Brian Kai-ping Leung took off his mask because he wanted to be heard.
The 25-year-old had joined hundreds of protesters charging into Hong Kong’s legislative building Monday night.
Most wore face masks to hide their identities in case of arrest as they surged into the legislative chamber and began spray-painting the walls with anti-government messages.
But after an initial surge of excitement, people started to wander off. Leung worried. If all the protesters did was vandalize the legislative building without making their demands clear, they could be easily framed as aimless, angry rioters.
He jumped on a table and pulled off his mask, calling on people to stay and continue to occupy the building, or at least make a declaration before dispersal.
“Someone has to define what we are doing now, instead of just an explosion of energy and anger,” Leung said in an interview Wednesday. “I don’t want the damage to overshadow the demands that we make.”
Two days after the brief seizure of Hong Kong’s legislative building on the 22nd anniversary of the former British colony’s handover to Chinese control, protesters were still fighting to define what they did.
It will be hard for pragmatic, moderate citizens of Hong Kong to look past images of masked youth smashing glass and breaking gates and listen, even as many sympathize with the protesters’ core frustrations.
The takeover came after hundreds of thousands of peaceful marchers protested an extradition bill that would allow the semiautonomous territory to send suspected criminals to mainland China for trial.
Opponents of the bill say it reflects Beijing’s growing influence over Hong Kong, which more than 2 million citizens rejected in mass marches in June.
Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, suspended the bill after violent clashes broke out between police and protesters on June 12. But suspension didn’t satisfy the protesters. They want full retraction of the bill, investigation into police violence, and, among other demands, universal suffrage.
“The lack of a democratic election is the root of all evils,” stated part of the “Admiralty Declaration” that Leung read on behalf of the protesters in the legislative building on Monday.
Police said Wednesday that 12 people had been arrested for suspected involvement in the pro-democracy protest Monday and face such charges as possession of offensive weapons, unlawful assembly and assaulting a police officer.
Leung Kai Chi, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studies community identity and mobilization, said he and friends were confused by the protesters’ actions at first. There was no legislative meeting taking place at the time.
Then, the professor said, he thought of three protesters who had died in the last two weeks after leaving suicide notes in support of the anti-extradition bill movement. The legislative chamber takeover, he said, appeared to be an extension of such drastic measures.
“There’s a sense of desperation. They don’t know what else they can do,” Leung Kai Chi said.
The protesters themselves are struggling to hold together a decentralized movement that entered uncharted territory on Monday night.
Some worry that a culture of martyrdom is settling over Hong Kong’s democracy movement, especially among the young.
When police used tear gas and rubber bullets during mass protests on June 12, many of the youths didn’t go home, said local pastor Wong Siu-yung. Four churches opened their doors to protesters that night, where pastors and social workers tried to counsel crying, scared youths, many in their teens and 20s.
“They’re sad, they’re lonely, they’re very, very angry. They haven’t sorted out the emotions in their heart,” Wong said. “They don’t want go home, because what do they face? Parents who don’t understand them.”
By Monday, mental health and martyrdom had become dual themes of the movement.
Along the marching route and at the legislative building complex, candles flickered over white flowers and origami cranes at shrines to the three people who died, often referred to as “martyrs.” Volunteers set up psychological support stations and spread the word about mental health hotlines seeking to prevent suicides. A therapist scrawled her phone number on the ground.
Experts fear that glorification of the recent deaths will cause a contagious effect among already emotionally strained protesters. They’ve tried to prevent dramatization of the suicides, to little avail.
“Please don’t make it heroic and so sensational,” said Paul Yip, director of the Center for Suicide Research and Prevention at Hong Kong University.
The more protesters made heroes of those who died, the more others suffering mental health problems and feelings of helplessness might try to copy them, misled into thinking their deaths would have meaning, he said.
“These guys like to justify their deaths, and the people use their energy to continue to protest. But these feedback loops are not helpful,” Yip said. “There is no point to use these three cases to anyone’s advantage. We cannot ride on their tragedies to achieve what we want to do.”
Many protesters disagree. “If someone sacrificed their life just to make some message heard by other people, I think the correct way to respect and honor them is to spread their message, instead of covering it up,” Leung, the activist, said.
