A Hong Konger's View
Eighty-seven tear-gas canisters, umbrellas raised as shields, and a city that learned in one afternoon what it would not be allowed to forget for the next seventy-nine days.
It started the way it always starts: with a small piece of legal text. The 31 August 2014 decision by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress told Hong Kong that its 2017 Chief Executive election would, in fact, not be a free election. Candidates would be vetted in Beijing. The promise of universal suffrage, written into the Basic Law, was being narrowed to a list of names someone else had approved.
For most of September the response was orderly and Hong Kong about it. The Hong Kong Federation of Students called a class boycott on 22 September. Lectures at CUHK and HKU moved outdoors. Joshua Wong, seventeen years old, ran an organisation called Scholarism out of school corridors. On 26 September he and a small group of students climbed the fence into Civic Square at government headquarters. He was arrested. He spent two nights in detention. When he came out, the city was different.
Occupy Central with Love and Peace — the legal scholar Benny Tai's long-planned civil-disobedience campaign — formally launched at 1:40 in the morning on 28 September. It had been talked about for over a year. By then it was no longer leading; it was catching up. The students were already in the street.
The afternoon the umbrellas went up
Around 5:58 pm on 28 September, the police fired the first round of tear gas at unarmed people in Admiralty. They fired eighty-seven canisters in total. People who had come down on a Sunday afternoon in office clothes and school uniforms found themselves coughing into shirt collars, eyes burning, with nothing to hide behind except the umbrellas they had brought against the sun.
The image of those umbrellas, opened against gas instead of rain, is what gave the movement its name. Nobody chose it. The foreign press chose it. By Monday morning the Hong Kong protests were the "Umbrella Movement" or the "Umbrella Revolution," depending on which paper you read, and a yellow umbrella had become a flag.
Three encampments
What people forget is that there wasn't one occupation. There were three, and they had different temperaments.
Admiralty — the government district, on the eight-lane Harcourt Road — was the student camp. It was the one that ended up on postcards. Tents in neat rows. A study area with desks and lamps run on car batteries. A self-organised recycling system. Volunteers came after work to refill the water bottles. The kids did their homework on the asphalt. HKFS leaders like Alex Chow gave press conferences in front of a flag that just said, in Chinese, "I want real universal suffrage."
Mong Kok, across the harbour in Kowloon, was something else. Working-class, dense, market-stall city — the people who occupied Nathan Road were taxi drivers and shopkeepers as much as students. It was also where, on 3 October, men with triad tattoos and t-shirts of an organisation no one had heard of last week showed up and started swinging. The police took a long time to intervene. After that, Mong Kok was where the front line lived. It was where, two weeks later, a WCN reporter named James Bang was pushed to the ground by police for not producing a press pass fast enough. From the World Crypto Network's live audio that night:
"Are you okay?" — "Don't touch me." — "Do you need ambulance?" WCN ground audio, Mong Kok, 16 October 2014
Causeway Bay was the smallest and the strangest. A pedestrian commercial strip in the middle of the shopping district, a few hundred tents tops, sandwiched between Sogo and the tram line. People shopped around it. It was the one that lasted longest by accident — cleared last, on 15 December.
The impasse
On 21 October the government finally sat down with the students on television. Carrie Lam, then Chief Secretary, on one side. Alex Chow and the HKFS on the other. Nothing happened. The government's position was that the 8/31 decision could not be reopened. The students' position was that the 8/31 decision was the whole point. It was the only televised dialogue of the seventy-nine days.
After that, the occupations slowly lost momentum the way occupations do — through exhaustion, court injunctions, and the patient bureaucratic work of clearance. Mong Kok was cleared on 18-19 November. Admiralty was cleared on 11 December after a bus-company injunction. Causeway Bay went on the 15th. Seventy-nine days. No one above 689 in the system gave up anything.
What it felt like
What the foreign coverage mostly missed, and what a lot of the Bitcoin-world coverage missed too, is that this was not a riot. It was a city of people who had grown up reading Basic Law in school, who had been told their whole lives that Hong Kong was different, sitting down in the road and politely refusing to move until somebody honoured the contract.
It was teenagers doing their physics homework under street lamps. It was retirees bringing congee at 2am. It was a man in a tie standing in front of a tear-gas line with an umbrella because that was what he happened to have in his bag.
The contract was not honoured. But the city found out, in those seventy-nine days, what kind of city it had been all along. That knowledge did not go away when the tents did.
Episodes cited
Tear-gas count (87 canisters) and 28 September 2014 timeline: HK Police Force public records and contemporaneous reporting.
James Bang profile: The New Yorker, "Thugs, Mainland China, and the Hong Kong Protests."
Ground audio: WCN livestream excerpt, 16 October 2014 (master video cV3VfV3ZbTo).
Encampment clearance dates: HK govt court-injunction records, Nov-Dec 2014.