Like many Hong Kongers, Candy Kwok is anxious, and it is not just because she fears the government might use more force against her and other protesters who have flooded the financial hub’s streets in the past few weeks.
A single mom, Kwok worries about her 12-year-old daughter’s future in a territory where home prices have surged 170 percent in a decade and the wealth gap keeps widening.
She thinks living standards are dropping and that migrants from mainland China are siphoning resources from long-time residents.
Illustration: Yusha
Her concerns underscore the challenges facing Hong Kong’s government and its backers in Beijing as they try to quell the former British colony’s worst political crisis since the 1997 handover. While the demonstrations began as a fight over a proposed extradition bill, they have morphed into an expression of deeper anxieties that have might linger indefinitely.
Below are profiles of Kwok and two other Hong Kong residents: K.T. Li, an unemployed 23-year-old, and Andrew Au, a 66-year-old retiree. While they have different views on the protests, they are united in feelings of despair over Hong Kong’s long-term future.
On a recent Sunday morning, Kwok rode a bike to church on Lantau Island. Dressed in a white polka-dot dress and a straw hat, the Web designer cheerfully greeted fellow worshippers but steered clear of politics.
Her congregation includes people who have been protesting and members of the police force, so it is important to be considerate, she said.
After church came the most important part of the day: marching with her daughter and thousands of other people in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district to protest the bill, which would allow extraditions to jurisdictions including China.
HER CHILD’S FUTURE
The demonstrators’ ire intensified after Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) said the bill was “dead,” but not formally withdrawn.
Kwok’s daughter marched quietly, looking at her cellphone only a few times and asking to go home near the end because she was tired.
The 12-year-old can knowledgeably debate the implications of allowing extraditions to China and says the protests are intended to ensure that her generation has a future.
Kwok, meanwhile, has become an active member of a group called “Housewives from Hong Kong, Kowloon, New Territories and the Outlying Islands who oppose extradition to China.”
The group collected more than 6,000 petitions against the bill last month, and members march together and share information on Facebook.
“Mostly it’s for my daughter. I don’t want to leave behind a worse society for the children,” she said.
Kwok worries that young people could struggle to buy their own homes because of skyrocketing prices, and she fears that an influx of people moving in from the mainland takes vital resources away from Hong Kong natives.
More than 1 million people from China migrated to Hong Kong between 1997 and last year, and these new immigrants now represent about 14 percent of the territory’s population, government data showed.
“There is a lot of unfairness in society, that’s why the protests can sustain. This anti-extradition law protest is just a trigger point,” Kwok, 40, said in her apartment in a public housing estate.
Kwok has memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, when the Chinese army retaliated against student protesters.
On June 12, as the Hong Kong police fired tear gas during clashes with protesters, she grew worried about the possibility of a more violent response from the government.
Kwok and her daughter have been marching peacefully, but the past few weeks have been worrisome for her.
On the night of July 1, when some protesters stormed the territory’s Legislative Council (Legco), she watched the scenes on a Facebook live feed and could not fall asleep.
“I didn’t understand why they had to break into the Legco — what could you possibly gain shattering a glass door? But I understand their anger, because the government so far has not withdrawn the law or answered protesters’ demands,” she said.
On July 21, protesters surrounded China’s liaison office in Hong Kong and spray-painted over the national emblem.
Meanwhile, roving groups of masked men in white T-shirts attacked protesters in different parts of the city. Six suspects were arrested.
Hong Kong’s police force has drawn criticism for not responding fast enough to the masked attackers, although Hong Kong Police Commissioner Stephen Lo (盧偉聰) has denied any links between them and officers and vowed to bring those who broke the law to justice.
ANOTHER XINJIANG?
Last week, Kwok was furious when she saw the news about the men beating up protesters and believed it was condoned by the government.
“Do you think a country’s emblem deserves to be respected when it doesn’t respect the people?” she said.
K.T. Li, who graduated from college a couple of months ago, used to be a demonstrator who believed peaceful methods were the best ways to voice opinions. However, in an interview earlier this month, Li said he is less confident about that approach after the government did not formally withdraw the extradition bill.
Li said he has been on the front line during the demonstrations and that he shielded fellow protesters from police as they were breaking into the Legco, though he did not break in himself.
His frustration appears to have deeper roots. In his town in the New Territories district, he hears students in the streets conversing in Mandarin rather than Cantonese, the territory’s dominant tongue. Local shops have given way to pharmacies catering to demand from mainland tourists.
“I’m afraid that Hong Kong will one day become like Xinjiang, where everything is monitored,” Li said, referring to China’s predominantly Muslim region where the use of mass detention and surveillance has drawn international condemnation.
Hong Kong operates as a quasi-democracy, but many in the territory are fearful about losing freedoms in the coming decades. China’s legal commitment to maintain the current setup — called “one country, two systems” — expires in 2047.
China has criticized the protests, saying they threaten the health of Hong Kong’s economy.
In the past few weeks, Beijing issued its harshest warnings yet against the escalating violence, saying protesters were testing its “bottom line.”
Li said he considered self-immolation at one point, because he believed everything he was doing was futile. That moment of despair came after he learned of the death of one protester, who fell from the roof of the Pacific Place mall while putting up a banner to protest the bill.
“I regretted not being able to go there in time to help. Then I considered self-immolation because they didn’t care, even after the incident in Pacific Place,” Li said.
At least four people are reported to have committed suicide after leaving notes with anti-extradition bill messages, according to Stand News, an online pro-democracy publication.
Protesters have been holding vigils and counseling sessions to discourage people from such actions.
Li said he might escalate his own actions in demonstrations, because he believes the government has failed to address the protesters’ demands.
At the same time, he stressed that he does not want to harm anyone, including the police.
Li is unemployed and lives with his mother, who said she was not aware that he was out protesting.
“Is what we do right? It’s for later generations to decide,” Li said.
STOP THE PROTESTS
Retired restaurant manager Andrew Au, 66, disagrees with the protesters. He believes some variation of the extradition bill, first introduced by Hong Kong’s government in connection with a murder in Taiwan, is needed to bring fugitives to justice.
Still, he has his own worries, mainly that continued turmoil in Hong Kong — and demands by some for independence — could hurt the territory’s economic prospects.
“If Hong Kong becomes independent, it will be without a doubt the end of Hong Kong. Property prices would drop, consumer prices would inflate, because we’d have to rely on imports. China will cut off our resources,” Au said.
Au’s father came to Hong Kong from China’s mainland in the 1940s to flee the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
China has improved a lot with the enforcement of laws and the economic boom of the last few decades, and his father forgave the CCP by the time he died, Au said.
“My grandfather’s generation was a land owner and didn’t have much good feelings toward the Communist Party, but it’s changing now,” he said.
Still, he blames Hong Kong’s government for allowing the protests to drag out by not arresting more protesters.
“What are the Hong Kong police doing?” he said.
Lam has said the government wants to find the root cause of public anger and is reviewing its governance style, although that has not appeased her detractors, who continue calling for her resignation.
Au said he does not understand why young people are demanding universal suffrage, considering the territory did not have any kind of democracy when it was a British colony.
“College students these days don’t have much analytical skills. Those who went to university, have they worked an hour in their lives?” he said.
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