A Frail Face Becomes a Defiant Focus of Hong Kong’s Waning Protest Movement
By CHRIS BUCKLEY and ALAN WONG
DEC. 5, 2014
Joshua Wong, a protest leader, spoke to reporters, accompanied by two other student activists who are also on a hunger strike. Credit How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency
HONG KONG — A spindly, stooped teenager in a blue windbreaker shuffled from a tent on the edge of Hong Kong’s main remaining protest camp. Dozens of onlookers applauded, shouted to him or just stared. Cameras snapped and journalists leaned in to catch his soft voice.
The teenager, Joshua Wong, who embodied the hopes of the city’s pro-democracy street movement in its headiest days, has become the exhausted yet defiant focus of what looks to many like the movement’s final throes.
Mr. Wong, 18, on Friday entered the fourth day of a hunger strike at the very place where he had instigated the confrontation that ignited months of street demonstrations. On Sept. 26, students occupied a gated forecourt of the local government’s offices after Mr. Wong shouted encouragement. Hong Kong residents took to the streets in large numbers two days later, after the police tried to disperse the students with tear gas.
This week, Mr. Wong and four other students on hunger strike huddled in tents next to those same steel gates. On Friday, one of the students gave up, and Mr. Wong and the others appeared increasingly spent.
“I’m quite tired from the hunger strike right now, but I will persist in fighting,” Mr. Wong said in an interview on Friday, hunched, pale and occasionally slumping on a chair.
Under a canopy, he and the other strikers lie wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags in their one-man tents, surrounded by supporters and given constant attention. Doctors visit every few hours. Mr. Wong and his fellow hunger strikers periodically post information about their blood-sugar levels and other health indicators on the social media they use compulsively.
“I feel so guilty about these children,” said Frances Ho, a middle-aged woman who visited the tents to offer support on Friday. She shivered with tears when Mr. Wong briefly came out to speak to reporters. “We’re using them as human shields against the government,” she said. “We’ve left it to the children to fight for democracy.”
For Mr. Wong and other leaders, the hunger strikes represent a last-ditch attempt to preserve the hopes that flowered with their pro-democracy youth insurgency.
He said he planned to starve himself, drinking only water and eating no food, until Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s leader, or chief executive, agreed to public talks with him. Mr. Leung has said that he was worried about the hunger strikers’ health in the chilly weather, but he also said that any talks with protesters must be based on acceptance of the Chinese government’s proposed rules for Hong Kong’s elections for chief executive, which would allow Beijing to effectively screen the candidates.
“I’m still optimistic about having a public meeting with the government,” Mr. Wong said Friday.
But many in the pro-democracy movement are far less hopeful. Their journey has been a lesson in the power and limits of a grass-roots campaign that found unity in symbols and broad aspirations, but not a cohesive organization nor, so far, a strategy that could overcome an obdurate government.
Early last week, the police cleared a protest camp in Mong Kok, a crammed, boisterous shopping neighborhood. And after a failed attempt on Sunday to blockade the government headquarters, protesters have come under pressure from both officials and sympathizers to leave the two remaining street camps. On Thursday, student leaders including Mr. Wong said they were considering whether to retreat.
“It is not surprising that a hunger strike would be used at a point in the movement where other tactics seem to have lost their efficacy and reached dead ends,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied student protests in China and closely monitored the Hong Kong tumult.
Two students, Isabella Lo, 18, and Prince Wong, 17, began the hunger strike with Mr. Wong on Monday, and two more, Gloria Cheng and Eddie Ng, both 20, joined them on Wednesday. Ms. Lo said on Friday night that she was abandoning the hunger strike and going home.
The hunger strikers’ tents in the Admiralty neighborhood, the main remaining protest camp, have become a somber pilgrimage site.
Mr. Wong occasionally emerges from his tent, his slight frame even lighter than its usual 99 pounds after days without nourishment, apart from a teaspoon of sugar mixed in water and 100 milliliters of an energy drink taken on doctors’ advice. A friend steadies him as he makes his way to a public toilet. On Friday, Mr. Wong used a wheelchair, his legs under a blanket.
Still, he and the other hunger strikers have mustered the energy to speak to hundreds of protesters who gather around the camp’s main stage at night. On Friday night, Mr. Wong was perched on the stage and in a quiet voice urged the demonstrators to remain steadfast.
But even Mr. Wong has revealed doubts about his chances of prevailing.
“Frankly, I know I’m attempting the impossible,” he said in a video message released on Friday to supporters of what has been called the Umbrella Movement, after the umbrellas that protesters used to ward off pepper spray.
He said, “I can’t resign myself to the Umbrella Movement retreating empty-handed, without any gains.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Frail Face Becomes a Defiant Focus of Hong Kong’s Waning Protest Movement.
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