On July 1, 2003, some half a million Hong Kong people took to the streets to protest a national-security bill, proposed by Hong Kong’s government and backed by Beijing, that was widely believed to restrict freedom of speech. I had just moved to Hong Kong, where I worked as a journalist for three years. The day of the protests was hot. People were carrying umbrellas for the sun, not for tear gas. Some wore black to mourn their freedoms. The protesters were orderly and good-natured, but that shouldn’t be confused for complacency—the people I saw in Hong Kong were passionate about defending the “one country, two systems” that is supposed to protect them from Chinese interference. In 2003, the people won, and the controversial bill was shelved.
Today, thousands of people in Hong Kong are protesting an election reform that would essentially mandate Beijing approval of candidates for Hong Kong’s chief executive. There are many differences between 2003 and now, especially in terms of duration, but perhaps the biggest distinction is that the 2003 protests felt mostly like a Hong Kong story, separate from the rest of the world. There was some media coverage, but Beijing did not have to worry nearly as much about protest images spreading to the mainland. In 2003, the Hong Kong protesters were relatively isolated. Today, they enjoy a global network of online support. In the social-media age, protests are no longer “local.”
The potential reach of these protests certainly has Beijing worried. China has been cracking down on Internet users who demonstrate sympathy for the Hong Kong protesters, and almost a dozen people have been detained. Censors are aggressively scouring Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. According to one estimate, the rate of Weibo censorship on September 28th, two days after the Hong Kong protests began, was more than double that seen on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, earlier this year.* China has also blocked Instagram, apparently because people were sharing images of the protests. (Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are already blocked in the country.) But, as I found in a decade’s worth of research on Internet dissent in China, censorship is never completely effective; some information always gets through. Twitter has far fewer mainland users than Weibo but nonetheless has emerged as a kind of virtual gathering place for the Chinese dissident community. People jump over the firewall via proxy servers and virtual private networks. Furthermore, blocking a platform can also motivate a new crop of people to get around the Great Firewall of China. Chinese Instagram users, for example, now deprived of their habit, will likely find other ways to access the service.
Behind the firewall, Internet users get around automatic filters by purposefully misspelling words or writing in code. For example, instead of writing “June 4,” the date of the Tiananmen crackdown, people would write “May 35.” (Censors, of course, eventually caught on.) Mainland Internet users have shown their support for the Hong Kong protests by sharing images of umbrellas, which demonstrators used to ward off tear gas. Within a week, the umbrella has become an easily recognizable, nearly ubiquitous symbol of solidarity.
While the current protests could certainly have happened without the Internet, social media is playing an important role. A loosely organized but active group of accounts has broadcast images of the protest to the world. Last night, I spoke to one of the people who run the popular Occupy Central Twitter feed, @oclphk, who for security reasons wanted to be known simply as KTG. “What’s emerged is this large group of people live-tweeting from the protests,” he told me. “Basically all @oclphk does is retweet their great work.… It feels like a burden lifted from our shoulders.”
In this way, social media and mobile devices have helped to sustain the protests. Images and information have spread over many different platforms, as activists find creative ways to share their message. George Chen, a Yale World Fellow and columnist for the South China Morning Post, told me that people are using the texting app Whatsapp to exchange information. “If your friends ask you to join the protest, they just Whatsapp you: ‘Hey, I am going, are you?’ Then you quickly decide.” Another app, called FireChat, allows users to communicate via Bluetooth or cellphone radio, and does not require a phone or Internet connection. Some protesters may be using this app out of fear that authorities will cut them off from the Internet.
Social media won’t prevent Beijing from cracking down on the protesters in Hong Kong, but if a violent repression occurs, the world will be watching in real time. The sense of being part of a global online community has encouraged the protest movement. Jessica Fan, an Occupy volunteer, posted photos of Hong Kong protesters on Facebook, and received encouragement from people in places ranging from France and Ireland to Myanmar. This has a powerful psychological effect, Fan told me. “When they share their support, I feel happy that I’m not alone when I’m fighting for Hong Kong democracy.”
*Correction: A previous version of this post included a reference to censorship numbers on September 26th. This version has been updated to reflect the correct date, September 28th.
*Update, October 2nd, 10:39 A.M.: A previous version of this post was illustrated with a photo from a march in Taipei in support of the Hong Kong protests.
