The police sieges of CUHK and PolyU four years on: a historic watershed
With an interlude on how Denise Ho has become the consummate Hong Kong artist
In early November, a new edition of my book on the Hong Kong protests, Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the freedom struggle, was published by Bui Jones Books in the United Kingdom. The book includes a chapter on the police sieges of the two Hong Kong universities in November 2019.
The piece below looks back on that dramatic and perhaps climactic moment in Hong Kong history and traces its legacy; in particular, an abiding and still only half-comprehended sense—shared by all who went through that time—of having experienced something quite extraordinary, the birth of the Hong Kong nation just as it was about to be crushed, the precipitous decline in academic freedom, and the regime’s targeting of youth.
I’d wanted the above photo to be on the cover of the original edition of Liberate Hong: Stories from the freedom struggle, but when I asked the photographer, Chan Long-hei, for permission to use it, he said no. I was a bit surprised. It was early 2020, when solidarity still ruled and everyone said yes to just about everything. But Long-hei told me too many people had asked to use the photo, and he didn’t want it to be over-used, over-exposed. I could use any other photo of his, he said, just not that one.
I could see his point. The photo seems a bit over-determined, almost as if staged, as if it were what you would compose if you wanted to make an image of “war” or “siege.” Especially with the Liberate Hong Kong flag as its focal point, it evoked the US national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the flag flying through the night in defiance of those laying siege. (Indeed, that was precisely why I wanted to use it: the title of the book is Liberate Hong Kong, and there is the flag, right at the heart of the photo.)
It all turned out just as well.
Long-hei went on to publish his own book of photos of the protests, The Unspeakable. This is the image he chose for the cover:
The photo that ended up being used on the cover of my book was actually not that different—a close-up of protesters in a cloud of tear gas, taken by Tyrone Siu:
They look almost as if they are dancing or wandering lost through the fog. There is something dream- or trance-like about it.
You couldn’t necessarily tell from the cover of Long-hei’s book that it’s about the protests. The same could be said of mine, if not for the hyper-explicit title. You might be able to safely sell Long-hei’s book in Hong Kong these days; whereas mine, no way: I doubt any bookseller would take the chance.
Much else involving those elements—books, flags, slogans—has become too hot to touch. The Liberate Hong Kong flag’s virtually been banned. The phrase has been ruled “seditious” in a court of law. The government’s been attempting to get a court injunction banning the song, “Glory to Hong Kong,” partly on grounds that it contains that “seditious” phrase. (Since the song’s de facto banned in Hong Kong already, the government hopes to use such an injunction to compel the big global internet companies to censor it worldwide.) Books have indeed become dangerous, with Hong Kong public libraries systematically vetting their catalogue and removing hundreds of books on grounds they may be in violation of the national security law. Six people have been arrested in Hong Kong for selling books about the protests from a market stall. Then of course there’s the infamous case of the trade unionists being sent to prison for 19 months each for publishing “seditious” allegorical children’s books about sheep. And a man has just been imprisoned for four months for importing the seditious sheep books.
But getting back to the police sieges of Chinese University of Hong Kong and Polytechnic University in November 2019: Long-hei’s photo comes from the night of the siege of CUHK, the first critical moment of what would become a weeks-long ordeal.
Looking back on the sieges, even four years on, I am a swirl of turbulent thoughts and emotions. There seems to be something I haven’t altogether processed about that experience, that extraordinarily intense and eventful period. It would hardly be honest to present some coherent, well-wrapped and finished product out of it all. I have, though, managed to extricate and identify five main thoughts from amidst the tangle. In and of themselves, they may not be especially profound or insightful, but perhaps together they can convey something of the significance of that time and its legacy.
1. It’s quite unusual for police to lay siege to university campuses
The first thought is, simply, how utterly extraordinary for a police force to lay siege to two public universities for, altogether, 16 days (CUHK for four days; PolyU for 12). How had it come to this? And any way the authorities might seek to justify it, what a bad look: police attacking the campuses of institutions of higher learning. You simply think, “There’s something wrong with this picture.”
