*36C3 preroll music*
Herald: Our next talk is going 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're about to start the talk called "What the world can
learn from Hong Kong" 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 Katharin Tai is a University of Oxford alumni and a PhD candidate at
M.I.T.. So let's welcome Katharin on stage.
Let's give her a big round of applause.
*Applause*
All yours. Katharin Tai: Thank you. 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 about to say, despite
knowing how fast I usually speak. So quick round of applause for the translators over
there in the boxes. *applause*
So my name's Katharin. As the dear Harald, I actually don't know your name
mentioned, I'm a PhD student at M.I.T. 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 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 listening to and who I would love to put
on the stage in many cases are people who go to great lengths to protect their 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 and protest in Hong Kong but in general,
my talk will be interspersed with references 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 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. So also, we want to talk about technology because, of course,
it's C3. So it's incredibly important that we recognize the very high tech things
that the protesters have been using to defend themselves against the police, such
as catapults. *Short video starts playing*
*Group shouting* K: 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 and then I'm going to
move on and explain the political demands and the protest strategies that the
protesters have been using and in the end, I'm going to give kind of like a bit 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? Can I have light on
the audience for a second? I don't know who I talk to about this. Great. So I want
to know, 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, 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. 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 taken by a colonial power and
handed over to a different government. Ironically also it is that it's called the
return to China because the current Chinese government was not even in power
when Hong Kong was last part of what you could consider China. But at this Handover
event or before this Handover event, the British and the Chinese signed an
important document, which was the Sino- British Joint Declaration, which says
that... which essentially says 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 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 center, it did
have a lot of kind of like 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 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. It's
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 that in
89, 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 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 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. 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 97, the Chinese government decided that what Hong
Kong is going to get is essentially a government that is basically appointed by
Beijing. There's... 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 the 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. But they do not
get to elect their government. So that's where we're starting in 97. 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 following the handover as well.
Antony 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. These are just some examples. 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. People protested against it.
And the reform was stalled. In 2012, a lot of students protested against a 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. 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. 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, people went out on the streets in thousands and people
had political rallies such as out of 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 and I studied for my own mid-term exams at the Student Study Center. What
had happened was that the 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 it's plan for electoral reform and said that, yes, you
get universal suffrage, so everyone gets to vote, 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 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 there 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? They were
like, I don't know how exactly it's going to 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 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 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 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 3 booksellers who were abducted, probably by the Chinese
government, one in Thailand, one in southern China and one in Hong Kong
itself. So these are 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 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 who suddenly turn up in China, possibly making a public
confession. So that looks bad. In 2016, this is also important, people had been...
the Fishbowl Revolution happened, which is also where this beautiful piece of art
comes from. The Fishbowl Revolution was the 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. 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... like
clashes between the... like between police forces and protesters. People were tearing
up the pavement, throwing bricks at the police. Police was throwing some bricks
back. So that happened. And then from 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 want to work through the
institutions and we want to get elected into the legislative council, into the
parliament, and we want to change the system from within. But what happened was
that 6 candidates, and then later even 6 elected parliamentarians were all
disqualified for, in some cases not credibly promising that they essentially
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, are
still, 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. 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 protest it as part of an oath
taking ceremony. And those people then also got kicked out. So that looks bad.
This means if you're, I'm not going to 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 feet. And then post 97, you were
just kind of like handed over to the Chinese government. Maybe at the age of
like 4, 5, 6, depending on 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 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 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 that tell me China doesn't want 1
country, 2 systems. And if they don't want it, 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
system, and it's going to 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. 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, 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 fraud
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, okay, look, we're going to get an extradition bill so we can start
extraditing people to Taiwan, including, 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, one million people, estimated, went on the street to protest
against the extradition bill. And this is where we're starting, right? This is where
the political movement starts. I want to give you an overview of what's happened
over the past 7 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 240000. So
that's the police. The organizers say 1 million people. On June 12th, we get 40000
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 beanbag rounds against protesters that were largely
unarmed and in some cases held umbrellas 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 are protesting on July 21st. I
think this is one of the events that people really need to know about. Well,
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. 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 they were all seeing on their screens. So
everyone knew this. Like at some point there were thousands, tens of thousands of
people in this live stream. And yet the police was doing nothing. And it 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 3 people. 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 the person is politically for the government, I
cannot trust the police to come and save me. And a lot of people, especially
wealthier, more well-off, middle class people, that's the point when they change
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. So more people go out in the pouring rain. An estimated 1.7
million people protesting. August 31 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 like
illegal assembly. Maybe a riot which carries up to 10 years. 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 is the first day someone was shot with a life round. So a protester
in his 20s was shot by a policeman at close range. On October 4th, again,
thousands of people out in the streets. The government tries to ban masks, so they
went to prevent people from hiding their faces. And you see what people do in
reaction to that. They put on masks and they go out and protest because it's Hong Kong
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 saved and 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 at a clash between police and
protesters. He was hit in his face, in the head by a brick and died several days
later. Also after a coma. This was what set off the most extreme and the most
violent days of protests in Hong Kong that we have seen this year and possibly ever.
