Politicians and police have done a thorough job of alienating our youth
Gordon Mathews says an incompetent government and, now, the police's use of disproportionate force to clear the protests have radicalised our youth
I went to Admiralty on Sunday night, to be with my students after the Federation of Students called for an escalation of protests. I went because the police have on occasion been behaving badly, and I wanted to be a witness to what would happen. Unwittingly, I also wound up protecting my students, only because, when I was there, they felt a need to protect me as an onlooker rather than be on the front lines confronting the police.
The news over the past several days has been full of claims by police and Hong Kong government figures that protesters had become violent. Perhaps a few somewhere were - but, from what I saw over eight hours, the violence was overwhelmingly committed by the police beating students with their batons with great force.
The protesters were indeed engaged in illegal behaviour, occupying roads around the central government complex in an expansion of their earlier protest zones. Some force was probably necessary to clear the roads. But many police were behaving in an out-of-control way, as dozens of videos on television and YouTube attest. This does not compare to police brutality in the United States: we have had no shootings, and I pray this will continue. Hong Kong is still more civil in its behaviour than almost anywhere else in the world. But the police have become politicised, largely because of Hong Kong's political leaders hiding from sight.
Students have shown me their many bruises from being beaten - these aren't radicals, but ordinary students, who in a saner political environment would be at home studying for exams. They may never again see the police as their protectors, but rather as goons doing the bidding of a despised government.
The Occupy Central movement will end soon, although many more demonstrations will take place in the coming months and years. The long-term legacy of the movement will be an ongoing generational chasm. On Hong Kong university campuses, the overwhelming majority of students support Occupy Central and its civil disobedience, although many believe the demonstrations have gone on too long. Almost all students believe the Hong Kong government is run by incompetents who have no understanding of how ordinary people live.
Hong Kong students overwhelmingly see the mainland as a foreign dictatorship rather than a motherland, and see Hong Kong as being progressively swallowed up by its authoritarian mainland masters. This is totally different from what Hong Kong and Beijing pundits envisioned 20 years ago; they assumed young people would become more Chinese. This was not even fully imaginable 20 months ago. A generation has been radicalised.
Will this young generation be running a new, more democratic and open Hong Kong in future decades? Or will it be doomed to suffer an ever more plutocratic and authoritarian Hong Kong? I eye the future with a tiny bit of hope and a great deal of fear for my city. Meanwhile, Hong Kong's political leaders and police officials should know they have completely alienated most of Hong Kong's youth, and will probably never get them back.
