ON WATER, FROM HONG KONG

To be water is to be fluid, to fight like hell when it means something, and to fade away when it doesn’t. To be water is to enact forms of direct democracy such as staging a vote on LIHKG Forum on whether to continue an occupation in the airport and call more people in or abandon the site to avoid detention. To be water is to continually incorporate more supporters within and without our society. To be water is to exchange tactical training advice with protesters in Beirut and Catalonia. Whereas the internationalist movements of the 1960s were calibrated by a logic of exclusion, the Hong Kong movement produced a new way to do revolution. To be water is not just to be anti-government, but to be pro Hong Kong — to work out, as a group of people, how to be a group of people without top down governance. As Zeynep Tufekci reported in the Atlantic, the society we built during the protests enabled a rapid response to the coronavirus. Under a flailing government, people orchestrated their own forms of mutual aid and information vetting.

Hera Chan, “Channeling Energy, for Freedom Fighters! “ in Safar, issue VII, Networks