“Be Water, My Friend”: Intercepting Horizontalism in Hong Kong

The popular crime drama series Longstreet aired in the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network between 1971 and 1972. The show casted the Hong Kong American martial artist, film star and cultural icon Bruce Lee in the role of Li Tsung, an antiques dealer who becomes the martial arts teacher of the blind protagonist Mike Longstreet (who seeks a vendetta against the people who killed his wife and left him blind), by training him in the art of Jeet Kune Do which translates to English as The Way of the Intercepting Fist. Thirty four minutes and forty two seconds into the first episode (the nomenclature of which is nothing but the English translation of the martial art form itself), Lee, in course of the training, delivers the following piece of advice to Longstreet:
“Be Water, My Friend.
Empty your mind.
Be formless, shapeless, like water.
You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Now water can flow or it can crash.
Be water, my friend.”

A monologue that he reiterated in his famous interview with the Canadian journalist Pierre Berton, this maxim on formlessness remains to this day the most telling aphorism associated with the name of perhaps the greatest martial artist to have ever graced the silver screen.
The sudden and outright reference to a certain cut monologue derived from the screenplay of a popular televised crime series based in the early 70’s of the last century in relation to the current uprising in Hong Kong certainly appears to be extraneous, from the first look, to say the least; that is if we ignore the trans-contextual applicability of it. This well-known catchphrase has been espoused by the Hong Kongers in defining the leaderless, mobile, spontaneous and dynamic functional structure of their movement. Moreover, with time they have added their own bits to the maxim to enhance its applicability, for instance, ‘gather like dew’, ‘flow like water’, ‘be as strong as ice’, ‘scatter like mist’ in the effort of delineating the formlessness of their movement.

Millions of protestors took to the streets in Hong Kong in the uprising of 2019, which started as an expression of public resentment against an extradition bill (Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019) tabled by Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) in the Legislative Council (LegCo) that would have facilitated the transfer of fugitive offenders to the jurisdictional domain of mainland China among other nations. Extradition of fugitives to the mainland would inevitably lead to the decay of juridical autonomy of the HKSAR from the mainland as enshrined in Article 2 and Article 19 of the Hong Kong Basic Law. Anybody with a minimum of knowledge about the unfair and opaque court proceedings in the mainland coupled with its neo-draconian methods of punishment, will invariably state that if enacted, this bill had potential enough to alter the entire picture of political activism in Hong Kong for good. If this bill was allowed to be raised in the parliament, it would have been definitely passed. Even though the pro-democracy legislators secured a clear majority in the 2016 legislative council elections, the majoritarian attitude in the legislative body is conspicuously pro-Beijing and that is due to the unique nature of seat distribution in the HKSAR LegCo. Out of the 70 seats in the LegCo only 35 are assigned to geo-political constituencies, whereas, the other half is constituted of members assigned from various financial and commercial interest groups that dance to the whims and fancies of the Chinese government simply to secure their financial assets and commercial ventures in the mainland.

9th June saw a million protestors taking to the streets to oppose the unpopular bill. Inspite of prolific public opposition when the HKSAR government, with the support from the pro-establishment faction in the LegCo, looked undeterred in its intention to push through the bill; scores of protestors tore through the police barricades, water guns, tear gas smoke screens, flying rubber bullets and stormed inside the LegCo campus on 12th June, the date the second session on the discussion of the bill was supposed to be held. The government had to finally bend to the unrelenting public pressure. Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of the HKSAR, someone who is well known for her pro-Beijing stance (would not have been ‘selected’ for the post otherwise) appeared on national television and announced the suspension of the bill on June 15.

However, the citizens of the semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong were not even close to satisfied with the mere suspension of the bill. The next day, over a quarter of the total number of citizens in Hong Kong (7 million) took to the streets, held marches, organised demonstrations, conducted rallies and sit-ins in front of the major thoroughfares, ferries, metro stations, railway junctions, administrative buildings and even the airport. Though the initial demand of the movement was restricted to a complete withdrawal of the unpopular bill which clearly jeopardized the semi-autonomous nature (One Country, Two Systems) of the HKSAR, as days progressed and state-sponsored brutality against the protestors continued unchecked, the demands of the protestors hydra-headed from one to five. The virtual and physical space of Hong Kong was flooded by the overwhelming wave of the Hong Konger’s voice shouting “Five Demands, Not One Less.” The five demands can be briefly summarised as:

· the immediate and complete withdrawal of the bill,

· governmental retraction on the labelling of the protest movements as ‘riots’,

· immediate release of the protestors isolated to police custody,

· an independent committee be erected to inspect and adjudicate on issues related to police atrocity perpetrated on the protestors, and,

· last but certainly not the least, implementation of complete universal suffrage.

