HK's Umbrella Movement 9 Years Ago

Police fired 87 teargas canisters on September 28, 2014

Has it been nine years since the start of the Umbrella Movement?

It seems like a lifetime ago, but it was a seminal moment in Hong Kong's recent history.

Before September 28, 2014, several young people occupied Civic Square at Tamar Government headquarters and they in turn were surrounded by the police.

The occupation of Admiralty lasted 79 days

On that day, hundreds of people descended on Admiralty armed with umbrellas, some wore goggles and shouted at the police to release them. They demanded that they 开门. or "open the gates" but to no avail.

My friend YTSL had just returned from a trip to Japan when she joined in, but was feeling hungry. Seeing as nothing was happening, we went to the nearby shopping mall Pacific Place to have a bite at Dan Ryan's.

While we were eating I happened to check Twitter and the police had shot teargas at the people, around 6pm!

We rushed back to Admiralty Centre and the Umbrella Movement had begun -- people were walking around on what is usually a busy freeway, and traffic had come to a stand still. It was absolutely surreal.

At the time I had to go to Kowloon side for dinner with relatives and watching the TV we were shocked to see the police had fired more teargas -- 87 canisters in total.

This only enraged more people to come out to Admiralty that evening and so on for 79 days and spread to Causeway Bay, Wan Chai and Mongkok.

People of all ages hanging out particularly in Admiralty fostered a sense of community on a large scale; people handed out water bottles, picked up garbage, helped students study, created crafts and art work. 

It inspired artwork and a sense of community

They wrote their hopes for Hong Kong on coloured sticky notes and wore yellow ribbons. 

Then Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying had contempt for student leaders Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Alex Chow Yong-kang, Lester Shum Ngo-fai and Nathan Law Kwun-chung. Most memorable was the televised debate between the young people and the government officials, with the former easily winning in the court of public opinion. 

Leung would deal with academic Benny Tai Yiu-ting, Chan Kin-man, and Chu Yiu-ming later. Tai's grand plan didn't exactly work -- he had to move up his "Occupy Central" idea up a few days and quickly got lost in the shuffle. The media focused on Joshua Wong and he and his colleagues took the reins of the movement.

Nine years later things have completely changed, almost all these people are behind bars or have been convicted for their part, the pro-democratic camp decimated and the Legislative Council only having seats for patriots.

Tens of thousands of people have left Hong Kong and the city is struggling economically and socially.

Meanwhile the Hong Kong diaspora is trying to recreate that community feeling again in their new homes in different ways. It will take time to see if they have succeeded or not. 

Review: We Have Boots

Chan's doc on the Umbrella Movement

It's hard rewatching footage of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, police indiscriminately firing tear gas canisters at protesters, roughly pushing them down on the ground, and the scenes of officers beating up commuters in Prince Edward MTR station are horrifying every time, as well as the white shirted men with sticks attacking people at the Yuen Long MTR station.

How did this all happen within a span of days, weeks and months?

But these scenes only make up a small part of director Evans Chan's documentary, We Have Boots: Hong Kong on the Edge (2020) that was shown online as part of the Global Hong Kong Studies at the University of California.

Yellow umbrellas became symbol of movement

His film actually focuses more on the 2014 Umbrella Movement, how it happened (spontaneously), thousands of people occupied parts of the city and ended without a proper resolution 79 days later as police arrested people and cleared the streets.

Chan demonstrates the consistency of the Hong Kong government to ignore the Basic Law, to ignore the will of the people and to reinforce Beijing's authority over the city. He focuses on a few pro-democracy activists, both young and old and how they each found their way to be part of this movement.

They include legal scholar Benny Tai Yiu-ting, former sociology professor Chan Kin-man, Agnes Chow Ting, Alex Chow Yong-kang, localist Ray Wong Toi-yeung and social worker Shiu Ka-chun.

It's interesting to hear Agnes Chow explain how she got politically involved through a Facebook page, and threw herself into the cause, while Tai and Chan rationalise the need to have this civil disobedience exercise in the streets. They look to Martin Luther King Jr for inspiration, and believe (naively or not) that people inherently have the right to protest on moral grounds and that they will persevere in the end.

Film interviews Tai (middle) and Chan (right)

Meanwhile the documentary notes that the localist movement grew out of the 2014 movement because they were not given a chance to speak to the crowds in Admiralty, to provide another opinion. The pro-democracy movement acknowledges this mistake which caused the movement to splinter into groups like Hong Kong Indigenous.

While Chan and Tai said they were mentally prepared for prison time by not using air conditioning as much as possible, for Shiu it was heartbreaking to see him with his mother and knowing she would be on her own for several months while her son was in jail. He was doing it for the greater good, but at the same time he was pained to know he would not be there to look after his mother.

However, the documentary feels like it's missing Joshua Wong Chi-fung -- who was considered a key part of the 2014 movement, and pushed onto the international stage by the global media. There is no interview with him at all to learn how he was dealing with being one of the ring leaders of the movement, and also the decisions they were making at the time.

Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai-Chee-ying is also missing in this film, who was literally at Admiralty everyday. He and his newspaper played a major role in helping to get the crowds out.

There is a lot of reflection from Alex Chow, who was a key member of the Occupy Movement and then he became a Buddhist in jail and went overseas to study, probably never to return. 

Chan puts events into context

Director Chan gives a lot of background to explain how the 2014 Umbrella Movement came to be, as more mainlanders flooded the city to buy goods, leaving locals overwhelmed and beginning to identify more strongly as Hongkongers and realising the government was not standing up for them, that they had to do it themselves.

However after the movement was shut down without any resolution, many people were depressed and despondent. So is it any surprise how they were determined to learn from their mistakes in 2014 and have a leaderless pro-democracy movement?

By this time people like Wong and Tai were in jail, the government thinking it had everything under control. Chinese officials in the Liaison Office were completely out of touch with what was going on too, as evidenced by the November 2019 District Council elections where pro-democracy candidates swept 17 out of 18 districts. 

We Have Boots gives a condensed taste of what happened with the government's bungling of the extradition bill and how young people were very creative in fighting back. Their fight became an existential one of literally fighting to keep Hong Kong's rights and freedoms -- a huge burden for the next generation. But they felt they had no choice.

It is believed Chan has plans to follow up We Have Boots with a closer examination of the 2019 protests and that would be good to have some analysis and more importantly a record of what happened. While it is re-traumatising to watch this footage over and over, we need to remember this happened and we saw it happen.

We Have Boots: Hong Kong on the Edge

Directed by Evans Chan

2hours, 9 minutes