1. I first read about Maria Kolesnikova before I was taken to punishment—tales of how she ripped her passport apart at the border to refuse deportation, choosing jail over exile, along with trivial accounts of solitary prison life. How, as a professional flutist, she filled her head with imaginary flute music. How she kept on writing letters despite 80% of them being confiscated.
2. The protest in Belarus during 2020-21 was the last movement I followed real-time, before my own imprisonment. It went viral in this part of the world as protesters adopted the Be Water tactic of the 2019 Hong Kong Movement. A few years on, a Belarusian political prisoner’s timely advice passed on all the way from her prison in Belarus to mine in Hong Kong in ChatGPT-translated English.
3. How curious. Today, we enjoy multiple advanced communication platforms, yet people are more polarized than ever. Genuine and honest conversations have become more difficult, rendering democracy less and less convincing as the better system in the face of multiplying crises. But, now living in a world of only pen and paper, with heavy scrutiny and severe delays spanning weeks—I relearn, time and again, that genuine human connection is possible and why it is worth fighting for.
***
4. The Hong Kong democratic movement of 2019 is renowned for its impressive arsenal of tactics, combined with the creative use of technological platforms. These tactics travelled across social media, were transplanted into other movements, and bloomed anew. But what holds people together and makes all the creativity possible lies beyond technology or tactics. The movement itself is open to interpretations (and criticisms), yet what has stayed with me to this day, nearly four years later, is something simpler.
5. People are engaged. They are eager to connect with each other. Injustice and oppression, once witnessed, together with bravery and determination, once felt, bred an unstoppable urge to express oneself politically and to be part of the struggle; but it didn’t turn into a homogenizing essentialism. Learning from the failures of past movements, people made extra efforts to communicate and incorporate diverse ideas. We did not avoid lengthy, difficult conversations, even amid imminent violence, with rubber bullets flying over our heads. We were adamantly leaderless, each taking our own initiatives and emphasizing individual and equal contributions to the movement. We remained vigilant against disinformation, careful not to let rumours tear the movement apart from within.
6. Decentralization unleashed a political momentum unseen in Hong Kong and revealed the city’s exciting diversity, which had previously been constrained by traditional organizational structures. Accustomed to critical and intense political debate, people in Hong Kong only needed to overcome their hesitation about whether their actions mattered to emerge as their own initiators of creative new ways of struggle. They reformed connections into more direct, efficient, and inclusive networks of activism.
7. When social institutions crumbled one after another around us, we rose above fear and emerged as a genuine civil society, each living out the true meaning of citizenship. Though democracy was denied at various institutional levels, we built one from the bottom up.
8. Meaningful conversations are only possible when you have faith that people around you, and yourself, are not blind followers of someone else, that they are clear of what they are fighting for and take responsibility for their needs. Independent in their decisions but acting for the collective.
9. It's not so much hope for a better future that drives the movement, because hope has always been scarce when you're a city of 7 million facing a superpower, but that even if our vision of the future is different, we trust each other, we can rely on each other to do our best. We trust, we act, we can create. All become one, united in our differences.
10.
![[[ ]] 404 KIDS SEE GHOSTS Telegram Channel](/avatar/1407/1407174982.jpg)
