What the World can learn from Hongkong
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36C3: Resource Exhaustion118 / 254
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:22
to be translated into German and possibly into French. So there is a link you can all go to. It's streaming.c3lingo.org. You can go there for translations. And we are about to start the talk called what the world can learn from Hong Kong.
00:44
And it's going to take 90 minutes because apparently we can learn a lot from Hong Kong. So buckle up. It's going to be a long ride. And our speaker, Katherine Tai, is a University of Oxford alumna and a Ph.D. candidate at
01:05
MIT. So let's welcome Katherine on stage. Let's give her a big round of applause. All yours. Thank you.
01:21
Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me to C3. For starters, I'd also like to thank the brave people who are planning to translate what I'm going to say despite knowing how fast they usually speak. So quick round of applause for the translators over there in the boxes.
01:47
As the dear herald, I actually don't know your name, mentioned I'm a Ph.D. student at MIT where I study political science. I also work as a freelance journalist on the side. And in my capacity as a freelance journalist, I amongst other things covered the Hong Kong
02:03
protests over the past seven months, which, as you can possibly imagine, was quite eventful. I think one important caveat for this talk is I am not originally from Hong Kong, and I think the people who you should probably be listening to and who I would love to put on the stage in many cases are people who grow to great lengths to protect their
02:22
own anonymity and to protect their own identity. And so these are people who would not put themselves on the stage. So what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to tell you to the best of my ability the things that I've learned from them and from the people who go out on the streets in protest in Hong Kong, but in general, my talk will be interspersed with references
02:41
to journalists and some activists in Hong Kong who I recommend you follow them because ultimately they are the ones who know best. But what do I want to do? For starters, because this is 90 minutes, so I want to give you a quick heads-up. I'm going to give a quick overview of why and how things are happening, so historically
03:02
and politically, and we will also be showcasing some amazing protest art, and then I want to talk about the incredible strategies that protesters have been using and that they've been using for over half a year now, and that's helped them to essentially keep going for more than half a year in the face of what is truly an incredibly strong government.
03:24
So also we want to talk about technology because, of course, it's C3, so it's incredibly important that we recognise the very high-tech things that the protesters have been using to defend themselves against the police, such as catapults.
03:43
This was recently at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, but there are more catapults. But, seriously, like I said, I'm going to start with some historical political background,
04:01
and then I'm going to move on and explain the political demands and the protest strategies that the protesters have been using. In the end, I'm going to give kind of like a quick preview of what we can maybe expect to happen in the next few years, and what you can do to stay informed. So what is happening and why?
04:20
Can I have light on the audience for a second? I don't know who I talked to about this. Great. So I want to get a quick sense of how much people know about Hong Kong's politics. So if you know why the years 1997 and 2047 are meaningful for Hong Kong politics,
04:41
please raise your hand. Wow. Thank you. That's definitely more than I expected. I hope this won't bore you then. Thanks for the lights. That's fine. Although I actually like seeing the audience. That's quite good. I'm still going to give a quick overview. Some of you may know that Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997.
05:02
So it was under British colonial rule for more than 100 years. Once the British lease of Hong Kong was up, the British negotiated an agreement with the Chinese government to return Hong Kong to China. Ironically, this event was called the Handover, where Hong Kong was literally
05:20
taken by a colonial power and handed over to a different government. Ironically also is that it's called the Return to China because the current Chinese government was not even in power when Hong Kong was the last part of what you could consider China. But at this Handover event, or before this Handover event, the British and
05:42
the Chinese signed an important document, which was the Sino-British joint declaration, which essentially says that the rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of academic research, and of religious belief will be ensured by law
06:01
in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Why are they writing something like this? Hong Kong was a colony, but because it was essentially used as a big and important commercial centre, it did have a lot of societal freedoms. So people were able to protest to the extent that colonial law allowed it. And there was, for example, freedom of the press.
06:22
And there were worries in the UK and also in Hong Kong. A lot of Hong Kongers were extremely worried about this, about what might happen to these freedoms when they would essentially go become part of China, which is not democratic, which is not a democracy. It wasn't a democracy in the 80s or the 90s either. This is something like these anxieties were obviously exacerbated by the fact
06:43
that in 1989, the Chinese government suppressed a student protest in Tiananmen Square. Hong Kongers knew about this. And so they were watching from just across the border, and they were looking at the students in Tiananmen and Beijing, and they were wondering, is this going to be us next? This whole thing, this whole idea that Hong Kong's freedom will be
07:03
guaranteed is called one country, two systems. And so the idea is that Hong Kong gets to maintain its own government in some ways. It gets to maintain its own legal system. And it gets to maintain all these political freedoms that in many ways are not guaranteed in mainland China. In addition to that, Hong Kong does not have democracy in the sense
07:23
that most people understand it. But the Hong Kong Basic Law says that the ultimate aim is the selection of the chief executive, which is the head of government in Hong Kong, by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.
07:40
So basically, this could be read as there will also be democracy at some point maybe, depending on how we define all of these terms. So in 1997, the Chinese government decided that what Hong Kong is going to get is essentially a government that is basically appointed by Beijing.
08:00
It's a bit more complicated, but essentially the Hong Kong chief executive is appointed in Beijing. And people get to vote for their parliament. But the parliament doesn't really have, they can't come up with laws and say we want to pass this law. So they can essentially veto bills that come from the government. But Hong Kongers basically get to elect their opposition in free and fair elections, or part of their opposition.
08:22
But they do not get to elect their government. So that's where we're starting in 1997. So I think this is important to understand, because while Hong Kong is part of China legally, it has a special status that makes it very different politically. And that's something that became very obvious in the years
08:41
following the handover as well. Anthony Dapiran, a lawyer who works in Hong Kong, has called the city a city of protest. And you can see this, for example, because since the handover, there has been a range of protests. All of them have been political, and a lot of them have been in some ways related to China. This is just, these are just some examples.
09:04
One was in 2003, the protest against Article 23, which was an anti-subversion law. So basically it was an anti, so it was basically seen as a way for the government to get rid of people who they disagreed with politically.
09:21
People protested against it, and the reform was stalled. In 2012, a lot of students protested against curriculum reform that people essentially denounced as brainwashing. They said it would be painting democracy in a bad light, and was painting China as too positive.
09:41
Again, the protest succeeded. There were a range of other protests as well in the 2000s that, for example, protested for maintaining important buildings, what people called Hong Kong heritage. A lot of those unfortunately failed. But so there's been ups and downs, but it's in no way the case that Hong Kong wasn't free. People were able to go out on the streets.
10:01
People went out on the streets in thousands. People had political rallies, such as at a university, as you see in the picture in the background. And then 2014 happened. I'm sure people have seen this. This was the umbrella revolution in 2014. I took this picture when I was actually at Occupy Central,
10:20
and I studied for my own midterm exams at the Student Study Center. What had happened was that that promise of maybe democracy that I was talking about earlier, people thought that Beijing had broken it. Because in that year, Beijing had essentially published its plan for electoral reform, and said that yes, you get universal suffrage so everyone gets to vote,
10:42
but we still pick the candidates. So people felt cheated, and didn't think that that was what they were owed, and people went into the streets. And people occupied a part of the center of the city for two full months and two full weeks, which was extremely impressive. This is basically one of the major roads
11:01
in the middle of Hong Kong. It's usually full of cars. You couldn't possibly walk there, but people reclaimed it and made it into a protest village. People built their own institutions, people organized tutoring services. It was an incredible feeling. People, when they were there, were incredibly optimistic and were telling me it will be fine, we just need to work together. And if I asked them, how are you going to get democracy, though,
11:21
they were like, I don't know how exactly it's gonna happen, but it will happen. But what actually happened is that the protest camp was cleared out by police and by the government, and there were fights internally in the democracy movement over how to continue, and so there was a lot of disagreement, and what followed was essentially a long period
11:40
of political depression, right? People had been able to bring thousands of people onto the streets, but the government didn't even, except for one conversation, sit down and negotiate with them. One person who I interviewed last year, so almost two years ago now, told me at the time that if the government doesn't even listen to us,
12:03
when we bring so many people out on the streets, then I don't know what can change anything politically. The one thing that Umbrella has taught me is that there are no bounds to how disappointed I can be in my government. In addition to this feeling of depression, you had several other incidents
12:21
that made people feel like the promise of one country, two systems, that Hong Kong would really be separate from mainland China, at least until 47, wasn't being kept. One of these examples are the bookseller abductions from 2015. The people, there were three booksellers who were abducted probably by the Chinese government, one in Thailand, one in southern China,
12:42
and one in Hong Kong itself. So these were people who were essentially selling books that were, honestly, a lot of it was probably rumors and kind of gossip, but they were very critical of the Chinese government, and they suddenly turned up in China again. So imagine you're a Hong Konger, and you've grown up in a city where you're being told you have your own legal system,
13:02
and you have nothing to fear from China because if you don't go, it's your own government that is in charge for you, but then you hear about these people who are grabbed off the street in your own hometown, and you suddenly turn up in China, possibly making a public confession. So that looks bad. In 2016, this is also important,
13:21
people had been, the fishbowl revolution happened, which is also where this beautiful piece of art comes from. The fishbowl revolution was a protest in part of Hong Kong called Mong Kok, and basically what happened was that people decided that violent means might be what is needed to actually oppose the government to get political change.
