
ping-up of surveillance techniques drove activists to choose strategies of pronounced
organizational ‘fluidity’, with ambiguous effects on participants’ self-perceptions and
behaviors. The article concludes with a discussion of the global and local implications
of a drawn-out episode of increasingly violent confrontations and of the cognitive disso-
nances that resulted for international and domestic audiences.

Timeline of events
The 2019 protest events were triggered by plans on the part of the city’s government,
announced on 3 April, to introduce a bill that would allow criminal suspects in the

CONTACT Heike Holbig holbig@soz.uni-frankfurt.de Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Frankfurt 60323, Germany;
German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany.
ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
326 H. HOLBIG

Hong Kong Special Administrative Zone (HKSAR) to be extradited to the People’s

Republic of China (PRC). Critics warned that such an extradition law could be used not
only to intimidate dissidents, but potentially also to threaten business people, expats or
even tourists on visits in Hong Kong. In May, on a non-official tour of North
American and European countries, Anson Chan, the first HKSAR chief secretary after
the transfer of sovereignty over the territory from the United Kingdom to the PRC in
1997, cautioned Western leaders and think tanks about the risks of the expected bill for
Hong Kong’s rule of law and democratic freedoms.
The protests on Hong Kong’s streets started on Sunday, 9 June, when approximately
one million people held a largely peaceful rally to demonstrate against the proposed bill.
On 12 June, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets for the first time during smaller
skirmishes with protesters, thereby escalating the situation and provoking strong emo-
tional reactions among the city’s youth. On Saturday, 15 June, one day before the next
mass rally was to be held, Carrie Lam, who had taken over as HKSAR chief executive
two years previously, announced that she would delay the extradition bill indefinitely.
Despite her dramatic reversal, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people (from 7.5 million
Hong Kong inhabitants) took to the streets the next day, demanding Ms Lam’s resigna-
tion and a complete withdrawal of the bill. That same day, Lam characterized the pro-
tests as ‘organized riots’ (Ng 2019). Following intense stand-offs in more and more
parts of the city and growing numbers of injuries on both sides, protesters blockaded
police headquarters, demanding that previously arrested fellow campaigners
be exonerated.
An irreversible step toward escalation was taken when protesters stormed the
Legislative Council (LegCo)1 Complex on 1 July, the anniversary of Hong Kong’s hand-
over. Besides the physical occupation of a heavily guarded official building, the televised
acts of vandalism inside parliament sent strong but highly ambiguous messages to local,
mainland Chinese and international media audiences. The interpretations of media
reports ranged from revolutionary heroism to treason. Violent scenes from Hong
Kong’s airport were also televised: here protesters were welcoming incoming travelers
with their version of events to combat the ‘riot’ narrative sponsored by the governments
in Hong Kong and in Beijing, where the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda
apparatus had switched from conspicuous non-coverage of the protests to vilifying pro-
testers and their alleged foreign supporters. During the three months from 1 July to the
seventieth anniversary of the PRC on 1 October, protests spread throughout the city
and to different districts. The districts bordering Guangdong province were particular
hotspots, with protesters attempting to block mainland traders and commuters from
entering the HKSAR and unabating police violence and suspected triad assaults
on protesters.
It was also during these weeks of summer that the protesters’ concerns crystallized
into ‘Five Demands’. While in early July these were quoted as ‘one, the bill must be
withdrawn; two, the chief executive must resign; three, the government must retract its
characterization of the violent clashes as “riots”; four, there must be a full independent
inquiry into the actions of the police and; five, everyone arrested in respect of the
clashes must be unconditionally freed’ (Tong 2019), the call for Carrie Lam’s resignation
was soon replaced with the demand for universal suffrage for LegCo and chief executive
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 327

