Hong Kong 2019 demonstrations and arrests
As of November 20, 11,286,456 demonstrators have taken part in 648 demonstrations; at least 4,891 have been arrested and 728 charged.
Last updated on November 20. AS OF NOVEMBER 20, THIS PAGE WILL NO LONGER BE UPDATED. A NEW PAGE DEDICATED TO PROTESTS HAS BEEN CREATED AND WILL BE UPDATED REGULARLY. A NEW PAGE DEDICATED TO ARRESTS IS IN THE WORKS.
Note: The numbers above are accurate as of the above date. The information and charts below regarding numbers of demonstrators and demonstrations are updated weekly, usually on Monday or Tuesday.
As of November 20, 11,286,456 demonstrators; 648 demonstrations
Note: As of early October, I have stopped updating all of the numbers on arrests below on a regular basis, simply because they have become far too many for me to keep up with. I will continue to update the overall numbers here at the beginning of the article. The number of protest arrests is based on the announcements of the Hong Kong Police Force as its regular press conferences. The number of protesters charged in court is based on regular announcements by the Arrested Persons Concern Group (被捕人士關注組).
As of November 20, at least 4,891 protesters arrested; 728 charged in court, of whom 477 with ‘riot’ and 39 with assaulting police. 31 protesters have been remanded in custody. But police have not given a complete accounting of the mass arrests that occurred on November 18 and 19. They have said 1,000 to 1,100 were arrested, surrendered or had their ID details taken, but they didn’t disaggregate or give a precise time period, making it impossible to accurately update the arrest numbers. The number of arrests is surely several hundred more than the last precise figure given of 4,891. Likewise, Arrested Persons Concern Group, which I’d come to rely on as authoritative, has been so swamped with the number of cases coming through the courts that it has been unable to update its figures for days, so the figures of those in trial are also provisional.
The first demonstration against the Hong Kong government’s plan to amend the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance in order to legalize extradition to China took place on March 31. Twelve-thousand demonstrators turned out. The second occurred on April 28. One-hundred thirty-thousand demonstrators participated. This was already the largest demonstration in Hong Kong since the 2014 Umbrella Movement, but it wasn’t until the demonstrations of June that the matter began to draw international attention and pitch the Hong Kong government and Communist Party control over Hong Kong into crisis.
While the immediate precipitator of the crisis was the extradition bill and from June 16 onward, demonstrators have had anywhere from three to five other specific demands (the resignation of the Chief Executive, that the government and police stop referring the June 12 demonstration as a “riot”, that demonstrators not be prosecuted, that the Chief Executive establish an independent Commission of Inquiry to investigate policing of the protests and the government’s handling of the extradition bill, and that genuine universal suffrage be implemented in elections for the Chief Executive and Legislative Council), underlying the demonstrations is Hong Kong people’s deep dissatisfaction with Communist Party rule and skepticism about any kind of future worth wishing for under it. It’s safe to say that if the Communist Party had granted genuine universal suffrage to Hong Kong in 2014 and 2015, as it is required to do by Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, and by international law, the current anti-extradition protests never would have occurred. The Communist Party and Hong Kong government’s attempt to foist extradition to China upon the people of Hong Kong was simply the tipping point. Frustrations have been building over the past five years. These frustrations have been documented in my articles here on Medium and in Hong Kong Free Press and in my book published in March 2019, As long as there is resistance there is hope: Essays on the Hong Kong freedom struggle on the post-Umbrella Movement era, 2014–2018.
Never has Communist Party rule over Hong Kong been so challenged, not even during the Umbrella Movement. Hong Kong is coming to a breaking point. While governments in the rest of the world continue to recite like a mantra that all sides must abide by the “one country, two systems” formula, both the Communist Party and Hong Kong people know “one country, two systems” is already dead, especially as far as the relationship between the Communist Party and Hong Kong government is concerned. What is happening now is a struggle over what is to replace it, with the Communist Party attempting to impose greater control and promote greater assimilation with the rest of the territory under its rule and Hong Kong people fighting for self-determination.
Demonstrations
Of the 569 demonstrations in Hong Kong between March 31 and October 13, five have been marches organized by Civil Human Rights Front. 1.03 million, 2 million, 550,000, 430,000 and 1.7 million people turned out for those marches and one was a rally organized by CHRF in which 80,000 demonstrators participated. The other demonstrations were organized by various groups including young people, lawyers, mothers, hunger strikers, journalists, social workers, aviation workers, old people, medical workers, civil servants, teachers, secondary students, university students, accountants, relatives of police officers, trade unions, women’s rights advocates, pet owners and veterinarians, and holders of BNO passports.
