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‘Stress-testing’ the system: speculations on the Hong Kong protests from afar

ABSTRACT Protests in Hong Kong have seen a significant evolution – from the Queen’s Pier campaign of 2007 to the Occupy movement of 2014, and then to the summer of 2019 – in the concepts of both leadership and space. Conventional political agitations are territory, demand- and leadership-driven, typically mounted against the presumption of an orthodox democratic state apparatus. This basic presumption may however need to be revised both in the light of the new character of the ‘tactically extended’ state, as well as the ensuing populisms that allow a narrow and often culturally gated civil society to arrogate to itself the right to speak for the ‘people’ as a whole. In response to transformations in the very apparatus of governmentality, political protests have queried the concept of citizenship itself (and thus also queried its most visible representations, including those of leadership and authorship), and have turned their tactics instead to amorphous, even invisible, modes of leadership alongside post-Occupy definitions of amorphous and undefined space. This essay is in part a personal account, taking from conversations and texts produced in Hong Kong and India between 2015 and 2020, and it draws substantially on how Hong Kong’s ‘be water’ tactic was viewed in India in late 2019. As the protests began in Delhi against the Citizenship Amendment Act, India saw its own experiments, historical discoveries and transborder similarities, around anonymous subjects and invisible speech, meme-forms and other meanings produced entirely through circulation. It also saw the return of the radical analogue in the context of punitive internet shutdowns.