elections. This demand had been the overarching concern of the pro-democratic camp
for more than a decade, including the Umbrella Movement in 2014 (see below), and
had consistently fallen on deaf ears.2
On 4 September, Carrie Lam ultimately announced the withdrawal of the extradition
bill, while refusing to concede to the remaining four demands. A month later, to deter
violent protests, she invoked the rarely used colonial-era Emergency Regulations
Ordinance to ban the wearing of face masks, which protesters used widely to avoid
being identified by the police with the help of face-recognition software. In mid-
November, the High Court ruled that the ban was incompatible with the Hong Kong
Basic Law, initiating a judicial review that continued into 2020 and that potentially
invites a final decision by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of
China, which is empowered to deliver the ultimate interpretation of the Basic Law.
In the meantime, violent confrontations between protesters and police climaxed after
news of two student deaths went viral, a bystander was set on fire and other heavy inju-
ries occurred on all sides. Over the course of October and November, student protesters
occupied various universities. A 12-day siege of the HK Polytechnic University campus
in late November, where protesters equipped with petrol bombs and bows and arrows
fought against the police, who had cordoned off the campus, ended with more than
1,100 people being arrested. The dramatic clashes coincided with the 2019 HK District
Council elections on 24 November, which saw a landslide victory for pro-democracy
candidates. Thanks to a first-past-the-post election system, pan-democrats won almost
90 per cent of seats based on an average majority of 60 per cent among voters whose
turnout had almost doubled from the previous elections to over 70 per cent (K. Cheng
2019a). Three days later, on 27 November, as solidarity rallies took place in various cit-
ies worldwide, the United States passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy
Act in support of the protest movement. The Chinese leadership rejected this as an
unacceptable intervention in domestic affairs. Only with the emergence of the new cor-
onavirus, which began to make headlines in China and Hong Kong in early January
2020, and after abstract resentments against mainlanders were channeled into concrete
fears of contagion, did the protests peter out.
According to various statistics, the police had arrested 7,800 people, prosecuted over
1,200 and seized over 3,700 mobile phones in connection with the mass protests
(Wong, Sum, and Ng 2020). In mid-April 2020, with media attention focused on the
pandemic, Hong Kong police arrested 15 high-profile representatives from the pro-dem-
ocracy camp, among them veteran politicians and prominent lawyers, on suspicion of
organizing and participating in protest activities during summer and fall 2019 (Hong
Kong Free Press, 2020). The mass protests flared up once more in late May 2020 when
the National People’s Congress came together for its annual meeting after a two-month
delay due to the Covid-19 crisis. To the surprise of most Hong Kong people, Chinese
premier Li Keqiang announced in his 22 May report on the government’s work that a
draft decision to enact a national security law for the HKSAR had been submitted to
China’s legislature for deliberation. In unison with enraged Hong Kong protesters, US
and other international media condemned the Chinese leadership’s plan to bypass the
Hong Kong government and to impose national security legislation, thereby breaking its
promise regarding the city’s high degree of autonomy and sounding the ‘death knell’ for
328 H. HOLBIG

Hong Kong’s freedoms. On the other hand, individual voices argued that ‘Hong Kong
has only itself to blame for failing to implement Article 230 of the HKSAR Basic Law
(Cross 2020), which had originally left it to the HKSAR to enact a national security law
on its own.3 As shown below, the law’s enactment according to Article 23 had been a
highly controversial political issue ever since Hong Kong’s handover to the PRC in
1997 – in fact, it had triggered the first round of mass protest in the HKSAR in the
summer of 2003. With the benefit of hindsight, at the time of writing Hong Kong’s pro-
test movement appears to have come full circle with the 2019 anti-extradition protests,
which are the focus of this analysis.

City of protests: political, socio-economic and cultural contexts

In fact, social protests have shaped Hong Kong’s image over the past two decades –
in 2000, Western media labeled it the ‘city of protests’ (Holbig and Liu 2000:785). In
addition to annual candlelight vigils in commemoration of the 4 June 1989
Tiananmen events and mass rallies on 1 July, the anniversary of the city’s handover
to the PRC, Hong Kong has witnessed a series of major social protest episodes. In
2003, the city’s pro-democracy camp formed an ad hoc coalition with the Christian
churches to oppose Article 23 of the Basic Law. As noted above, this Article stipu-
lates the enactment of a law prohibiting treason, secession, sedition, subversion, theft
of state secrets and interference by foreign political organizations. The city’s govern-
ment shelved its plan to enact Article 23 after a rally on 1 July, which drew more
than half a million protesters. In 2012, an alliance of students’ and parents’ groups,
together with other civic associations, successfully protested against the PRC’s ‘Moral
and National Education’ campaign, which was designed to increase Hong Kong citi-
zens’ patriotism. From September to December 2014, the ‘Umbrella Movement’
attracted international media attention over almost three months. In some ways the
movement foreshadowed the dynamics of the 2019 protests, with events quickly
unfolding into a sustained and increasingly militant youth movement (Ma 2019;
Fulda 2020:188–202).
Over the summer of 2014, an older generation of the city’s pro-democratic movement
collaborating under the name of Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP, in the
vein of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement) had planned to kick off a civil dis-
obedience campaign on 1 October, the sixty-fifth anniversary of the PRC’s founding, to
demand free and fair elections of the city’s chief executive. Five days in advance, on 26
September, however, a coalition of younger protesters, mobilized during the 2012 move-
ment, took control of the events and spearheaded the campaign, which from there
quickly unfolded into a spate of city-wide clashes with the police. The movement was
dubbed the Umbrella Revolution by foreign media due to its use of umbrellas as a sym-
bol of resistance, mobile hideouts and a tool of defence against the police (E. W. Cheng
2019b; Fulda 2020:202–206). While the Umbrella Movement ended in mid-December
2014 without achieving its core demand, it had a strong and lasting mobilizing effect
among Hong Kong’s youth, particularly among those who had grown up after the 1997
handover. In a way, the 2019 protests picked up where the Umbrella Movement left off.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 329