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 and
rescue the people who were inside, who were afraid of the police, who didn't want
to 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 going to happen if I go
out, but who also said we have fought for so many months at this point. So this was
November, right? So a month ago, they were saying we have fought it for so many
months, we cannot just give up. We need to at least try. One thing that happened as
part of that was that people coordinate 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. And then you have
motorcyclists waiting for them down the bridge. All of this is coordinated online.
And we don't know how many people are going out that way, but maybe 50 or 100
men were able to escape arrest.
*Video playing, human voices, photo shutters, motorcycle noises*
It's kind of like getting down and being picked up by motorbikes. The sieges
eventually ended. Kind of a lot of people were arrested. I think more than a
thousand people were arrested around the university that was occupied. But several
days later, there were district council elections, which are basically local
elections in Hong Kong and 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. *applause*
One thing that's important to bear in mind is that Hong Kong uses the 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 a electoral difference. So I think
it was 60/40. So with 60% for pro- democracy, 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, recognize that there's a lot of
organizational work that went through this. So people put in a lot of time, no
love like work to make sure that people went out and would be able to vote and the
people knew who they were voting for. So here we are in December. By the count of
the activist and writer Kong Tsung-gan there have been 6152 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. That was as of
December 23. Since then, there have been several more hundred arrests. So we're
probably getting closer, much closer to 6500, 6600. And that's where we are after
7 months of protest in Hong Kong. This is somewhat depressing, but it's also
incredibly impressive 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, no, it's fine. People
are entering real battles with police and essentially running and hiding from police
for, in some cases for hours. A lot of people have been driven to physical
exhaustion. A lot of people aren't doing well mentally because that'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 that the Chinese government
has access to, 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 they are very clear demands that the movement has. The first is a complete
withdrawal of the extradition bill. So the blog that I was talking about earlier that
was fulfilled in September. The second is the release of arrested protesters without
chargers. So they're saying we want all those 6..., more than 6000 people, those
should be released and they should be able to go home without being charged because
they were trying 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 the withdrawal
of the characterization of protests as a right of old. Any protest is a riot. This
is a bit technical, but the basic gist of it is that there is a law that the British
colonial administration introduced 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
are 14 years old 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. Let's... That's
very scary. The first demand. Which is one of the ones that has some of the most
support in the population. Currently at 72 percent as of December 8th is an
independent investigation to police brutality because people don't trust the
government watchdog. That is essentially staffed by people who the government gets
to pick. And they have has been. 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 about this. So people want an
independent investigation. I specifically did not include images of protest
brutality 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 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 beats them up or where the police just put like
stomps their foot on the head of an arrested protester who's already lying on
the ground. They're not used to like watching police kicks, like just kick
someone who's already on the ground. They're also don't, ... they're also not
used to, ... they're also not used to police arresting teenagers. So, yeah,
that's number four. And number five is real universal sufefrage. This is currently
at 70 percent support in the broader population. So the idea is, essentially,
people say, we want that democracy that promised, if you meet us in 97 or what we
think you..., like 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. But if the past seven months they've been watching a
government that essentially refused to listen to any of the protesters and
pretended like that none of their demands were in any way politically legitimate. So
now people like... now a lot of people who are fired a year ago 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. 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. Independence is not a demand
of the movement and 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 the
protest slogan..., with a protest sign. Right? So whenever you see pictures of
protest, you will see people just holding up their hands like this because they're
like five demands. And then they put up another thing 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. 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. 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. They
protect themselves so they can't be identified. And so there was a week when
people started drawing the Pokemons of the Hong Kong protests. 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. 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 and in the end 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. 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
where they have,... or you have scouting channels first, where people, when they
see police, they just submit a report to the,... like to the telegram channel. So
there are bots where you can submit reports. You say, I've seen a police unit.