13:41
In 2014, people had been peaceful, and they had tried, but nobody listened. So if that doesn't work, some people thought we need to try new methods. So there was something that could be called a riot, and there were really clashes between police forces and protesters. People were tearing up the pavement,
14:01
throwing bricks at the police, police was throwing some bricks back. So that happened. And then between 2016 and 18, another thing that was important happened, which is that after Umbrella, there were fights about what to do, and some people decided we will go and throw bricks at the police during the fishbowl revolution. Some other people decided we wanna work
14:21
through the institutions, and we wanna get elected into the legislative council, into the parliament, and we wanna change the system from within. But what happened was that six candidates, and then later even six elected parliamentarians were all disqualified for, in some cases, not credibly promising that they essentially
14:41
will uphold the Hong Kong Basic Law. Again, there are legal reasons for this. Some of these disqualifications were later overturned by courts. Some, I think, still stand. But I think what's really important is that what a lot of people felt was, again, that this was kind of like a broken promise, right?
15:00
They were like, even within the system that we have, so we get to elect so few people, but even within that system, you don't let us elect the people we want to. You disqualify candidates. This is something that had never happened before. And then you also disqualify people after they've been elected. So you have democratically elected representatives of the people who essentially protested as part of an oath-taking ceremony,
15:20
and those people then also got kicked out. So that looked bad. This means if you're, I'm not gonna date myself, but if you're my age and you're a Hong Konger, you first lived under British colonialism, where the British colonial government was in charge of your fate, and then post-'97, you were just kind of like handed over to the Chinese government,
15:41
maybe at the age of like four, five, six, depending how old you were. But at no point did you actually get a choice. But you also grew up with a lot more political freedom than a lot of people in mainland China. You had no internet censorship, and people in Hong Kong talk very openly about a lot of things that the Chinese government has done. And so you're very aware of things
16:00
such as the Tiananmen massacre, and you're afraid that those things might maybe happen to you in'47, when you know there's an expiration date on all the freedoms that you have. But in'47, you might also be part of that, and those things might also be what happens to you. But at the same time, what you'd also seen is that you'd seen freedoms eroded, and you saw all these signs that made you think that the promises, the promise of those 50 years
16:23
of freedom and of a separate political system, that that was an empty promise, and that China was not intending to keep it. And this, I think, is also really important that a lot of people who I spoke to, they tell me, China doesn't want one country to systems, and if they don't want it, like they will undermine it if they can. So one person who I spoke to is in his 20s said, China just wants one country, one systems,
16:42
and it's gonna do whatever it wants to achieve that. And that's the mindset, I think, that we need to understand to know why people are going out on the streets right now. So people are scared of China. People think people don't trust the Chinese legal system. And what happens in 2019 is that the government introduces an extradition bill.
17:02
Previously, one of the ways the Hong Kong legal system was kept separate from China is that it couldn't extradite people to China. So if someone commits a crime in China and flees to Hong Kong, the Hong Kong government cannot send that person to China for prosecution. But what happened is that someone committed a crime in Taiwan
17:21
which Hong Kong considers to be part of China. And that person, so this person was a Hong Kong citizen, he killed his girlfriend and fled to Hong Kong, was convicted of a couple of credit card charges, but because the Hong Kong courts didn't have jurisdiction, they couldn't actually get him for the murder of his girlfriend. And so the Hong Kong government said,
17:40
okay, look, we're gonna get an extradition bill so we can start extraditing people to Taiwan, and then also start extraditing people to China. I mean, what do you think people thought about that? They weren't happy. So on June 9th, 1 million people estimated
18:01
went onto the streets to protest against the extradition bill. And this is where we're starting. This is where the political movement starts. I wanna give you an overview of what's happened over the past seven months because it's easy in hindsight to forget just the scale of a lot of what happened. So on June 9th, we get, official numbers are 240,000, so that's the police.
18:23
The organizers say 1 million people. On June 12th, we get 40,000 people who essentially gather around the government headquarter and prevent the bill from being read a second time, from being discussed, and the police used tear gas, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds against protesters that were largely unarmed and in some cases held umbrellas
18:42
to essentially defend themselves. People were really mad at that, and so on June 16th, the largest protest march in Hong Kong history happened with an estimated of 2 million people. Which is a sizable proportion of the city's population. So people protesting. On July 21st, I think this is one of the events
19:02
that people really need to know about. While there was a protest in the center of Hong Kong in a metro station further north in Yuen Long, suddenly a group of 20, 25 men in white T-shirts turned up and started beating people. So just started indiscriminately beating people up who were on the metro.
19:21
We all know this because there was a journalist in the same metro station, and she was live streaming the entire thing. So for 40 minutes, she was live streaming violence that people in Hong Kong had never really seen before. People are used to being relatively safe. Hong Kong has a pretty low crime rate, and there was this incredibly vicious violence that they were all seeing on their screens.
19:42
So everyone knew this. At some point, there were thousands, tens of thousands of people in this live stream, and yet the police was doing nothing and didn't turn up until after these people had disappeared. And I think within that day, they may be arrested. I think within a couple of days, they didn't arrest anyone, and then later, they arrested three people.
20:01
But so far, nothing has come of that. That was really a turning point where people lost a lot of trust in institutions that they used to have before because they decided that ultimately, when in doubt, if there's some gangster beating me up, if that person is politically for the government, I cannot trust the police to come and save me. And a lot of people, especially wealthier,
20:22
more well-off, middle-class people, that's the point when they changed their mind. Maybe before they said, the extradition bill isn't that bad. I don't mind. It will be fine. But that was the moment when they saw those people getting beaten up. They looked at them and they were like, that could have been me. And that's when they said, now something needs to happen and something needs to be done about this government.
20:40
So more people go out. In the pouring rain, an estimated 1.7 million people protesting. August 31st, the estimate is tens of thousands, but this was an illegal march, so the protest wasn't allowed. So people went out to protest despite it being illegal. They knew they could be charged with illegal assembly, maybe a riot, which carries up to 10 years.
21:03
After that, the government essentially stopped allowing protest marches and they were like, maybe if we don't allow you to protest, people won't come out to protest. Didn't work out. On October 1st, Chinese National Day, thousands demonstrated on the streets again. And this was the first day someone was shot with a live round.
21:21
So a protester in his 20s was shot by a policeman at close range. On October 4th, again, thousands of people out on the streets. The government tries to bend masks. So they want to prevent people from hiding their faces. And do you see what people do in reaction to that? They put on masks and they go out and protest because it's Hong Kong.
