Without skipping a beat, Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho, dissident artist Badiucao, Hong Kong human rights activist Johnson Yeung (楊政賢) and Chinese dissident Yang Jianli (楊建利) launched into stories of solidarity, resistance, and civil disobedience from Hong Kong’s summer of dissent at an Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) panel on September 13. They recounted the ways Hong Kong’s anti-extradition protests have flourished into a pro-democracy movement through creativity and resilience.
Yeung said Hong Kong protesters have learned a very important lesson from the 2014 Umbrella Movement: the absence of a central leader figure prevents the movement from being directly decapitated by the opposition, while allowing participants to express themselves more creatively and effectively. This includes examples of volunteers rescuing protesters who were stranded near the airport, people gathering outside to watch a laser pointer show for comic relief, designers and musicians creating works to boost protester morale, and so on.
While pundits have likened Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement to the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, the panel discussion provided a sharp contrast of the two movements and how the world has changed drastically since 30 years ago. Today, the internet provides us with global, real-time news coverage, methods of creative and anonymous dissent, and untraceable private communication, but we should also keep in mind that 30 years ago, autocracies outnumbered democracies by a ratio of two to one. There was simply far less global understanding of what democracy meant in 1989.
