Hong Kong’s Despair Runs Deeper Than Protests
Hong Kong currently operates as a quasi-democracy, but many in the city are fearful about losing freedoms in the coming decades.
(Bloomberg) -- Like many Hong Kong residents, Candy Kwok is anxious. And it’s not just because she fears the government might use more force against her and other protesters who’ve flooded the financial hub’s streets in recent weeks.
As a single mom, Kwok worries about her 12-year-old daughter’s future in a city where home prices have surged 170% in a decade and the wealth gap keeps widening. She thinks living standards are dropping and that migrants from mainland China are siphoning resources from long-time residents.
Her concerns underscore the challenges facing Hong Kong's government and its backers in Beijing as they try to quell the former British colony's worst political crisis since the 1997 handover. While the demonstrations began as a fight over a controversial extradition bill, they’ve morphed into an expression of deeper anxieties that have the potential to linger indefinitely.
Below we profile Kwok and two other Hong Kong residents: K.T. Li, an unemployed 23-year-old, and Andrew Au, a 66-year-old retiree. While they have different views on the protests, they are united in feelings of despair over Hong Kong’s long-term future.
The Worried Mother
On a recent Sunday morning, Kwok rode a bike to church on Lantau Island. Dressed in a white polka-dot dress and a straw hat, the web designer cheerfully greeted fellow worshippers but steered clear of politics. Her congregation includes people who have been protesting and members of the police force, so it’s important to be considerate, she said.
After church came the most important part of the day: Marching with her daughter and thousands of other people in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district to protest the bill, which would have allowed extraditions to jurisdictions including China. The demonstrators’ ire intensified after Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said the bill was “dead” but not formally withdrawn.
Kwok’s daughter marched quietly, looking at her phone only a few times and asking to go home near the end because she was tired. The 12-year-old can knowledgeably debate the implications of allowing extraditions to China and says the protests are intended to ensure that her generation can have a future.
Kwok, meanwhile, has become an active member of a group called “Housewives from Hong Kong, Kowloon, New Territories and the Outlying Islands who oppose extradition to China.”
The group collected more than 6,000 petitions against the bill last month, and members march together and share information on Facebook.
“Mostly it’s for my daughter,” Kwok said. “I don’t want to leave behind a worse society for the children.”
Kwok worries that young people will struggle to buy their own homes because of skyrocketing prices. And she fears that an influx of people moving in from the mainland takes vital resources away from Hong Kong natives.
More than 1 million people from China migrated to Hong Kong between 1997 and 2018, and these new immigrants now represent about 14% of the city’s population, according to government data.
“There is a lot of unfairness in society, that’s why the protests can sustain,” Kwok, 40, said in her apartment in a public housing estate. “This anti-extradition law protest is just a trigger point.”
Kwok has memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, when the Chinese army retaliated against student protesters. On June 12, as the Hong Kong police fired tear gas during clashes with protesters, she grew worried about the possibility of a more violent response from the government.
Kwok and her daughter have been marching peacefully, but the recent weeks have been worrisome ones for her. During the night of July 1, when some protesters stormed the city’s Legislative Council, she watched the scenes on a Facebook live feed and couldn’t fall asleep.
“I didn’t understand why they had to break into the LegCo — what could you possibly gain shattering a glass door?” she said. “But I understand their anger. Because the government so far has not withdrawn the law or answered protesters’ demands.”
On Sunday, protesters surrounded China’s liaison office in Hong Kong and spray-painted over the national emblem.
Meanwhile, roving groups of masked men in white T-shirts attacked protesters in different parts of the city. Twelve people have been arrested. Hong Kong’s police force has drawn criticism for not responding fast enough to the masked attackers, although Police Commissioner Stephen Lo has denied any links between them and officers, and vowed to bring those who broke the law to justice.
This week, Kwok was furious when she saw the news about the men beating up protesters and believed it was condoned by the government.
“Do you think a country’s emblem deserves to be respected when it doesn’t respect the people?” she said.
The Angry 23-Year-Old
K.T. Li, who graduated from college a couple of months ago, used to be a demonstrator who believed peaceful methods were the best ways to voice opinions. But in an interview earlier this month, Li said he’s less confident about that approach after the government didn’t formally withdraw the extradition bill.
Li said he has been on the front line during the demonstrations and that he shielded fellow protesters from police as they were breaking into the city’s legislature, though he didn’t break in himself.
His frustration appears to have deeper roots. In his town in the New Territories district, he hears students in the streets conversing in Mandarin rather than Cantonese, the city’s dominant tongue. Local shops have given way to pharmacies catering to demand from mainland tourists.
“I’m afraid that Hong Kong will one day become like Xinjiang, where everything is monitored,” Li said, referring to China's predominately Muslim region where the use of mass detention and surveillance has drawn international condemnation.
Hong Kong currently operates as a quasi-democracy, but many in the city are fearful about losing freedoms in the coming decades. China’s legal commitment to maintain the current setup — called “one country, two systems” — expires in 2047.
China has criticized the protests, saying they threaten the health of Hong Kong’s economy. In recent weeks, Beijing issued its harshest warnings yet against the escalating violence, saying protesters were testing its “bottom line.”
Li said he considered self-immolation at one point because he believed everything he was doing was futile. That moment of despair came after he learned of the death of one protester, who fell from the roof of the Pacific Place mall while putting up a banner to protest the bill.
"I regretted not being able to go there in time to help," Li said. "Then I considered self-immolation because they didn’t care, even after the incident in Pacific Place.”
At least four people are reported to have committed suicide after leaving notes with anti-extradition bill messages, according to Stand News, an online pro-democracy publication. Protesters have been holding vigils and counseling sessions in attempts to discourage people from such actions.
Li said he might escalate his own actions in future demonstrations because he believes the government has failed to address the protesters’ demands. At the same time, he stressed that he doesn’t want to harm anyone, including the police. Li, who is unemployed and lives with his mother, said she wasn’t aware he was out protesting.
“Is what we do right?” Li said. “It’s for later generations to decide.”
The Anti-Protest Retiree
Retired restaurant manager Andrew Au, 66, disagrees with the protesters. He believes some variation of the extradition bill, first introduced by Hong Kong’s government in connection with a murder in Taiwan, is needed to bring fugitives to justice.
Still, he has his own worries, mainly that continued turmoil in Hong Kong — and demands by some for independence — could hurt the city’s economic prospects.
“If Hong Kong becomes independent, it will be without a doubt the end of Hong Kong,” he said. “Property prices would drop, consumer prices would inflate because we’d have to rely on imports. China will cut off our resources.”
Au’s father came to Hong Kong from China’s mainland in the 1940s to flee the Communist Party.
China has improved a lot in recent years with the enforcement of laws and the economic boom of the last few decades, Au said. And his father forgave the Communist Party by the time he died.
“My grandfather’s generation was a land owner and didn’t have much good feelings toward the Communist Party,” he said. “But it’s changing now.”
Still, he blames Hong Kong’s government for allowing the protests to drag out by not arresting more protesters. “What are the Hong Kong police doing?”
Lam has said the government wants to find the root cause of public anger and is reviewing its governance style, although that hasn’t appeased her detractors, who continue calling for her resignation.
Au said he doesn’t understand why young people are demanding universal suffrage, considering the city didn’t have any kind of democracy when it was a British colony.
“College students these days don’t have much analytical skills,” he said. “Those who went to university, have they worked an hour in their lives?”
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anjali Cordeiro at acordeiro2@bloomberg.net, Michael Tighe
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