In all, 10,281,746 demonstrators have participated in the demonstrations. These numbers are the reported crowd counts by organizers. In some cases, there was no organizer and the crowd count is based on media reports. Note that I use the term “demonstrators” rather than “people”. Of course, many people have attended multiple demonstrations, but each time a person attends a demonstration, she is counted as one demonstrator. The Hong Kong population is currently 7,392,000 million. 10,256,316 is 138 percent of the Hong Kong population. That does not mean that 138 percent of Hong Kong people have participated in the demonstrations, but it does give a sense of the demonstrations’ enormous scale. To estimate the proportion of the Hong Kong population that has participated, take the 2-million-person march of June 16 as the baseline. That’s 27 percent of the Hong Kong population. So, at a minimum, 27 percent has participated. The maximum would be 138 percent, but since it can be safely assumed that many people have participated in multiple demonstrations, the percentage of Hong Kong people who have participated can’t be nearly that high. I think it’s safe to assume that somewhere between 30 and 45 percent of Hong Kong people have participated, and as time goes on, it may very well be more toward 45 percent, and the percentage could also be even higher.
The two-million-person march was probably one of the largest single-day demonstrations anywhere in the world ever, and certainly one of the biggest as a percentage of the population. As a whole, it would be hard to find participation rates as high as those in the anti-extradition demonstrations over the period of time — thus far, eleven weeks — that they have lasted.
Between June 9 and July 1, CHRF-organized demonstrations alternated with those organized online by mostly young demonstrators. The CHRF demonstrations were entirely peaceful and attended by wide swathes of Hong Kong society. The demonstrations organized by young demonstrators tended to be more confrontational and aggressive. Since July 1, CHRF has organized two demonstrations, on July 21 and August 18 and had one demonstration partially banned on August 18 and two marches on August 31 and September 15 entirely banned by police. All demonstrations since July 1 besides the two CHRF marches that were allowed have been organized by a variety of other groups and individuals. There have been mass marches in many districts throughout the city, including Kowloon, Shatin, Yuen Long, Mong Kok, Tseung Kwan O, Kwun Tong and Tsuen Wan and smaller demonstrations in Tuen Mun, Sheung Shui, HK Island West, Tai Po, HK Island East, the airport, and seven locations during the August 5 general strike. An almost total ban on marches since the end of August put an end to the big district marches. Smaller demonstrations have occurred in many places in almost every corner of Hong Kong.
It is worth noting that more demonstrators (8,962,931) have participated since the Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced on June 15 that she was “suspending” the extradition bill than before (1,281,000). Of the demonstrators’ five core demands, only one — full withdrawal of the bill — has to do with the extradition bill. Of the other four, three have to do with other actions of the government and police since the beginning of the protest, namely, setting up an independent Commission of Inquiry into police abuses, dropping all charges against protesters, and not labelling protests “riots”. The last of the five is to implement full and genuine universal suffrage. This demand was added after July 1. The demands give a sense of the scope of the demonstrators’ concerns, and the last in particular shows that fundamentally, what the demonstrations are calling for is a fair and democratic system, which is promised to Hong Kong people in the Basic Law, and still, after 21 years under Communist Party rule, unfulfilled. Also, as of the Mong Kok march of August 3, the number of demonstrators since the 2-million-person march on June 16 surpassed 2 million.
From September 2 to 6 and on September 9, students from a total of at least 230 secondary schools participated in human chain protests. The full list can be found here.
Arrests
My work on the Umbrella Movement, resulting in the book, Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong, convinced me that tracking the arrests and prosecutions of demonstrators is essential to holding the government and police accountable. This is perhaps even more the case with the anti-extradition protests.
On the one hand, ever since the police used overwhelming, disproportionate and excessive force to clear 100,000 demonstrators (almost all of whom, with the exception of a few hundred, were entirely peaceful), people from across Hong Kong have been calling for an independent Commission of Inquiry into policing. Similar calls were made in regard to policing of the Umbrella Movement, in particular the eight-hour-long teargas attacks of September 28, 2014 that triggered it, and in regard to the clashes between police and protesters in Mong Kok in February 2018, the most violent since the 1960s. In both cases, government and police refused. That’s how we got to June 12, when police apparently acted in full confidence of complete impunity.
On the other hand, the Hong Kong government and police have at various points labelled demonstrators “rioters” and threatened “hundreds of arrests”, especially in regard to the Legislative Council break-in of July 1.
