I've just imported all of my old articles to Substack

They read like a chronicle of the Hong Kong freedom struggle over the past decade

I’ve just imported 118 old articles dating from between 2015 and 2022 to Substack. Now you can find all of my occasional writings in one place. Looking back over them, I’m reminded of many aspects of recent Hong Kong history, and I thought I might mention a few of them here that apppear most significant and/or as relevant as ever.

I started writing about Hong Kong after the Umbrella Movement of 2014. During the Umbrella Movement, I worked on the international media liaison team of Occupy Central with Love and Peace, the group started by Benny Tai, Chan Kin-man and Chu Yiu-ming to pressure the Communist Party to grant full and genuine universal suffrage to Hong Kong as promised in the Basic Law. (A note on their whereabouts says it all about how much Hong Kong has changed in the past ten years: Benny was sentenced to 10 years in prison on November 19, 2024 for being the “mastermind” of a “conspiracy to subvert state power” because he organized a pro-democracy primary in 2020. Chan and Chu have gone into exile in Taiwan.) The head of OCLP’s international media liaison team was a young woman who’d just returned from studying abroad. She understood the importance of telling our story to the world. Before the Umbrella Movement, the international media regarded Hong Kong to a large extent as first and foremost a business and finance story. It was really the Umbrella Movement that began to turn Hong Kong into a political story in the international media, and people around the world began to see that Hong Kongers were fighting for the freedom and democracy they did not possess. Up to the Umbrella Movement, the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement was really quite amazingly parochial, and there were few amongst us who both understood the importance of speaking to the world and were good at doing it. Suddenly, with the streets of Hong Kong occupied for months on end, the international media descended on Hong Kong like never before. One outcome of the movement was a much greater awareness among Hong Kongers of the importance of speaking to the world and explaining what was going on Hong Kong. It was a matter of “achieving our own voice,” as I put it, and that had to be done in English, the most international language as well as an official language of Hong Kong. That was when and why I started writing about Hong Kong.

104 of the stories I’ve just imported are from 2015 up to the 2019 protests; 19 come after the start of those protests. 2015-2018 was a period when, if you were reading the international media, it might have seemed not that much was happening in Hong Kong, but in fact, even though there were no massive, sustained street protests, a lot was going on, in particular, two major forces. On the one hand, as a result of the Umbrella Movement, the Communist Party was gradually tightening its grip on Hong Kong and freedoms and rights were being eroded. On the other, the pro-democracy movement was responding to the perceived failure of the Umbrella Movement and asking itself, “What now?” It was clear the CCP was never going to allow Hong Kong genuine universal suffrage, as it was obliged to do by both its own promises and international law, so what could we do about it? 2014 to 2017 in particular was a time of intellectual ferment, with various solutions to our political conundrum proposed, including self-determination and independence, which of course made the CCP all the more nervous and all the more intent on cracking down. Some of my essays from this period were later collected in the book, As long as there is resistance, there is hope: Essays on the Hong Kong freedom struggle in the post-Umbrella Movement era, 2014-2018, which actually came out just three months before the start of the 2019 protests.

Some of the pieces from that 2014-2018 period that might still be interesting in the current historical context include the following:

1. The future is uncertain: issues and decisions facing the HK pro-democracy movement after its defeat…, an essay that was part of a larger three-part project in 2015 looking back at the Umbrella Movement and then forward toward the future

2. Joshua Wong (now, like Benny, imprisoned; in Joshua’s case for “only” four years and eight months) was the most prominent early proponent of self-determination. Here are a couple of his early articles about it as well as the Chinese government’s reponse and a couple of my commentaries. By 2017, the Chinese government made clear it would crack down on advocacy of self-determination and independence, even though taking those positions was perfectly legal under Hong Kong law.

3. At the CCP’s behest, the Hong Kong government began disqualifying pro-democracy politicians elected to the Legislative Council as well as candidates who ran to fill their vacant seats. It also stepped up various attacks on the pro-democracy movement, which in comparison to what’s happened since 2019 aren’t nearly so severe but nevertheless had a chilling impact, among other things driving debates on self-determination and independence underground. These attacks included prosecuting nine pro-democracy leaders for “inciting” the Umbrella Movement as well as other pro-democracy leaders for a variety of reasons; taking various steps to “mainlandize” Hong Kong, making it more like China, eroding its autonomy, and integrating it; finding ways to exclude pro-democracy voices from the Legislative Council; attacks on particular pro-democracy political parties it perceived as pushing most aggressively for change; and exerting increasing pressure to censor and self-censor. The atmosphere was ominous. Every time something happened, it felt like the CCP was a big bully pushing and pushing its victim, and you wondered when the Hong Kong people would stand up and say, “We’re not taking it anymore!” (The answer, of course, was eventually 2019.)

4. Hong Kongers often told me they appreciated this piece about booing the PRC national anthem at Hong Kong national team football matches. That, of course, has since resulted in the imposition of a new law criminalizing “insulting the national anthem.” The reason, I think, Hong Kongers liked the essay is that it’s about the rise of a separate and assertive Hong Kong national identity opposed to China. This was a development that made the CCP very uneasy, but it had no one but itself to blame for it—the root cause was its poor governance of Hong Kong, its refusal to introduce genuine universal suffrage and its ensuing crackdown.

5. Chan Kin-man’s testimony at the Umbrella Movement 9 trial. Along with the trial of Joshua Wong, Alex Chow and Nathan Law, also related to the Umbrella Movement, this was the most prominent political trial in Hong Kong prior to the 2019 protests. Since those, of course, thousands have been tried in political trials, and Hong Kong has had 1,917 political prisoners since June 2019. Before that, it had 26: some of the Umbrella Movement 9 as well as those imprisoned for altercations between protesters and police in Mong Kok in 2017.

As far as pieces since the 2019 protests go, this is probably the most in-depth report on the decisive demonstration on June 12, 2019, when protesters surrounded the Legislative Council to prevent that body from passing legislation that would legalize extradition to China, the root cause of the 2019 protests. In response, the Hong Kong police attacked protesters indiscriminately, setting the stage for an escalation of confrontations between police and protesters in the many months of protest to come. This is one of the most detailed catalogues of the protests—1,096 of them from June 2019 to July 2020, in which at least 15,246,481 protesters participated, making these protests among the largest protest uprisings anywhere in modern history. A timeline of the protests can be found here.

Two profiles I still very much like: of Chow Hang-tung (currently in prison) and Cardinal Zen.

I tried to contribute to a debate on political development in the diaspora with these two pieces in 2021 and 2022. The Hong Kong diaspora is large and vibrant and should be credited with many accomplishments in these years in which it’s grown exponentially (some 300,000 and counting have left Hong Kong since 2020), but it has so far failed, in my estimation, to take up the responsibility of the freedom struggle’s political development which can no longer occur in Hong Kong.

And this story of my own journey into exile which may be the beginning of my fourth work on the Hong Kong freedom struggle, focused on the diaspora. I opened this Substack account to start telling that story here. When I wrote my first book on Hong Kong, Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong, I thought it would also be my last. But then came the book about the intervening years, and then, in 2020, Liberate Hong Kong about the 2019 protests. Before I knew it, I had an unintended trilogy. Who knows what’s to come.

Note: The 118 articles I’ve imported are only accessible by paid subscribers. This is to encourage those who can afford to do so to support my work. If you can’t, many of these stories can be found on Medium, though Medium charges after just a couple free articles….