Hong Kong protests: "Might as well go down fighting"

Zeynep Tufekci (previously) has been in Hong Kong reporting on the protests for months, and she's witnessed firsthand the failure of every prediction that the uprising would end soon -- but despite the mounting numbers and militancy of protesters, she reports that the protesters are not animated by hope or optimism, but rather, a fatalistic understanding that they will lose eventually, and a determination to go down fighting.

The protesters that Tufekci has spoken to invoke Xinjiang province, where millions of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been imprisoned in hundreds of concentration camps where they are subjected to torture, rape, and brainwashing. The Hong Kong protesters understand that President Xi and the Beijing establishment have declared war on dissenters in China, and that further integration with the mainland could lead to the disappearance, torture and murder of their loved ones.

The protesters have formulated a program with five demands on it: withdrawal of the extradition bill, independent investigations of police violence, dropping riot charges against protesters, amnesty for the arrested, and universal sufferage -- the right to nominate and vote on their own leaders, without those nominations being subjected to a veto by the mainland Chinese state.

Universal sufferage is the most urgent of these demands (though all of them are non-negotiable -- as the popular slogan goes, "Five demands, not one less"). The protesters understand that their fate depends on being able to elect their own leaders, and that without a legitimate, accountable state, they will ultimately be sold out to the mainland. Read the rest