Various contextual factors – political, socio-economic and cultural – have been iden-
tified in the social science literature as having led to the formation of a diffuse, and at
times increasingly militant, social movement among Hong Kong’s youth.

Political factors
In a nutshell, the ‘protest-proneness’ of Hong Kong citizens can be understood as a leg-
acy of the ‘one country, two systems’ formula of the 1984 Sino-British Declaration,
under which the two sides compromised on the conditions of the city’s return to PRC
control in 1997. The Chinese side has consistently emphasized the ‘one country’ aspect
by claiming the right of China’s National People’s Congress to the ultimate interpret-
ation of the HKSAR’s Basic Law and by installing various representative institutions in
the city to guarantee military presence, political oversight and social penetration (Lo,
Hung, and Loo 2019). The ‘two systems’ aspect, granting the HKSAR a ‘high degree of
autonomy’ for a period of 50 years (1997–2047), has served as a means to preserving
this autonomy as the metropolis’ status as a global financial hub has been regarded as
hinging upon the city’s rule of law and its ‘democratic’ reputation. The British negotia-
tors, on the other hand, regarded the ‘one country’ aspect as a moving target sufficiently
far away to provide hope of democratization or at least the incremental pluralization of
China’s political system before the end of the semi-centennial grace period. All expecta-
tions were actually centered on the ‘two systems’ aspect – imagined as a promise that
Hong Kong’s sophisticated set of civil rights and liberties as well as rule-of-law stand-
ards would remain intact. In fact, most of these freedoms and institutions had not
existed during the majority of Hong Kong’s colonial history, but had been initiated as
part of a belated political liberalization process in the run-up to the 1997 handover
(Holbig and Liu 2000).
It is from this strategic ambiguity of the ‘one country, two systems’ formula that
many political cleavages have originated. Among the most socially engrained is a gener-
ational cleavage between cohorts socialized before and after the handover – a factor that
also clearly prevailed in the 2014 and 2019 protests, when many young protesters had a
hard time justifying their pro-democracy, anti-establishment stances to their parents.
The cleavage between the ‘pro-’/‘pan-democratic’ and ‘pro-Beijing’ camps has shaped
contestations in many arenas, whether in party politics, legislation, local business, the
media, education, language or civil society. Some observers have gone so far as to see a
lack of political maturity and leadership among overtly fragmented pro-democratic pol-
itical parties and civil society forces – which they view as unable to accommodate
diverse interests and negotiate viable compromises with the pro-Beijing establishment –
as the root cause of repeated and increasingly violent rounds of social protest on the
ground (Fulda 2020:205–207; Chow 2019).
While there is certainly something to this analysis, the local situation is compounded
by the fact that political cleavages run not only through domestic affairs, but also
through international relations. Particularly in the United States’ and the United
Kingdom’s foreign policies toward China, Hong Kong serves as a powerful symbolic
icon of democratic and rule-of-law values. For the majority of state leaders worldwide,
who tend to heed Beijing’s ‘One China’ principle, Hong Kong pro-democracy protests
330 H. HOLBIG

thus notoriously present a diplomatic dilemma. These multiple political contestations at

the local, national and international levels aroused media attention at home, among
overseas Chinese and on the part of foreign audiences. Between July and November
2019, the protests formed a major media event televised during prime times across the
globe. The massive media coverage must be recognized as a catalyst for confrontations
on the ground, as all involved parties were aware that ‘the world’ was watching.

