Vox - Hong Kong Protests 2014https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2014-10-02T11:20:02-04:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/66551322014-10-02T11:20:02-04:002014-10-02T11:20:02-04:00The worst thing Obama could do for Hong Kong's protests is support them
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<figcaption>Protesters in Hong Kong | Chris McGrath/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>When pro-democracy movements break out, the United States tends to show them a lot of at least rhetorical support. America sees itself, and often is seen, as a champion of democracy, sees the spread of democracy as in its interest, and believes it can often exert a little pressure on authoritarian government to respect those movements.</p>
<p>But the United States government, right up to President Obama, has been conspicuously quiet on the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. On the surface, that might seem disappointing (and, if shit hits the fan in Hong Kong, you can bet protesters will call on the US for a show of support). But the truth is that, given how paranoid the Chinese government is about foreign influence, and given the risk that Beijing could crack down with bloody force, Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement is probably better off with Obama keeping quiet.</p>
<p><q class="right" aria-hidden="true">chinese leaders earnestly believed that 1989's protesters were dangerous foreign agents</q></p>
<p>The silence has been, to use a cliche, deafening. On Wednesday, China's National Day (sort of like their fourth of July), Secretary of State John Kerry issued a statement <a href="https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/517423411187171330">congratulating China</a> that did not mention the Hong Kong protesters who were using the holiday to demand Beijing live up to its pledge to grant them democracy. The statement did not even make an oblique reference to, say, the abstract importance of freedom of assembly, the sort of subtle nod that the State Department often makes in delicate situations like this.</p>
<p>Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel also called China's foreign minister on Wednesday; the subject of Hong Kong reportedly did not <a href="https://twitter.com/attackerman/status/517423428820041728">even come up</a>. <span>Later, the White House announced that Obama would </span><a href="https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/517447038888595458" style="font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;">travel to Beijing</a><span> in November; a bit like announcing a goodwill trip to Cairo in the middle of the Egyptian revolution.</span></p>
<p>The reason for American silence comes through in the one significant public mention, from Kerry during a joint press conference in Washington with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Kerry raised the issue in the most restrained possible language, saying, "We have high hopes that the Hong Kong authorities will exercise restraint and respect for the protestors' right to express their views peacefully." Wang responded defensively, in language that made it sound as if the US were planning on handing out AK-47s to protesters:</p>
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<p><span>Secretary Kerry mentioned Hong Kong. The Chinese Government has very firmly and clearly stated its position. Hong Kong affairs are China's internal affairs. All countries should respect China's sovereignty. And this is also a basic principle governing international relations. I believe for any country, for any society, no one will allow those illegal acts that violate public order. That's the situation in the United States, and that's the same situation in Hong Kong. We believe that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's government has the capability to properly handle the current situation in accordance with the law.</span></p>
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<p>The thing you have to understand is that, in the context of how China sees the United States and sees pro-democracy protests generally, <i>this is a restrained response</i>. The Chinese Communist Party has long been absolutely convinced that the US is <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138009/andrew-j-nathan-and-andrew-scobell/how-china-sees-america">bent on their destruction</a>, and actively working toward that end. It also tends to see any protest, especially a pro-democracy protest, as a dangerous conspiracy that is seeking to foment chaos and bring down the entire country. And, maybe most crucial of all to understand, they see their country as <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/10/1/6875487/this-is-the-single-most-important-fact-for-understanding-chinas">perilously weak</a>, constantly on the precipice of disaster and implosion.</p>
<p>So even a gentle hint of a suggestion of a whisper of rhetorical American support for protesters in Hong Kong risks being heard in Beijing as "the Americans are covertly backing a dangerous rebel movement that is seeking to plunge us into chaos and will succeed if allowed the slightest opportunity."</p>
