It was in November last year that I first met Spider-Man; then, as now, he looked nothing like a superhero. I found him at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the narrow campus in central Hong Kong where a tumultuous confrontation was taking place.
Looking back more than a year later, it was the climax of the democracy struggle. Everything that had happened since the summer led up to it; everything that happened since has trailed away.
None of this was obvious at the time. One thousand protesting students armed with bows, arrows and firebombs had occupied the campus, a city block of multi-storey buildings, courtyards and staircases, besieged by an encircling army of riot police. For two days, they had kept them at bay with their barricades and stones fired from giant makeshift catapults. And now the battle was turning.
The protesters were scared and surrounded. The police, equipped with body armour, tear gas and water cannons, knew that all they had to do was wait. All the exits from the campus were blocked; anyone who walked out was immediately arrested. Those who remained had abandoned their crude weapons and become exclusively preoccupied with the task of escape. They all used nicknames, like the noms de guerre of old revolutionaries – his was Spider-Man.
My friend May noticed him – there was something that set him apart from the others, an air of restless sadness. On the face of it, he was just another slim university student in a T-shirt and jeans. He had earrings, a tattoo on his arm and wavy hair; at 18 years old, he was a long way from being the youngest there. In English and Cantonese, he talked of his anger with the government of Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam. He talked frankly of how scared he was about being pinned down and trapped.
The Hong Kong police had officially designated the protest as a riot, meaning that everyone inside the university campus could potentially face a 10-year prison sentence. Having been arrested at a protest before, and released on bail, Spider-Man faced guaranteed incarceration if he was picked up again. "I'm really scared," he said. "I don't know if I should stay or leave. I don't know what to do."
Just a day before there had been an atmosphere of giddy defiance among the protesters. Within the campus, well-organised teams fashioned petrol bombs out of beer bottles and filled emptied eggs to make paint bombs. Teams of "artillerymen" fired the giant catapults from high terraces. The hard core of the protesters referred to themselves with a Chinese word meaning "the valiants".
But now their courage was failing them, and the jubilation and defiance had given way to dread. "We came here because they were appealing for people to come in and increase the numbers," said a 16-year-old schoolgirl called Chloe, who was there with her 15-year-old friend, Nicole. "We thought that we could help to rescue the protesters inside. But now we need to be rescued ourselves."
Even for journalists, it was difficult to get out. Having bluffed our way in through the police lines, May and I tried to sneak out with a group of protesters, but were immediately engulfed in tear gas and forced back.
Later, as the sun was setting, we presented ourselves and our press cards at a checkpoint and were gruffly waved through. When we came back the next morning, it was impossible to get back through the police lines.
A few days later I left Hong Kong, expecting to return after a few weeks. But in January came the coronavirus, which made travel impossible, and the Chinese government's legal lockdown, which drove the democracy movement further into the shadows.
I never forgot the atmosphere during those two days at Poly U: of terrified children, stalked by a sense of imminent doom, desperate to be allowed to go home. So many bold nicknames, so many scared young faces. What had happened to them as the police closed in on the university – and in the year since?
As the rest of the world struggled with the pandemic, Hong Kong seemed to have become isolated and beyond reach, like a land suddenly frozen into ice. But then, months later, I found Spider-Man again, and heard his sad and painful story, which stands in its own way for the story of Hong Kong.
A friend of his had given him the nickname, Spider-Man – like the Marvel character who wants to be a hero but is stalked by a sense of inadequacy. The best-known face of the Hong Kong democracy movement is Joshua Wong, who faces repeated arrest, prosecution and detention with an implacable courage. He is the exception. For all their bravado, many of the valiants are overwhelmed by exhaustion, doubt and fear, and few more than Spider-Man.
He was born in 2001, four years after the handover of Hong Kong from the UK to China. He was 13 when he went on his first demonstrations, the so-called "Umbrella Movement" protests of 2014 that petered out after 79 days.
"I was never super-serious about it," he said. "I'm not a Joshua Wong." But like much of Hong Kong, he marched again last year with his parents and his two little sisters in the unprecedentedly large demonstrations that electrified the territory over the summer.