Socio-economic factors
In addition to these immediate political cleavages, a number of socio-economic factors
have been identified as contributing to the protests. As a general trend, observers have
made out a steady decline in Hong Kong’s previous status as a leading international
metropolis. It is not just as a global trade entrep^
ot and financial hub that Hong Kong
has experienced successive setbacks over the past two decades and been eclipsed by
other Chinese and Asian cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen or Singapore (Zenglein and
K€arnfelt 2020). Hong Kong’s pride as a world-class city has also been impacted by
shrinking numbers of European and other foreign tourists, crowded out by an increas-
ing influx of mainland tourists and commuters, whose presence has significantly
reshaped local business, traffic, flair, etc.
The growing presence of the nouveau riche from the mainland has driven up real
estate prices, thus aggravating an already tense housing market and worsening living
conditions, particularly for younger Hong Kong citizens, more and more of whom who
cannot afford reasonable housing. According to a 2018 Oxfam study, from 2007 to
2017, average rents of small units doubled, while property prices for this segment
almost tripled over the same period (Oxfam Hong Kong 2018:20–21). While those who
own housing also have the financial means to invest in their children’s education, those
who have to pay the exorbitant rents often lack the means to do so. The dramatic hous-
ing shortage has not only contributed to a widening gap between rich and poor but has
also had a negative impact on intergenerational upward mobility (Y.C.R.
Wong 2017:116–129).
While Hong Kong still features the highest number of billionaires – in US dollars –
of any city in the world, bar New York (71 versus 92 billionaires according to Forbes
2020), the middle classes have found it increasingly hard to cope with rising costs not
only for housing but also for education and healthcare. Hong Kong’s youth has found
itself in a most dire situation as wages have been stagnant for over a decade. This is
particularly true for tertiary graduates, whose numbers have been growing rapidly since
the 1990s4 and whose salaries have continued to be depressed within the labor market.
A sense of relative deprivation has thus taken hold not only among the city’s working
class, but also among the offspring of the previously privileged and educated middle-
class households – a factor already observed among the Umbrella Movement protesters
five years ago (Holbig and Schucher 2014). Adding to these economic woes are mutual
accusations between Hong Kong and mainland citizens of arrogance in daily encoun-
ters. Socialized in an aura of cosmopolitan self-confidence, the offspring of an erstwhile
prosperous and highly educated Hong Kong middle class appears particularly vulnerable
to resentments against the new ‘snobs’ from the Chinese mainland.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 331

Cultural factors
Linked to these political and socio-economic tensions is the dimension of cultural-polit-
ical identity among Hong Kong citizens. Various studies, one of them designed as sys-
tematic longitudinal research stretching back to the early 1990s,5 have investigated the
identity trends of different age groups, professions, social strata, educational cohorts,
etc. Their results converge on three major findings: First, while national identification
among Hong Kong’s populace with China increased over the first decade after the
handover, the trend reversed after 2007–2008. Some have attributed this turning point
to the growing assertiveness of the PRC on the global stage. A new nativist ‘Hong
Kong’ identity has increasingly taken hold among the SAR’s citizens.
Second, the demographics confirm a consistent generational gap between persons
socialized before and after the handover, with nativist identities being particularly pro-
nounced among people under the age of 30. Parts of this generation have been dubbed
‘localists’ in the wake of a spate of protests centered around the preservation of urban
cultural heritage since 2004. As a new cultural-political identity, ‘localism’ combines
geographical and linguistic affirmations of being ‘Hongkongers’, claims of cultural
autonomy and community participation, and moral appeals to traditional Chinese phil-
osophy justifying collective resistance vis-a-vis unrighteous rulers. For localists, direct
action such as civil disobedience and confrontation with police have become part of
their concept of rightful resistance and their protest repertoire (C.-K. Lee 2019a:14; Veg
2019:178–179). Unlike earlier generations and other pro-democracy advocates from
their own generation, localists have increasingly appeared ready to fight with all means,
including physical violence, against the perceived authoritarian encroachment by the
PRC and for the rule of law and civil liberties which they have taken for granted.
Third, while Hong Kong students tend to have a relatively strong pan-Chinese eco-
nomic identity due to the perceived economic and technological prowess of China, this
does not translate into socio-political identification with the mainland. Instead, separat-
ist tendencies appear to be undergirded by post-materialist values stressing personal
freedom, self-expression, environmental concerns and civil liberties, which are particu-
larly pronounced among Hong Kong college students (Pang and Jiang 2019; Cheung
and Hughes 2019). It is also these groups which appear to have constituted the core of
the 2019 protests: highly educated adolescents, students and professionals with a mid-
dle-class background who were under 30.

