Rebel City. South China Morning Post Team

1, the 22nd anniversary of the city’s return to Chinese rule, marked a critical juncture for the protests. Thousands of demonstrators skipped the annual peaceful procession and forced their way into the Legco complex after smashing glass entrances with a metal cart and iron poles. Inside, they vandalized the city’s emblem, trashed the chamber and spray-painted graffiti on walls. A number of pan-democratic lawmakers who had previously stopped protesters from escalating their actions were outflanked and shouted down.

      Among them was Leung Yiu-chung. He tried to spread his arms to prevent the protesters from charging ahead with their metal cart. A black-clad protester in goggles and helmet swooped in and tackled the grey-haired 66-year-old to the ground. “They questioned what could the legislature still achieve when even 2 million people had failed to budge the government,” Leung said, recalling the anger of that day. “Sadly, I could not answer. These young people are in despair and they have no hope for the government anymore.”

      Violence as a means to an end was not easy to endorse but hard to abhor, supporters of the movement said repeatedly in the aftermath of July 1. Labour Party lawmaker and social worker Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung, who had tried to dissuade a group of young protesters from breaking into the Legco complex at the height of the Occupy protests in 2014, said the change in attitude was stark. The protesters of 2014 preached “peace and love.” The demonstrators of 2019 had no qualms about the use of force, even if it cost them their future or, worse, their lives, he said. They were not a fringe group, he warned.

      Cheung said news about three unusual deaths around then had been a trigger for the rampage on July 1. The trio had either left suicide notes or other references to the political crisis. “These protesters believed they should be held responsible for the three victims as they had failed to force the government to address their cause,” Cheung said. “They were sad, angry, guilty and in despair. They have a strong desire to sacrifice themselves regardless of the consequences. This is very different from five years ago. It is very sad and a really dangerous sign.”

      That same evening, a hotel front-desker who goes by the initials CC sat in his office canteen transfixed by the live broadcast of protesters’ attempts to smash Legco’s glass doors. Police were nowhere to be seen. CC sighed and concluded that it was a trap; that law enforcers had deliberately retreated from the legislature, hoping the public would be so shocked by the protesters’ actions it would withdraw its support. The 30-year-old went home with a heavy heart.

      A university graduate, CC made up his mind that night to throw himself fully to the cause. He said he had to ensure the movement could carry on if frontliners were arrested after the night of July 1. A supporter who had considered himself a wo lei fei – a term for peaceful, rational and non-violent protesters – he decided he had to change. He would become one of the jung mou, or the “courageous and fierce ones,” the romantic Cantonese term the radicals used for themselves.

      The remarks of a French colleague played on his mind. “He said … the peaceful protests were not going to force the government to do anything,” CC recalled. “So, yes, why have we been so polite and apologetic about the protests we staged?”

      The next day, CC woke up to find Hongkongers leery of condemning the previous day’s violence. Supporters of the protesters stuck to two key messages purveyed online that would have a talismanic effect on the movement.

      First was the pledge of “no mat-cutting” – or bat got zek – which urged protesters to neither blame nor distance themselves from one another despite their different approaches. The second was the precept of “two brothers climbing a mountain, each making his own effort” – meaning different routes to reach the same summit were acceptable.

      Almost every weekend after that, clashes between black-clad frontliners and police became the rule rather than the exception. Frontline radicals also became more sophisticated in their protective gear, trading cling film – used to repel the sting of tear gas and pepper spray – for body armor, and swimming goggles for gas masks.

      Hard-core mobs at first blocked roads by digging up bricks and building barricades made of bamboo poles or metal fences and bins. They went on to trash railway stations and vandalize banks and restaurants seen as Beijing-linked, before turning to making and throwing petrol bombs and starting fires.

      Often overwhelmed by the mayhem protesters caused in multiple locations with their “be water” strategy, police expanded their range of crowd-dispersal weapons from tear gas, rubber bullets and beanbag rounds to deploying water cannons which fired a blue-dyed, pepperbased solution.

      On July 21, CC was among those who besieged the Beijing liaison office in the western part of Hong Kong Island, pelting it with eggs, splashing black paint on the national emblem and scrawling anti-Beijing expletives on its walls. Previously, the most daring thing he had done was to hold up umbrellas to shield the identity of his comrades when they dismantled metal railings at roadsides. But that night, he helped build barricades, pushing them all the way to the front line to fend off police.

      That night too it dawned on him he was risking arrest and possibly jail time. “I was caught by surprise when a protester came over, swiftly covered the logo of my Puma sneakers with black tape and asked me to protect myself well,” he recalled. CC later formed his own frontliner squad of four to six people, each with his own assigned role. One person always stayed at home to monitor live television broadcasts, while others sourced supplies or planned their next moves. CC’s job was to locate exit routes.

      Wo lei fei and jung mou demonstrated a rare unity born of the lessons gleaned from the Occupy protests. The endless infighting between the moderate and radical factions of Occupy in the end gutted the movement from inside. The strategy of occupying spaces over long stretches inconvenienced people and drained their goodwill. Remembering these missteps, protesters like CC were disciplined about adopting short, seemingly random bursts of rampaging to sustain momentum and public support and elude any police dragnet.

      They also worked hard at cultivating the image of a leaderless movement, so there would be no ringleaders to arrest. The reasoning went that even if influential figures were picked up by police, others could step in. “Occupy is like a mirror – we are actually doing the opposite of what we did five years ago,” CC said. “The failure of 2014 has made the 2019 protests very different, even though we have yet to succeed.”

      Broad support

      While Hong Kong has long had a tradition of peaceful protests, the turn to violence in 2019 should not have come as a surprise, said political scientist Cheng. The Mong Kok riot three years earlier provided a preview. Pro-independence activist Edward Leung Tin-kei and his associates had gone to the shopping area on Lunar New Year to avenge what they saw as the poor treatment of unlicensed hawkers. For hours, they clashed with police, throwing bricks and setting fires, even setting police vehicles ablaze.

      Activists were weary of “old and useless” peaceful tactics, Cheng said, and decided on actions that would exact a higher cost on the authorities. “They had prepared for it since 2016 and it is not something new to the frontliners today.”

      At the time, the scenes of chaos in Mong Kok shocked Hongkongers. In 2019, after a few clashes and with an emerging narrative of police violence, many became inured to the sight of physical fights between the two sides, the mess and mayhem and the clouds of tear gas fired. One argument protesters used to justify their violence was that police were using disproportionate force to take on ill-equipped young people. Moreover, they argued, while the protesters caused minor inconvenience, police were choking innocent people with their tear gas. Broad swathes of society – the wo lei fei and also middle-class bystanders across the generations – sided with the protesters, becoming the political vitamin sustaining the movement.

      Engineer George Chu, 40, was among them. “Police officers, with public power, have been using stronger weapons so it is only reasonable for protesters to escalate their actions,” Chu said at a Kennedy Town rally on August 4, an event that, again, ended in chaos and tear gas.

      CC recalled how some middle-aged residents had cheered