Charles said the protests that had been raging against inequality in Chile, literally on the other side of the planet, were closely followed and cheered on from Hong Kong. Later in 2020, when I spoke to protesters from Belarus standing up to a dictator, the Belarusians told me how surprised they were to get a flood of online messages of support from people they’d never met in Hong Kong. Even as the Hong Kong protest movement was about this particular localized identity, the movement was self-consciously globalizing, a vessel for opposing the generalized sense among the world’s young people
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