It's going 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 there were
seen in. One person who I interviewed, who's middle class, doing really well. I
asked him what the protest changed about him. 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. 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 sent in are essentially turned into a map that you can
use to strategically avoid being captured by police. And also that, for example,
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 in which, ... into which areas you
really shouldn't go. And basically, if there are a lot of icons in the place,
that means a lot of stuff is happening there. If there are ..., if you have like
the puppy logo, that means police units, 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 predators, the
dinosaur logos. 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 further down
towards the lower part of the map. There's a camera sign. And so that means that
there are life feeds from that place. So if you want to know what's going on at a
particular place, a lot of Hong Kong journalists are live streaming the
protests. And so you can go and just watch a livestream to see what's really
happening on the ground. Right like there. And there's even a Web site that compiles
up to nine live streams at the same time. So you can just 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 is no way of saying how many people they've helped in
avoiding arrest. But one friend of mine who was talking to another protester 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, they sent him a screenshot of Google Maps where you could just see where
they'd 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. *Applause* I think it's worth clapping for, like because these are
people's lives, right? If there are only 10 people that got to escape police arrest
because of these things, we don't know to how many years those people could be sent
to the prison. They could just be sent its defiance. Maybe they could send us to
prison in three years. But all of that is time. 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 crowdsourcing and open sourcing all of this information.
And that's an incredible effort 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 to understand where people are coming from. People of
all ages are protesting. But it's really young people who are disproportionally
against the government and against the bill. I think especially, ... I think
earlier in June or July, the numbers were that 59 percent of people under 16 oppose
the extradition bill. That's almost 100 percent amongst people 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 you if you're a leader, you get
arrested and you get put in prison. Joshua Wong, who you may have heard of, is one of
the people who that happened to him. Another person who that happened to his
Edward Lung, who was a leading figure of the fishbowl riots of 2016. He's currently
still serving time in prison. But how do you organize a movement without having
political leaders? You well, you do the whole crowd intelligence thing. Right.
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 on Hong Kong. So you
have,... if you have no leaders, you have nobody who the government can arrest to
cripple the movement. They can maybe arrest one person. They can arrest a
hundred people. They can arrest 6000 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? So there
are telegram groups primarily and there there's also a forum called LIHGK. That's
a bit like reddit. And then people just have political discussions on those. In
addition to that, people often have groups on whatsup. People have Facebook groups
like my parents are like probably not on telegram, but kind of like the equivalent
of the children. Their generation 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. And 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,
they start sharing it further on. 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 we kind of like consensus is
often being built. At the same time, if you want to,... 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 and 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 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 someone, just like basically the
equivalent of a Reddit user 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 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 that
have maybe 60-70 thousand members. So often people use polling to essentially
make decisions. I don't know whether you know the poll function of telegram?
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. And that's how a
lot of the -- especially -- decision making and discussion on demands or
deadlines that 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,
which is an incredibly important international hub, and where they managed
to 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 and start clearing out the airport violently with
tear gas. And police was deploying increasingly more people towards the
airport. Because you have all these telegram channels, you see that people
take pictures of police. They post them and you see, "Oh, my God, all this police
is coming towards the airport, I am here. They cut off the metro. So you cannot take
the train back into the city. 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, 60000 followers and the
admins kept asking, should we stay or shall we go? And the ratios kept
changing towards leaving. And then suddenly it was 70 to 30 percent. And
people were like, OK, this is it, we're leaving. And that was kind of the moment
when you could see people changing their mind, right on the spot. There was nobody
who said, "We're now leaving," not a 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." 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 and grassroots discussion strategy;
I was talking to Chiffon Young, who's the China correspondent for the German paper,
Die Zeit and she was reporting from a small group that was building street
blockades in Hong Kong. And there they were practicing grassroots decision making
in person. So, they built a blockade. They hear police is coming, so scouts are
telling them. They leave and they run to 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. So one says "We want to go here," and the other person says "We're
going there." And maybe after five minutes of shouting, they decide; "OK, we have
reached consensus." Swarm intelligence. *laughers* 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 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 -- I think they
said it was a citizen's arrest but -- they basically tied a person to one of those
luggage carts, who they thought was an undercover policeman from China, and beat
that person up. I think he was led away in the end, but it was an incredibly ugly
scene, and when you were watching it, it felt a lot like mob violence. But what
happened after? 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 their mind." But what happened afterwards is that you saw the
same thing that I was describing earlier. People saw that this was bad. And people
agreed that that 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 that 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, they all
stood around him and started taking selfies with him. *cheerful laughter* In addition to that,
increasingly you see people... pushing people, pulling people back. And so people
are saying, "Well, this is something you can't do, you can't attack this person."