There is simply no way to reconcile these diametrically opposed views of police and demonstrators. The arrests are, among other things, political acts meant to impose the government and police views of the demonstrations. Both demonstrators and government/police invoke “rule of law”.
The question, from demonstrators’ point of view, is how we can really speak of “rule of law” in a context in which the government itself is literally illegal because not elected according to the principles of genuine universal suffrage, as required by both the Basic Law and international law.
In such a context in which the Communist Party and Hong Kong government refuse to abide by the law, how can Hong Kong people get their basic rights? The principle of the Umbrella Movement was nonviolent civil disobedience. While the movement defeated the Communist Party’s fake suffrage plan, it didn’t bring about genuine suffrage. Over 1,000 demonstrators were arrested, over 250 were prosecuted, and some 120 were convicted. Four are currently serving prison sentences. This background may help to explain why, up to now, the millions who have marched peacefully have for the most part been supportive of and sympathetic with the mostly young demonstrators who have been more confrontational and aggressive in their actions and tactics and why many believe the government and police will use arrests politically to avoid accountability and avoid addressing the underlying issues of governance and policing that are root causes of the mass uprisings of the Umbrella Movement and anti-extradition campaign.
As of September 2, the number of those arrested this summer 2019 has surpassed the number arrested in the Umbrella Movement: In the latter,1,283 in 79 days. In the former, there have been 2,022 arrests in 115 days. Most of those arrests have occurred since July 14. 148 were arrested on August 5 and 149 from August 9 to 11 alone. On October 1, the single-day arrest record was shattered: 269 arrest on that day alone. After July 1, the Hong Kong government and police came out aggressively saying they would pursue those who broke into Legco and hold them legally accountable. They spoke of “hundreds of arrests”. This was part of a propaganda ploy to shift the narrative. When they failed to do this and most people continued to support the young demonstrators, they decided to hold off on mass arrests for the time being, but that prospect still very much hangs over the movement. Since July 1, there has been one single arrest related to the Legco break-in, and there have been 17 after-the-incident arrests. That is to say, the vast majority of arrests have been on-site, not a result of post-event investigation.
On July 28, police arrested 49 people in Sheung Wan. On July 31, 45 of them were brought before the court. Forty-four were charged with ‘riot’ and one with illegal possession of an offensive weapon. This has substantively changed the situation. Before July 31, only one of the 199 so far arrested had been formally charged with a crime. Not only that, but ‘riot’ is a serious and controversial crime, with a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. The average sentence for those convicted of ‘riot’ in relation to the Mong Kok police-protester clashes of February 2016 was three years, with a few getting sentences as heavy as six and seven years. The Hong Kong government has charged the 44 with ‘riot’ in direct defiance of two of the protesters’ demands, to not prosecute protesters and to stop labelling protests ‘riots’, and in doing so, is doubling down on a strategy ordered by the Communist Party: to insist on a narrative of the protests as only about ‘law and order’ and to refuse outright to even so much as entertain or engage substantively with any of the protesters’ demands. The decision to prosecute 44 on ‘riot’ charges is blatantly political. Prosecutors in the Department of Justice sent the Secretary for Justice an extraordinary letter (never before in HK have public prosecutors publicly accused their boss) saying that she has made prosecution decisions based on political factors. Instead of ordering an independent Commission of Inquiry into policing or the government’s handling of the extradition crisis, instead of looking into the triad attacks in Yuen Long that left 45 members of the public hospitalized, instead of accepting any kind of responsibility or accountability for the political and governance crisis through resignations of secretaries, the police commissioner or any top leaders, the government, under the orders of the Communist Party, is trying to push the story that this is all about ‘violent rioters’. On October 2, the second mass riot trial began, with 96 charged with that crime.
On August 5, the day of the general strike, the HK government held a press conference in which it adopted a stern tone towards demonstrators and voiced full support of police. This appears to have coincided with an even more aggressive policy regarding arrests. That day, 148 were arrested, nearly triple the highest number of arrests in a single day up to that point. At the end of the week, from August 9 to 11, 149 were arrested. On the weekend from September 6 to 8, 157 were arrested.
So far, of 2,022 arrests, 324, or 16 percent, have been formally charged with an offense in a court of law. Almost all of the others have been released unconditionally or on bail. Fifteen have been remanded in custody. One-hundred seventy-four have been charged with riot — 53% of all of those charged. It is expected that the government will eventually decide to prosecute many more.
— KTG