21:41
On November 8th, the first person died. In the context of the protests, a young man who fell from a building near a police action stayed in a coma for several days and then died on November 8th. This picture is from one of the vigils for him. And several days later, the second person died in the context of the protest, an old man who was probably just a bystander
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to a clash between police and protesters. He was hit in the head by a brick and died several days later, also after a coma. This was what set up the most extreme and the most violent days of protest in Hong Kong that we have seen this year, and possibly ever,
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where people started occupying university campuses and had real battles with police to essentially defend those campuses against police. And the whole thing culminated on November 18th in police essentially laying siege to an entire university, trapping people inside and thousands of people going out to protest and trying to essentially break through the police cordon from the outside
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and rescue the people who were inside who were afraid of the police, who didn't wanna come up because they'd seen videos of police violence over the past few months and they were scared because they said, I don't know what's gonna happen if I go out. But who also said, we have fought for so many months at this point. So this was November, right, it was a month ago. They were saying, we have fought for so many months,
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we cannot just give up, we need to at least try. One thing that happened as part of that was that people coordinated an absolutely insane exit from the besieged university where they basically came down from a footbridge. Some of these people are climbing, but some of them are just falling down.
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And then you have motorcyclists waiting for them down the bridge, all of this was coordinated online. And we don't know how many people got out that way, but maybe 50 or 100 and were able to escape arrest.
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The sieges eventually ended. Kind of a lot of people were arrested, I think more than 1,000 people were arrested around the university that was occupied. But several days later,
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there were district council elections, which are basically local elections in Hong Kong. This was the electoral map before the elections. Red are pro-government parties and yellow are pro-democracy parties. There was a record turnout, the highest ever in the history of Hong Kong and the pro-democracy camp made the map to this.
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One thing that's important to bear in mind is that Hong Kong uses a first-past-the-post system. So you win in your district if you gain an absolute majority. So these seats actually don't translate into that much of an electoral difference. So I think it was 60-40. So it was 60% for pro-democracy,
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but especially compared to what the districts had looked like before, this was an incredible achievement. And I also think this is one thing that's really important to recognize that there's a lot of organizational work that went through this. So people put in a lot of time, their love-like work, to make sure that people went out and would be able to vote and that people knew who they were voting for. So here we are in December.
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By the count of the activists and writer Kong Song Gan, there have been 6,152 arrests, at least, possibly more. 921 people have been prosecuted, so there's an incredible backlog. And there have been 774 protests. That includes smaller ones.
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That was as of December 23rd. Since then, there have been several more hundred arrests, so we're probably getting much closer to 6,500, 6,600. And that's why we are after seven months of protests in Hong Kong. This is somewhat depressing, but it's also incredibly impressive
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that people have been able to keep going for such a long time. These people who are going out into the streets are not just walking for half an hour or an hour and then go home and are like, oh yeah, now it's fine. People are entering real battles with police and are essentially running and hiding from police for, in some cases, for hours. A lot of people have been driven to physical exhaustion.
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A lot of people aren't doing well mentally because it's incredibly depressing. There's a lot of anxiety. People are very scared of what could happen to them if they do get arrested. And so one thing that I want to now focus on is how they've been able to just keep this going for such a long time. Hong Kong is such a tiny place. And if you look at the resources
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that the Chinese government has access to and that the Hong Kong government has access to, how can a protest keep going for so long? I think I have a few answers. The first answer is that there are very clear demands that the movement has. The first is a complete withdrawal of the extradition bill.
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So the law that I was talking about earlier, that was fulfilled in September. The second is the release of arrested protesters without charges. So they're saying we want more than 6,000 people, those should be released, and they should be able to go home without being charged because they were trying
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to make their government listen to them because there is no other way you can get your government to listen to you if you cannot vote. The only thing you can do is you can go out on the street. The third demand is a withdrawal of the characterization of any protest as a riot. This is a bit technical, but the basic gist of it is that there's a law that the British colonial administration introduced
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which allows police to classify a lot of protests as riots, it's like a pretty broad definition, it's pretty vague, and that if you're convicted of rioting, that carries up to 10 years in prison. So I think roughly a third of arrested protesters has been under 18. Imagine you're 14 years old
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and you're out in the streets and you find out that you could be charged with rioting and you're looking at a 10-year prison sentence. That's very scary. The fourth demand, which is one of the ones that has some of the most support in the population, currently at 72% as of December 8th, is an independent investigation into police brutality
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because people don't trust the government watchdog that is essentially staffed by people who the government gets to pick. There were a few international experts on that panel, but all of them resigned because they said this is actually a joke and we don't think we can actually do anything meaningful with this. So people want an independent investigation. I specifically did not include images of police brutality
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in my presentation, but if you think you can take the violence, I would urge you to actually go look them up. There's a lot of material online. Hong Kong Free Press has documented a lot of these cases and reports on the legal follow-up on them as well. This has not been good and I think it's also something that the violence
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was especially disproportionate and shocking for people because people are used to being safe. People are not used to living in a country where the police just comes and eats them up or where the police just stomps their foot on the head of an arrested protester who's already lying on the ground. They're not used to watching police just kick someone who's already on the ground.
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They're also not used to police arresting teenagers. That's number four. And number five is real universal suffrage. This is currently at 70% support in the broader population, so the idea is essentially people say we want that democracy.
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That promise that you made us in 97 or that promise that we think you made us, we want that. And this is also something that has been strengthened especially over the past few months because until a year ago, maybe people thought it doesn't matter that much if I elect the government because things will be fine and most people are competent who are in government,
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but over the past seven months, they've been watching a government that essentially refused to listen to any of the protesters and pretended that none of their demands were in any way politically legitimate. So now a lot of people who were fine a year ago are saying, well, now we need democracy because we've seen what happens if you have a government that doesn't represent the people it's supposed to represent.
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I think this is an important strategy because it means that everyone who goes out knows what they're protesting for. So since July, people have been going out on the streets and they say, these are the five things we want. This is what we want, nothing else. Notably, independence is not part of this list, although the Chinese government likes to say that the protesters are separatists.
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Independence is not a demand of the movement. It also has pretty low support in Hong Kong. But instead, because you have these five demands, it's very catchy. People have even come up with a protest sign, right? So whenever you see pictures of protests, you will see people just holding up their hand like this because they're like, five demands and then they put up another thing
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and they're saying, not one less. So that's one guiding slogan that they've been using. And it's been memed. Everything gets memed in the Hong Kong protests. So for example, if you're disappointed with the new Star Wars movie, go to Hong Kong because there's a lot of very entertaining Star Wars content that includes protesters.
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So on the left, you can see at the bottom again, it says, five demands, not one less. And the image on the right also has that in Chinese. Strategy number two, be water.
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This is an image by an artist that essentially, so you've seen some of the images where people cover their faces to protect themselves against tear gas and they protect themselves so they cannot be identified. And so there was a week when people started drawing the Pokemons of the Hong Kong protests.
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And this was an image for be water. Be water has essentially been a guiding principle of the movement since the very beginning. And it's based on a Bruce Lee quote. He's a martial artist. He was in a bunch of like Kung Fu films from Hong Kong. And he said, empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water.
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Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. So the idea of be water is that you essentially accumulate and gather people in places unexpectedly and very quickly
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and you disappear as quickly as possible. There were scenes where protests of thousands in the center of Hong Kong just kind of like dissipated and disappeared into nothingness. This is how you can avoid police capture in many cases, right? Like you don't sit and you don't stay in a place like people did with Occupy Central in 2014.
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You leave once the police turns up. But you don't even have to wait for the police to show up to know that they're coming. Because what people have started doing is that essentially you get maps, or you have scouting channels first, where people, when they see police, they just submit a report to the Telegram channel. So there are bots where you can submit reports.
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You say, I've seen a police unit that's going here, from here to this place, that direction, this many policemen. And that gets posted on a Telegram channel with a hashtag for the location that we're seen in. One person who I interviewed who's middle class, doing really well, I asked him what the protest changed about him.
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And he said, it really changed my frame of mind because now I got used to observing the deployment of police whenever I see it. I got alerted to a siren. And once I see it, I will immediately send the info onto a Telegram channel. These reports then also get turned into maps.
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So this was Christmas Eve in Hong Kong. So people got a white Christmas, not because there was snow, but because there was a lot of tear gas. And the reports that people send in are essentially turned into a map that you can use to strategically avoid being captured by police. And also that, for example,
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some relatives of mine wanted to go to Hong Kong. And they said, well, we are worried about going into areas of protest. And I was like, well, you can use this map and you can avoid, you can see really easily into which areas you really shouldn't go. Basically, if there are a lot of icons in the place, that means a lot of stuff is happening there. If you have the puppy logo, that means police units.
