Keep calm. Don't shoot.

As I pour out of Exit E of Causeway Bay MTR station with the rest of the hordes of black shirted bodies, I almost collide with a young man sitting on top of an aluminum step ladder. He is holding a donations box crammed full with Hong Kong bank notes. 

It's Joshua Wong Chi-fung, the poster boy of the localist movement, only recently released from prison. I find myself shaking hands with him and enthusiastically stuffing a modest $20 into his clear Perspex donations box. I can exclusively report he had a reassuring firm handshake and I have to admit, I admire that in a political figure.

I should have asked him for a telling quote I suppose but today I am a citizen not a journalist, though often the lines get blurred.

Every street is crammed with people standing shoulder to shoulder in the intense heat, shouting slogans and holding posters and banners. If this is a revolution it’s a very Hong Kong revolution. The people are very nice you see. They are all generally very restrained, polite and dignified. They bring their aunties and their kids. Plastic bottles are recycled, drinks are shared, litter is picked up. Even the policing is very low profile and restrained for now, at least. The posters being handed out are well designed and witty.

“Keep calm, don’t shoot,” was my favourite, though there were many contenders.

This movement which traces its roots back to the 2014 Occupy movement and beyond was supposed to be dead. Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor had most of its leaders and figures of inspiration behind bars. The remaining former student leaders were expelled from political office and their followers demoralized, rejected and cynical. Job done as far as Beijing was concerned and all justified by the rule of law too.  Well done Carrie. Well done indeed.

She should have heeded the words of John F Kennedy before she attempted to introduce the proposed Extradition bill and on such blatantly bogus grounds as the urgent need to bring an alleged murderer to justice in Taiwan.

“Never paint your opponent into a corner,” Kennedy once said, referring to international diplomacy. Or, to put it more crudely, don’t keep poking a defeated enemy with a sharp stick because eventually it will strike back, even if it knows the fight is futile. There is no more noble a cause to fight for, than a lost cause, after all. This is Hong Kong’s lost cause and many are prepared to fight for it. Some even say they are willing to die for it.

So, as this is being written, the Legislative Council building in Admiralty is being attacked and ransacked by angry young Hongkongers right next to the PLA headquarters where China’s soldiers await orders from Beijing. No-one knows what will happen next but even the most avowed optimist would struggle to predict a happy ending. Please keep calm Hong Kong and don’t shoot.

Lessons in Dissent

There is a natural reticence on the part of many Westerners in Hong Kong to demonstrate overt support for the Umbrella Movement and Occupy Central. However sympathetic to the cause, they fear it might inadvertently reinforce the Beijing fictional narrative that youthful dissent on the streets of Hong Kong is somehow inspired and supported by Western capitalist agents.  In reality, many of the activists weren't even born when Hong Kong was a British colony and when you visit the Occupy sites most of the well-behaved youngsters in the sprawling tented communities assume you are just another gawping tourist. 'Gweilos' are just about irrelevant in their campaign.

My  feeling of impotence and irrelevance was only increased by watching the excellent new movie by Mathew Torne, shown at the Foreign Correspondent's Club this week which succeeds in touching a few raw nerves.

Lessons in Dissent documents the contrasting political development of two very young social activists, Joshua Wong,  the church-going co-founder of the student group Scholarism and Ma Jai, a more vehement anti-establishment figure and instinctive rebel, with appropriately long hair and a rock & roll personal image. Curiously, both boys grew up on the same middle class housing estate in Ap Lei Chau and while Wong becomes the well-scrubbed media darling of the student campaign to oppose National Education and Beijing's tightening grip of authority on Hong Kong's civil society, Ma Jai becomes slightly cynical about relying on media-invented celebrities like Wong to achieve political change.

It's a fascinating dual portrait combined with an exposure of the extremely mild but determined and idealistic version of radicalism, born in Hong Kong schools and universities that is now at the very heart of the Umbrella Movement. Torne should be congratulated for his foresight, fortune or instinctive talent for spotting such an influential movement and its key characters, at such an embryonic stage and bringing it to wider attention.

Joshua Wong appears as articulate, energetic, persuasive, politely recalcitrant and occasionally over- zealous as he  confronts leading establishment figures about their failures in office. He is truly impressive and the viewer has to remind themselves this is a vulnerable 15 year old child we are witnessing, directing dissent against arguably the most powerful and ruthless organisation on the planet- the Chinese Communist Party.

Wong, now just 18, is on a hunger strike. Today it was reported that his blood sugar levels are dropping to alarming levels but he is refusing medical advice to accept glucose water. He is younger than my youngest son and he and his colleagues like Ma Jai, are prepared to risk their health for their ideals while the rest of us gawp, sneer, ignore, or even moan about them delaying our taxi journey by a few precious minutes.

Hats off to Mr Wong. That's what I say.  Well done son and please ...take care.