So if there's a person who's tempers may be running really high, often there will
be people around the person who say, "No, we're going to pull you back." People
tried to write guidelines. They said you need to be careful about journalists.
Don't accuse people of being fake journalists, all these things. So was a
lot of like self correction and self control coming out of that moment. I
thought that was really interesting and really important because was one sign the
course correction can happen even if you have thousands of people. But it requires
everyone to participate and requires people to be willing to essentially
interrogate the things that they had done and also possibly admit mistakes. Strategy
four: anonymity. Again, I think it may be something that hackers can empathize with.
I know there is, 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 is being eroded and all the
securities and certainties and rights you had disappearing slowly is that you don't
know, months line has moved, so you don't blow anymore. A lot of people I've spoken
to don't feel like they can speak politically anymore so they don't know
what the consequences are going to be. 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've been fired probably for the things that
they said on Facebook, such as a person who was a union leader with a Hong Kong
airline, Cathay Pacific. So, anonymity is enforced both in person and online. Also,
again, through a lot of kind of like 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, 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 you especially in these
bigger groups who cannot ever assume that there is no police in there. 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 is one channel, for example, that
started passing around, kind of like JPEGs that had instructions for how to
set your telegram settings, 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 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 nobody can see your phone
number who isn't already a contact of yours or you change this thing and that
means that your account essentially self- destructs if you're inactive for seven
days. And so in many ways, a lot of this is about the social kind of the social
enforcement and also breaking things down and making them assess as accessible as
possible. Another thing is that there's a telegram account that alerts people to
people who have been arrested. And the operational assumption is that if you've
been arrested, you're compromised. And so it posts the names and the telegram
handles the 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 maintain that
very basic security. 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 and that they have all this data
and they might be watching people. It 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 the police is probably watching,
but we don't know how much information they have access to. In real life, you can
see kind of on the lower right corner, the usual outfit that people are wearing.
These are front liners who are tend to be more directly involved in clashes with the
police. That's the people who cover their faces with usually gas masks, sometimes
just simple surgical masks. 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 identities. For
example, if people are building a street blockade, 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 are
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.
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 or people have asked individuals to delete pictures and videos when they've
seen them film them. But they've also destroyed essentially these cameras on the
metro. And again, then you will have someone kind of like 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, what
you can also see here, so people are essentially is wearing black for the
protests, which also means that you have no recognizable marks like on yourself,
like in the moment. And then when you kind of practice to be water, if you hear
police is coming, you go into a side street. And often there are people who are
not participating in the protests, like personally directly, but to, for example,
donate regular clothing. That's basically clothes like any clothes that aren't
black. This was particularly like in the summer when you had these mass protests,
like people would just bring T-shirts into metro stations. So people were often
leaving with the last train. And so people were just rushed to metro stations. You
kind of like see people changing inside streets to make sure they get out of those
very recognizable black gear and to essentially change into these clothes. So
HongKongers have basically managed to build the world's largest black block,
which is another way of maintaining anonymity.