In the beginning, the protests were directed against efforts to pass a new law that would have allowed criminal suspects in Hong Kong to be extradited to China, regarded by many as a deeply sinister proposal that would undermine the freedoms and autonomy guaranteed by Beijing before the handover. Eventually, in October 2019, Carrie Lam gave in and dropped the bill. It was too late.
Now the protests – two million had taken to the streets back in June – became the expression of much broader and deeper resentments, a dry and combustible pyre of accumulated anxieties for which Lam's extradition law was just the spark.
These included the abduction of Hong Kong citizens by the Chinese security services, the encroachment of mainland Chinese into daily life and the increasing hardship of living in a territory with the highest property prices in the world.
But at its core, the movement was a struggle for democratic rights by a generation of younger people who feared that this might be their last realistic chance to make such a demand. Many of them, like Spider-Man, had known nothing but rule by Beijing but, like him, they experienced it in their guts as a daily affront.
Lam and her colleagues, who govern through a system rigged to ensure dominance by supporters of Beijing, responded with evasions; the police responded with water cannon, tear gas and baton charges. Permits for new marches were refused, scaring off the many families and older people who had taken part in the summer demonstrations. The protests went ahead anyway, now reduced to a core of young people without formal leadership, mobilising via online messaging services.
Throughout the autumn the tension rose as the police became less and less restrained in their tactics and the demonstrators resorted to firebombs and stones. "I was very worried about my personal safety," said Spider-Man. "I felt I was risking my life. One mistake and I would be arrested. I was always worried that I wouldn't make it home that night." The year reached its climax at Poly U.
The demonstrators had occupied university campuses before, and then beaten a retreat. The idea was that Poly U, with its tall buildings and narrow confines, would be easier to defend. In the end, the protesters walked into a trap of their own making.
For two days after I met him, Spider-Man and his friends contemplated methods of escape. Some walked out to the checkpoints and peacefully surrendered; some made a run for it and got picked up anyway. More than 1000 people, among them the protest movement's most committed members, were arrested and effectively taken out of action. "To all comrades," someone sprayed on a wall in the trashed campus. "This time we didn't prepare well, and brought a lot of trouble to everyone. We are very sorry."
One group climbed into the sewers to emerge from a manhole, soiled, gagging, but at liberty. Spider-Man and his friends got their hands on ropes which they knotted together. Friends on the outside were watching the movements of the police and keeping them informed by mobile phone; when the coast seemed clear, they ran out onto a flyover adjacent to the campus, tied the ropes to the railing and began climbing down 25ft to the road below, where friends in cars and on motorbikes were waiting to whisk them away.
"There wasn't a moment when I wasn't scared," said Spider-Man. "One girl fell off the rope. I saw her fall. I heard her screaming. A lot of people had their hands burnt by the rope. I heard the police shouting, 'Don't run!' They were ten yards away. I got to the car. There were five of us in it, and it drove off. We got away, although not everyone did.
"I got home and had a bath. I phoned the others to make sure they were OK. There was a kind of nightmare haunting me. There was a darkness. It was hard to sleep."
It was May who found him again. She was part of an informal activist network who supported groups of younger protesters. She had taken down Spider-Man's telephone number and later had sent him a message to ask how he was. They had stayed in touch. Over the months, in intermittent messages from May, I heard fragments of news about Spider-Man and about life in Hong Kong.
As the siege was petering out, elections had been held for the territory's district councils in which the pro-democracy parties triumphed. Formerly, they had not held a single one of the 18 local councils – now they controlled all but one of them. Turnout was the highest it has ever been. It was decisive proof, if any more were needed, that most people in Hong Kong rejected the authority of Beijing and its encroachment on their freedoms.
But it made no difference at all. The district councils had only petty, local powers. On New Year's Day, 2020, the police arrested 420 people during chaotic confrontations with protesters. The first coronavirus case was confirmed three weeks later and mass gatherings were banned. But the stuffing had in any case been knocked out of the movement.