This image might give a sense of what I mean:
It’s hardly one of the most dramatic images from the sieges but it captures the strangeness: tear gas canisters raining down on an athletic field at CUHK. The collective reaction of Hong Kongers was, “What the hell?!”
The photo is from the afternoon of November 12, before the long dark “Star-Spangled Banner” night. Long-hei’s photo at the start of this piece successfully captures the intensity of that barrage. Over the course of the six months of protests up to that point, police had shot about 7,000 tear gas canisters at protesters. More than 1,000 were shot in that one night.
There were actually not that many protesters at CUHK—several hundred perhaps, a couple thousand at most. The campus is located in a relatively remote part of Hong Kong. Except for this incident, it was never a main site of protest during the eight long months of millions in the streets.
But via livestreams, people all over Hong Kong watched what was happening in disbelief and outrage. I remember my own reaction very clearly: I thought about the police, Whatever shred of legitimacy might have remained, it vanished that night. The force had become little more than the regime’s private militia warring against its own people, and kids no less, kids armed with petrol bombs and not much else.
To contextualize: On November 8, 22-year-old protester Chow Tsz-lok—a student himself, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology—died from injuries sustained under mysterious circumstances on November 4 in a parking garage near a protest in Tseung Kwan O. His was the second fatality directly related to the protests, but whereas there was little mystery about the first—that of Marco Leung Ling-kit who had died on June 15 after falling from scaffolding where he had been protesting high on a building near government headquarters—there were widespread suspicions of police involvement in Tsz-lok’s death.
In response, a week of protests labelled Operation Dawn was called. Protesters disrupted transport, nearly paralyzing the city, and classes at eleven universities were suspended. Some protesters gathered at university campuses, and from there, ventured out to block roads in the vicinity. Police entered three campuses, breaking a taboo—up to then, it had been an unwritten rule that police stayed off university property unless requested by the university administration.
At CUHK, protesters blocked a main road that ran alongside the campus, mostly by dropping objects from a bridge spanning it. Police tried to dislodge them, leading to the first major university siege, which actually turned out to be quite brief, the main conflict ending after less than 48 hours.
Students at PolyU, HKU, BaptistU and CityU fortified their campuses against police incursions, setting the stage for the siege of PolyU, which began on November 17, four days after the main part of the siege of CUHK had ended.
The entire PolyU campus, an enormous complex right in the heart of Kowloon, was surrounded by police and cordoned off late in the evening. Hundreds were trapped inside. Police threatened to storm the campus and did not rule out the use of lethal force. The next day, tens of thousands of protesters attempted to break the police lines and rescue their comrades. In the evening, the police went on the offensive, arresting hundreds of the would-be rescuers and clearing the surrounding streets. While the whole city watched, the PolyU siege dragged on for twelve days, concluding on November 29.
During those twelve days, other momentous events occurred. On November 25, pro-democracy candidates won a landslide victory in District Council elections, an unequivocal sign of overwhelming support for the protests and condemnation of the authorities by the vast majority of Hong Kongers. And on November 27, the landmark Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was signed into law in the United States. When police finally invaded the campus, they couldn’t find a single protester. All had escaped, or been arrested trying.
2. It was so dark, both literally and metaphorically
My second main thought, reflecting back on the sieges, is: how utterly dark.
As noted, police had threatened to use lethal force to clear the PolyU campus, and some there thought they might die. Though I didn’t think so, I was influenced by them: I wrote a farewell note and put it in my wallet. To be found on my corpse in case of death.
The night was pitch black. The blackness was brought into relief by a surprise attack by police in the early morning hours, around 5:30. Many had been up all night keeping watch; some were dozing off. Suddenly, out of the darkness, shouts; then a firestorm. Protesters had barricaded the main entrance with furniture, and at the first sign of police attack, set it alight. Inside, there was utter confusion. We thought it might be the start of a full invasion. As it turned out, police were attempting to nab protesters who either were trying to escape or had ventured too far from the entrance. Or perhaps they were probing for weaknesses and had unexpectedly encountered protesters.
An Apple Daily videographer was livestreaming from the inside. I later saw the footage and since have tried to find it because it captured so well the shock of the sudden conflagration out of the darkness.