*Applause* The government recognizes that this is a
problem for them. And they tried in October to address this by implementing a
mask ban. So they're essentially like the mask ban itself says that anyone who wears
a mask at a lawful rally or a march or an unlawful or unauthorized assembly or
during a riot. So even if you go to a peaceful protest, but you cover your face,
you can be sentenced 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 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. 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 after like in the afternoon, once people got off work, people went out
on the streets like people were just like turning up, like schoolchildren in the
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. 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 be water strategy. So there is this idea climbing the hill in
different ways. This is again a lesson that people learn from through 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 and what the right strategy was. People have now kind
of come to the opposite extreme. But people are saying whatever you do,
everyone is climbing the mountains. Everyone's trying to get to the top and
everyone's using their own ways of getting there. And everyone's using their own
their own path, essentially. Hence the mountain imagery. I think one example that
really illustrates this very clearly was a person who's kind of like 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 and 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 and 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, like 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. 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 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 people who are against the protesters
because of vandalism, that's very clear. Based on the polls, I would say maybe 30,
40 percent, but I'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, because our
overall goal is what is most important. *Applause* I want to give two examples quickly of how
this can work. So one example of this is that people have gained an increasing
economic understanding of how politics works. So rather than saying we just want
to change laws, there 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 make feel the pain 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. 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. 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. Some people also use the lists for essentially vandalism against
stores. This is special. 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. *Applause* 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 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. 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 or designing for them. And that's kind of
like a good sign. I think that's a good example for the different types of effort
that went into that district council election victory as well. Right. 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
elected into the district councils. The other thing is that this division of labor
doesn't only happen in kind of like in terms of what you choose that you're
doing, but that's also an incredibly sophisticated and very well defined
division of labor. So this is kind of like a representation of kind of what the
movement is supposed to be like. So there's this idea that like 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. And 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 frontliners. So
this is these are people who wear kind of like the most recognizable uniform,
they're all in black so they cannot be identified, they wear gas masks 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 teargas canisters that are being
thrown 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. 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 frontliners. One particular type of front liner are the – I'm missing the
English word right now – basically there's the people are supposed to extinguish
fires usually. Firefighters, yes. Sorry. Firefighters, except instead of fighting
fire, they're fighting teargas and so on the right, you can see someone from an
incredibly iconic scene where someone used like a metal tin that they usually use to
steam fish and he like he extinguished the teargas with water and then put the metal
tin just on the teargas. And people were making fun for like how protest ready
people are just by having your regular Chinese kitchen. On the left this is a
reference to a strategy that people have been using and where essentially they put
a traffic cone on a tear gas canister the moment like they find it. And so 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 twisting or tear gas and in some cases, throw it back at the police.
And I think I have a video of this happening, actually.
*Video playing* It's also you can see they didn't do this
for the first time, right? So they've been doing this for a while. 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 they clearly
there's been some like, oh, let's see how we can adopt these strategies 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 adopting
them in other instances. Another important group are peaceful protesters. I am very
thankful that someone memed all of them, all of the important group, so I have
these like standard images that I can use. And this is really the only thing that you
kind of like need for a peaceful protester. You 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 in the street. These are the people who frontliners in many ways feel like
they're defending. When I was talking to a few people who are still in high school
and who essentially are frontliners and who've been in clashes with the police
directly and when I asked 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 when 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 to deal with teargas and they're not equipped
to deal with that pepper spray. So I will be here and I will give them enough time
so they can retreat and go home. But there's a lot of kind of like lionization
of frontliners because they're kind of like the heroes of the movement, they're
flashy heroes. But also everyone knows that the movement is not going to succeed
in any way, it wasn't be able to keep going because just of frontliners, right.
So peaceful protesters are essentially the heart of the movement as well, the people
who keep coming out in numbers. So there's a lot of reminders that we all need to
work together. This is kind of this idea, we cannot be divided. So it goes back to
this idea: we all climb the mountain in different ways, right. So we are 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 is kind of like ready to get into a fight with the
police. 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 only if you had only one of those, you
probably wouldn't be able to keep going for half a year. *Applause* Another group that I
think is really interesting is logistics, because people have now adopted all 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 couple of months ago, teargas was still
something that kind of like made people leave and made people go away. A water
cannon would scare people away, but people have really adapted and teargas doesn't do
that much in Hong Kong anymore, to be very honest. One person who's 19 and who I talk
to and was like, doesn't the teargas stink. And they were like, well, the first
time, yes, but then you get used to it and you just keep going. And to do that, you
need kind of all this gear, right? Like, you need to be equipped. You need to have
hardhats. You need to have all these umbrellas. And so there are people kind of
like in the background for collecting material near a big protest sites where
they know there will be protests and then 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 a clash 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 were in the clash with the police. And logistics are
the people who make sure that the stuff is around. It is kind of 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 am 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 protest gear. And so
medical resources, for example, might be like saline solution, which you can use to
wash people's eyes out if they have been affected by pepper spray or teargas. And
so this is someone who said, I am not a frontliner 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 within my power to make sure that they have what
they need. *Applause* 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 up by police. There've 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. But 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. So these people are around and are visibly
marked as first aiders and make sure that people get as much medical treatment as
they need to the extent that they're 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 movies where someone is trying to
take in a castle or something like that, right. So the 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.
