After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

The movement learned from the failure of the Umbrella Movement. Because people can’t take off work for months at a time, this time the protests would be episodic—a flash mob on a lunch break, a surge of people on a weekend, in shifting locations. Because an identified leadership could be arrested, this time there was no leadership—instead, a kind of direct democracy prevailed; in some cases protesters went into mass groups on encrypted online message boards and voted on a time and place for protest. This is how the movement tried to avoid being crushed by Beijing, like a virus evolving to survive. No disunity. No single venue. No leader. Secure communication. Over the summer of 2019, the authorities started blocking peaceful mass protests. In this second phase of the protests, the police set up roadblocks and clashed with protesters who turned out. Many people who’d participated in the mass marches started staying home, and the streets were left to what became known as “frontline protesters”—people who chose to climb the mountain through confrontation. As the protests stubbornly continued every day, with crowds that swelled on the weekends, the approach toughened. “They started shutting it down as soon as people appeared in the streets,” Wilson told me, “firing tear gas and so on.”