A decade of protest is now a defiant memory

The memories began rushing back as Kenneth strolled through Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, once a focal point for the city’s resistance to China.

As a child, Kenneth would buy calligraphy posters from pro-democracy politicians at the annual Lunar New Year fair.

Then there were the protest marches he joined as a teenager, that would always start here before winding their way through the city. When he was just 12, he began attending the park’s massive vigils for the Tiananmen massacre – a taboo in mainland China, but commemorated openly in Hong Kong.

Those vigils have ended now. The politicians’ stalls at the fair are gone, protests have been silenced and pro-democracy campaigners jailed. Kenneth feels his political coming-of-age – and Hong Kong’s – is being erased.

“People still carry on with life… but you can feel the change bit by bit,” said the former activist, who did not want to reveal his real name when he spoke to us.

“Our city’s character is disappearing.”

On the surface Hong Kong appears to be the same, its packed trams still rumbling down bustling streets, its vibrant neon-lit chaos undimmed.

But look closer and there are signs the city has changed – from the skyscrapers lighting up every night with exultations of China, the motherland, to the chatter of mainland Mandarin increasingly heard alongside Hong Kong’s native Cantonese.

It’s impossible to know how many of Hong Kong’s more than seven million people welcome Beijing’s grip. But hundreds of thousands have taken part in protests in the past decade since a pro-democracy movement erupted in 2014.

Not everyone supported it, but few would argue Beijing crushed it. As a turbulent decade draws to a close, hopes for a freer Hong Kong have withered.

China says it has steadied a volatile city. Hundreds have been jailed under a sweeping national security law (NSL), which also drove thousands of disillusioned and wary Hongkongers abroad, including activists who feared or fled arrest. Others, like Kenneth, have stayed and keep a low profile.

But in many of them lives the memory of a freer Hong Kong – a place they are fighting to remember in defiance of Beijing’s remaking of their city.

When Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to China in 1997, it was under the assurance that the city would keep some rights, including free speech, freedom of assembly and rule of law for 50 years. But as Beijing’s power grew, so did the disquiet within the city’s pro-democracy camp.

In September 2014, tens of thousands of protesters began to stage mass sit-ins in downtown Hong Kong, demanding fully democratic elections. It propelled a new generation of pro-democracy campaigners to prominence – such as Joshua Wong, then a 17-year-old student, and Benny Tai, a college professor, who called the movement Occupy Central.

It also seeded the ground for more explosive protests in 2019, which were triggered by Beijing’s proposal to extradite locals to the mainland. The plan was scrapped but the protests intensified over several months as calls grew for more democracy, becoming the most serious challenge to Beijing’s authority in Hong Kong.

“Without Benny Tai, there would have been no Occupy Central,” says Chan Kin-man, who co-founded the campaign with Tai and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming.

“He had the temper of scholars and spoke his mind… that’s why he was bold enough to push for changes and think about big ideas. It is always people [like this] who change history.”

Chan and Rev Chu are both exiles in Taiwan now. Chan moved to Taipei in 2021, after serving 11 months in jail for inciting public nuisance in his role in Occupy Central. He is now a fellow at a local research institute.

Tai is still in Hong Kong, where he will spend the next decade behind bars.

Earlier this month he was sentenced to jail for subversion, along with more than 40 other pro-democracy campaigners including Wong, many of whom have been in jail since their arrest in early 2021. As Wong left the courtroom, he shouted: “I love Hong Kong.”

The following day 76-year-old billionaire Jimmy Lai, a fierce critic of China, testified at his trial for allegedly colluding with foreign forces. Frail but defiant, he told the court his now-defunct newspaper Apple Daily had only espoused the values of Hong Kong’s people: “Pursuit of democracy and freedom of speech”.

The trials have passed quietly, in stark contrast to the events that led to them. Small signs of protest outside the court were quickly shut down – a woman sobbing about her son’s sentence was taken away by police.

Beijing defends the restrictions – including the NSL under which the trials are happening – as essential for stability. It says the West or its allies have no right to question its laws or how it applies them.

But critics accuse China of reneging on the deal it struck in 1997. They say it has weakened the city’s courts and muzzled the once resounding cry for democracy in Hong Kong.

Chan has watched these events unfold from afar with a heavy heart.

After 2014, there had still been the possibility of change, he said. Now, “a lot of things have become impossible… Hong Kong has become no different from other Chinese cities”.

Faced with this reality after campaigning for democracy for more than a decade, “you can say that I have failed in everything I have done in my life”, he said with a wry smile.

But still he perseveres. Besides teaching classes on Chinese society, he is writing a book about Occupy Central, collecting items for an archive of Hong Kong’s protest scene, organising conferences, and giving virtual lectures on democracy and politics.

These efforts “make me feel that I haven’t given up on Hong Kong. I don’t feel like I have abandoned it”.

Yet, there are moments when he grapples with his decision to leave. He is happier in Taiwan, but he also feels “a sense of loss”.

“Am I still together with other Hongkongers, facing the same challenges as them?”

“If you are not breathing the air here, you don’t really know what’s happening… if you don’t feel the pulse here, it means you are truly gone,” said Kenneth, as he continued his walk through Victoria Park.

With friends leaving the city in droves in the last few years, he has lost count of the number of farewell parties he’s attended. Still, he insists on staying: “This is where my roots are.”