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Cars means police cars. You see some water drops kind of like in the middle towards the left. That means there's a water cannon right there that you probably want to avoid. And there's also different signs for the different police units. So they're raptors, and those are portrayed as the dinosaur logos.
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And in addition to that, you kind of have the, you know at what time the report was submitted, you can verify a report. You see like further down towards the lower part of the map, there's a camera sign. And so that means that there are live feeds from that place. So if you want to know what's going on in a particular place, a lot of Hong Kong journalists are live streaming the protests.
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And so you can go and just watch a live stream to see what's really happening on the ground right there. And there's even a website that compiles up to nine live streams at the same time. So you can just like watch all of them at the same time on your screen to make sure you know what's happening. These maps are extremely useful, and there's no way of saying
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how many people they've helped in avoiding arrest. But one friend of mine who I was talking to who went out to protest in July said that he was going home from a protest, and he was wearing the distinctive black shirts that protesters usually wear. He didn't have any change of clothes, and he wanted to avoid arrest. And he told his friends. And so within a few minutes,
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they sent him a screenshot of Google Maps where you could just see where he, like they had just shown him this is your escape route, just going around all the police units that they could see on the map using only open-sourced, crowd-sourced information that was all made freely available online and that people put on maps like this.
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I think it's worth clapping for, like because these are people's lives, right? If there are only 10 people
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that got to escape police arrest because of these things, we don't know to how many years those people could be sentenced in prison. They could just be sentenced to fines. Maybe they could send us to prison in three years. But all of that is time in people's lives and the lives of people who have been going out to protest. And all of that was saved thanks to people crowd-sourcing and open-sourcing all of this information. And that's an incredible effort
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that people have been making for months now and an incredibly important institution that really has helped people. The next part of Be Water is decentralized decision-making. One of the reasons I talked about the history of Hong Kong protests before and all of that political stuff is because I think it's very important
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to understand where people are coming from. People of all ages are protesting, but it's really young people who are disproportionately against the government and against the bill. I think, especially, I think earlier in June or July, the numbers were that 59% of people under 16 opposed the extradition bill. So that's almost 100% amongst people
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who are not even eligible to vote, not even close to being eligible to vote. But these people have also been protesting for a very long time, and they've also learned from the past. One thing that they've learned from 2014 is that if you're a leader, you get arrested and you get put in prison. Joshua Wong, who you may have heard of,
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is one of the people who that happened to. Another person who that happened to is Edward Long, who was a leading figure of the fishbowl riots in 2016. He's currently still serving time in prison. But how do you organize a movement without having political leaders? Well, you do the whole crowd intelligence thing, right?
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Like, you start having grassroots decision-making, you have a leaderless movement. Hong Kong is not the first time this has happened. The Gezi protests in Istanbul in 2013 were doing something similar, and now it's happening in Hong Kong. So if you have no leaders, you have nobody who the government can arrest
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to cripple the movement. They can maybe arrest one person, they can arrest 100 people, they can arrest 6,000 people, but all of those people are only drops in the bigger movement and in that wave that we were talking about earlier. So how does political decision-making work if you have thousands of people?
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So there are telegram groups, primarily, and there's also a forum called L-I-H-K-G that's a bit like Reddit, and people just have political discussions on those. In addition to that, people often have groups on WhatsApp, people have Facebook groups. My parents are probably not on Telegram, but kind of like the equivalent of their generation
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has groups on Facebook, and that's where people are talking about what they think should happen, about strategic questions, about questions in terms of what their aims should be. So it's just kind of happening on all these platforms. And so if you have an idea or if you have an argument that you think is important, you share it, and if people agree with you, start sharing it further on.
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So decision-making is kind of like, has like a snowball effect where you can see once you are in different groups, like arguments that people agree with keep reappearing like in 10, 15, 20 groups, or people start rephrasing them. And so that's how kind of like consensus is often being built. At the same time,
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if you have an idea for a really cool protest action, such as you want people to form a human chain across part of Hong Kong, which is something that they did, someone just came up with it. And posted about it online. And then someone made a poster for it. And more people made posters. And lots of people said this is a great idea. And so they just did it. I hope that especially hackers can empathize
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with this idea that someone has a cool idea, just does it, and then people recognize that it is cool and kind of go along with it. And that's how a lot of the movement has been working for the past few months as well. Another example of this is the December 1st protest where thousands of people came out because and someone just like, basically the equivalent of a Reddit user
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in his 20s had just said, well, I thought we should try to have a protest again. And all of a sudden the government actually gave him permission and there were thousands of people again out on the streets because anyone can register a protest. One thing that's hard is decision-making. Some of these groups have thousands of people. I think I'm in several telegram groups
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that have maybe 60, 70,000 members. So often people use polling to essentially make decisions. I don't know whether you know the poll function on Telegram or basically the admins can send in a poll and say these are your four options. Do you think we should do A, B, C, or D? And then just kind of vote.
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And that's how a lot of the especially decision-making and discussion on demands or deadlines that what people were trying to set was happening earlier in the movement. But it's also something that people can use if they need to make strategic decisions quickly on the spot. On August 12th, people occupied the Hong Kong Airport
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which is an incredibly important international hub and where they managed to basically just paralyze the entire airport. The Hong Kong government announced that day that flights would stop taking off at 4 p.m. and there started being rumors that the police would essentially come in
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and start clearing out the airport violently with tear gas. And police was deploying increasingly more people towards the airport. And because you have all these Telegram channels, you see people take pictures of police, they post them and you see, oh my God, there's all this police coming towards the airport. I am here. They cut off the metro so you cannot take the train back into the city.
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The Hong Kong Airport is on an island. You cannot get away from there. And so there was a lot of heated discussion back and forth that day and people were discussing, is it safe, is it not safe? And ultimately there was one channel that had I think 60,000 followers and the admins kept asking, should we stay or should we go? And the ratios kept changing towards leaving
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and then suddenly it was 70 to 30% and people were like, okay, this is it, we're leaving. And that was kind of the moment when you could see people changing their mind like right on the spot. There was nobody who said we're now leaving, not the single person who said we're now going back, but just thousands of people who were watching and who said, this looks too dangerous. We need to stay safe and we need to go home.
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The result of that was a mass exodus where people literally walked for hours as you can see on this picture just across streets because buses were full and stopped running, the metro had stopped running but they needed to get back home. One of the funniest things I think that I've heard of as part of the be water
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and grassroots discussion strategy, I was talking to Sifan Yang who's the China correspondent for the German paper Diezite and she was reporting from a small group that was building street blockades in Hong Kong and there they were practicing
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grassroots decision making in person. So they build a blockade, they hear police is coming, so scouts are telling them, they're leaving and they run into the metro but then they need to know where they're going next because there's no plan. Because if you have no plan, the police can't know your plan and can't wait for you there, but also you have no plan. So you have five people, 10 people who are just shouting at each other on the metro platform.
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Someone says we wanna go here and another person says we're going there and maybe after five minutes of shouting they decide okay, we have reached consensus, swarm intelligence. But it works. It's chaotic but it works because it really makes it hard to figure out where people are. Another really hard thing of this whole grassroots decision making
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and bottom up decision making has been how do you correct course? If you make mistakes, how do you correct those mistakes if there's nobody who can tell someone that they need to stop doing these things? Again, this was something you could observe during the airport protests where people occupied the entire departure hall and at some point,
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I think they said it was a citizen's arrest but they basically tied a person to a luggage, to one of those luggage carts who they thought was an undercover policeman from China and beat that person up. I think he was let away in the end but it was an incredibly ugly scene and really when you were watching it, it felt a lot like mob violence.
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But what happened after, and so a lot of people were saying well, this is a sign that this whole leaderless movement thing is not working and you cannot actually change anything about your behavior. There's nobody who can tell these people that they need to change your mind. But what happened afterwards is that you saw the same thing that I was describing earlier. People saw that this was bad
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and people agreed that it was bad. So people were going around and everyone kept encouraging everyone else, you need to be careful, don't use violence. If you think someone is an undercover cop who's spying on you, you can't just beat the person up. Afterwards, there was one scene where people ran into someone who they thought was maybe a cop from mainland China and so instead of beating him up,
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they all stood around him and started taking selfies with him. In addition to that, you've also seen increasingly you see people kind of taking, drawing people, like pushing people, pulling people back. Right, and so people saying, well, this is something you can't attack this person.