<p>That same thinking drove China's response to the pro-democracy protests in Beijing and elsewhere in 1989. State media and official government rhetoric accused the peaceful demonstrators of being a foreign-backed rebel movement — which also became the official justification for the military-led massacre that killed an estimated 2,600 peaceful protesters. It wasn't just rhetoric: internal Communist Party documents released years later showed that senior Chinese leaders — smart people — <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/6/2/5772016/this-1989-speech-is-one-of-the-most-important-in-chinas-history-and">earnestly believed their own conspiracy theories</a>.</p>
<p>Fast forward to 2014, and Chinese state media are already accusing Hong Kong's protest leaders of being foreign-backed agents.</p>
<p>Were the United States to offer louder public support for the Hong Kong protests, yes, this would put the Chinese government under a bit more pressure to handle those protests responsibly, maybe even give in to some of the (relatively modest) protester demands. But it would also seriously raise the risk, already dangerously high, that ever-paranoid and ever-insecure Beijing could come to see the peaceful protests as a foreign-backed threat so existential that they have to be <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/9/30/6865759/the-question-terrifying-hong-kong-would-china-try-another-tiananmen">put down at any cost</a>. That would doom the movement. The best thing that Obama can do now, unfortunately, is probably to keep quiet.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/2/6889245/obama-is-staying-quiet-on-hong-kong-thats-probably-a-good-thingMax Fisher2014-09-30T13:10:02-04:002014-09-30T13:10:02-04:00As Hong Kong protests, China's biggest newspaper is covering pigeon "anal security checks"
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<figcaption>Protesters gather in Hong Kong, not that you would know it from People's Daily | Chris McGrath/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Mass protests have been ongoing now for several days in Hong Kong, presenting the Chinese government with one of the greatest and most difficult challenges that it has faced in years. Chinese information authorities, naturally, are <a href="http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/censors-keep-mainlanders-dark-hk-protests/">working aggressively</a> to censor all news of the protests on China's mainland, and state media is complying.</p>
<p>But the statiest Chinese state media outlet of them all, People's Daily, may have gone a little overboard in diverting attention from the Hong Kong news. On Tuesday evening local time, the official Twitter account of the People's Daily newspaper and media group tweeted this out:</p>
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<p>10,000 pigeons go through anal security check for suspicious objects Tue, ready to be released on National Day on Wed <a href="http://t.co/HitEpLMv8o">pic.twitter.com/HitEpLMv8o</a></p>
— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) <a href="https://twitter.com/PDChina/status/516962895662682112">September 30, 2014</a>
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<p>Now, I have no idea what a pigeon "anal security check" is, or what crimes you have to commit to be conscripted to conduct many thousands of them. But this is probably related to security concerns in ultra-security-conscious Beijing, which is celebrating China's National Day on October 1. National Day commemorates Communist China's founding and is sort of like the country's version of July 4.</p>
<p>This is not necessarily meant as a deliberate diversion from the events in Hong Kong — the People's Daily covers weird stuff all the time — but it is a reminder of the gaping absence of coverage in China of a story that has momentously huge importance for that country and its future. It's a reminder that state-owned media is an enormous public disservice in the most fundamental sense.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>A theory: the level of crazy in <a href="https://twitter.com/PDChina">@PDChina</a> tweets is directly related to the size of Hong Kong's protests.</p>
— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) <a href="https://twitter.com/austinramzy/status/516982405115019264">September 30, 2014</a>
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<p>That's not to tar all journalists with state-run Chinese outlets — you might be surprised at how many are trying to gradually improve the system from within — but it is a pretty marked reminder of the failures of the Chinese state media as a system. Even if it does produce these occasional, unintentionally hilarious tweets.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2014/9/30/6872963/as-hong-kong-protests-chinas-biggest-newspaper-is-covering-pigeonMax Fisher2014-09-30T10:30:02-04:002014-09-30T10:30:02-04:00The risk of a Tiananmen-style massacre in Hong Kong is remote. But it's not zero.