Instead, I’ve come across this footage, taken from the outside, from the vantage point of the police. It gives some sense of what was happening (in fact, a much better sense than I had at the time) but doesn’t show what it was like for those who were inside.
That pre-dawn raid decided me in favor of taking my chances and trying to get out. I tell about the escape in the book. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic or perilous as those who went through the sewers or abseiled down from a bridge to awaiting rescuers...
Or of the many who were caught while trying to escape.
The darkness at that time was so dense and quintessential that today, whenever I think “dark,” that comes to mind.
It was a darkness that permeated Hong Kong. Something had snapped in a city that had already experienced six months of massive, tumultuous protests. The police siege of PolyU left the whole citizenry numb. One of my friends was abroad when the siege began. She returned while it was still going on. From the moment she got off the Airport Express and entered the city, her overwhelming impression was that you could see it on everyone’s faces. No one said anything; in fact, there was silence; but you could tell; it hung in the air. It was a collective experience: Hong Kong was dark, and everyone was numb.
3. An interlude: Denise Ho’s new song shows she’s become the consummate Hong Kong artist
As I contemplated this piece, casting memory back four years, I heard Denise Ho’s new song, “William/威廉,” for the first time.
In conjunction with its release, Denise was interviewed. I was struck by how carefully she chose her words, allusive, euphemistic, a noticeable trend in the public speech of pro-democracy people who have remained in Hong Kong; that is to say, the very few who still say anything in public at all; a clear sign of the effects of the immense pressures of the new censorship on public use of language, of how warped it’s become. Denise spoke of “being under a lot of pressure in recent years” and feeling “confusion.” She said, “There are a lot of things happening in the overall environment,” and she has had to “find a new way in my heart…. I hope to find a new language that is suitable for the current situation and myself at this moment.” The process, she said, of regaining her identity as a singer was “very difficult and long.”
To say that Denise has been “under pressure” is to put it mildly. In the past two years, she’s been arrested twice on national security charges.
In one case, it was for being a trustee of the immensely successful and effective 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which was set up to assist arrested protesters and had received more than HK$200 million in donations from ordinary Hong Kongers.
In the other, it was for being on the board of directors of Stand News, the independent news website that was forced to close after its offices were raided and its editors and board members arrested in December 2021.
In neither case has she (so far) been prosecuted on the national security and sedition charges for which she was arrested. In the 612 case, she and her co-defendants were convicted of the lesser but no-less-bogus charge of failing to apply for society registration of the Fund, and fined HK$4,000 each. (They’re appealing.)
She is technically still “under investigation” and, as a result, remains on bail. Her bail conditions include confiscation of travel documents and a ban on leaving Hong Kong.
With all this in mind, it is understandable that she would choose her words carefully. It’s one of the many prices one pays for remaining in Hong Kong these days. For those who desire freedom, it is little more than an open-air prison.
I’ve admired Denise for years. She was one of the first outspoken proponents of LGBT rights in Hong Kong, which most Hong Kongers either support or have no opinion about but to which the never-elected government has always been firmly opposed. Then, on the last day of the Umbrella Movement in December 2014, as the police were clearing the main occupation site and ordering people to leave, she along with about 200 others remained and got herself arrested for a classic act of civil disobedience meant to show solidarity with the hundreds of thousands who had participated in the 79 days of occupations.
But in spite of my admiration, I have never paid much attention to her music. Of course, I loved “Raise Your Umbrella/撐起雨傘,” the de facto anthem of the Umbrella Movement, but otherwise, her music was just too Cantopop-y for me.
Her new song hit me differently. It is sung by a voice of experience, of someone who’s been through a lot. On the surface, it’s an intimate, personal song, but in fact it expresses the soul of Hong Kongers at this moment in time. Her growth as an artist tracks the political and spiritual maturation of the Hong Kong people. We have all been through so much together.