Be water: the fluid nature of the protest movement

While these political, socio-economic and cultural identity factors have formed the con-
text in which social movements in post-handover Hong Kong have evolved, they do not
explain the protesters’ tenacity nor the massive escalation of protests, which developed
from peaceful mass rallies in the city center to violent clashes across large parts of the
HKSAR’s territory. To understand the enormous effectiveness of the mobilization, we
have to look at the dynamic nature of the protest movement, the fluidity of its symbolic
repertoires and its practices of resistance.
Confronted with the presence of a well-trained and well-equipped local police force,
digital surveillance mechanisms, and security forces under China’s political control
332 H. HOLBIG

(including the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in the city center), protesters adapted
quickly. Experiences from past protests and their creative development facilitated a steep
learning curve. At the symbolic level, activists combined global and local elements to
mobilize the city’s youth. Prominent international examples ranged from reminders of
Eastern European revolutions such as Czech-style Lennon Walls or a human chain
modeled after the 1989 Baltic Way (Tufekci 2019), refashioned as post-it walls and other
public art projects, to the anti-establishment Occupy Movement that had inspired pro-
tests in Hong Kong five years before, to the borrowing of popular memes such as ‘Pepe
the Frog’, which was reinterpreted from a hate speech icon of the US alt-right move-
ment into a catch-all recognition feature for protesters (Ellis 2019; Ko 2019). Local sym-
bolic language, on the other hand, built on the repertoire of previous and newly
formulated slogans in Cantonese, Mandarin and English (Veg 2019), too rich to be dealt
with in this brief format. A highly resonant example from local martial arts culture may
suffice here for illustration. Early on, young protesters shared a quote from the Sino-
American kung-fu movie star Bruce Lee, who had stated in a 1971 TV interview, ‘Be
formless, shapeless, like water … Water can flow, or it can crash — be water, my
friend.’6 From this quote, protesters developed a philosophy of resistance composed of
four principles: ‘Be strong like ice; be fluid like water; gather like dew; scatter like mist’
(Anderlini 2019).
‘Be water’ served not only as a clarion call for young protesters, but also as a power-
ful organizational tactic: similarly to patterns observed during the 2014 Umbrella
Movement (E. W. Cheng 2019b), the 2019 protests appear to have emerged from the
bottom up among activist networks in a nonhierarchical, diversified fashion dependent
more on the spontaneous initiatives of individual participants than on protest leaders’
top-down organization. At the level of protest practices, this tactic of overlapping
‘leaderless’ social movements served a double purpose: while granting protection from
police power and prosecution of activists, the organizational fluidity at the same time
allowed for very efficient horizontal communication among diffuse groups of protesters.
Over a period of seven months from June 2019 onward, digitally networked groups
organized mass rallies and strikes, blockaded public buildings and traffic hubs, boycot-
ted pro-Beijing businesses, barricaded streets, and seized various university campuses.
The rapid escalation of confrontations between protesters and police forces resulted
from an unprecedented ‘techno-evolutionary arms race’ (Tufekci, 2019). With the help
of social media, interactive maps indicating police operations and cutting-edge mobile
apps such as ‘Airdrop’, an Apple technology which allows the sharing of messages
between cell phones within a certain area without disclosing the sender (S€ uddeutsche
Zeitung 2019), participants were able to co-ordinate in real time and to flexibly navigate
between locations and protest events. While the police utilized traditional means of
deterrence such as water cannons, pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, etc., protesters
stepped up their equipment successively. In order to protect themselves against the
police, but more importantly to avoid identifying themselves, their garb developed from
simple surgical masks to safety goggles and construction helmets, to full-body protective
gear, sometimes including full-face gas masks. When surveillance lampposts with face
recognition software were erected in more and more parts of the city, protesters reacted
with innovative camouflage make-up and hairstyles (Twigg 2019), black clothing to
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 333

