inmediahk.net/frontpageToday, 14:22
It became real for most of us the moment the first tear gas was fired.
Pop!
Time slowed. We went silent for a long second, trying to process, in disbelief.
"What the fuck?!"
Then the anger came, almost in unison. We looked to the source of the firing, and saw fully geared special force police lined up on the bridge above, all in black, fully masked, uniformity distanced, inhuman.
"Shame on you!!" We started yelling. More hurt and heart-broken than anything - so it comes to this now. They are attacking their own people.
The faceless police stood erect on the bridge, leering down at us, almost celebratory.
"Are you human?! Fuck you!!!"
We held our middle fingers as high as we could in the air.
It was minutes before 6pm I remember. We had been passing supplies to the "frontline" for a couple of hours now. We formed two long winding lines of human chains almost all the way from the Admiralty MTR station to Harcourt Road, one of the busiest highways in Hong Kong. The supplies we passed included surgical masks, plastic goggles, bottled waters, contact lens solutions, and what in time would appear on the cover of Time magazine and became the symbol of our movement: umbrellas.
For a few hours, the supplies seemed to flow endlessly from the Admiralty station. A day later, the pro-establishment media would insinuate that the supplies came from the local pro-democratic rich (like all two of them?); some even said they were sponsored by the U.S. government. But we knew where they came from: they came from us, tens and thousands of us, who ourselves came from different MTR stations from all parts of Hong Kong. "We" were merely distressed residents of Hong Kong.
The back story
Most of us, including myself, didn't expect ourselves to be there that day a year ago on 9/28. In fact, no one expected any occupying would happen at all, let alone on the busiest blood vessel of our international city like the Harcourt highway. Sure, the idea of Occupy Central, proposed the previous year by law professor Benny Tai Yiu Ting, had been avidly discussed by the pro-democratics in Hong Kong. Still, when the Chinese government announced the new Hong Kong political reform proposal as if it was a decree on 8/31/2014, the pan-dems in Hong Kong were seriously concerned, but nothing bigger than small protests by the democratic core took place.
The fact that tens of thousands of Hong Kong people were occupying both directions of a 4-lane highway, probably the first occupy of such kind in history, was the outcome of pure chance and the arrogance of the Hong Kong government. The night before 9/28, about 100 student protestors climbed into the heavily guarded and fenced up public space in front of the Legislative building next to the government complex in Wan Chai, near the Admiralty station, in protest of the 831 political reform proposal. It was a defiant move by Hong Kong protesting standard, but there was a legitimate reason for their aggressiveness: the 831 proposal was supposed to be the answer to "gradual and orderly progress" in our electoral reform promised in the Basic Law, our city's consititution agreed by the Chinese government, Hong Kong people and the British government (Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997) to ensure that Hong Kong enjoyed "one country, two system" status for 50 years, until 2047. With existing rights to elect district council members in our neighbourhoods and legislature representatives into the increasingly undermined Legislative Council, the logical next step in the "gradual electoral reform" would be allowing Hong Kong people to elect our own Chief Executive. Beijing's 831 reform proposal promised universal suffrage in the next Chief Executive election in 2017, but dictated that the 2 - 3 candidates allowed to run must be selected by 1,200 super elites in Hong Kong. That meant if the proposal got through, 0.017% of our 7.188 million population got to decide who we could elect for the next Chief Executive. Needless to say, these 1,200 super elites, hand-picked by the Chinese government and collectively called the Election Committee, were comprised of pro-government politicians and the super rich in Hong Kong, whose collective interest was to safeguard their own privileges through supporting the Chinese government. So although the proposal was packaged and sold hard by Beijing and the Hong Kong government as a significant democratization step, anyone with half a functioning brain could see that this heavily "filtered" nomination process deemed that there would be no true democracy in the upcoming Chief Executive elections.