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So if there's a person whose temper is maybe running really high, often there will be people around the person who say, no, we're going to pull you back. People try to write guidelines. They say you need to be careful about journalists, don't accuse people of being fake journalists, so all these things. So it was a lot of self-correction and self-control coming out of that moment.
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I thought that was really interesting and really important because it was one sign that course correction can happen even if you have thousands of people, but it requires everyone to participate and it requires people to be willing to essentially, like to interrogate the things that they had done and to also possibly admit mistakes.
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Strategy four, anonymity. Again, I think maybe something that hackers can empathize with. I know there's, as usual, a lot of talks about how to maintain your security and anonymity online. For people in Hong Kong, this has become incredibly important. The thing about feeling like your political system
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is being eroded and all the securities and certainties and rights you had disappearing slowly is that you don't know one's line has moved. So you don't know anymore. A lot of people I've spoken to don't feel like they can speak politically online anymore. So they don't know what the consequences are going to be.
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Instead, what people do is they start changing their names on their Facebook accounts, for example, because something that they would have said openly like a year ago, they no longer dare to say under their own name. There are people who have been fired probably for the things that they said on Facebook, such as the person who was a union leader with a Hong Kong airline, Cathay Pacific.
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So anonymity is enforced both in person and online. Also, again, through a lot of community control and people supporting each other and essentially enforcing these rules with each other. Online, it's very much a social rule. So if you're kind of like in a working group on Telegram and people are starting to chat kind of about personal stuff
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then usually there will be someone who tells everyone else no, get back to work, stop talking about that stuff. You're disclosing too much about yourself. One phrase that people keep using is they say there are ghosts. So the operational assumption is that in any group there will be someone who is listening. So especially in these bigger groups, you cannot ever assume that there is no police in there.
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So you can do your work but assume that you're being watched while you're doing anything that you're doing. Another thing that they're doing is that there are several channels that are dedicated to cybersecurity. And there's one channel, for example, that started passing around kind of like JPEGs that had instructions for how to set your Telegram settings
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because you need to assume that a lot of the people who you're working with don't have a lot of interest necessarily in technology and maybe have as the highest priority going out to protest. And so it helps that there are easy rules, right? So people send around these instructions that say, you toggle these things on your Telegram settings, make sure that that ensures that nobody can see your phone number
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who isn't already a contact of yours. Or you change this thing that means that your account essentially self-destructs if you're inactive for seven days. So in many ways, a lot of this is about the social enforcement and also breaking things down and making them as accessible as possible. Another thing is that there's a Telegram account that alerts people to people who have been arrested
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and the operational assumption is that if you've been arrested, you're compromised. And so it posts the names and the Telegram handles of people who have been captured by police and tells people delete this person's contact, like delete this person from all of your chats, like you cannot also be compromised. So that's another way they're trying to kind of like maintain that very basic security.
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I don't know how well this is working, to be very honest. I haven't really heard any reports of people who have been arrested for stuff that they've done on Telegram, but that might also just be that it hasn't been reported or we don't know about this. It's also possible that the police has been just very busy mass arresting people at protests
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and that they have all this data and they might be watching people and might come back around to that later on. Sometimes people have actually been able to identify the Telegram handles or think they've been able to identify the Telegram handles of policemen, which led to several people being kicked out of groups. But again, so people are, like the police is probably watching,
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but we don't know how much information they have access to. In real life, you can see kind of in the lower right corner, the usual outfit that people are wearing. These are front liners who tend to be more directly involved in clashes with the police, but so people will cover their faces with usually gas masks, sometimes just simple surgical masks.
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They're wearing goggles and hard hats to protect against projectiles, pepper spray, water cannons, tear gas, the things you encounter in the streets of Hong Kong these days. In addition to that, people have all of these umbrellas which they use to hide each other's identity. So for example, if people are building a street blockade,
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then you always have some people who are building, who kind of like building the blockade, and there's other people who are holding up umbrellas to prevent them from being photographed, especially given how much covered the protests are. This is especially important because there's reporters and media around all the time, and people want to make sure that they don't accidentally end up on camera while committing what is probably a crime.
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There's other ways this is being used as well. For example, when people were destroying cameras in the metro stations in some cases, because people were very aware of the fact that they were being filmed by someone who they couldn't talk to. So people have asked individuals to delete pictures and videos when they've seen them film them,
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but they've also destroyed essentially these cameras on the metro. And again, then you will have someone kind of cover you with an umbrella to avoid a person being filmed in the middle of essentially committing vandalism. The other thing is that people have these, so this kind of uniform, which you can also see here,
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so people are essentially just wearing black for the protests, which also means that you have no recognisable marks on yourself in the moment. And then when you kind of practice be water, if you hear police is coming, you go into a side street. Often there are people who are not participating in the protest personally directly, but who, for example, donate regular clothing
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that basically, any clothes that aren't black. This was particularly, in the summer when you had these mass protests, people would just bring t-shirts into metro stations. So people were often leaving with the last train. And so people would just rush into metro stations. You'd kind of see people changing in side streets to make sure they get out
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of this very recognisable black year and to essentially change into these clothes. So, Hong Kongers have basically managed to build the world's largest black block, which is another way of maintaining anonymity.
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The government recognises that this is a problem for them. And they tried in October to address this by implementing a mask ban. So they're essentially, the mask ban itself says that anyone who wears a mask at a lawful rally or a march or an unlawful or unauthorised assembly or during a riot.
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So even if you go to a peaceful protest, but you cover your face, you can be sentenced to up to one year in prison, simply for trying to hide your face. This is a law that was implemented under the emergency ordinance, which essentially is kind of like a national security law that gives the government sweeping powers
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in particular emergency situations. It is currently unclear to what extent this is constitutional. So this mask ban has been challenged in court multiple times and it's currently still making its way through the courts. But it's also possible that basically Beijing might come in and say, we have the ultimate right to interpret the Hong Kong Basic Law,
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so we will say that this law has to be constitutional. So this is something that we just need to wait out, but I think it's a sign where we can see that the government wants to essentially limit people's ability to maintain their anonymity. And people were really pissed at this. Like this was announced on a Friday, just kind of like during the workday. And in the afternoon, once people got off work,
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people went out on the streets. Like people were just like turning up, like school children in their school uniforms, people in their office clothing, just everyone put on a mask and was like, we want to keep this right. Because that day at midnight, the mask ban was supposed to be implemented. So you had less than 24 hours notice and it went into force the next day.
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Strategy five, division of labor. This again is something that I think is very interesting and uniquely Hong Kong, very uniquely Hong Kong like the B water strategy. So there's this idea, climbing the hill in different ways.
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This is again a lesson that people learn from 2014 because post 2014 and also in 2014 itself, one of the biggest weaknesses of the pro-democracy movement was that there was a lot of internal division. People really disagreed over tactics and there were fights over who was leading the movement and who should be listened to
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and what the right strategy was. People have now kind of gone to the opposite extreme, but people are saying, whatever you do, everyone is climbing the mountain. So everyone's trying to get to the top and everyone's using their own ways of getting there and everyone's using their own path essentially, hence the mountain imagery.
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I think one example that really illustrates this very clearly was a person who's kind of middle-aged and works in the finance industry in Hong Kong. So they're very well off, have profited from the system as it exists, but also support the protests. And they said, I did not get involved in the protesters' destructive actions and I would never, but I will try my best to give them more support
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in delivering materials, donations and my presence. So you can see that there's a very clear differentiation between the goal that people have and kind of like the methods. There's a lot of people who say I disagree with those methods, but essentially I will not undermine people who are working towards our same goal, the five demands, in different ways.