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<figcaption>Anthony Kwan/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>A huge and oft-stated fear among Hong Kong's protesters right now is of a Chinese military crackdown like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which troops killed 2,600 protesters who were asking for a lot less democracy than Hong Kongers are asking for now. Some protesters are already anticipating it, lacing downtown with yellow ribbons <a href="https://twitter.com/tomgrundy/status/516619953105952768">marked</a> "they can't kill us all." A WhiteHouse.gov <a href="https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/support-hong-kong-democracy-and-prevent-second-tiananmen-massacre-hong-kong/dfdCpQZz">petition</a> circulating in Hong Kong has already drawn 190,000 signatures asking President Obama to "Support Hong Kong Democracy and Prevent A Second Tiananmen Massacre in Hong Kong."</p>
<p>It sounds both outlandish and not outlandish. Hong Kong, a largely-autonomous part of China since it left the British Empire in 1997, has far more freedom than the rest of China, including free speech and the frequently-exercised right to protest peacefully. It's an international city with a free press; any mass violence would disgrace image-conscious Beijing. But Hong Kongers see China gradually asserting more control over their city, and they remember clearly the 1989 massacre, and they worry that Beijing's willingness to use violence against mainland protesters could one day apply to them as well.</p>
<p>It's impossible to say for sure how the Chinese Communist Party leadership will act, but the analysis suggests that the crisis is unlikely to escalate to that level of violence. Still, while the Party leadership will probably succeed in tamping down protests before they cross Beijing's threshold for risking an existential crisis — spreading to the mainland — it is almost impossible to overstate the lengths to which the Party would go to prevent that, potentially up to and including another massacre like the one it executed in 1989.</p>
<h3>Two Chinese officials have warned it's a possibility</h3>
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<p class="caption">Hong Kong police present at protests in the financial district (Anthony Kwan/Getty)</p>
<p>Back in July, during a previous round of protest in Hong Kong against China's encroachments on the city's autonomy, a Beijing-allied politician there made <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/7/1/5862242/beijing-allied-politician-in-hong-kong-some-degree-of-violence-is">an alarming statement</a>. He seemed to hint that, if the unrest got bad enough, China's military (the People's Liberation Army, or PLA) could put it down with force.</p>
<p>"A showdown is getting more and more inevitable by the day, and some degree of violence is imminent," said the Hong Kong politician, Lau Nai-keung. "If worst comes to worst, the PLA will come out of its barracks."</p>
<p>Lau, to be clear, has zero authority to call in a PLA crackdown. Neither does former high-ranking Chinese official and diplomat <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/record-crowds-expected-for-hong-kong-pro-democracy-rally-1404141024" sl-processed="1">Zhou Nan, who suggested</a> that the PLA could potentially be called up to put down protests. "[The party] would not allow Hong Kong to turn into a base to subvert China's socialist regime under the guise of democracy," he'd said.</p>
<p>These officials are both speculating, so take it with a grain of salt, but the fact that they are discussing this at all is a scary sign that the possibility of another Tiananmen in Hong Kong, however remote, is not entirely out of the question.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, another official, the head of China's liaison office in Hong Kong, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/29/is-hong-kong-tiananmen-2-0.html?via=mobile&source=twitter">menacingly hinted at this</a> when he told a group of pro-democracy lawmakers, "The fact that you are still alive already shows the country's inclusiveness." And Chinese state media has been accusing the Hong Kong protests of being a foreign plot — an echo of similar accusations made against the 1989 student protesters.</p>
<h3>The fear of another Tiananmen is already shaping events in Hong Kong</h3>
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<p class="caption">This June 1989 photo shows tanks moving into downtown Beijing during the Tiananmen massacre (Peter Charlesworth/LightRocket via Getty)</p>
<p>Demonstrators are out in the streets to preserve their autonomy and freedoms, but that implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — includes the freedom from fear of military massacre. You saw this at work on Sunday, when Hong Kong's normally restrained police used nearly-unprecedented force (tear gas, nightsticks, pepper spray, what appeared to be shotguns likely loaded with non-lethal bullets) and the city became outraged, with many residents galvanized to join the protests.</p>
<p>The thing you have to understand is that the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre looms awfully large in Hong Kong. While the city was unaffected by the massacre (it was under British rule at the time), its residents hold an annual mass vigil in memory of the event, which has been so heavily censored in China itself that many young people <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/7/1/5862242/beijing-allied-politician-in-hong-kong-some-degree-of-violence-is" sl-processed="1">have never heard of it</a>.</p>
<p>Hong Kongers feel they have a responsibility to keep memory of Tiananmen for the fellow Chinese who cannot, but they also earnestly fear that it could happen to them. That is a big part of why Hong Kong's residents are so upset to see their police donning military-like uniforms and firing tear gas this weekend; it feels like an echo, however faint, of 1989's violence. The drive to preserve freedom and autonomy in Hong Kong is all mixed in with the fear of another Tiananmen.</p>
<h3>Would China ever actually do it?</h3>