“What people are angry about is that the government ignored and covered it up and did not address them,” Leung said. To be told that those who died were suffering from issues besides the extradition bill cause was “insulting” and “really frustrating,” he added.
“It really goes back to what is the source of and who can solve the problem?” Leung said. “If the government is being responsible, if they address them respectfully, if they respond to our demands adequately, nothing is going to continue like this.”
Fernando Cheung, one of several legislators who pleaded with the protesters to remain peaceful before they charged the building and who begged them to leave once inside the chamber on Monday, said one protester told him that if only the demonstrations had done more faster, maybe the three who died might have lived.
“He felt his hand was stained with blood,” Cheung said in an interview.
Cheung had reasoned with the protesters on Monday that storming the building would be counterproductive. It would give the government fodder to label them rioters, he said, which meant potential arrest and up to 10 years in prison.
The group of protesters that wanted to charge told him they knew and accepted the consequences. Then they pushed the legislators aside and began ramming the building’s glass walls.
”They knew they were doing something that would lead to self-destruction, not only the physical destruction of the building,” Cheung said. “They wanted it anyway.”
Hong Kong’s protests are now famously leaderless. No central leadership also means that small groups can use tactics with which others disagree.
But the protesters have also pledged to support one another despite disagreement over tactics.
“If we argue, then we’re just not a team, and then we will fall…. So we remind each other all the time that we leave no man behind, and we just work toward this,” said Rachael, 24, a protester who asked that her last name not be published for fear of arrest.
She believes in peaceful protest, but went to the legislative building to support those charging in on Monday.
“I totally understand them and I wouldn’t say they are wrong," Rachael said.
Her parents thought China brought economic benefit to Hong Kong, which Rachael said didn’t matter.
“I’m trying to defend my values. It’s not about how you can bribe me with money or benefits,” she said.
“Everybody wants to be peaceful. But if we write letters and go protesting and it doesn’t work, then we have to step up and do something else,” Rachael said. “I think this is a breakthrough in Hong Kong protesting. It is another way.”
Hong Kong’s authorities and the central Beijing government were quick to condemn the building takeover as violent hooliganism on Tuesday, promising severe legal consequences. Pro-Beijing legislators quickly followed suit.
“No slogan, no demand can justify this violence,” lawmaker Regina Ip said at a news conference Tuesday.
Legislator Martin Liao dismissed the idea that desperation could justify the takeover.
“Are you saying desperation is enough to kill people?” Liao said. “We have no sympathy.”
Pro-democracy legislators outside the building Tuesday said that they didn’t condone vandalism, but also appealed to the public to try to understand the protesters’ desperation.
Anson Chan, a former chief secretary of Hong Kong, said that violence “doesn’t solve anything,” but that Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and the government should take responsibility for the “increasing sense of anger, futility and frustration.”
“It is the culmination of several years of injustice: a legislative council that is not performing its function; a government that listens only to pro-Beijing parties and ignores the rest of Hong Kong people,” Chan said.
The fundamental problem is “disconnect between the government and the vast majority of Hong Kong people, particularly the younger generation,” Chan said.
“The more you turn a blind eye to their requests, you’re not going to engender trust. Without trust, Carrie Lam is going to find it increasingly difficult to govern Hong Kong.”
Leung, who edited a student magazine during the Umbrella Movement and returned to join Hong Kong’s protests on break from pursuing a doctorate in political science at the University of Washington, said his generation had grown up in a culture of dissent.
Young protesters were not naive, Leung said. They’d seen mass arrests after the Umbrella Movement and expected the same this time around.
They knew the odds were stacked against them, he said, especially because resisting Hong Kong’s government really means taking on Beijing, the superpower behind it. They knew about Tiananmen Square too, growing up in the only part of China where the 1989 killings have not been censored.
But they’d also rejected the “utilitarian, calculating mask” that made older generations cynical.
“You know, the way of saying, what’s the probability? What’s the payoff? They put it aside and said, ‘We’re going to do what we believe is just and right,’” Leung said.
“I really believe nothing is automatic about human history. It’s human agency, human commitment, it’s collective action that defines history. You either fight and build and learn and grow and accumulate experience and improve your civil society, or you give up, and let the government do whatever they want.”
“No matter the outcome, we’re going to fight to the end.”
