‘These kids are fucked,’ my American friend said. We were standing on the Harcourt Road flyover, looking down at some of the thousands of people surrounding the central government offices in Hong Kong. It was 12 June 2019, a Wednesday. The previous Sunday, a million people had marched through the streets. The following Sunday, it was two million. The protesters’ initial...
Looking back at the Hong Kong protests now – especially at the hundreds of hours of video footage on YouTube and elsewhere – I find it hard not to marvel at what happened. I’m also shocked by it. Failure was always the most likely outcome, yet so many people, for so long, believed that something else was possible.