What France’s ‘yellow vests’ can teach Hong Kong activists about political protests and the use of violence
- Jason Y. Ng says the French president’s concessions to the violent protesters have reignited debate in Hong Kong about whether peaceful resistance is an effective route towards political change
Shots of tear gas ring out on a major thoroughfare. Protesters roar as they disperse from a phalanx of riot police. Waves of yellow ripple from the front lines. A city is under siege.
Demonstrators wear a yellow reflective vest, safety gear that all motorists in France are required to put on after getting out of their vehicle in an emergency. The brightly coloured vest has become a symbol of despair and a defiant call for change.
Like Occupy, the French protests have been spontaneous, leaderless and self-organised via social media. Neither was tied to a political party, although the threat of it being “hijacked” by politicians was ever-present.
But the most poignant common thread is what engendered both uprisings in the first place. Both Hong Kong and France had been a political tinderbox before social and economic frustrations finally bubbled to the surface.
In France, the fuel tax was the tipping point, but beneath the surface are more deep-rooted economic woes, including the widening rift between big cities and poor rural areas where working families have been left behind by globalisation and the urban elite who benefit from it.
These similarities notwithstanding, the two movements are also marked by stark differences. For starters, Occupy was largely nonviolent. Hong Kong protesters earned praise for exercising restraint and discipline, fending off police offensives with little more than umbrellas, cling wrap and eye goggles.
Indeed, four years after Occupy, whether violence is a necessary evil in protest movements remains one of the most divisive questions facing activists in Hong Kong.
That Macron backed down only after protesters stepped up their fight has reignited a bruising debate in Hong Kong and given radical groups a live example of “why violence works”.
But to subscribe to that argument is to ignore several key cultural and political differences that shaped the two uprisings.
France has a centuries-old history of political and even regime change brought about by civil unrest. The credo guiding the country – liberty, equality and fraternity – is deeply entrenched in the national psyche.
Polls conducted during the Occupy movement put public support for protesters somewhere between 8 and 25 per cent, whereas over three-quarters of the French population rally behind the yellow vests. It is this difference in public support and societal priorities that contributed to the disparate results in Occupy and the French protests.
There is also the difference in government accountability. In France and other modern democracies, politicians have an eye on their poll numbers and the next election. If Macron and his government appear unsympathetic to the yellow vests’ demands or inept in handling the crisis, they will face a political reckoning. Genuine universal suffrage provides the necessary checks and balances to hold tone-deaf politicians and poor policy decisions to account.
The same cannot be said of Hong Kong. Not only are the city’s chief executive and nearly half the lawmakers not elected by the general electorate, public opinion had lost much of its potency by the time Occupy erupted in 2014.
The leadership changes in Hong Kong and Beijing in 2012 had much to do with the sudden shift in the authorities’ attitude towards public polls and protest turnouts. Under President Xi Jinping’s strongman leadership and Leung’s hard-nosed management style, it became imperative to implement the national agenda in Hong Kong.
Jason Y. Ng is the author of Umbrellas in Bloom: Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement Uncovered