But these thoughts are reflections formulated after the fact. When I first heard the song, I didn’t think; I simply choked up, overcome by a combination of having been in the midst of remembering the police sieges and the lyrics and tune. It was as if something in me cracked open, recalling that famous line from Franz Kafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Denise’s song was that axe for my frozen sea. One of my main coping mechanisms in these past four years has been to view intellectually what I and Hong Kong have gone through. Whatever its merits, this approach has kept emotions at bay, like those iron barriers that separate the pavement from the streets in Hong Kong: the emotion is right next to me there, but not so close that I will be overwhelmed by it.
I don’t know whether Denise intended the song to be understood allegorically, but I can’t help but think so. Is this yet another sign of the effects of the new censorship—how carefully, allusively everyone must speak, pointing toward something rather than naming it?
To be sure I wasn’t just imagining it, I asked others, who said they too understood the lyrics allegorically.
On the surface, the song is about remembering a long-lost friend of youth. The cover image encourages this impression:
On the one hand, the friend’s scratched-out face reflects a retrospective ambivalence or even resentment that is very familiar to those who have looked back on youth from a not-so-great distance. In this sense, Denise is rethinking her relationship to a person she once loved, and then hated, but whose memory she now can’t quite shake. The scratched-out face also reminds me of masked protesters, or the way images of protesters are often blurred to obscure their identities. It reminds of the people I stood side by side with at the protests but didn’t really know because maybe I never even saw their faces.
The song plays on the old trope of melancholic nostalgia for youth and friendship: You know it was special, but you also still wonder what it all really meant.
The initial refrain is vague and pregnant with meaning:
臨近冬季 追逐理想
一人留守 一人前行
何時竟也 飽受創傷
不能回首 不理然後
(Winter is coming / chasing ideals // One person stays behind / one person goes on // When did it actually happen? Traumatized // Can’t look back / ignore it and then…)
When the refrain is repeated, a new line is added:
人人都也 身負重傷
(Everyone is gravely injured)
The song concludes:
告別的威廉
我共你或許相連
那讓我在此刻 回你 安好了
(Farewell, William // Maybe you and I are connected // Then let me return to you in this moment, be well)
It is as if Denise is speaking not only to William but also to herself, in the same way that when you remember a friend from youth, you may also be looking at the person you were then, who is both the same as and different from the person you are now.
I venture to say this is a quite common experience of those who took part in the protests. They were an unusually special time in our lives, a bit like youth, holding a kind of core significance that we may not entirely understand and are either still trying to work out or are pushing it behind us and trying to close the door on that part of our lives. The people we experienced the protests with are also very special to us, but in the short time since then, all of us have gone our own ways, often even as far as to the other side of the earth. We may not have even known the identities of some of those people, or we have lost touch with them, but they were still special in our lives, and we speak to them in our memories, we wonder where they are now, what they are doing, how they are doing. In thinking of them, we are also thinking of ourselves, the people we were then, the people we are now. Who stays behind? Who goes on? Are we not all injured? Is it not that that we share?
Around the same time as I was contemplating this piece, and hearing Denise’s song and choking up, a Hong Konger I didn’t know at the time of the protests but got to know after going into exile sent me a photo of myself at the protests that she’d happened to take, without at the time knowing who I was. I think she’d come across it when it flashed up in one of those “moments” packages that computer photo programs automatically generate, showing what was happening on this date in years gone by. It seemed so strange: that person was recognizably me, and the protests occurred just four years ago, and yet because of all that’s happened since and how much Hong Kong has irrevocably changed for the worse, and how I’ve been separated from so many I knew then—now in prison, in Hong Kong, spread to the four corners of the earth—it seems almost as if from a different era, a different lifetime.
In this sense, Denise’s song, rather than being just about looking back on a friendship in youth, has captured that common experience of so many of us. Using the tropes of Cantopop, she’s transcended them. She’s grown up. We’ve all grown up. We (or at least part of us) wish we could recapture what we were then, and wonder what we’re doing now.