*applause* 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 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, or people were stuck at the airport, you
could see that literally thousands of Hongkongers grab their own cars and just
drove out and said we will pick people up. And so they post on Telegram and they say,
hey, I'm a parent, I'm going to pick up my children. I have space for three people
*laughs* And then there's even there's also code for. So this why used that image
cause it's like the parents taking care of the kids. It's a very, very wholesome
imagery. And they have this, this code essentially where they're saying: if you
say that you have 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. And 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. It also often says if there's a female driver so people can feel safe. And
to make sure that you don't get accidently picked up by undercover cops people are
maintaining an inofficial database of cars that they've identified to undercover cop
cars. And so there's a telegram bot. And if you like, so these posters, once you
have someone's license plate, you go to the bot and you're like, is this a cop and
the bot will tell you yes or no. *applause*
In addition to that you have thousands, countless working groups where people are
just kind of working around the clock. 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. And it says: Hong Kong is facing a humanitarian crisis. What I
think is interesting about this is that some of these groups are basically working
around the clock. So 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 purchases did if they feel like they need to explain themselves. And
then when Hongkongers sleep, people who live in Europe, but who many cases are
still from Hong Kong and people who live in the United States work through their
evenings and through their mornings. So by the time Hongkongers wake up, they often
can have these messages in different languages. And so this happened doing the
airport protest, where on the 13th of the morning, people just woke up and had
posters in like ten different languages that explain what was happened in Hong
Kong, printed them and went to the airport straight away at 8:00 a.m..
*applause* 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 cooperating and also by being completely anonymous
together, where during the Pope, Poly, during the siege at the Polytechnic
University, Hong Kong. So when hundreds of people were stuck on that university and
didn't want to go out. Suzanne Sataline 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 this person went down into the sewers, wading through
probably knee, like kind of chest high waste water, 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 sewage system and like directed this person, they were telling them, this
is where you go. You hit kind of like, you hit like a crossroads and then you take a
left, like this is where you take a right. And then the last moment they actually,
the 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. And so they're watching police
moving in 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, 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 any of those people. They're all still strangers.
*applause* The strategy number 6, that I think is
important, are counter narratives. So the Hong Kong government and the Beijing
government have a very clear framing for what 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 realize that
maybe memes are nice, but memes are maybe not enough. So part of the movement,
actually Kim, 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 new media outlets
actually going there and talking to them. In the background you have someone who's
interpreting this into sign language. Because they essentially know we need to,
at least somehow, try to get control of the narrative again ourselves to make sure
there's not just a 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 organizing and mobilizing, which is the last thing that I want to talk
about. 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 and is now under rule by China without people really getting a choice at
any point. And so in early September people crowdsourced an anthem for the city
online and someone composed it and published it on September 11th. And
several days later someone had arranged for an orchestra. And right after that
this video went online. *Video plays (orchestra/choir)**applause*
I think everyone who is interested in the meaning of that song, I would recommend
that you go and read Vivienne 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 the first time, that was kind of like 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've talked about have been able to
sustain the movement and have been able to help people and individuals avoid arrest
in the short term. But the question is how sustainable this entire movement is in the
long run. I think the orchestra it's like a fun, they call themselves Black
Blorchestra, by the way. It's a fun example of how people can just get tons of
people together and suddenly come up with an entire orchestra and fund that entire
thing with like pretty good production value, I just downloaded a shitty version.