move unseen at night, and laser pointers to confuse the police and the surveillance cam-
eras (Hansen 2019).
It is hard to tell what impression the globally televised images of activists in heavy
gear made on the protesters themselves. However, it appears plausible that the iconic
anonymity of militant activists hiding in plain sight generated a powerful emotional mix
of fear, rightful indignation, revolutionary romance, heroic revenge, and martyrdom
which might have contributed to the escalation of violence (cf. Livni 2020). On the part
of the protesters, media coverage included individual attacks against police, suspected
hired thugs, off-duty cops or pro-Beijing journalists. When they realized that the Hong
Kong government, after withdrawing the extradition bill in early September, would not
give in to any of their other demands, protesters employed physical violence more and
more widely.7 Particularly during the November stand off at the Polytechnic University
campus, Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs and medieval-style bows and arrows were
used to fight off the police.
In a sense, the fluid nature of the protest movement can be seen as both a strength
and a weakness: while the wide and innovative use of digital media helped to sustain
the protest campaigns over time and space, it might have contributed to the move-
ment’s fragmentation and made it difficult for protesters to articulate common causes
and developing coherent strategies vis-a-vis Hong Kong and Beijing power holders (for
similar observations in 2014, cf. F. L. F. Lee 2019b). At the same time, while it allowed
participants to communicate efficiently and to maneuver flexibly across protest loca-
tions, events and forms, the tactical anonymity and malleability of a ‘faceless’ struggle
might have at the same time incentivised a greater willingness to risk violent confronta-
tions with the security forces. Paradoxically, the movement’s fluidity and tenacity was
interpreted by pro-Beijing officials as evidence of the ‘well-planned nature’ and
‘syndicated manner’ of protest organization and of participants’ links to ‘overseas train-
ing’ and ‘foreign manipulation’ (Wong, Sum, and Ng 2020). These quotes demonstrate
the deeper conundrum of protests in Hong Kong: the more effectively protesters cope
with the growing political pressure, the more ground they give for their criminalization.

Global and local implications

To conclude, the 2019 protests in Hong Kong can be expected to have far-reaching
implications. Seen from a global perspective, they were a unique testing ground for
innovative combinations of online and offline techniques of resistance which will cer-
tainly be absorbed into the revolutionary toolkits of social movements and protest
mobilizers worldwide. Given the increasing use of face-recognition software and big
data applications by both autocratic and democratic governments, the Hong Kong
experience will contribute to the development of cutting-edge technologies in an
ongoing digital arms race, with varying positions for future winners and losers in differ-
ent regime contexts.
Locally, the events of 2019 might have rather bleak implications across the board.
Politically, the outcome of the latest round of protests has once more confirmed the
fundamental dilemma of the ‘one country, two systems’ formula. The conspicuously
uncompromising attitudes on the part of Hong Kong and Chinese leaders, who
334 H. HOLBIG

successfully opted to sit out the protests, has left little hope of an incremental democra-
tization of Hong Kong’s political system before the end of the 50-year ‘grace period’ in
2047 that is stipulated in the Basic Law. The realization that the authorities have had
the upper hand during longer periods of contestation – despite the innovative protest
practices analyzed above – might have strong alienating effects for Hong Kong’s youth
(Cai 2019).
In economic terms, the violent confrontations appear to underline the larger trend of
a previously ‘world-class’ city declining toward the status of a more ordinary Asian
metropolis (Johnson 2019). It is hard, though, to distinguish the negative effects of the
protest episode from the damage caused by the ongoing corona crisis, which has
severely hit all the region’s economies. In any case, the most problematic legacy of the
2019 events is the deep cleavage running through Hong Kong’s local businesses, divid-
ing the ‘blue’ pro-China camp from the ‘yellow’ pan-democrats’ camp. While ‘yellow’
businesses had appeared to win the day during the protests by identifying themselves as
supporting the activists’ cause, a backlash against them may ensue as the protests sub-
side (Beech 2020).
With regard to cultural identities, the rift between the pro-Beijing and pro-democratic
segments of the city’s populace as well as the already stark generational divide have cer-
tainly deepened. There is no doubt that the trend of increasing localism among Hong
Kong’s youth has been strengthened, though with an unclear outcome. For those with
strong post-materialist values, the devastating blow delivered to the latest protest experi-
ence by the envisaged security law might represent a disillusioning turning point that
causes a growing number of the more affluent to leave the city rather than seek a future
there. For those who have to stay, the disillusionment could have radicalizing effects.
Overall, we find a structural dissonance between global and local perceptions of the
2019 protests in Hong Kong. While the international media – when they chose to cover
them – tended to frame the protests in a ‘David versus Goliath’ style as a heroic battle
between good and evil, and to ignore episodes that did not fit this Manichean pattern,
the contestations appeared blurrier on the ground. In the local media, vilifying accounts
of ‘rioters’ blocking the city’s infrastructure and ruining Hong Kong’s economy com-
peted with counter-narratives of activists’ creativity, solidarity and tenacity. Over time,
however, the organizational fluidity of the protests as well as the tactical choice of
‘faceless’, poorly lit, guerrilla-style confrontations with the police appears to have diluted
the initially powerful images of revolutionary heroism. As the ongoing corona crisis
demands the wearing of protective masks by everybody, the once iconic anonymity of
protesters may now fade into a nameless depression.

