This year marks a quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall and, less happily, since pro-democracy protesters were gunned down in and around Tiananmen Square. The Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong is nowhere near as momentous, but still remarkable. The protest by secondary school and college students is the most youthful the world has seen: indeed, the precocity of its teenaged leaders may explain why it is the kindest, gentlest uprising ever. The Umbrella Revolution is not an epic, but a poem, the sweetest of political sonnets.
On Tuesday, as I approached the main area around the Hong Kong government's Stalinist complex updated for the 21st century, I saw a banker walking down the cordoned off road towards the complex carrying a golf club. In seconds, two students had rushed over on mini-bicycles, and implored that he not bring a "weapon" into the area. The protests, which started on September 28 with demands that Beijing allow universal suffrage to choose the mayor of Hong Kong, have been extraordinary. Both the police - after an initial episode of needlessly using tear gas - and teenagers have shown how civil civil disobedience can be. In this instance, the banker strode ahead shouting at the students; they let him pass.
The protesters' politeness is already legendary. Students had erected makeshift ladders along the three-foot high barriers that run along what is ordinarily an urban highway, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. As visitors exited the area, there were students extending a hand to help each of us step down. Don't jump, I was told. "We don't want anyone getting hurt," a teenager said. This seemed just the right strategy when up against as unforgiving a force as Communist China. The main protest site, which is in Hong Kong's chrome and steel skyscraper business district, did not have a single window-pane smashed as far as I could tell, a contrast from the mayhem of anti-G20 protests in the West.
Journalists recounted stories of protesters holding up umbrellas to shield them from the afternoon sun while they conducted interviews. Another, who once covered the Pentagon, told of police allowing him an interview with a dim sum sous-chef before he was taken off to jail. After schools reopened, there was the odd sight of 12- and 14-year-olds returning to the protest wearing their school blazers and ties. Asked why he was doing his homework while on protest, a schoolboy replied, "This is not a holiday." Their grandfathers and great grandfathers in the 1960s often held down two jobs. These students are similarly industrious: they want to make Hong Kong a democracy - and get good grades while they are doing it.
Almost two decades after the handover, Hong Kong is, as the distinguished China economist Arthur Kroeber put it, a glass half full, glass half empty kind of place. Most of its freedoms at the time of the handover in 1997 - a free press, an independent judiciary, the right to demonstrate - remain in place. The Chinese army's barracks are a short walk from the protests but, to Beijing's credit, the soldiers were nowhere in evidence.
But, on many fronts, there have been major encroachments - such as the recent directive that all judges should be "patriotic" or the unsuccessful push for "patriotic education," plans to have five-year-olds singing songs proclaiming their love for China in schools two years ago. If your view is not from the swank apartments favoured by rich mainland Chinese in buildings called The Masterpiece, but from the government-owned housing where half the local population lives, Hong Kong seems an unequal city where the disparities are made worse by mainland Chinese businessmen and corrupt officials pushing up stratospheric real estate prices. Among the people I bumped into visiting the protest site, was a former colleague and her husband, both firmly among the middle class anywhere else in the world, who are unable to afford a tiny flat in the city that is their home yet too "well-off" to qualify for subsidised housing.
A subtext of resentment is coupled with the belief that the city's government of tycoons, for tycoons and by tycoons propped up by Beijing must change. This week saw an unknown Chinese company called Anbang Insurance buy the Waldorf Astoria in New York for $2 billion. It was one of those moments when business commentators proclaim the dawn of Chinese ascendancy. The deal is a portent of a different kind.
Anbang, in case you were wondering, is not a Hilton in the making, but owned by a grandson-in-law of the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. His wife's name appears to be the owner's sole calling card, but in China that is more than enough. So-called princelings, children and grandchildren of leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, control the country's politics and business not dominated by the state. For all their politeness and the lack of a common platform, the teenaged protesters are loudly accusing Beijing of manipulating the electoral system in Hong Kong. Whether it is in the South China Sea or in its business dealings, a rigged contest is Beijing's modus operandi. Out of a sense perhaps that ascending powers reshape the world to suit their ends, the world accepts this with scarcely a protest. Hong Kong's students may achieve little in the end, but should be applauded for demanding that China play by the rules.
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