What irritates him is the rhetoric from those who leave, that the Hong Kong they knew has died. “Hong Kong continues to exist. Its people are still here! So how can they say that Hong Kong is dead?”

But, he acknowledged, there have been dramatic changes. Hongkongers now have to think twice about what they say out loud, Kenneth said.

Many are now adapting to a “normalised state of surveillance”. There are red lines, “but it is very difficult to ascertain them”.

Instead of campaigning openly, activists now write petition letters. Rallies, marches and protests are definitely off-limits, he added. But many, like Kenneth, are wary of taking part in any activism, because they fear they’ll be arrested.

A t-shirt, social media posts and picture books have fallen foul of the law recently, landing their owners in jail for sedition.

These days Kenneth goes out less frequently. “The contrast is so drastic now. I don’t want to remember what happened in the past.”

Still, as he walked out of the park and headed to the Admiralty district, more memories unspooled.

As he neared the government headquarters, he pointed to the spot where he choked on tear gas for the first time, on 28 September 2014.

That day, the police fired 87 rounds of tear gas on unarmed protesters, an act that enraged demonstrators and galvanised the pro-democracy movement.

As the protests deepened and tear gas became a common sight, many sheltered behind umbrellas, spawning a new moniker – the Umbrella Movement.

The final stop was his alma mater, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, also known as PolyU. It was a key battleground during the 2019 demonstrations that saw protesters battling police on the streets, hurling projectiles against tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.

Five years on, the PolyU entrance where students fended off the police with bricks and petrol bombs in a fiery showdown has been reconstructed. A fountain which saw the most intense clashes has been demolished.

Like elsewhere in Hong Kong, the campus seemed to have been scrubbed of its disobedient past. Kenneth believed it was because the university “doesn’t want people to remember certain things”.

Then, he darted away to a quiet corner. Hidden beneath the bushes was a low wall pockmarked with holes and gobs of concrete. It was impossible to tell what they were. But Kenneth believes these were traces of the battles which escaped the purge of memories.

“I don’t believe we will forget what happened,” he said. “Forgetting the past is a form of betrayal.”

At a Tesco’s café in Watford in the UK, Kasumi Law remembered what she missed about her old home.

“I never thought I’d love the sea in Hong Kong so much. I only realised this when I arrived in the UK,” she said, as she tucked into a full English breakfast. Unlike the cold and dark ocean surrounding Britain, “in Hong Kong the sea is so shiny, because there are so many buildings… I didn’t realise how beautiful our city is”.

Kasumi’s decision to move to the UK with her husband and young daughter had stemmed from an unease that crept up on her over the previous decade. The Occupy Central protests began just months after her daughter was born in 2014.

In the following years, as Beijing’s grip appeared to tighten – student activists were jailed and booksellers disappeared – Kasumi’s discomfort grew.

“Staying in Hong Kong was, I wouldn’t say, unsafe,” she said. “But every day, little by little, there was a feeling of something not being right.”

Then Hong Kong erupted in protest again in 2019. As Beijing cracked down, the UK offered a visa scheme for Hongkongers born before the 1997 handover, and Kasumi and her husband agreed it was time to go for the sake of their daughter.

They settled in the town of Watford near London, where her husband found a job in IT while Kasumi became a stay-at-home mum.

But she had never lived abroad before, and she struggled with a deep homesickness which she documented in emotional video diaries on YouTube. One of them even went viral last year, striking a chord with some Hongkongers while others criticised her for choosing to emigrate.

Eventually it was too much to bear, and she returned to Hong Kong for a visit last year. Over two months she visited childhood haunts like a theme park and a science museum, scoffed down her mum’s homecooked fuzzy melon with vermicelli and stir fried clams, and treated herself to familiar delights such as egg tarts and melon-flavoured soy milk.

But the Hong Kong she remembered had also changed. Her mum looked older. Her favourite shops in the Ladies Market had closed down.

Sitting by the harbour at Tsim Sha Tsui one night, she was happy to be reunited with the twinkling sea she had missed so much. Then she realised most of the people around her were speaking in Mandarin.

Tears streamed down her face. “When I looked out at the sea it looked familiar, but when I looked around at the people around me, it felt strange.”

Kasumi wonders when she would visit again. With the passing of a new security law this year – Article 23 – her friends have advised her to delete social media posts from past protests before returning.

It is a far cry from the fearlessness she remembers from 2019, when she brought her daughter to the protests and they marched on the streets with thousands of people, united in their defiance.

“It’s too late to turn back,” she said. “I feel if I go back to Hong Kong I might not be used to life there, to be honest.

“My daughter is happy here. When I see her, I think it’s worth it. I want her world to be bigger.”

Kasumi’s world is bigger too – she has found a job and made new friends. But even as she builds a new life in the UK, she remains determined to preserve the Hongkonger in her – and her child.

Kasumi and her husband only speak in Cantonese to their daughter, and the family often watches Cantonese films together. Her daughter doesn’t yet understand the significance of the 2019 protests she marched in, nor the movement that began in 2014, when she was born. But Kasumi plans to explain when she is older.

The seeds Kasumi is planting are already taking root. She is particularly proud of the way her daughter responds to people who call her Chinese. “She gets angry, and she will argue with them,” Kasumi said, with a smile.

“She always tells people, ‘I’m not Chinese, I’m a Hongkonger’.”