Notes
1. While the Legislative Council is often dubbed Hong Kong’s ‘parliament’, only half of its
members are directly elected through geographical constituencies; the other half hold
functional constituencies based on interest groups, most of them business-oriented and with
a pro-Beijing background.
2. In a nutshell, the wording of the 1984 Sino-British Declaration and 1990 Basic Law was left
strategically ambiguous with regard to universal suffrage (Holbig and Liu 2000). Since 2017,
the controversy has boiled down to whether Hong Kong voters would be allowed to freely
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 335

elect the HKSAR’s chief executive from among a limited number of candidates preselected in
a nomination process under the influence of Beijing.
3. Article 23 of the Basic Law states: ‘The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact
laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the
Central People’s Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political
organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit
political organisations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political
organisations or bodies.’ Since Hong Kong’s handover to China, the Standing Committee of
the PRC’s National People’s Congress (PRC NPCSC) has interpreted the Basic Law in five
instances (1999, 2004, 2005, 2011 and 2016; see Huang and Huang 2016) in accordance with
Article 158 which grants the PRC NPCSC the ultimate authority of interpretation of the Basic
Law. The 2020 case is different, however, as the Chinese government has decided unilaterally
to legislate a national security law without involving the LegCo, based on Article 18 of the
Basic Law, which authorizes the Central People’s Government to apply national laws in Hong
Kong. According to this logic, the relevant law should be ‘confined to those relating to
defense and foreign affairs as well as other matters outside the limits of the autonomy of the
HKSAR’. The May 2020 decision thereby contravenes Article 23 which stipulates that the
HKSAR ‘shall enact [relevant laws] on its own’ (see above). The legal complexities will have
to be clarified in the future; at the time of writing, however, the Chinese government’s
decision appears to signal that it might no longer abide by the political rules of the game that
have granted and circumscribed Hong Kong’s autonomy so far.
4. The number of tertiary graduates in the population aged 30–39 increased from 61,000 in
1981 to 297,000 in 2001 and 464,000 in 2011, and is projected to rise to 678,000 in 2021 (R.
Wong, 2016).
5. See, for example, the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme (HKUPOP). On
28 June 2019, a HKUPOP press release reported that ‘53 per cent of the interviewees
identified as Hongkongers, while 11 per cent identified as Chinese. 12 per cent identified as
“Chinese in Hong Kong”, and 23 per cent identified themselves as “Hongkongers in China”.
When asked if they were proud to be a national citizen of China, 71 per cent said “no” and
27 per cent said “yes.” 90 per cent in the age group 18–29 answered “no.”’; cf. https://
hongkongfp.com/2019/06/28/hongkongers-identifying-chinese-record-low-10-youth-proud-
citizens-poll/.
6. The 1971 video clip was shared, among others, via Twitter by Amnesty International: https://
twitter.com/amnesty/status/1162730057942675456?lang=en
7. In November, a bystander believed to be a mainland citizen was set on fire by protesters.
The video clip went viral among mainland netizens as proof of Hong Kong protesters’
‘rioting’ behaviour.

Notes on contributor
Dr Heike Holbig is a professor of political science with a focus on Chinese and East Asian area
studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, and a senior research fellow at the German
Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include
Chinese politics, state-society relations, ideology and political legitimacy, as well as China’s
changing role in the international order.

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