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This is also something that's notable because in 2016, violence was something that was condemned. I cannot speak to that many other contexts, but for example, in the US, where I study and similarly in Germany, once protesters use violence, even if it is just destruction of things, often there is a lot of pushback
56:20
and people say that has delegitimized you. This is something that is not really working that well in Hong Kong anymore. So there are clearly people who disagree with vandalism and also there are people who are against the protesters because of vandalism, that's very clear. Based on the polls, I would say maybe 30, 40%, but they'd have to check the exact numbers, but there are a lot of people who say, even if I disagree with you, I will still support you
56:42
because our overall goal is what is most important. I wanna give two examples quickly of how this can work. So one example of this is that people have a pretty,
57:02
have gained an increasingly economic understanding of how politics works. So rather than saying we just wanna change laws, they also say we need to attack, for example, and we need to hold accountable companies that are supporting the government and we need to make people and government supporting companies feel the pain
57:23
for essentially their political support for them. So people have started boycotting stores that don't support the protests. And again, this is something that is all collected online where you have these incredible resources where you have entire maps so you know you can make these custom Google Maps. So there's custom Google Maps that tell you which stores in Hong Kong support the protests.
57:42
And there's entire lists for different sectors where, for example, like for food, it says these stores are for us and these stores are against us. And one of the people I spoke to was incredibly amazed at this. They're almost 40 years old. They've lived in Hong Kong for a long time and were often very frustrated with how unpolitical the city was.
58:01
But they said now it's the exact opposite and everything has become political. So they said wherever you get your lunch, where you get your coffee, even what kind of public transport you take, everything is now political and everything you use to show which political side you're on. And the idea is really to essentially hurt stores that much, that it becomes unviable to be against the protest movement economically.
58:22
Some people also use the lists for essentially vandalism against stores. This has especially been seen with, for example, Starbucks, because the people who own the Starbucks franchise in Hong Kong have very vocally opposed the protests. And so in some cases, that means also hurting them financially by throwing in windows.
58:46
Another example was the same person who I spoke to had, by the time I spoke to them a couple of weeks ago, stopped going out to protests. And this really surprised me because I met them during the protests in 2014. And I thought if there was one person who's middle-aged
59:02
and who would still go out, then that's you in terms of the people who I know. But they were like, well, I decided that I have different skills and that my design skills are something that I can use better in a different place. And so because at the time people were already working towards the district council elections and they were still working, I don't know what, like 60 hour weeks or something crazy.
59:21
But they decided that they would start working with a campaign for one of the local, for one of the people who was a candidate for the district council, who was a person who had never been in politics before. And this interview was like, well, I can help this person. I'm going to be able to help them get elected. And so they went essentially did social media and like a lot of campaigning and designing for them.
59:40
And that's kind of like a good sign. Like, I think that's a good example for the different types of effort that went into that district council election victory as well. So there's all these people who made a choice that this is something that they care about. And that again, they're all climbing the mountain in different ways. And these people decided that their way is supporting local politicians to get.
01:00:00
elected into the district councils. The other thing is that this division of labour doesn't only happen in terms of what you choose that you're doing, but there's also an incredibly sophisticated and very well-defined division of labour, so this is kind of like a representation of kind
01:00:22
of what the movement is supposed to be like. So there's this idea that we're all Hong Kongers and we're all part of this movement and it doesn't matter what we're doing, we're all part of the same thing, so that's kind of like a diversity that gets represented a lot. And that kind of appears in a lot of protest art as well. The most distinctive group that you've definitely seen are front-liners.
01:00:41
So these are people who wear kind of like the most recognisable uniform, they're all in black so they cannot be identified, they wear a gas mask to protect themselves against pepper spray and tear gas, goggles for the same reason, hard hats. They often have gloves to be able to grab tear gas canisters that are being thrown
01:01:02
at them. In some cases, they have water bottles to extinguish the tear gas canisters to essentially avoid being affected by the tear gas itself, and this is kind of like how you signal that you're, sometimes they're called the braves, but essentially this is about as radical as you can look as part of the Hong Kong protest movement.
01:01:21
These are the people who are going to be in clashes with police. You can see that one of them is about to probably grab a brick, but these are front-liners. One particular type of front-liner are the ... I'm missing the English word right now. The people are supposed to extinguish fires, usually.
01:01:44
Firefighters, yes, sorry, firefighters, except instead of fighting fire, they're fighting tear gas. So on the right, you can see someone from an incredibly iconic scene where someone used like a metal tin that you usually use to steam fish, and he extinguished the tear
01:02:02
gas with water and then put the metal tin just on the tear gas, and people were making fun for how protest-ready people are just by having a regular Chinese kitchen. On the left, this is a reference to a strategy that people have been using where essentially they put a traffic cone on a tear gas canister the moment they find it.
01:02:22
One person holds the traffic cone, one person puts water in at the top to extinguish the tear gas, and then some cases people also put it into plastic bags that are full with water to extinguish the tear gas, and in some cases throw it back at the police. And I think I have a video of this happening, actually.
01:03:13
It's also ... You can see that I didn't do this for the first time, right? So they've been doing this for a while.
01:03:22
It's sad in many ways that these are young people who have to do that and who feel that it's like a thing that they need to do to be able to be heard, but it's also something that was a video out of Chile a couple of weeks ago where essentially Chilean protesters were using a similar strategy to extinguish tear gas, and someone who was apparently from Chile posted it somewhere saying, thank you, Hong Kong. So clearly there's been some like, oh, let's see how we can adapt these strategies
01:03:43
for what's happening in Chile itself, which I think is an important thing to look at as well, because in some ways Hong Kongers have learned from other places, but also now people are looking at Hong Kong and looking at these strategies and adapting them in other instances. Another important group are peaceful protesters. I'm very thankful that someone memed all of them, all of the important groups, so
01:04:03
I have these like standard images that I can use, and this is really the only thing that you kind of like need for like a peaceful protester, yeah, just need a surgical mask, maybe a hat to protect your identity a bit more, and that's it. You just need to go out on the street. These are the people who frontliners in many ways feel like they're defending.
01:04:20
I was talking to a few people who are still in high school and who essentially are frontliners and who have been in clashes with the police directly, and when I ask them why they're doing it, they're saying, I don't even know whether we can get our political aims, but the very least I can do is I can be one more person who is there, and with the police advances, I'm going to be one more person who can make sure that the police doesn't get to the peaceful protesters behind me, because they're not equipped
01:04:43
to deal with tear gas and they're not equipped to deal with pepper spray, so I will be here and I will give them enough time so they can retreat and go home. So there's a lot of kind of like lionization of frontliners because they're kind of like
01:05:03
the heroes of the movement in a way, they're the flashy heroes, but also everyone knows that the movement is not going to succeed in any way and wasn't able to keep going because just of frontliners, right? So peaceful protesters are essentially the heart of the movement as well and are the people who keep coming out in numbers.
01:05:21
So there's a lot of reminders that we all need to work together. This is kind of this idea of we cannot be divided, so it goes back to this idea we all climb the mountain in different ways, right? So we're all important. And in both of these kind of like pieces of art, you can see now, right? You can see the recognizable frontliner on the left in both cases because he has the hard hat and a bit more gear, kind of like ready to get into a fight with the police,
01:05:43
but next to the frontliner, you in both cases have someone who just put on a mask, maybe came straight from the office, maybe straight from school, and those people are working together because if you had only one of those, you probably wouldn't be able to keep going for half a year.
01:06:04
Another group that I think is really interesting is logistics because people have now adapted all these strategies to how they can kind of like deal with the things that police is throwing at them. So a year ago, or even a couple of months ago, tear gas was still something that kind of like made people leave and made people go away.
01:06:23
A water cannon would scare people away, but people have really adapted and tear gas doesn't do that much in Hong Kong anymore, to be very honest. One person who is 19 and who I talked to, and I was like, doesn't the tear gas sting? And they were like, well, the first time, yes, but then you get used to it and you just keep going.
