NEWS
Monday, January 19, 2015 3
Hong Kong’s Social Awakening
A Post-Modern Approach to Political Reform
sachin seth › canadian lawyers for
international human rights
T
he streets of Hong Kong have been emptier as of late, from Mong Kok to Admirality.
A movement for political reform that initially
drew tens of thousands has been largely stifled by police presence and arrests.
“Success isn’t necessarily measured in result, but
in the collective social awakening, and we’ve achieved
exactly that,” says Jason Y. Ng, a University of Toronto
law alumnus who moved back to his ancestral home
of Hong Kong after working as a securities lawyer in
New York.
In October and November of last year, Ng toured
universities in both Canada and the US to talk about
the movement. He was a regular fixture at these sites,
penning the stories of fellow protesters for the South
China Morning Post and his blog, As I See It.
He laments the Western media’s ignorance of the
largely peaceful protests, attributing it to a lack of
“sexy” scenes of violence that make for good TV.
“There was some interest in first week when the
term “umbrella revolution” was coined. The fact that
students were peaceful, organized, and polite grabbed
headlines. Though in the absence of violence that you
would maybe see in Egypt, the coverage has faded.”
Another reason could be the potential long-term
nature of this movement. The demonstrators are
fighting Beijing’s restrictive plan for the state’s 2017
executive election, which is years away. China plans
to restrict nominees to those selected by its leading
Communist Party, while protesters want a more open
and democratic election.
But Ng believes the implications of these demonstrations are already being seen among a generation
of people who are,
for the first time,
ge t t i n g a n g r y
about their lack
of influence in the
political system.
“We have a
generation of young people who don’t only care about
video games, karaoke, and grades. They care about
politics, which used to be a very uninteresting subject
to most of them. Now they are participating in political movements.”
In a place like Hong Kong, politics has not historically been at the forefront of young minds.
“Hong Kong has a reputation among Asian countries to be materialistic and selfish. People think
the students care only about jobs and money. We’re
known to be very unneighbourly.”
These protests however have revealed a latent side
ê Photo credit: Justin Chin/Mac