"Without Covid, there'd be some protests, but not many," said Spider-Man. "Street protests are so costly. After Poly U, so many of us were really exhausted. We create these images that look impressive. But we pay a heavy price."
The political tumult in Hong Kong was obvious to everyone watching the news: the vast contending crowds of protesters and police, the screamed slogans, the volleys of tear gas and firebombs. But each of these epic tableaux was made up of thousands of individuals, on both sides, with pumping hearts and lurching emotions. And, by the end of the year, the emotions were becoming too much. It had been gathering slowly, ever since the summer when Spider-Man had marched with his family and more than one million others in the huge early rallies. Now, as Hong Kong slipped rapidly into depression, so did Spider-Man.
"Poly U definitely had a huge impact on me," he said. "It was very traumatising. From December to March [this year], I was not emotionally stable at all. I felt very negative all the time. I felt really, really down. I took antidepressants. They didn't help at all.
"There's the fear of being arrested and jeopardising my future. I'm constantly worried about becoming trapped, like in Poly U. I worry that all the roads will be sealed off and blocked, and I can't get home. There's all the stuff on social media, pictures of protesters being beaten unconscious or a girl who was blinded by a rubber bullet. I worry that'll happen to me or to people I know and care about.
"Last year, a lot of us poured our hearts into Hong Kong's future. It was the only thing we thought about. No one was paying us to do it – we just wanted to build a better world. We came so far. But nothing has worked out."
The pressure and disappointment hurt relationships as well as individuals – friends and comrades squabbled and fell to reproaches. In March, Spider-Man became aware that people he knew were talking about him behind his back, accusing him of faking his anguish. "That made me feel even worse," he said. "And helpless – there was nothing I could do. There was one week when I thought I had no feelings in me. I felt I was an empty bottle. I was like a zombie, walking around without a soul."
I heard about what happened next in a phone call from May: Spider-Man had cut his wrists and fallen unconscious from the loss of blood.
He was found just in time. He spent 20 days in a psychiatric clinic with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. It took weeks of treatment and physiotherapy to restore movement in his left wrist.
Mental illness and suicidal impulses rarely have a single cause. Spider-Man's fragility did not begin with the democracy protests; he had previously suffered from depression as a schoolboy. But there is no doubt the political conflict in Hong Kong has had a terrible effect on the mental wellbeing of many of its people.
Doctors at the University of Hong Kong reported at the beginning of this year that one in nine Hong Kongers was depressed in 2019. A subsequent survey of mostly young people found in August that three quarters of them displayed "moderate to high levels of depressive symptoms, such as feelings of worthlessness and recurrent thoughts of death". There has been a string of suicides, and of suicide notes talking of despair over the future of Hong Kong.
"More and more people are coming in with depression," Kwok Chan-fung, who runs two clinics specialising in Chinese medicine, told me. "When people face problems, they can deal with them if they are able to see the end. In two hours, you will finish the task – or in 10 years. If you know that, it makes it easier. But here people still can't see any light. They can't find any hope. That's what makes them frustrated."
This frustration only got worse during 2020. In April, the Hong Kong police arrested 15 democracy campaigners for offences connected with the demonstrations, among them Martin Lee, known as the "father of Hong Kong democracy", who was 81 at the time.
The following month, the Chinese authorities announced that they would introduce a national security law (NSL), imposed from Beijing without reference to the Legislative Council, Hong Kong's parliament. When the law itself was published at the end of June, it became clear that it was the biggest blow to Hong Kong's freedoms since the handover from Britain exactly 23 years earlier.
The law covers four crimes: terrorism, separatism, subversion and collusion with foreign powers, but the offences are vaguely defined. Cases can be sent to Chinese courts – effectively the power of extradition that the demonstrators had fought off last year. The borders of Hong Kong and China are no barrier to a law that asserts extraterritorial jurisdiction over every person on the planet.
Yesterday, the newspaper tycoon Jimmy Lai, a scathing opponent of Beijing, became the fourth and most prominent person charged under the law. "This is real Gestapo-level stuff," wrote Donald Clarke, a professor at the George Washington University Law School. "If you've ever said anything that might offend the PRC [People's Republic of China] or Hong Kong authorities, stay out of Hong Kong."
