I’d like you to imagine a city of seven million souls, rising up almost as one. One day out seven million people, two million are out in the streets. It was eerie. Schools were empty. Shops closed. Students marching alongside teachers. Police officers, nurses, elderly grandparents hoisting granchildren onto their shoulders… words don’t really do justice to the sheer size of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. Nor do pictures fully capture the massiveness of the seas of people gathered there…
You’d be anywhere in the city away from the mass of protesters, and you would be struck by how… empty it was. Like a post-apocalyptic scene. It seemed as if almost everyone was out there, at first. Of course the authorities did all they could to lessen turnout, to thwart protesters and eventually beat them down by any means necessary. And as the months went by, crowd sizes went down significantly. But nothing I’ve ever seen will compare to those first days of protest. It was a whole city coming together as one soul. Speaking with what seemed like one voice. And saying, loud and clear: “We do NOT want to be a part of China and fall under China’s corrupt jurisdiction!”
We all know what happened. How the protests were crushed and how — conveniently — Covid-19 arrived just around that time. Suddenly ‘mass gatherings’ were forbidden altogether. For public health reasons, the authorities said. Hong Kong had been promised autonomy and the right to elect its own leadership until the year 2047, but Xi callously rolled back all promises and brought the city-state to heel. A vibrant culture was crushed overnight. But I was there to see it’s defiant last stand. And it was spectacular.
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