From November 2019: On the Fetishization of Nonviolence in Hong Kong
NOTE: I originally wrote this for Foreign Policy last November, another essay covering the same ground with more scholarly analysis ran first, so I’ve been sitting on this draft for the last 6 months. As protests are renewed in Hong Kong, I find that the subject is still very much relevant, so I’m posting this now for those who care to read it.
November 19, 2019
After months of protests in Hong Kong, violence — both from police and protestors — has escalated severely. At the beginning of the movement in June, the world marveled at the orderly and polite conduct of the large scale leaderless movement, which at one point saw nearly 2 million participants (almost one third of Hong Kong’s population) march together. In the photos that emerged from Hong Kong, cameras lingered lovingly over recycling stations and cleanup efforts after each march, documenting the upstanding citizens that put the “civil” in civil disobedience.
After weeks of government unresponsiveness, the protestors who stormed the Legco building introduced vandalism and graffiti into their tactics. This change also marked a turning point in public opinion, as some began to question the protestors’ destruction of public property. This line of questioning against hardliner actions grew ever sharper with the increased use of Molotov cocktails, as MTR stations burned, and Mandarin speakers became increasingly targeted with harassment and violence.
More and more people bemoan the movement’s apparent loss of focus and shift towards nihilist destruction, even terrorism. They call the protestors “rioters”, “thugs”, even “lynch mobs”, and see them as lawless criminals. To those who hold this view, police in riot gear using tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and live rounds seem necessary for the containment of blood-thirsty rioters bent on destroying the city. To them, violence begets more violence which threatens to undermine stability further each day.
“Voices of reason” have emerged, expressing concern for long-term negative impact of the protests, calling for de-escalation on both sides, advocating restraint and dialogue from police and protestors bothThese arguments that bears only the veneer of sensible objectivity. Not only do they draw false equivalency between implications of violence employed by two vastly different entities, they idealizes the fantasy of a peaceful alternative, namely a return of the “model protestors” from early summer, who gave the police precious little impetus to pursue drastic measures. Most Hong Kongers do not hold this view. As both opinion polling and the recent thrashing handed out to the pro-establishment camp at the ballot box show, while about 40 percent of people think protestor violence is a problem, over 80 percent say the police are primarily to blame. But it’s been easy for outsiders to slip into this habit of thought.
It is important for observers to understand that when they condemn protestor violence without recognizing the government and police’s disproportionally greater agency and room to maneuver, they essentially put the onus on the protestors’ to deescalate police suppression through saintly behavior, even if they must sacrifice their own safety and dignity. When protestors fail to remain saintly and untouchable, that is not grounds for the police to punish them. As Hong Kong has repeatedly shown, the state chooses violence even when other options are available. Hong Kongers have tried peaceful protest many times over the last decade or more; it has not halted the inexorable erosion of their rights and Beijing’s encroaching influence into the territory.
Why are so many people enamored with non-violent protest? It’s not hard to understand the appeal of predictable and peaceful protestors who demonstrate politely. That is the ritualized version of protest, a mass mobilization sans mess. When we watch the breathtaking drone footage of hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers marching peacefully, parting like water for an ambulance, forming a human chain up to their tallest mountain peak, it’s like a real-life version of a Biblical fable. The marvelous and orderly gatherings seem to defy normality, poised to lead to a miracle. But in reality, these peaceful means have yielded little beyond amazing optics, and instead showed protestors the ineffectiveness of those tactics. As the iconic graffiti message to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam read, “It was you who taught me peaceful marches did not work”.
When I was a university student, our campus anti-war organization was run by a friend who famously organized several building occupations on campus, as well as highway obstructions. When the topic of his protests came up in conversation, I praised his peaceful tactics, but grilled him about causing people to be late for work and disrupting several classes. He rebutted that protest that manages to inconvenience no one would not impress law makers into action with their meticulous thoughtfulness, but instead be easiest to ignore. This is something I think about often as I observe Hong Kong’s situation from afar.
The fetishization of non-violent protests from the start of the Hong Kong protests propagates the problematic notion that protestors who behave with an inordinate amount of grace have more valid claims and also more likely to have their demands met. As anyone who has worked with dissenters and petitioners in mainland China knows, disenfranchised people often end up angry and damaged, beaten down by both the original problem and by the obstacles they encounter in seeking justice. It makes little sense for protestors to be judged for their likability rather than the validity of their claims and demands. Additionally, this view suggests that protestors’ deviation from non-violence somehow justifies the police suppression that followed, as if that would herd them to get back into their peaceful, orderly lane.
An insistence on peaceful tactics ends up valuing martyrs over victories. There’s a naive optimism that images of police or soldiers using force against non-resisting protesters might stir the world.. To elevate non-violence blindly is to believe it is better for protestors to become victims than to break windows or start fires. Demanding protestors adhere strictly to non-violence at this juncture is fueled by an appetite for victimhood porn, a lust for seeing unresisting bodies blasted by water cannons, pelted with rubber bullets, and swallowed by clouds of tear gas.
No magical solution would yield if the protestors behave just right. This is a last-ditch effort to hold off the government and win space for Hong Kongers who are putting their bodies on the line. The calls for non-violence aren’t an actual strategic plan; they are another way of dismissing, or forgetting, protestors so that people can return to the status quo.