"It's a hundred times worse than the extradition law," said Spider-Man. "One wrong word could be prosecuted under the NSL – I had to throw away all my flags and banners. And there's even an NSL hotline, which people can use to report you. You have to watch your every move."
In June, between the announcement of the new law and its promulgation, Spider-Man was walking to his part-time job, when he noticed two men looking at him. He kept walking but then came a tap on the shoulder. It was the police, accusing him of police obstruction and of making nuisance calls reporting drugs offences to them. "They played a recording of one of the calls," he said. "It obviously wasn't my voice. And for the time the call was made, I had an alibi. But it wasn't a mistake. They must have known it wasn't true."
A few weeks ago, in mid-November, four Hong Kong opposition MPs were expelled from the semi-elected Legislative Council by order of China. Their remaining colleagues, who had never been numerous enough to do more than slow down government legislation, resigned in solidarity.
For many young activists like Spider-Man, this was long overdue; to them, the efforts of the older democratic politicians to work within the Legislative Council were a waste of time at best and, at worst, lent credibility to a hopelessly corrupt system. But it raises again the question that many in Hong Kong have long asked: where is the hope?
Democracy activists speak of three "fronts". The first of these, protest on the streets, had been shut down by the combined force of the police and the pandemic. Now the second, the "legislative front", has been abandoned. That leaves only the "international front" – the pressure, including sanctions, brought to bear by foreign governments and companies.
The United States, in particular, has been stern in its criticism of China, for building military bases in the South China Sea, its border skirmishes with India and its oppression of Uighur Muslims, as well as the people of Hong Kong. It was because of his toughness on China that so many seemingly liberal young Hong Kongers, including Spider-Man, found themselves rooting for Donald Trump in the US elections.
But there is a problem that goes deeper than that of individual leaders: as well as being an authoritarian dictatorship, China is the largest consumer market in the world. All big modern economies depend to some extent on exports to China. Will the governments of the US, Europe and Japan jeopardise this for the sake of seven million people in Hong Kong – and even if they try, will they succeed? And if that fails, what is left?
I talk to Spider-Man one more time a year after we had met at Poly U. We speak for three hours on Zoom; it is an emotional conversation. I am worried about his state of mind, and the potential effect on it of going over again all that has happened. At one point, he reads on his phone the breaking news that the hero of the movement, Joshua Wong, has been held on remand after pleading guilty to "unauthorised assembly", and he begins sobbing. (The following week Wong is sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison.) But Spider-Man is not in despair.
In October, he was told that the police had dropped all charges against him (a common pattern – of some 10,200 people arrested in connection with demonstrations, only 2300 have so far been prosecuted). The charges were absurd, after all, and even after all that has happened, Hong Kong has not abandoned rules of evidence and due process.
Since childhood, it has been Spider-Man's dream to be an actor, and in September, he started at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, where many of the territory's most famous stars studied. His new medication is controlling his depression. "I'm much happier than before," he says. "And talking about this is a release for me. It gives me comfort that people will read about the situation of young people in Hong Kong."
Activists speak now of the need to accept the situation and to turn it to their advantage – to educate themselves better about Hong Kong, China and the world at large, to build networks of communication among themselves and with the outside world.
"You need to know when to take a break," says Kwok Chan-fung, the practitioner of Chinese medicine. "You need to rest and recover when you are tired. Winning a war does not mean winning every battle. A revolution takes 10 years or 20 years – you can't do it in one year."
Spider-Man says his friend gave him his nickname "because I've got a great fear of failure. Once you've failed, you have to find the courage to gather yourself up and face the thing that defeated you again. That's a huge pressure. I believe that out of everything you do comes something. It all has some effect, somewhere. Nothing is in vain."
Soon afterwards, we say goodbye. We promise that we will meet again in person one day, as soon as it is possible, whenever that might be. I realise I never even asked him his real name.
Written by: Richard Lloyd Parry
© The Times of London
