Since the protests in Hong Kong began over an extradition bill proposed in February of this year, the authorities and their supporters have sought to indict the protesters for fomenting violence and chaos, a formula that should be familiar from Beijing’s approach to Xinjiang and the days of the "Arab Spring" in the Middle East.
Yet there surely have been very few instances where, in the midst of mass protest and pitched battles between citizens and police and even as widespread fear and despair grew, a non-violent and orderly exercise in population-wide democracy was carried out.
The last time Hongkongers voted for their district council representatives – the lowest tier of the city's government but also the most purely democratic – in 2015, the year after the Umbrella Movement protests, the turnout by noon was just over 340,000 voters. By noon last Saturday, the number of votes cast in the 2019 ballot had surpassed 1 million.
Such turnout is a powerful refutation of the idea that the protesters are beyond the reach of reason in their dealings with officialdom. But the organisation of the voting and its conduct is also a reminder to Hong Kong's leadership that their surest way out of this bloody impasse is not through increasingly harsh crackdowns but in dialogue through civic institutions. Across the globe – in Sudan, Spain, Chile and Lebanon – we see states facing similar challenges, with the possibility of more and more indiscriminate state violence in the wings.
There can be little doubt that elections that usually focus on local concerns such as pest control and potholes were on this occasion a referendum on the city-wide upheavals of recent months. While Junius Ho, a leading pro-Beijing voice in the territory, called his defeat at the ballot box "strange" and the city's embattled chief executive Carrie Lam promised to “reflect” on the result, state-run media in China muttered darkly about foreign interference.
Pro-democracy activists now find themselves with a new platform. Yet they, too, will need to guard against overreach. The idea of the international community turning its back on the People's Republic to rally for human rights in Hong Kong is at best untested and, as US President Donald Trump’s recent remarks on possible China sanctions made clear, may fall prey to trade considerations. Ironically, the globalised economy of which Hong Kong has long been such a beacon could leave the city to face Beijing in political isolation.
What the protesters and the various parties they have voted for must do now is urgently forge a common front and decide how the demands they have set out – which, crucially, include extending full universal suffrage to the Legislative Council and the city's chief executive – are best pursued in a landscape still dominated by the increasingly authoritarian leadership of Xi Jinping.
The protesters have prided themselves on being leaderless and flexible “like water”, but this is a moment that forces them to take a solid form, which could prove brittle. Is out-and-out confrontation the only option left or is there still a chance to find common ground in the formula of "one country, two systems"? Many lives – and the very existence of Hong Kong as we know it – will hang on the answer.
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