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<p class="caption" style="text-align: start;">Protesters and police in Hong Kong's Central district (Anthony Kwan/Getty)</p>
<p>The ultimate question here is whether, or when, the central Chinese government in Beijing would ever decide to use force against protesters. That would seem unthinkable, given the global backlash that image-conscious China would face for using force in a city full of foreigners and foreign media.</p>
<p>But perhaps the most essential eternal truth for understanding China's government is that the ruling Communist Party prioritizes the preservation of one-party rule way before anything else, including the outrage of the entire world, to the extent that it will sacrifice just about anything to maintain the system. The world has changed a lot since 1989, and so has China's role in it, but it was also true in 1989 that Beijing was full of Western journalists and China knew it would pay heavily for massacring protesters, but did it anyway.</p>
<p>The Communist Party government fears democracy and popular unrest as existential threats — perhaps deeply enough to once again put protests down with tanks and machine guns. But the important difference here is that Beijing probably does not see Hong Kong protests, in themselves, as a threat. What likely would terrify Beijing is the "risk of contagion," as the Economist <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/hong-kong-protests">put it</a>: the danger of protest and unrest spreading from Hong Kong into the mainland.</p>
<p>You could see that fear in early 2011, when Chinese authorities launched one of their toughest clampdowns in years in response to the Arab Spring protests thousands of miles away in Egypt and Tunisia. Now the protests are much nearer and in a Chinese-speaking city — a place where lots of mainland Chinese travel every autumn for holiday shopping. The risk of "contagion" is much, much higher. Chinese officials have already started clamping down on news and social media censorship to prevent word of the protests from spreading.</p>
<p>If the Chinese leadership believes that unrest is spreading from Hong Kong to mainland cities, then it could start to see the events in Hong Kong as an existential threat to them and their system. That would make the unthinkable thinkable: a military crackdown on Hong Kong.</p>
<p><span>The one other possibility that could lead Chinese leaders to consider a military crackdown is if they believe that the protesters are seeking, and could potentially get, full independence. That's extremely unlikely, as protesters aren't even asking for this, but keep in mind that Beijing is hyper-sensitive about this. Protester acts like turning the national Chinese flag </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Stone_SkyNews/status/516366184200282112" style="font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;">upside down</a><span> over government buildings risk sending the </span><a href="https://twitter.com/niubi/status/516371642172203009" style="font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;">wrong signal</a><span>.</span></p>
<h3>China's leaders will probably win before a crackdown becomes imminent, but that could involve violence</h3>
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<p class="caption">Chinese leader Xi Jinping (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty)</p>
<p>The good news is that this a full, Tiananmen-style crackdown is probably unlikely. The bad news is that it's unlikely because China's Communist Party, perhaps the most skilled authoritarian regime in modern history when it comes to self-preservation, will probably succeed in either negotiating calm or dispersing the protesters non-violently before it got to the point of seriously considering a military crackdown.</p>
<p>China has been managing unrest in its imperial periphery for years: in Tibet, in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjian, in Inner Mongolia. It has done so ruthlessly, and abetted by near-total media blackouts that would be impossible in Hong Kong, but the point is that it has found a way. It put down mass labor unrest in the early 2000s in northeast China.</p>
<p>Maybe the most instructive example is from late 2011, when China managed to successful put down a peaceful uprising in the southern Chinese village of Wukan, which at first looked like a revolutionary new mode of Chinese protest. The village was stuffed full of Western reporters, limiting China's ability to crack down as violently as it might have liked, much as in Hong Kong now. Beijing negotiated a palatable enough outcome that the protests ended and the reporters dispersed, then gradually reneged on its promises and reasserted control over the village to prevent another protest. It worked.</p>
<p>But violence is still possible. Political scientist Jay Ulfelder, who helps run a statistical forecasting project that is designed to evaluate risks of mass atrocities, says that the events in Hong Kong elevate the possibility of "state-led mass killing." He <a href="http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/occupy-central-and-the-rising-risk-of-new-mass-atrocities-in-china/">walks through several possible outcomes</a>, but suggests that the most likely outcome is that China will ultimately succeed in quashing the protests. In what passes for optimism these days, he concludes that this could well include state violence against the protesters, but that it will probably not kill enough people to count as a mass atrocity.</p>
<p>"I still don't expect that [a state-led mass killing] will occur, but not because I anticipate that Beijing will concede to the protesters' demands," he writes. "Rather, I expect violent repression, but I also doubt that it will cross the 1,000-death threshold we and others use to distinguish episodes of mass killing from smaller-scale and more routine atrocities."</p>
https://www.vox.com/2014/9/30/6865759/the-question-terrifying-hong-kong-would-china-try-another-tiananmenMax Fisher2014-09-29T19:00:02-04:002014-09-29T19:00:02-04:00A fantastic interactive timeline of tweets about the Hong Kong protests
