For their protection, the author of this article has chosen to remain anonymous
Despite claims of prosperity, peace and unity, polarisation is the true legacy of the Hong Kong protests
On my recent trip home to Hong Kong, I plucked up my courage to revisit a place I had actively avoided since 2019. Tsim Sha Tsui East, an urban area in southern Kowloon, is quite unremarkable to most people. It is packed with high-rise buildings just like most parts of the city. But to me, it was the place where I had witnessed some of Hong Kong’s most violent and bloody confrontations. It was a battlefield. This was where hundreds of protesters demanding democracy clashed with riot police, who were laying siege to a nearby university which the protesters had occupied. It was where the protesters inside the campus had tried to break free, only to be beaten with batons and arrested. The air had been thick and white with tear gas; protesters were bombarded with water cannon blasts and rubber bullets.
I wondered if my time away had healed the trauma of reporting on these events, of evading tear gas canisters raining from the sky, of seeing tears and blood streaming down very young faces, and of seeing Hong Kongers fight Hong Kongers.
Everything in the area looked extremely normal. Some would even say peaceful. Birds were chirping, office workers were out for lunch, people were going about their business and some tourists were exploring the area. Signs of the conflicts that revealed how divided Hong Kong was just four years ago had vanished. Since then, Beijing’s imposition of a sweeping national security law has transitioned Hong Kong from ‘chaos to governance, and from governance to prosperity’, officials say, and all is well, we are told.
But this harmony and peace, or I should say, this silence, is eerie and unsettling, somehow more so than echoing battle cries and police sirens. Throughout my trip, I found my family and friends steering clear of any discussions about politics or public policies. Any discontent and frustration over the current sociopolitical climate were uttered in quiet whispers. I found myself unconsciously self-censoring when I cheered on the city’s football team with ‘Hong Kong, Add Oil’ – a widely used Cantonese phrase in Hong Kong – which was so ubiquitous during the 2019-20 protests that it has since become controversial.
The civil unrest four years ago prompted Beijing to enact the national security law. My trip home coincided with the government’s introduction of a new, even tougher national security law targeting acts of espionage, treason, foreign interference and theft of state secrets. A similar proposed law was scrapped in 2003 when 500 thousand people took to the streets in protest, but this time around there was barely any public discussion, online or off. Officials said that the city is united in its consensus that the legislation should be completed as soon as possible, citing that 98% of the responses they received in a public consultation support the law.
Behind the ‘consensus’, however, is a mass of people suppressing their voices, finding it difficult to express their genuine opinions or any criticism of the state without it being deemed as inciting hatred towards the government. The risk is too great, when even a pro-government lawmaker was accused of using language amounting to ‘soft resistance’ – an undefined term, which allows Hong Kong latitude to ‘crack down’ on civil unrest. There is little point in debate anyway, when officials focus on rebuttals and bulldozing the law through. It is impossible to organise any major protest. Previous protest organisers have disbanded; pro-democracy leaders have been jailed or exiled. Citizens’ ability to organise protests has been strictly restricted by the national security law and other administrative measures.
Hong Kong’s peace and cohesion are products of the total throttling of its freedoms, in the media, in arts, in education, in civil society and in people’s daily lives.
When I departed Hong Kong a few years ago, I was left worrying whether my hometown and its people would ever heal: not just from the trauma of experiencing the chaos and violence on the streets but also from the heartbreak of having relationships, families and friendships torn apart by incompatible visions for the city’s future. Yet, even though there are no longer street battles between Hong Kongers, nor constant family shouting matches over politics, Hong Kong feels more polarised and divided than ever before. In 2019 and 2020, polarisation manifested in the paroxysms of rage and violence that exploded in the city: the anger expressed by a disenfranchised mass which led to the crackdown to obtain obedience from the people. Polarisation manifested in the unwillingness from either side to back down, the antagonisation of opposing and the unquestioning support for their own, and the increased radicalisation and militarisation of both sides. Both extremes were intertwined in a non-stop cycle of escalating violence.
But polarisation is also embedded in the alternate realities different Hong Kongers now inhabit. Perceptions of the same facts are deeply bifurcated. We have one group relishing in the stable society they now live in, utterly satisfied that the Chinese and Hong Kong governments have reined in rioters, locked up traitors and restored peace to the city; and another group who grieves the freedoms they have now lost and deeply distrusts mainland and Hong Kong authorities. One group lives in a universe where an election with a record-low 27.5% turnout is considered a ‘high-quality’ showcase of ‘real, functioning democracy’, lauded by officials for electing ‘patriots’; another lives in a world where political participation has become too dangerous and meaningless to contemplate. Most people respond to government activities and initiatives with mockery, apathy or silence.
Due to distrust, fear of reprisal and other factors, polarisation removes the space for healthy discussions and the ability to find common ground. Polarisation also leads to a significant portion of the population being shut out of the discourse and eventually losing hope, rejecting the city and leaving their homes in search of a new life somewhere else – in Canada, in the UK, in Taiwan. The Hong Kong community is not just divided and fragmented within its borders. It is also scattered across different parts of the world. I was on the point of leaving Tsim Sha Tsui East when something caught my eye. On the sidewalk laid with tightly packed bricks, I saw a few concrete patches. I had seen them before. Protesters had used the missing bricks as makeshift weapons during the uprising. After the clashes were over, authorities poured concrete into the holes. I might have overcome the anxiety of revisiting a place so closely associated with the protests, but these tiny scars remain, reminding passers-by of the agony, despair and fear its people experienced – silent witnesses to a divided city.