THE young people of Hong Kong are demanding for the dignity to have their own electoral slate of their own making and not for a political party in Beijing to make it for them. This is an abstract right that even Americans do not enjoy. Ordinary Americans do not decide on the list of candidates from which they can choose on Election Day. Two political parties and billionaires do that for them.
The Occupy Central movement is unique. It is, self-consciously, the model of the future it seeks to achieve. For one, it is composed of the future: the hope-filled young, not the hope-bereft old. They are neat, well-groomed and clean, and, thus, self-respecting. They made provisions to spray the air with water and deodorants to relieve themselves from the heat and subdue the odor from exposure and exertion. They were well-behaved. Hundreds of thousands of protesters left not a scrap of litter in the places they occupied, and even sorted out recyclable materials, Reuters said.
They did not sacrifice schoolwork for social action; this was not an excuse to goof off, as the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) suggested when it reported that Hong Kong was going back to work. They did their schoolwork while doing social action: on their butts or on their feet, day and night, on cold and wet or hot and dry pavement, so as not to fall back on their studies.
They wielded umbrellas against the rain and the tear gas, and not placards for the public to read, because they are the public and they will not let anything rain on their parade.
They passed around food donations so that none would go hungry, like in the Hong Kong they hope for one day. By protesting in a brave and gentle manner, they prefigured the society they want to have. Show it, don’t say it, as Ernest Hemingway had advised to aspiring writers.
Beijing was worried; so were its acolytes on Wall Street and Lombard Street. Protesters getting in the way of their business as usual have discredited, by their sterling example on the streets, the usual excuse dredged up by business and the government to suppress them: that demonstrations dirty the streets and cause traffic. These young people left no dirt behind, and they did not get in the way of working people. They occupied mostly the smartest and, therefore, the “baddest” parts of Hong Kong—the central district of government and finance—so that the people most inconvenienced were not those who work, but those who plunder.
The young had come out in the hundreds of thousands. When gassed, they choked, but they stood their ground. Roughed up by triads, they called the media to witness; and when the government gave the ultimatum for the crowd to clear out by Monday, they turned out in the hundreds of thousands last Saturday.
Among social-media sites, Instagram was singled out and banned because that’s how the young were sending out the message: through pictures, showing how they stand and not by the sounds of what they say. You can see what they wanted by looking at them: a Hong Kong that is clean and polite, with teeth straight (unlike those of British bankers—“nice suits, bad teeth,” a Twitter friend once summed them up) and not tobacco-stained (like those of the triads sent by the government to stab the boys and grope the girls).
They showed, in their persons and by their conduct, the Hong Kong they want to have: clean, polite, loving, caring and, above all, equal—really equal, without some more equal than others, like the pigs in Animal Farm.
Equal means not the China with which the West is so enamored—the China of billionaires hiding loot in British and American banks—but the Hong Kong of the young who are living by their example of hard work, consistent academic application, and a placid but indomitable will on the streets, which is a victory in itself. Last Monday a student stood up and shook the hand of a policeman as a signal to let go a group of policemen who were holed up in their station, so they could go back to their homes. The most powerful government on earth—like Josef Stalin was the most powerful man on Earth, according to those on the postwar French intellectual scene—had asked for some concessions, which the students had graciously given. Given the disparity in power, that is already a victory.
Sure, they went, as the WSJ gleefully announced, back to work. What do you do after winning a battle? Press on a redundant advantage? The message was successfully delivered. Beijing dared not use the force it commands, which is like saying the United States dares not bomb its rogue assets in Syria, lest one of those in the Islamic State survives to tell the truth of its connection.
My bet: Beijing will pick mostly, if not exclusively, Hong Kong candidates who are vocally partial to Hong Kong autonomy for the electoral slate from which Hong Kong will pick its next leader. The Occupy Central movement achieved its objective: to draw the line that Beijing would not dare cross. Up to here for now, and no more; later on, pushing the line back farther. Back to a British Hong Kong?
Never.
The Chinese will never return to the ignominy, neglect, corruption and the sheer, mind-boggling incompetence of fat, drunken white men and, if you will, the benign brutality of British rule, in the crooked teeth of which Chinese refugees made Hong Kong the leading manufacturing and commercial power in Asia.