The Hong Kong revolution won't back down
One year ago, the Hong Kong academic community sparked a huge protest movement for universal suff rage. Now that the Umbrella Revolution has been dissolved, scholars and students are facing a serious backlash. But a revolutionary flame still burns.
His trial is due next month. What does he expect? ‘There will be a verdict, no matter what. The government is looking for political revenge,’ Alex Chow (25) says. The comparative literature and sociology student at Hong Kong University was one of the leaders of the Umbrella Revolution – the movement of civil disobedience that shook up Hong Kong one year ago.
Hong Kong citizens were rallying for universal suffrage after Beijing decided that a committee would screen candidates for the election for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2017. Critics expected the committee to be packed with Beijing loyalists, presenting an obstacle to true democracy. More than one hundred thousand Hong Kong citizens went out to the streets to defy the Hong Kong and Beijing authorities in protest marches, and to demand free and open elections. This culminated in a sit-in at three of Hong Kong’s major arteries that lasted for 79 days.
It is undeniable that this protest movement was initiated by Hong Kong academics. Already in January 2013, Benny Tai, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, published an opinion article in the Hong Kong Economic Journal. He proposed an act of civil disobedience – to occupy the city’s central square – if the proposals for universal suffrage weren’t serious enough.
In September 2014, the Hong Kong Federation of Students, with Alex Chow as its president, together with Scholarism, a protest movement of high school students lead by the seventeen-year-old Joshua Wong, called on students to boycott classes in order to give ‘a fi nal warning to the authorities’.
‘If they continue to act against the public will, we will step up to stronger action,’ the student’s declaration read. Many professors publicly expressed that the students had a legitimate reason not to attend classes. After five days of student protests, Benny Tai announced that the long-awaited occupation was underway.
Academic freedom
If the Hong Kong government is, as Chow has said, ‘seeking political revenge’, how would thi s affect the academic community that was at the forefront of the Umbrella Revolution?
‘The police were waiting for the right opportunity, so they let everything die down,’ Surya Deva, Associate Professor at the School of Law at the City University of Hong Kong told AFP in August after student leaders Alex Chow and Joshua Wong were charged for their role in the protests. The charges were fi led nine months after things in Hong Kong turned back to normal.
During a student protest on September 26th last year, Chow was amongst a group of protestors that climbed over a three meter high fence into Civic Square, which is part of the government complex in Hong Kong’s Admiralty District.
He is charged for taking part in ‘unlawful assembly’ and could be sent to prison. But Chow is not afraid. ‘We have the right to use Civic Square and it is arguable whether it is an offence to protest,’ Chow says.
Whilst he doesn’t fear conviction, Chow emphasises that academic freedom has been restricted in many ways. He mentions Benny Tai, who was banned from supervising researchers earlier this month because he was suspected of receiving funds on Occupy-related research activities without notifying the university. The law professor responded by saying that he has not violated any regulations and that the political considerations behind the ban were clear.
Chow also mentions Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong and the convener of the Alliance for True Democracy (a coalition of groups campaigning for universal suffrage). In May, the City University demoted him from a chair professor to a regular professor after accusing him of plagiarism. The demotion happened just three months before his pension was due. Cheng stopped short of accusing the university of punishing him for his activism.
‘No one has evidence that this happened because they were activists, but one can argue against the decisions made,’ former student-leader Alex Chow says diplomatically. He sees an important role for the press in these cases. ‘Benny Tai and Joseph Cheng were getting a lot of criticism from pro-Beijing media.’
Already in summer 2014, newspapers were giving extensive coverage to the Joseph Cheng plagiarism case. This seemed odd to Cheng: ‘If it was “just” an academic accused of plagiarism, why should it be headline news for three days?’ he told the Times Higher Education.
He was not the only one worrying about the role of the press. A number of scholars believe they are targeted by media smear campaigns from pro-communist newspapers loyal to Beijing. In February, they wrote a public letter asking for the media to stop their attacks and to guard their independence. The letter has been signed by more than 1,000 students and professors.
Bottom-up
Although Joshua Wong already said that Hong Kong does not need another Occupy movement, and Benny Tai has expressed regrets that he did not end the sit-ins at an earlier stage, this pressure has far from snuffed out the revolutionary flame within the academic community. The movement has just changed tactics. Instead of openly defying the Hong Kong central authorities and Beijing, its leaders are aiming for a more structural and broader reform movement. ‘You have to nurture different tactics to put pressure on the government,’ Alex Chow states. Chow himself has moved his engagement from the student federation to the Community Citizens Charter, a group of scholars and activists that wants to ‘change civil society as a whole’.
The Charter movement wants to foster a bottom-up approach. ‘With the Umbrella Movement, people saw that support could be highly mobilised, but that there was little connection between these people,’ Chow noticed. In order to create a connection and to nurture a democratic culture, the movement organises public debates and creates citizen assemblies in all 18 districts of Hong Kong.
This bottom-up approach has already proven to be effective, Hong Kong-based American journalist Ariel Conant observes. ‘More students are getting involved by voicing their opinions,’ she says. Some of the members of the Charter movement are running for the district council elections in November. ‘There’s enough public support,’ Alex Chow says. He thinks it will prevent him from getting convicted for his role in the protests. This would be highly benefi cial to him, since he already expressed interest in pursuing his studies abroad.