Having your home stolen from you, as Hong Kong people have, is a deep and painful experience, felt on a very personal and immediate level. Its import is exceedingly difficult to convey to those who have never undergone the like; indeed not least of all because we may not even understand it that well ourselves. There is a tendency to dwell on one’s own personal powerlessness, and perhaps even blame oneself for it, resulting in a kind of ambivalence toward whatever it is in the past that is at the root of that experience, even if it is something about which we should feel proud, like standing up for your home and your people, like an old friendship. In this sense, “William,” as a song, is an act of recovery, of collecting up one’s power and agency, of turning one’s ambivalence about experience into a strength, in order to go on.
Probably my favorite performance of Denise’s is this stripped-down version of “Glory to Hong Kong/願榮光歸香港.”
She sang it on November 28, 2019 at a rally of 100,000 people in Edinburgh Place called “Thanksgiving for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act,” which had been signed into law in the United States the previous day. But most striking in the current context is that November 28 was also the day before the police clearance of PolyU. In other words, at the time this rally was happening on one side of Victoria Harbour, the police siege of PolyU was in its eleventh day on the other side. It was all happening all at once. What an intense time.
4. The sieges proved to be a historic watershed
As it turned out, no one died that first night of the PolyU siege, or at any other time during the siege, despite the police’s threat of lethal force and protesters’ fears.
But some other things may have died that night, or have begun to die.
While the protests continued, a change in attitude occurred on the part of young frontline protesters. Though they made up a small percentage of the overall number of protesters, they were very important element in the movement, providing the months-long protests with much of their momentum and drive.
Not long after the end of the police siege of PolyU, I asked a frontline friend, What’s up? Where is everyone?
What’s the use? he replied, which was not like him at all. We just can’t compete with the police when it comes to use of force.
But, I said, that’s nothing new; it’s always been the case, and you always knew the battle was asymmetrical.
Still…, he said. His cell of frontliners had decided to “pause” for the time being.
It struck me what a huge role psychology plays in struggle. These were the same frontliners whose slogan was, If we burn, you burn with us, and who professed the willingness to give their lives for Hong Kong. Now they were talking about the foolishness of futile action.
Without a doubt, defending university campuses and giving the police such a clear, stationary target had been a huge tactical error. Up to then, the slogan had been, Be water. When the police come, you disappear. What was the point of defending the campuses anyway, any more than defending any other territory? The police had taken the opportunity we provided them to ramp up arrests, hundreds at a time. They were fighting a war of attrition, seeking to deplete numbers and wear us down.
Over the course of the PolyU siege, there had been 1,399 arrests, 23 percent of the total of 5,890 since the start of the mass protests on June 9—a huge increase. (Eventually, the number of arrests would climb to 10,279 overall.) That’s a lot. But by my calculation there were something like 30,000 frontliners, and only perhaps one or two thousand of the 5,890 thus far arrested were frontliners. So if the frontliners returned to their Be Water tactics, they should still have been able to sustain the protests for some time to come. But, I sensed, the burden had become too much for them, and they needed at the very least to regroup. The police sieges had a much larger impact than just compelling a re-assessment of tactics.
So, in that sense, the sieges were the beginning of the end of the protests, even though they would continue for seven more weeks. In fact, 150 of the total of 1,004 protests occurred after the sieges. 2,642,723 out of a total of 14,512,241 protesters would take part in them. There would still be plenty of big protests: on December 1, 380,000; on December 8, 800,000; on January 1, 1,030,000, and on January 19, 150,000, plus hundreds of small protests with turnouts in the thousands and hundreds. (See here for a list of protests.) And December and January were the seventh and eighth months in a row with more than a million protesters out on the streets.
But something was gone. You could feel it. Oppression was increasing. The police were upping the ante. It had gotten to the point that if you went out on the street, you simply had to expect you’d be attacked and/or arrested as a matter of course.
Meanwhile, there was a partial shift of energy to other means of voicing demands besides protests, in particular, the District Council elections.
Some felt the pro-democracy landslide victory on November 24, while the police siege of PolyU was still going on, represented the opening of a new arena of struggle. The elections were widely considered a referendum on the protests and the government response. Pro-democracy candidates won 389 of 452 seats and formed majorities in 17 of 18 District Councils. The turnout of over 71 percent was a record for any election ever held in Hong Kong, all the more remarkable considering that District Council elections usually had low turnouts because District Councils had very limited power, indeed were considered cosmetic by many—meant to give the illusion of political participation without any actual power. The result showed overwhelming majority support for the protests and condemnation of the government and police. That was something to build on, and Legislative Council elections were scheduled for September of the following year.
