— Sure, the billion’s occupation of Beijing helped us. No doubt about it! That was huge, and of course part of why that happened was that the mainland’s illegal internal migrant population saw how we did it in Hong Kong, and decided to do it themselves, right in Beijing. And of course the Party was terrified, how could they not be? The people without proper hukou, without residency papers for where they lived, did all the dirty work in China, and there were about four hundred million of them when the occupation happened. That’s a lot of people without any feeling of representation or belonging. So yes, the Party had to deal with that, or lose everything. In that struggle Hong Kong became a smaller matter and had some wiggle room, you might say. Which we used very smartly. It was never about independence, you must understand that. It was only for one country two systems. For the rule of law that we had here to persist past 2047.
— Yes, of course Beijing had other big problems. And as I said, they couldn’t just kill us off. That left only talk. The discursive battle. And happily, we people of Hong Kong recognized this, and banded together. Solidarity— there’s no feeling like it. People talk about it, they use the word, they write about it, they try to invoke it. Naturally. But to really feel it? You have to be part of a wave in history. You can’t get it just by wanting it, you can’t call for it and make it come. You can’t choose it— it chooses you! It arrives like a wave picking you up! It’s a feeling— how can I say it? It’s as if everyone in your city becomes a family member, known to you as such even when you have never seen their face before and never will again. Mass action, yes, but the mass is suddenly family, they are all on the same side, doing something important.
— How did that play out in reality? What, didn’t you see? Have you forgotten? We took to the streets every Saturday for thirty straight years!
— Of course sometimes it was more intense and other times less so. Often we let the young people do it, the idealism of youth is very good at persisting in such things, young people want something to believe in, of course! Everyone does, but the young aren’t yet used to not getting it, so they persist. And they can handle the physical stresses of it better. But whenever push came to shove, we older people would come back out onto the streets also. As July 1 drew ever closer, we got back out onto the streets such that on some Saturdays the entire population of Hong Kong was out there. Those were stupendous events.
— Yes, there were other things we had to do also. Of course. These were not so exciting, in fact they were often tedious, but they needed to be done. Eventually you have to recognize that many necessary things are boring, but also, quite a few things are both boring and interesting at the same time. So we went to meetings, we joined the neighborhood councils, we went to the HK Legislature and did all the things that being part of a citizenry requires. It wasn’t just the demonstrations, although that was part of it. There was all kinds of work to be done, and we did it. You have to pace yourself for the long haul.
— No, they didn’t give it to us! Don’t put it that way. Your questions are kind of offensive, I’m not sure if you are aware of that or not, but whatever, I will answer you politely, because I know the difference. So, eventually what I think happened is we just wore them down. They couldn’t beat us; they had not the hegemony to do that. In fact, now some people say we beat them. These are the Tail Wags Dog people, who think our sterling example will eventually transform all mainland China into one big Hong Kong.
— No, I myself don’t think that’s right. It goes too far. China is too big, and the party elites are too convinced they are right. I’m more in the camp that gets called Tail Wags Dog’s Butt. This is more realistic, even to the image itself; when a dog wags its tail, even when it is most excited, it’s only the butt that also moves with the tail, not the whole dog. That wouldn’t make sense, just in the physical sense. You can see that when you look at any dog, even one in a frenzy of happiness: only the butt wags with the tail. The head and chest stay steady. So, it’s the same with China. The Cantonese-speaking part of China is in the south. It’s Guangdong, a very big and prosperous province in south China, centered on the city Guangzhou, used to be spelled Canton in English, and there are a hundred million of us who speak Cantonese, and it’s an older dialect than Mandarin. And most of the Chinese who live elsewhere in the world speak it, and we in Hong Kong speak it. Also in Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone where Beijing tried to piggyback on Hong Kong’s success in the world. So Beijing made a big mistake when they tried to suppress Cantonese as a language, which they did for many years, because that