01:06:44
And to do that, you need kind of all this gear, right, like you need to be equipped, you need to have hard hats, you need to have all these umbrellas, and so there are people kind of like in the background who are collecting material near big protest sites where they know there will be protests and they're carrying them kind of like in cartons. In some cases, they're collecting different types of shields, and so when it comes to clash
01:07:01
with the police, they make sure that stuff gets passed on to the front lines. I didn't include it in the presentation, but there's incredible videos of in some cases maybe a kilometer-long human chain where you just have like tons of peaceful protesters like passing things on to make sure that things get to the people who are in the clash with the police. And logistics are the people who make sure that the stuff is around and is kind of
01:07:20
like at these collection points and is then given to the people who really need it. It's also one person I spoke to who does a lot of logistics said, I'm not someone who would fight with the police in this movement, but I still want to give some help, and so I decided to manage resources such as medical resources or purchase gear. And so medical resources, for example, might be like saline solution, which you can use
01:07:41
to wash people's eyes out if they have been affected by pepper spray or tear gas. And so this is someone who said, I am not a front-liner, and I'm not going to be part of that, but I will be right there. I think these people are doing important work. I'm going to do exactly what I can, what's in my power to make sure that they have what they need.
01:08:10
First aiders are incredibly important in the movement as well because people have started to mistrust hospitals a lot because people are worried that the government might go and get their hospital records. So if they get injured as part of a clash with police, that might include getting beaten
01:08:23
up by police. There have been people, there was one person who was shot in the chest and who tried to run from the police, almost succeeded but then was arrested. So if someone like that doesn't trust the hospitals, doesn't go to a hospital, first aiders are the ones who are going to treat those injuries.
01:08:41
So these people are around, are visibly marked as first aiders and make sure that people get as much medical treatment as they need to the extent that they are able to. There was one incredibly hard situation for them, I think, in November when people were occupying the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and there was a real battle where you basically had a front line, like you kind of see it in like battle, like in like movies where
01:09:04
someone is trying to take in a castle or something like that, right? So you had a real battle line where people kept getting hit and injured, and first aiders kept running in and out, grabbing people and carrying them to a big sports field that was just full of injured people where they were treating all of them. And all of these are volunteers.
01:09:29
There's more people in the background, and I could keep going about this, my friends will be able to attest to the fact that I can talk about this for an hour or longer. I think one other group of people that I wanted to quickly talk about are the people who drive
01:09:42
like the school buses. School buses are code for cars that go to protest sites and pick people up. So for example, when the people were stuck, all people were stuck at the airport, you could see that literally thousands of Hong Kongers grabbed their own cars and just drove out and said we will pick people up.
01:10:02
So they post on Telegram and say, hey, I'm a parent, I'm going to pick up my children. I have space for three people. And then there's also code for, so this is why I use that image because it's like the parents taking care of the kids. It's a very wholesome imagery. And they have this code essentially where they're saying, if you say that you have
01:10:26
stationery in your car, that means that you have clothes to change in. So if someone is wearing all black, you have some other clothes that they can change in. So there's entire Telegram channels where just every post is just someone going from A to B. It says when they're leaving, it says how much space they have.
01:10:40
It also often says if there's a female driver. So people can feel safe. And to make sure that you don't get accidentally picked up by undercover cops, people are maintaining an in official database of cars that have identified as undercover cop cars. And so there's a Telegram bot. So these posts, once you have someone's license plate, you go to the bot and you're like,
01:11:01
is this a cop? And the bot will tell you yes or no. In addition to that, you have thousands, countless working groups where people are just kind of working around the clock.
01:11:22
This is an example of a PR translation working group that basically translated this particular poster from originally Chinese into a bunch of languages. One of them is German on the left, another is Korean on the right. It says Hong Kong is facing a humanitarian crisis.
01:11:40
What I think is interesting about this is that some of these groups are basically working around the clock. So if something happens in Hong Kong during the day, by evening often protest art comes out that kind of like is reframing an incident or is trying to explain what protesters did if they feel like they need to explain themselves. And then while Hong Kongers sleep, people who live in Europe but who many cases are
01:12:01
still from Hong Kong and people who live in the United States work through their evenings and through their mornings, so by the time Hong Kongers wake up, they often can have these messages in different languages, and so this happened during the airport protest where on the 13th of the morning, people just woke up and had posters in like ten different
01:12:21
languages that explained what was happening on Kong, printed them and went to the airport straightaway at 8 a.m. I want to share one more story because I think this is really one of the most gut-wrenching examples of what people have been able to achieve just by co-operating and also by being
01:12:43
completely anonymous together, where during the siege at the polytechnic university in Hong Kong, so when hundreds of people were stuck on the university and didn't want to go out, Susan Sattelene reported for Quartz that there was at least one person and probably more who managed to get out from the university through the sewers, so
01:13:03
this person went down into the sewers wading through probably kind of like chest-high wastewater in the dark, not knowing where they were going, and then actually were able to escape the university that way, because they were talking to people on Telegram who had dug up maps of the Hong Kong switch system and directed this person.
01:13:21
They were telling them this is where you go. You hit kind of like a crossroads, and then you take a left, like this is where you take a right, and so in the last moment, actually, their plans were changed, and so they were told you cannot go to the exit we initially told you because we've seen police there, right? Telegram channels again, like all of this comes back together, so they're watching
01:13:40
police movement that you can't go there, there's police there, instead we need to send you to a different exit, so he goes to that exit, and there's someone there waiting for him who lifts the lid, lets him out of the fucking sewage system, and then there's people waiting for them there, a school bus, who grabs them and takes them somewhere else, and that's how he got out of the university, and he still doesn't know
01:14:01
any of those people. They're all still strangers. The strategy number six that I think is important are counter-narratives. So the Hong Kong government and the Beijing government have a very clear framing for
01:14:22
how they want to frame the entire protest, right? So they want to say these are vandals, these are rioters, they have no legitimate demands, they just want to destroy things, nothing about them is legitimate or democratic or politically justified in any way. People realise that maybe memes are nice, but memes are maybe not enough, so part
01:14:41
of the movement actually started creating a citizen's press conference, where people anonymously basically hold a press conference, and you can see that press is coming there, right, because you have all the official mics, and so all these media outlets are actually going there and talking to them, and in the background you have someone who is doing interpreting this into sign language, because they essentially know we need
01:15:02
to at least somehow try to get control of the narrative again ourselves to make sure that it's not just the government who gets to define what is happening. The last strategy that I want to talk about is related to both counter-narratives, but also to organising and mobilising, which is the last thing that I want to talk about.
01:15:24
So as an introduction to that, I want to show you a video that in many ways I think demonstrates some of the capacity that people have been able to build. What I'm going to show you is a protest anthem called Glory for Hong Kong. As I said earlier, Hong Kong was a city that was first under colonial rule by the British,
01:15:43
and is now under rule by China, without people really getting a choice at any point. So in early September, people crowd-sourced an anthem for the city online, and someone composed it and published it on 11 September, and several days later, someone had arranged
01:16:01
it for an orchestra, and right after that, this video went online.
01:18:06
Everyone who is interested in the meaning of that song, I would recommend that you go and read Vivian Chow's article about it in the New York Times, because she wrote from a musical and cultural perspective about what it meant for her to have grown up in a city where there was never a song that she identified with, and for this to be
01:18:21
the first time there was an anthem for what she considers her home. So I would recommend you all go and read that. In the long term, a lot of the strategies that I talked about have been able to sustain the movement and have been able to help people and individuals evade arrest in the short term, but the question is how sustainable this entire movement is in the long run.
01:18:42
I think the orchestra is like a fun, they call themselves Black Blorchestra, by the way, it's a fun example of how people can just get tonnes of people together and suddenly come up with an entire orchestra and film that entire thing with a pretty good production value. I just downloaded a shitty version.
01:19:02
So that's happening, right? People are building all these groups, building all these new ties. A lot of times they're building these ties with people who they don't know and who are anonymous to them, but in a lot of other cases, one person who I spoke to said that essentially they've started exercising together as a neighbourhood, because he says that we cannot trust the police to save us, and if someone from the government comes
01:19:23
to attack us, we want to be able to defend ourselves. So he's also like organising this in kind of like small neighbourhood groups. So there's all these people who have lived in an anonymous major metropolis for years and probably barely talked to each other, but who are now basically getting together and starting to do things together and trying to keep these things going to protect
01:19:41
themselves. Another thing is that there has been a push for building and creating unions. So labour unions, more than 24, have been formed this entire year across a range of sectors. There were several attempts at organising strikes in Hong Kong over the summer. A lot of those weren't very successful because people still went to work in many
01:20:01
cases, but so people are essentially organising more long-term and trying to get people to join unions so they have organising capacity for the long run. Again, this is a picture from the district council elections. It's incredibly important to recognise the organisational capacity that went into the
01:20:21
elections. There are all these people out there now that know how to mobilise and have now partaken in a political campaign, an electoral campaign, and all of that is knowledge that now exists amongst young people and older people, and all of these are organisations and things that hopefully people will be able to build on in the long run.