Little did we know then that the November 2019 District Council elections would prove to be the very last mostly free and fair elections to be held in Hong Kong. In June 2020, the Communist Party imposed the national security law. In July, the Hong Kong government postponed the Legislative Council elections scheduled for September on spurious pandemic prevention grounds. (Major elections were held in many countries around the world during the pandemic without any sign they contributed to the spread of the coronavirus). Then, for good measure, it arrested virtually the whole slate of dozens of pro-democracy candidates on the national security charge of “conspiracy to commit subversion.” Their crime was having taken part in a primary premised on a strategy to win a majority of Legco seats. Most have been in prison ever since even though their trial is yet to conclude. Some could be sentenced to life. Then in May 2021, election laws were changed, lowering the number of directly elected seats in Legco from 35 to 20 (out of a total of 70), and introducing the “patriots only” requirement, which meant only those deemed loyal to the Communist Party could even qualify as candidates and all pro-democracy parties were excluded. The new fake “election” was then held in December 2021, and all 70 seats were filled by regime loyalists. Then the election law for District Councils was “reformed.” The “patriots only” rule was applied there as well, and the number of directly elected seats was reduced from 452 to 88. This is what the Communist Party refers to as “perfected democracy.” Hong Kong never was a democracy; that’s why the movement was called the pro-democracy movement—it was pushing for democracy. But the few democratic elements that did exist in Hong Kong’s political system have been entirely stripped away, in spite of China’s obligation under both international law and Hong Kong Basic Law to introduce genuine universal suffrage.
Flash forward four years, and the PolyU siege is the single event from the protests that has resulted in by far the largest number of political prisoners. In all, 292 have been convicted and incarcerated in relation to the PolyU siege, 255 of them for “riot.” That’s out of a total of 1,707 political prisoners overall and rising. Dozens of PolyU-related trials are still on-going; a few still have not begun. The average sentence for “riot” in relation to the 2019 protests has been, up to now, a little over three years. Many defendants have waited years to be tried, and while waiting, the vast majority of those on trial for “riot” are released on bail. Most of those arrested are young—the vast majority in their twenties. So let’s say you’re 20 years old at the time of your arrest at PolyU on November 18, 2019. You wait three years to be tried. The conviction rate for “riot” trials associated with the 2019 protests is about 90%, so you’re pretty certain to be convicted. Judges apply the principle of “joint enterprise” to the statutory crime of “riot,” meaning in practice that what the prosecution must do is prove “participation” in the “riot.” In about 70 percent of riot convictions so far, no evidence was presented of defendants having committed violent acts; rather, “participation” was proven based on the clothes the defendants wore (they “looked like” protesters), possession of protest gear (gas masks, helmets, protective equipment), the shouting of slogans (characterized as “encouraging rioters”), and remaining on the scene after police warned all to leave. Let’s say you’re convicted in 2023 and sentenced to the average, a little over three years in prison. This means you’ll probably get out in 2026, seven years after the siege. You’ll be 27, and for that one moment back in 2019, you will have given up one-fourth of your life to trial and prison.
5. The sieges symbolically foreshadowed the fall of academic freedom and the targeting of youth
Above all, the police sieges of CUHK and PolyU, as extraordinary as they were in their own right, were foreshadowing symbol of the demise of academic freedom in Hong Kong and the targeting of youth.
I recently met a young academic working at a Hong Kong university. He told me self-censorship is pervasive. “Everyone knows what not to say, the students, the professors. Every professor knows which research topics to stay away from.” Since 2019, a number of significant academic books about recent politics in Hong Kong have been published, including Kevin Carrico’s Two Systems, Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong, Ching Kwan Lee’s Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier, Ho-Fung Hung’s City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, all written by scholars based outside of Hong Kong and published by publishers outside of Hong Kong. They would most likely not have been able to conduct or publish that work in Hong Kong. No significant research has emerged about Hong Kong politics from within Hong Kong.