The overwhelming turnout of June 16 accounted to the largest one the city has ever seen. And, the protests have continued ever since. Clashes with the security forces have become a daily affair. But the people inspite of backing down have kept coming in larger numbers. The Chief Executive of the HKSAR announced the formal withdrawal of the bill on September 4, but the speech fell short of delivering on the other demands.

Whether the Hong Kong uprisings should be regarded as a bolt from the blue or as a torrential rain effectuated due to years of dark clouds of political uncertainty and authoritarian encroachment looming large over the island, will be the focal point of a subsequent essay dealing with the historicity and functionality of the unique political settlement that exists between HK and the mainland. However, the focus of the current essay will be on the ‘form’ and ‘nature’ of the uprising that has shaped the political attitudes of the citizens and future citizens of Hong Kong.

What is interesting about the HK protests is the leaderless and decentralized nature of it. Following the general trajectory of all anti-authoritarian (or anti-governmental, the notion generally avoided to refrain from sounding too radical by people fearful of intercepting the change) movements of our time, be it the Spanish Indignados movement, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Montreal, the Chilean and Venezuelan uprisings or the Arab Spring, the protests in HK have run on purely horizontalist lines.

Protestors organized their activities through end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Whatsapp, often using an online forum known as the LIHKG to relay scout reports of police activities to fellow protestors. Such online platforms not only provide anonymity to the dissenters, but also, play crucial roles in decentralised mobilisation and liquid organisation. Increasing reliance on technology as a means of mobilisation and effectuation has automatically placed ‘leadership’ in a redundant role. “Technology enables leaderlessness in a way that was not possible before,” says Carne Ross, the executive director of Independent Diplomat, a diplomatic advisory group, and the author of The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century, “Technology means you don’t need a leader to disseminate strategy. The strategy disseminates horizontally.”

The protests come at a time when neo-liberalism has clearly failed as a sustainable and equitable global economic model and public antipathy towards representative democracy has reached its boiling point. The adoption of ‘horizontalism’ as the driving force of all anti-governmental uprisings undoubtedly points towards the rising trend of anarcho-populism as a ubiquitous phenomenon in protests worldwide. In this age of heightened political consciousness which has inevitably come with the proliferation of higher education amongst a larger mass and living in a politically active urban environment, self mobilisation has become the spirit of the day. Paolo Gerbaudo, the author of The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest says, “These movements don’t appeal to specific categories, they appeal to the entirety of the citizenry … who feel defrauded by the political class.” Hong Kong has not been an exception to this trend and protestors have always been self-mobilised, thus erasing the need of a structured organisational platform in garnering public allegiance. Therefore, the outright rejection of any leader or hierarchical body for mobilisation and organisation by the protestors of the movement, is neither incidental or unprecedented.

Then again, learning from the failure of previous movements, for example the Occupy Central of 2014, the protestors refrained from holding on to the occupied sites. On the contrary they embraced the ‘be water’ theory as the modus operandi of spontaneous rebellion. A marked public antipathy to centralized leadership and their un-swaying affiliation to the idea of “no central stage” (無大台 wu datai) has only broadened the inclusivity of the movement. As a matter of fact, the very notion that the movement is leaderless has made it all the more irrepressible. While it is easy to suppress a movement by incarcerating or eliminating the leader, it is nothing short of impossible to put down a movement which does not have one!

The mask had become a staple accessory of the protestor’s attire months before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Long before the viral droplets were terrorising the masses, police cameras were screening the writhing crowds of protestors for any sign of identification that could be later used against them. Thus, the inception of the mask in Hong Kong did not come as a precautionary move against a virus but as a weapon against police supervision and state-inflicted terrorism. While encrypted messaging apps like Telegram were protecting the anonymity of the dissenter in the virtual space, masks, helmets and goggles were performing the same function in the physical space. The protestors have also invented radical techniques to disrupt police surveillance. Spray painting CCTVs, using laser lights on the ones too high to reach to distort image readings until the power supply is cut prove that the human intelligence has engaged itself in responding to the new challenges thrown forward by the machinery of exploitation. By organising ad-hoc demonstrations, by vehemently rejecting any form of leadership or structured hierarchy in the protests, by carving out a populist notion of nationalism for themselves, something distinct from the patriotic nationalism that is very black & white and brittle and that is imposed from top-down, the protestors in Hong Kong have, knowingly or unknowingly, have joined a wide league of bereaved agitators worldwide in their struggle against the hegemonisation of power by the state, and by doing so they truly have revolutionised the very form of revolution itself. As more and more people around the world wake from the post-colonial and high capitalist notional hangover of the state as a benefactor of human development, the prospects of a power struggle becomes all the more bright. New frontiers for the war are being laid and no bunker will be impregnable enough to provide protection against the public vengeance that comes due.

The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.