
Thousands of protesters joined a group of student activists who stormed into the courtyard of HK legislative headquarters on September 27, 2014. Image from inmediahk via Flickr CC: BY-NC 2.0.
A decade later, it seems almost unimaginable that a five-lane, inner-city highway in Hong Kong, bursting with traffic day and night, could have stayed occupied by protesters for 79 days.
The Autumn of 2014 was a unique time to stroll along Hong Kong's main thoroughfare. The “Occupy Central” movement, also known as the “Umbrella Protests”, began as a call for electoral reform for the universal suffrage of the city's Legislative Council (2016) and Chief Executive (2017) — a promise written into the city's Basic Law that Beijing failed to honour.
In the years since, the movement has left an indelible mark on the city and reshaped the lives of all its residents.
How did the movement change Hongkongers? And how do they view the changes their city has gone through?
A few former activists and two teachers who now have come to terms with the changed political landscape of Hong Kong spoke with Global Voices on this issue. The interviews were conducted by phone in English, and the interviewees requested anonymity over safety concerns.
A former activist explained how he was changed by the 2014 pro-democracy movement:
On a personal level, the Umbrella Movement (…) affected the course of my life and career in ways I still feel today.
Even though I was born in Hong Kong, it was the first time I felt like a Hongkonger. These were the days when the tired old stereotype of Hong Kong people as apolitical, materialistic, and self-interested still had credence. Yet everyone I met at the occupation sites was deeply engaged, creative, passionate, and committed to making the city they loved a freer, fairer, more open place. It was a side of Hong Kong I saw little of before but was always there, just below the surface.
While the Umbrella protests failed to change the political system in Hong Kong, the determination and the desire for change exploded five years later in 2019 as a staggering 2 million protesters — almost a third of the population — took to the streets to protest against an amendment to the city's extradition bill that extends the mechanism for transfers of fugitives to regions including Taiwan, mainland China and North Korea. Amid police crackdown, the anti-China extradition protests later evolved into a pro-democracy movement demanding universal suffrage, the unfulfilled agenda of the Umbrella protests.
The protests were more decentralised than previous movements, leading to a harsh crackdown and the introduction of the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020. This law, which criminalizes acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces and establishes a national security committee supervised by and accountable to the Central Chinese government, has effectively suppressed all voices critical of the Hong Kong and Beijing governments and undermined the city's autonomy.
These changes in the political landscape have profoundly impacted the city's public sectors — particularly the education sector. Currently, a significant means of social control is through education. One secondary school schoolteacher and previous activist said in an interview with Global Voices:
The curriculum changes all the time now; it’s hard to keep up.
Most revisions in the curriculum aim to instil more “patriotic” values into the next generations of Hong Kongers.
One primary school teacher said:
I have to give grades for ‘patriotism’ now; I have to assess students’ love of country. I don’t agree with these new policies, and I don’t think it is beneficial for students to think in these ways. I would like to talk to them about how different cultures are enriching and what we can learn from other worldviews. But I don’t have a choice if I want to keep my job.
The teacher was worried about the adverse effects of patriotic education on kindergarten and primary students as they are too young to comprehend the complexities of national identity and tend to take away only the most simplified version of “we are great, the others are terrible”.
The contentious political situation is also acutely felt at universities. Researching sensitive topics such as socio-political trends in China is now so risky that academics and students choose to self-censor to avoid repercussions. Previously powerful student unions that had a pivotal role in mobilizing protesters have been dismantled at all eight Hong Kong universities. Places of free expression on campus, such as “democracy walls” — a whiteboard for students to publicize opinions and posters — have been scrubbed clean.
As the “security regime” penetrated into the social system, many Hongkongers decided to leave the city altogether, despite their love for the city.
As the UK government introduced a British National (Overseas) visa scheme in January 2021 to help Hongkongers born before the 1997 handover of the former British colonial city to China to resettle in the UK, over 209,000 Hongkongers have applied for the visa, with 150,400 people resettled in the UK as of August 2024.
The driving force behind the exodus is primarily political. An activist who had settled abroad for several years explained why his peers ended up leaving the city:
It is sad but we can’t change the reality. The space for making change has vanished and many have given up. They have lost their hope.
However, many can't leave permanently, either due to money, job opportunities, or family obligations. A former activist said:
I feel like I can’t breathe in the city anymore. I fought as hard as I could for our political freedoms. I don’t feel like the city is my home anymore, and don’t want to stay. But so far, I couldn’t convince my father and sister to move, and I don’t want to leave them.
It has been estimated that the total number of Hong Kong's middle-class emigrants reached half a million in 2023, to the extent that the city's government has to import talent from mainland China to offset the emigration. However, the non-Chinese population, which is half what it was in 2019, has been slow to replenish. The city is becoming increasingly homogeneous as international businesses and NGOs seek less contentious pastures. The streets of Central, once teeming with foreigners from across the globe, now echo with predominantly Mandarin conversations.
Before 2020, Hong Kong was a city with a long history of civil disobedience. The 79 days of peaceful protests at the city centre in 2014 did not undermine Hong Kong's status as the Asian Financial Center, as people were hopeful for positive changes. Now, there are no protests and little open dissent, and the city has lost its ethos as an open society.