At the behest of the regime, university administrations have cracked down on student unions, which had traditionally been very politically active, and staunchly pro-democracy. Most of them no longer exist. Other student organizations, especially those having to do with the media, have also closed down due to state repression. In all, I’ve documented the closures of 15 student organizations in the past two years. Only media organizations have been hit harder than student groups, accounting for 19 of 90 documented closures of civil society organizations in the past two years as the regime has wiped out all but vestiges of independent civil society.
All students must now take and pass compulsory courses on the national security law as a requirement for graduation.
All monuments to the Tiananmen Massacre have been removed from university campuses, including, most infamously, the Pillar of Shame from the University of Hong Kong in December 2021.
In 2020, the University of Hong Kong fired Benny Tai, a law professor, leader in the Umbrella Movement, and main organizer of the 2020 pro-democracy primary for Legislative Council elections. The firing was clearly punishment for his activism as well as a signal to the Communist Party that the university would fall into line. Benny himself said the decision to fire him marked “the end of of academic freedom in Hong Kong…. Academic staff in education institutions in Hong Kong are no longer free to make controversial statements to the general public about politically or socially controversial matters…. [This decision] was made not by the University of Hong Kong but by an authority beyond the University through its agents…. I am heartbroken to witness the demise of my beloved university." Benny was later arrested and imprisoned for his role in organizing the pro-democracy primary. In the marathon trial of him and 46 others, candidates and organizers, Benny was portrayed as the mastermind of the “conspiracy to commit subversion.” He’s plead guilty and awaits sentencing. Many fear he could get the maximum sentence of life in prison, all for trying to apply his scholarly and legal principles in society.
The last time I saw Benny (I find myself saying that a lot when writing about HK these days: the last time I saw so-and-so) was in the men’s room at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts during a break in proceedings at the trial of the Umbrella Movement 9. He and eight others were accused of “inciting” the occupations of 2014. The trial concluded in early 2019, nearly five years later and not long before the mass protests broke out in June. Benny would eventually be convicted and sentenced to 16 months in prison. Back in 2014, I’d worked for Benny’s Occupy Central with Love and Peace, and I attended every day of the UM9 trial that I could—I felt a duty to support them to the end because, really, they were on trial for all of us, including those who’d worked for OCLP and all Hong Kongers who had rebelled.
As he was washing his hands in the restroom sink, this law professor whom the Communist Party had decided to designate as one of the evil black hands, I asked him how he was doing. He looked at me in the mirror and muttered something I didn’t quite catch, along the lines of “fine fine.” What I remember is the expression on his face, a combination of weariness, tension and reassurance. Now, whenever I think about Benny, I think of that expression.
He was one of two professors who lead OCLP during the Umbrella Movement. The other, Chan Kin-man, resigned from his position at Chinese University of Hong Kong before the UM9 trial started. He was still in prison serving his UM9 sentence when the 2019 protests began. After he got out of prison, the crackdown ensued and he left HK and took up a “visiting professorship” at a university in Taiwan. He has not returned.
In a recent update of the global Academic Freedom Index, Hong Kong is ranked 152nd out of 179 countries and is among a handful of countries where academic freedom has decreased the most in the past 10 years.
Several weeks ago, on September 28, 2023, three brave students at Hong Kong Baptist University (which was among the five campuses in November 2019 fortified against police attack, the others being CUHK, PolyU, HKU and CityU) decided to publicly mark the ninth anniversary of the start of the Umbrella Movement in a quiet, understated way. They stood on campus with yellow ribbons (a symbol of the Umbrella Movement) and signs on A4 paper. One read, “Freedom is not free; people sacrificed for it.” They were approached first by security guards who told them to leave and then by university administrators who said that disciplinary proceedings would be initiated against them.
Compare the images at the start of this piece—the war-like scene of CUHK under siege at night, the tear gas canisters landing on the CUHK athletic field—to the images below. There is a clear through-line. In a few short years, Hong Kong universities have gone from being vibrant academic communities to sterile places of utter intolerance of even mild dissent, much like the rest of Hong Kong.