HONG KONG — Five years ago, on June 9, 2019, I watched 1 million people march through the streets of Hong Kong.
Some put the crowd count higher. Police — as they do everywhere — put it lower. But it was a sea of humanity, stretching as far as I could see from my perch on one of the city’s ubiquitous elevated walkways. It was the largest protest in Hong Kong’s history, and by far the largest I’d ever seen anywhere.
It was also almost entirely peaceful, even festive, representing a cross section of Hong Kong society. I saw students and elders, well-known activists and ordinary people, and couples pushing children in strollers. It turned ugly only briefly, at midnight, when police fired pepper spray at a few hundred stragglers who refused to disperse.
The crowd had gathered that sweltering day with a singular demand — that Hong Kong’s handpicked leader, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, withdraw an ill-conceived extradition bill that would allow criminal suspects to be sent across the border to mainland China for trial.
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Looking back, it seems odd that a technical amendment to an existing ordinance would engender such widespread public attention and antipathy. Lam insisted the extradition bill was merely closing a “legal loophole.” Hong Kong already had extradition treaties with more than a dozen countries. China had inadvertently been left out.
That was untrue. China was deliberately left off the list at the time of the special administrative region’s 1997 handover of sovereignty from British to Chinese rule. Hong Kong enjoyed a Common Law system and proudly upheld internationally accepted judicial standards and human rights. China’s legal system was, and still is, a black box. Criminal suspects in China are subject to arbitrary detention, torture, forced confessions and a denial of medical treatment. China boasts a 99 percent conviction rate for suspects, sometimes after trials held in secret.
Hong Kongers are smart. They understood clearly that Lam’s extradition bill would tear down the legal wall that separated semiautonomous Hong Kong from the Communist-controlled mainland. They turned out in unprecedented numbers to show their anger.
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Normally, seeing 1 million people in the streets would give any elected leader pause. But Hong Kong in 2019 wasn’t a normal place, and Lam was not an elected leader. She was a career bureaucrat with no political experience, appointed by mainland China and ratified in the position by a small committee of pro-China loyalists. The vast majority of Hong Kongers had no say.
Lam’s response to the million-person march was something like imperial disdain. She said the people “didn’t understand” the bill. She said the government only needed to communicate better. And in her most condescending remark, she compared the demonstrators marching in the streets to her children throwing tantrums to get what they wanted. She vowed to ram the hated extradition bill through the pro-Beijing legislative council three days later, on June 12, 2019.
That never happened. Angry protesters surrounded the legislative building, blocking streets and charging police barricades. Police responded ferociously with tear gas and, for the first time in my memory, rubber bullets. The council members were unable to reach the chambers and the vote was postponed. A few days later, Lam reluctantly suspended the bill.
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The protesters learned a lesson that day — one that ultimately led to Beijing’s crackdown and its remaking of the city in China’s authoritarian image. We marched peacefully and Lam ignored us, some later told me, but when we became violent, she suspended the bill. Violence, they concluded, gets results.
Suspending the extradition bill meant it could be brought up later for a vote. Lam stubbornly refused the protesters’ demand for a complete withdrawal of the bill — a position she clung to for months, until September. It was too late.
By then, the protesters’ demands had grown, and the protests became more violent. They wanted an independent investigation into acts of police brutality that took place on June 12. They demanded that people arrested be freed and that rioting charges against them be dropped. They demanded universal suffrage — and Lam’s resignation.
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Nowhere among those demands was anything about independence from China.
In mid-2020, China imposed a draconian new national security law over the city that stifled protest and dissent, forced the shuttering of independent media outlets and caused civil society groups and labor unions to disband. China and its minions in Hong Kong have ever since tried to rewrite the history of what began on June 9, calling the protests “black riots” instigated by “foreign forces” trying to foment a “color revolution” against the Chinese Communist Party. Some insist, however implausibly, that the protesters were all being paid by the CIA.
That is nonsense, of course, and the government officials and pro-China propagandists know it. It’s also condescending to think Hong Kongers needed foreign help to organize mass resistance.
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Five years on, I am left pondering a series of “what ifs,” counterfactuals that might have changed the trajectory of Hong Kong’s history, and might have saved it from the repression it now faces.
What if, after the June 9 demonstration, Lam had been less obstinate, listened to the protesters and immediately withdrawn the extradition bill?
What if the marchers had remained peaceful, never resorting to violence and prompting the tough police response?
What if the protesters had not drawn Beijing’s ire by attacking China’s main government office building in Hong Kong, defacing the city emblem with black paint, and vandalizing mainland-linked businesses? In the days after June 9, Chinese media mostly ignored the massive protest. Would Chinese leaders have continued to overlook the unrest without the provocations?
We’ll never know what might have been. What we know is that Hong Kong has been changed irrevocably — by events set in motion five years ago on that second Sunday in June.