But, so that's happening, right, people are building all these groups, building
all these new ties. A lot of times they 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
neighborhood because he says that we cannot trust the police to save us. And if
someone from the government comes to attack us we want to be able to defend
ourselves. So then he's also like organizing this in kind of like small
neighborhood groups. So there's all these people who have lived in an anonymous
major metropolis for years and probably barely talk to each other, but who now
basically getting together and starting to do things together and trying to keep
these things going to protect themselves. Another thing is that there has been a
push for building and creating unions. So labor unions, more than 24 have been
formed its entire year across a range of sectors. There were several attempts at
organizing strikes in Hong Kong over the summer and a lot of those weren't very
successful because people still went to work in many cases. But so people are
essentially organizing more long term and trying to get people to join unions, so
they have organizing capacity for the long run. And again, this is a picture from the
district council elections. It's incredibly important to recognize the
organizational capacity that went into the elections. There are all these people out
there now that know how to mobilize and have now partaken in like a political
campaign and the electoral campaign and all of that is knowledge that now exists
amongst young people, amongst older people. And all of these are organizations
and things that hopefully people will be able to build on in the long run. So what
next? I think it's important to recognize that what people have been able to do in
Hong Kong is incredible from an organizational capacity and also has meant
that people have given up a lot. In many cases. And 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. Some people have just spent all their
money on protest gear. Other people are facing charges of up to 10 years in
prison. And because of the incredible backlog, might not know for a very long
time what's 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 was part of the protest movement and that's
also incredibly important to recognize that everyone in Hong Kong, both, 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 there who are really going to the
limits in many cases. More specifically there is a rally planned and announced for
January 1st. 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. And so this is really
going to be them trying, their movement trying to show that they're going to be
able to keep going through 2020 and maybe longer. The unrest and discontent is not
going to go away. I think that's very clear. So many people have been
politicized over the past few months and so many people have lost trust in their 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 remember that number, almost a hundred percent of people under 16 oppose
the extradition bill and those people are deeply involved, incredibly politicized.
And so, if anything, the people who are coming up are more anti government, are
more willing to go protest than anyone who's already out in the streets. The
things things that you can do. Go and follow Hong Kong journalists and support
them. 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've been
living in Hong Kong, who grew up in the city, who have been reporting on the
protests for months, in some cases for years. A lot of these people have already
reported on the Umbrella Revolution. So go and follow those people because they
essentially have the best information. They speak the language and they will be
able to report firsthand. And you'll also run into those crazy livestream web sites.
You should also follow and donate to Hong Kong Free Press, which is an independent
media outlet, was formed after the umbrella protests. And it's been doing
some incredible 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, yeah, go do that, follow those people. This is a
story that is not over and it will not be over anytime soon. And so the only thing I
can tell you is to go to the source and listen to the people who are 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 risk to
stand up to their governments. In India, in student protests against an 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
and a bunch of places. 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. And in
a lot of cases, people who are in these places recognize 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 grafitti 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 called for the 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 we should feel like we're part of the
same thing. 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.
*applause, exclamation*
Herald (H): Thank you, Katharin. I don't know if I told you, but I asked for this
shift specifically because of your talk. K: Thank you. *lauthing*
H: It was everything I expected and more. So we have time for two or three
questions. Go take one question from the Internet, because there is a lot of people
who couldn't make it. Signal Angel: Yeah. So it seems that
Telegram is a used a lot during protests. And one of the IRC users mentions that
it's centralized and asks if there were any problems with this centralized and
controlled thing and if they are attempts to move this to decentralized
communication solutions. K: Thank you. So I think. Oh, I just saw
that I misspelled MIT in my email. That's very smart. Um. *laughter* The telegram question is
important. So Telegram has actually come under DDOS attacks for multiple times. The
first time was in the summer and there was another time later like a couple of weeks
ago. So that shows clearly that Telegram is a vulnerability in some ways, right? In
the summer after the DDOS attack, Telegram said that they think it was a nation state
actor just based on the volume of the DDOS attack. So that is kind of like a point of
vulnerability. In reaction to that and another DDOS attack on LHKG, there was
some discussions 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, 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 the more kind of like proposals for using different apps
that, for example, work without Internet for the worst case scenario, that the
government might switch up 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 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 DDOS attack for people to actually switch to another
platform. So I think there I agree it's when I started from a security
perspective, it's probably not ideal. But their biggest challenge is the kind of the
organizational challenge of getting people to move wholesale to completely different
platform. H: Thank you. And now one question from
the audience. Microphone number three. It's the last question. So make it count.
Q: 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 a surprise. So it's only new police force from continental China whom became
suddenly brutal or people were not paying attention or was police brainwashed?
K: Thank you. That's 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 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 like major influx of mainland police officers into the Hong Kong police.
So it's probably not that. 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 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 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 to 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. H: Thank you
K: Thanks H: Katherin Tai, who has been heroically
standing here for 90 minutes talking nonstop, which is hard! So, people, a huge
round of applause.
*applause*
*postroll music*
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