Hong Kong, preoccupied with its extradition crisis and trying to ‘be water’, overlooked the climate emergency

Every year end, the media sags under reviews and rankings – person, film, business, event of the year. But few of these rankings arouse as much emotion as the word of the year. And in a bedlam year like 2019, it was a safe bet that we would get a bumper harvest.

Hong Kong’s companion word of the year was “be water”, the reflexive but highly effective ability of “cockroaches” to evade water cannon, often by sudden disappearance into Hong Kong’s underground network, which when undisturbed operates as a mass transit system. Paradoxically, evidence that “water” has just passed by has often been outbreaks of fire in bank branches, non-functioning traffic lights, explosions of graffiti and heavily-armed policemen working long hours of overtime.

For the rest of the world, the word of the year was “climate emergency”, according to Oxford Dictionary, but could have been any of the similar expressions of angst over the plight of humans on this planet: “climate strike”, “climate crisis”, “climate action”, “climate change denial”, “eco-anxiety”, “ecocide” or, bearing Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg’s imprint, “extinction rebellion”. We in Hong Kong were too busy being water around the extradition bill to notice this bigger anxiety of the year.