01:20:42
So what next? I think it's important to recognise that what people have been able to do in Hong Kong is incredible from an organisational capacity, and also has meant that people have given up a lot in many cases. People have gone broke. There are young people who have been kicked out of their homes by their parents because they don't see eye-to-eye politically.
01:21:00
Some people have just spent all their money in protest gear. Other people are facing charges of up to ten years in prison, and because of the incredible backlog might not know for a very long time what is going to happen. People are scared of the police, and so one big question is how things will be able to keep going, and I think one thing that, if you talk to someone from Hong Kong who is part of the protest movement, that's also incredibly important to recognise that
01:21:23
everyone in Hong Kong, also people on both sides, right, like everyone in Hong Kong, these are people, and these are not people who are just kind of like acting out like a geopolitical game like risk or something, but these are real people who are really going to the limits in many cases. More specifically, there is a rally planned and announced for January 1st.
01:21:45
They're still waiting for their letter of no objection, which means they don't know yet whether it will be a legal rally or not, so this is really going to be them trying, the movement trying to show that they're going to be able to keep going through 2020 and maybe longer.
01:22:00
The unrest and discontent is not going to go away. I think that's very clear. So many people have been politicised over the past few months, and so many people have lost trust in their government, and in very fundamental institutions such as hospitals and the police, and that's something that's not just going to go away, because that's going to be a problem that will haunt the government for a long time to come, especially,
01:22:23
remember that almost 100 per cent of people under 16 oppose the extradition bill, and those people are deeply involved and incredibly politicised, so, if anything, the people who are coming up are more anti-government or more willing to go protest than anyone who is already out in the streets. The things that you can do, go and follow Hong Kong journalists and support them.
01:22:46
If you're on Twitter, Laurel Chor and Hong Kong Hermit, I've linked both of them, have Twitter lists where you can follow local journalists who have been living in Hong Kong, who grew up in the city, who have been reporting on the protests for months and some cases for years. A lot of these people have already reported on the Umbrella Revolution, so go and follow
01:23:04
those people because they essentially have the best information. They speak the language, and they will be able to report first-hand. You'll also run into those crazy live-stream websites. You should also follow and donate to Hong Kong Free Press, which is an independent media outlet that was formed after the Umbrella protests, and that's been doing some incredible
01:23:20
coverage. They hired a really good photographer who took a bunch of the pictures that you saw here, and she also was arrested by police at some point for participating in a riot. So yes, go do that. Follow those people. This is a story that is not over, and it will not be over any time soon, so the only thing I can tell you is to go to the source and listen to the people who are
01:23:43
right on the ground. Last but not least, I can only speak about things that pertain to China because that's my area of expertise, or in this case, Hong Kong. But this has been a year with a lot of protest movements all over the world, and Hong Kongers are by far from the only people who went onto the streets at great, immense personal
01:24:01
risk to stand up to their governments. In India, in student protests against the anti-Muslim exclusion law, I think 17 or 20 people were killed in the past few weeks, and the Iraqi government just gunned down protesters that went out to protest for political rights. People have been protesting in Chile, in Iran, in Syria, in a bunch of places.
01:24:23
And those things might not be as well covered, necessarily, as Hong Kong. I certainly don't read about them as much, but that's also my personal interest, but I would encourage you, I think if you care about the things that people are doing in Hong Kong that they're trying to achieve, I would urge you to inform yourself about the things that are happening in other places as well.
01:24:41
And in a lot of cases, people who are in these places recognise that they stand for similar things, right? They want their governments to listen to them and they want to be represented. On the left, you have a graffiti from Lebanon, where in the middle, you can see the Hong Kong slogan, five demands, not one less, in Chinese, stenciled on the wall. And on the left and the right, you have Iraqi and Lebanese protest slogans that call
01:25:01
for all corrupt government officials to resign, regardless of which ethnic and religious faction they're part of. Whereas on the right, you have a protest poster from someone from Hong Kong who just lists all the protests, that they say, we're fighting for the same thing, we're fighting for freedom and justice, and so we should feel like we're part of the same thing.
01:25:22
And so I just want to urge you that if you care about any of these things, then you should probably care about it in more than one place. Thank you.
01:25:58
Thank you, Katherine. I don't know if I told you, but I asked for this shift specifically because of your
01:26:04
talk. Thank you. It was everything I expected, and more. So we have time for two or three questions. We'll take one question from the internet, because there is a lot of people who couldn't make it. Yeah.
01:26:21
So it seems that Telegram is used a lot during protests, and one of the ICU users mentions that it's centralized, and asks if there were any problems with this centralized and controlled thing, and if there are attempts to move this to decentralized communication
01:26:43
solutions. Thank you. So I think, oh, I just saw that I misspelled MIT in my email. That's very smart. The Telegram question is important. So Telegram has actually come under details attacks for multiple times. The first time was in the summer, and there was another time later, like a couple
01:27:03
of weeks ago. So that shows clearly that Telegram is a vulnerability in some ways, right? In the summer after the details attack, Telegram said that they think it was a nation-state actor just based on the volume of the details attack. So that is kind of like a point of vulnerability. In reaction to that and another details attack on LAHKG, there was some discussions
01:27:26
of moving to other platforms, but those ultimately didn't pan out. So I think organizationally it is probably not ideal to be working on a centralized platform, but the crucial question is whether you have alternatives that people can get on easily.
01:27:40
Because you're organizing so many people, and you really want like the smallest amount of friction possible, and I think that is the biggest challenge. So there were kind of like proposals for using different apps that, for example, work without internet for the worst case scenario that the government might switch off the internet in Hong Kong. But my read is that those ultimately didn't pan out because those are not necessarily apps that people are used to that might not be as easy to use, and also because there
01:28:04
is kind of like an institutional stickiness. So I think it would probably take some kind of disaster like either telegram getting blocked or taken down in Hong Kong, or kind of like being completely taken down by details attack for people to actually switch to another platform. So I think I agree from a security perspective it is probably not ideal, but the biggest
01:28:24
challenge is the organizational challenge of getting people to move wholesale to a completely different platform. Thank you. And now one question from the audience. Microphone number three. It's the last question, so make it count.
01:28:41
That's a lot of responsibility, but I really wanted to ask about police brutality. You mentioned that people were surprised by police brutality, but how can it be surprised? So it's only new police force, continental China, who became suddenly brutal, or people
01:29:03
were not paying attention, or was police brainwashed? Thank you. This is a good question, and I don't think we have absolute answers to this. The reason people were surprised is that the Hong Kong police force used to have an incredibly good reputation as a police force that was very reasonable and appropriate in its use of force, and that's clearly a reputation that's completely gone down
01:29:24
the drain over the past few months. The thing about police coming in from China is something there are repeated reports, but they're always incidental, and I haven't really seen any large-scale verified reports that there was any major influx of mainland police officers into the Hong Kong police, so it's probably not that.
01:29:42
I think one thing that people observed after the Umbrella Movement was that there was kind of like a siege mentality within the police itself, so that they kind of felt like they were being assaulted by the entirety of society, so it's possible that that was kind of like the formation of like increasingly strictly drawn lines and camps where the police felt like they're under assault from everyone else and that they're
01:30:03
justified in using force, which might be one of the explanations why they've also been so opposed to kind of like an independent investigation. In addition to that, another thing is that they've also been completely operating at capacity, so we know that they've paid, I think, 900 million Hong Kong dollars
01:30:23
or something, an absurd amount in overtime pay to the police. So I think one thing is also that these are people who in many cases are not trained in dealing with the events that they're supposed to be dealing with, and so it seems that they are possibly reacting by lashing out and in more violent ways than like would probably be appropriate. So it might just also be a lack of training, but there's no definitive answer.
01:30:43
Thank you. Thanks. Katherine Tai, who has been heroically standing here for 90 minutes talking nonstop, which is hard, people, so a huge round of applause.