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<figcaption>Anthony Kwan/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p><span>The protests in Hong Kong have escalated not just on the street, but also on </span>social media, with a little over 1.3 million tweets on the topic over the weekend.</p>
<p><span>Twitter's Reverb and data teams have been collecting all tweets related to the protests from September 26 to September 29, and have released a timeline documenting</span><span> the most contentious periods of the evolving movement.</span></p>
<h5><span> Hover over the blue line in the interactive below to see the tweets per second at various times since Friday.</span></h5>
<p><iframe height="550px" width="768px" src="http://reverb.twitter.com/view/599423876907891204"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Further Reading: </b>Max Fisher explains what's behind the <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/9/28/6856621/hong-kong-protests-clashes-china-explainer" target="_blank">protests in Hong Kong</a>.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2014/9/29/6869331/The-hk-protests-played-out-over-twitterAnand Katakam2014-09-29T17:30:02-04:002014-09-29T17:30:02-04:00How umbrellas became the symbol of the Hong Kong protests
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<figcaption>You can protest under my umbrella, hey, under my um-bur-ella. | Anthony Kwan/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p><span>Hong Kong's protestors have been using umbrellas to block tear gas, a practice that's becoming so ubiquitous that people have even started dubbed the protests the "Umbrella Revolution."</span></p>
<p>But this all started with weather — specifically, rain and sun.</p>
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<p class="caption">Blame it on the rain. (Aaron Tam/AFP/Getty Images)</p>
<p><span>Check out this chart of average monthly rainfall from the Hong Kong government. It rains most days in June, July, and August, and about half of the days in September.</span></p>
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<p align="center" class="caption">Let the rain fall down, and cover me. (<a href="http://www.hko.gov.hk/cis/climahk_e.htm">Government of Hong Kong</a>)</p>
<p>So there are a lot of umbrellas floating around in late September in Hong Kong. But during the current round of protests, it happened to be unusually hot and sunny. According to <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-29407067">the BBC</a>, demonstrators originally brought their spare umbrellas to block out sunrays. That meant that w<span>hen the police began spraying tear gas at protesters, they had a handy implement to block the toxic stuff. </span></p>
<p><span>The utilitarian adaptation quickly turned into an instantly recognizable symbol for the protest movement. </span><span>"It's a wonderful symbol, I think, which seems to have emerged organically from [umbrellas] being used to block pepper spray and then tear gas," Jeff Wasserstrom, a UC-Irvine professor who studies protest in China, wrote via email.</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>protestors in Hong Kong are using umbrellas to protect themselves from being pepper sprayed <a href="http://t.co/NfD4UzLd2S">http://t.co/NfD4UzLd2S</a> <a href="http://t.co/3VVNUdZ8ab">pic.twitter.com/3VVNUdZ8ab</a></p>
— Rossalyn Warren (@RossalynWarren) <a href="https://twitter.com/RossalynWarren/status/516545774386442241">September 29, 2014</a>
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<p>Umbrellas have also become part of protest strategy. "The police have been using pepper spray quite liberally in their attempts to contain protests," Ho-Fung Hung, a sociologist of China at Johns Hopkins, told <a style="background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://qz.com/272854/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-umbrellas-in-hong-kongs-umbrella-revolution/">Quartz</a>. "The protestors are organized, they're very prepared. So you see this ocean of umbrellas on the front line."</p>
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<p class="caption">Rain, I don't mind / Shine, the weather's fine. (Alex Ogle/AFP/Getty Images)</p>
<p>The striking visual image of one man holding an umbrella amidst gas clouds is quickly becoming the iconic photograph from the Hong Kong protests. Dubbed "Umbrella Man," after the famous "Tank Man" who was photographed standing in front of Chinese army tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen protests, this unidentified protester is now a highlight of social media commentary on the protests.</p>
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<p>Umbrella and tear gas in Hong Kong <a href="http://t.co/VmFPBroDwh">pic.twitter.com/VmFPBroDwh</a></p>
— jailhouserock (@jailhouserock) <a href="https://twitter.com/jailhouserock/status/516275180667408385">September 28, 2014</a>
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<p>Here he is, photoshopped into the original Tank Man photo:</p>
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<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Balkingpoints">@Balkingpoints</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/cryptostorm_is">@cryptostorm_is</a> <a href="http://t.co/e61SCpxLQu">pic.twitter.com/e61SCpxLQu</a></p>
— davi (德海) (@daviottenheimer) <a href="https://twitter.com/daviottenheimer/status/516479557277605889">September 29, 2014</a>
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<p>Some protesters, according to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/29/the-humble-umbrellas-surprising-role-in-hong-kongs-huge-protests/">the Washington Post's Adam Taylor</a>, have even used umbrellas as impromptu billboards, scrawling messages on the top.</p>
<p>Whoever thought umbrellas could become so important?</p>
<p><b>Correction: </b>An earlier version of this post misstated the approximate number of rainy days in Hong Kong in July and September. That's been corrected.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2014/9/29/6868709/umbrella-hong-kong-protestZack Beauchamp