‘Retake Hong Kong’: How a slogan defines one island’s battle with China

The revolutionary slogan and its different interpretations highlights divisions amongst the population

Edward Leung from Hong Kong Indigenous, who coined the slogan "Retake Hong Kong", when he was running for election in 2016. (ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images)

Edward Leung has been locked up for more than a year in a secluded island jail, but the bespectacled inmate is the closest thing Hong Kong’s tumultuous and leaderless protest movement has to a guiding light.

He coined the protesters’ most widely chanted and, for China, most subversive slogan. He pioneered some of the movement’s rougher tactics.

He gave voice to the identity politics at the heart of the Hong Kong protests, now in its 10th week, to avoid becoming just another Communist Party-run Chinese city.

The protests were ignited in June by anger at plans by the Hong Kong government to allow extradition to mainland China.

They have been freighted since with a host of other complaints about prohibitively expensive housing, unfair elections and alleged police brutality.

But at the movement’s root is a dramatic shift in identity since Britain pulled out in 1997 that has left a large majority of Mr Leung’s generation rejecting ties to mainland China and asserting what they see as their own distinct and entirely separate identity.

“I’m a Hong Konger, not Chinese,” said Kapo Chen, a student who joined protests at the city’s airport. “Of course, my blood is Chinese, but I can’t control that.”

A piece of paper with Mr Leung’s slogan was pinned to her back. The same words are now daubed on walls across Hong Kong, screamed by black-clad protesters who plunged the airport into chaos Tuesday and chanted at orderly gatherings around the city.

Mr Leung coined the slogan “Retake Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” in 2016, shortly before he was arrested over his role in a street brawl with police, while running for election to Hong Kong’s legislature.

But starkly different interpretations of what Mr Leung’s words mean — an incendiary call to break up China or simply an appeal to defend Hong Kong’s core values — highlight a gulf that has opened up in the former British colony.

The city’s Beijing-backed government is struggling against its foes not only for control of the streets but over what Hong Kong means as a place, a culture and a political entity.

Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, and Beijing officials have repeatedly denounced Mr Leung’s slogan as a treasonous call for the city to split from China and overturn the formula of “one country, two systems” under which Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule.

But young protesters and their supporters note that the word they are using for “retake” in Chinese literally means “return to the light”.

They insist that it is an appeal for Hong Kong to recover the freedoms and impartial system of justice that they believe have been steadily eroded.

Chu Hoi-dick, also known as Eddie Chu, is an elected member of the city’s legislative assembly and a protest activist who has visited Mr Leung in prison several times, said the activist was never as recklessly militant as portrayed by China’s propaganda machine and has moderated some of his more radical views while in jail.

All the same, he described Mr Leung as “the Che Guevara of Hong Kong’s revolution”. "He has this aura about him and is an icon for the young,” he said.

Mr Chu is also an early champion of Hong Kong’s “localist” movement, a cause focused on preserving the city’s sense of identity. He never agreed with Mr Leung’s tactics, which sometimes veered into violence, but shares his view that Hong Kong must preserve its different identity rooted in the rule of law, generous freedoms and local traditions.

The view that Hong Kong residents are not Chinese has dismayed not only the Communist Party but also some of its critics, who gather each year in Hong Kong for a candlelit vigil to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen massacre in Beijing.

Many student groups have voted in recent years to stay away from the event “because they want absolutely nothing to do with mainland China” and are “focused on their own identity politics”, said Bao Pu, a Hong Kong publisher who is the son of a senior, liberal-minded Beijing official purged in 1989.

After a brief surge of patriotic feeling during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, affection for and even interest in the mainland has fallen sharply, particularly after Xi Jinping became China’s paramount leader in 2012.

China’s harsh crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the nominally autonomous western region of Xinjiang has added to a grim sense of foreboding among many young people in Hong Kong.

In tandem with pleas since 1997 to accept their new masters in Beijing, Hong Kong authorities have tied the city ever more closely to mainland China through infrastructure projects.

With new transport links came huge crowds of mainland visitors — 51 million last year — many of them speaking Mandarin instead of Cantonese, Hong Kong’s principal language. They irritated many locals by buying up supplies of baby formula and other products because they did not trust the quality of goods sold on the mainland.

A group called Hong Kong Indigenous, in which Mr Leung was a leading activist, began harassing mainland shoppers in what it called “retake” actions.

Hong Kong’s colonial-era flag became a banner of resistance in what at times became an ugly xenophobic campaign against mainlanders.

Support for declaring Hong Kong an independent country has remained a tiny, fringe cause. It exists largely as a trope in Communist propaganda, which has used it to tar protesters as traitors and curb any sympathies people in mainland China might have for the protests.

Resembling an earnest young accountant more than a fiery revolutionary, Mr Leung cemented his stature as a youth icon during his trial last year.

He won widespread sympathy when the court handed down what many saw as an unfairly harsh six-year jail sentence for his role in what became known as the “fishball revolution”.

Mr Leung admitted to throwing things at police in a scuffle with street hawkers. He apologised but said he “could not suppress his anger".

His admission struck many young residents as brave and honest.

His organisation, Hong Kong Indigenous, never gained much traction beyond a fringe of disenchanted radical youth. But its warnings that Hong Kong was losing its special identity and must fight back have now found a new and far wider resonance as authorities’ often tin-eared response to the unrest inflames the public mood.

“This movement is not about independence. It is about returning Hong Kong to a free place,” said Emma Chan, a 20-year-old protester at the airport. Mr Leung, she added, “is not a hero but he inspired a lot of us to be interested in politics”.

“Many thought that politics do not matter,” she said. “They do.”

The New York Times