Those 100 student protestors, forerunners of the later famed Umbrella Movement, were violently pepper-sprayed by the police when they entered the public space in front of the Legislature building. That seriously enraged the pro-dem people in Hong Kong. Unlike in the US or Europe, where it is not uncommon for protestors to burn police cars or break into governmental buildings, Hong Kong, international but still pretty much a mildly-conservative Chinese community, has a long tradition of peaceful demonstration, most notably the June 4th Memorial Vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. The general Hong Kong public has a distaste for any level or form of violence from the protestors or the police in political activism. When we saw on television that those students were pepper-sprayed like they were criminals the previous night and were unreasonably arrested on the morning of 9/28, we were furious - first you tell us that you are fucking us up with a fake, "Iranian-style" election with no room for negotiation (Beijing even called it a "decision" rather than the proposal that it was), then you are assaulting our young for protesting against that bullshit "decision". Enough is just enough! (It didn't help also that the spectacles of our most recognized student leader, the skinny and kiddish-looking Joshua Wong, who later became the cover of Time magazine himself, were hit off and broken by the police, resulting in hours of fruitless searching and temporarily lost of clear sight.)
An accidental revolution
But the government had clearly prepared for protests near the government buildings in Wan Chai. Their tactic of preventing the protest from becoming larger than the few hundred people gathered there was to cut off foot traffic to the government complex. The police blockaded the only passenger bridge that connected the Admiralty station to the government buildings, effectively "starving off" the sieged protestors on the other side of the bridge. That morning we received many SOS messages sent from the core protestors in Wan Chai on What's App and Facebook. Their mood was somber and forlorn - they didn't have enough people and were surrounded. The moment the police started to "clean up" the place, the protest would be over. The little momentum that had been built up to that point would be depleted.
What they didn't know was that although the connecting bridge was blocked, thousands of people supporting the students and their cause rushed to the Admiralty MTR station anyway. Since they couldn't cross the bridge and join the protestors on the other side, they were stuck before the Harcourt highway. Around mid-day, there were so many people gathered that neither the heavy traffic of Hong Kong nor the fortified police force could stop us from marching over, this time not over the pedestrian bridge, but through the highway itself.
So the occupy movement that started on 9/28 last year was not planned, but the result of concerned citizens coming out to support sieged protestors and the arrogance of decision-makers whose plan to cut off the protest backfired, blowing up big time in their faces.
Now the political heads in Hong Kong, led by current Chief Executive Leung Chun Ying, had a big problem. Beijing's intention was clear: it wanted Hong Kong people to accept the 831 proposal without too much of a fuss so it could continue to effectively "appoint" the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, only in the future it would be in the name of democracy. So Leung and the "political reform team" were tasked to sell, lure, con, and if push came to shove, coerce us into complying.
With tens of thousands of enraged Hong Kongers suddenly occupying a major highway next the main government buildings, the government itself was besieged (talk about karma), there was no definite end of protesting in sight, and the bargaining dynamics of government vs. pro-dem might reverse. At the time, the people of Hong Kong were at the receiving end of this "831 decision" and had a definite lower hand. The umbrella movement was (beyond) the occupy protestors' wildest dream and Beijing's worst nightmare.
In this context, it was not arbitrary that the first round of tear gas was fired at peaceful protestors before 6pm. Hong Kong usually gets dark around that time of day and 9/28/2014 was a Sunday. If the protestors on the highway were to stay into the night and overnight, they would be blocking traffic come Monday morning, possibly paralyzing the business traffic going to financial centre Central. This was bound to be international news.
Someone at the top made a swift if nasty executive decision: disperse the crowd in one big flow so protestors would scatter and weaken, then they could be contained and arrested in smaller groups. Divide and concur.
Holding our ground
I, together with my brother, was among those tens of thousands who rushed to Harcourt Road to support the pioneer protestors. When my brother and I arrived around 4pm, a stretch of the highway were already full of people, so we followed the new joiners to form human chains to pass supplies to the "frontline". The frontline consisted of the brave souls, many of them secondary school and college students, who volunteered to stand face to face with the police at the edge of the protesting crowd. For a few hours, they had been pepper-strayed like they were pests by the police. The only protection they had were the supplies we passed up: face masks and plastic googles over their face, raincoats over their body, and umbrellas over their heads. Heck, we even passed up plastic wraps for wrapping around their heads (some of us eventually became pretty skilled in this). These protective supplie
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