November 3, 2023 at 1:00 a.m. EDT
A demonstrator draws attention to a photo of Li Peng, China’s former premier, during a protest in the Yuen Long area of Hong Kong on July 27, 2019. (Paul Yeung/Bloomberg/Getty Images)Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
This article is adapted from “Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy,” which will be published by Hachette Books on Nov. 7.
Almost everyone living in the Hong Kong neighborhood of Yuen Long heard the warnings. In the days before July 21, 2019, rumors circulated in forwarded messages, then by word of mouth: Residents should be alert to possible violence, directed at those supporting the pro-democracy protest movement.
“Please try to stay out of Yuen Long after noon on Sunday,” one message read. “If you do go there, wear white, don’t wear a mask. The bosses in Yuen Long had a meeting and decided to wear white shirts, they don’t want to hit the wrong people.” Other messages were far more graphic: “If you wear a mask in Yuen Long, both your arms and legs will be amputated.”
Hong Kong was in revolt that summer, the largest uprising on Chinese soil since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The discontent had started with a proposed bill that would allow fugitives to be transferred from Hong Kong to mainland China, but grew to encompass anxieties about Beijing’s control that predated the territory’s 1997 handover from Britain. The movement that emerged was the last stand of an in-between place: not China but not independent; fiercely proud of its democratic culture but without the luxury of democratic governance; promised rights like free speech and free assembly but ruled by one of the world’s most powerful authoritarian states.
Events in Yuen Long on the night of July 21 when residents were brutalized by marauding gangs would rupture whatever hope still existed that Hong Kong could reach some kind of political compromise. Reporting for a narrative history of the pro-democracy movement reveals that the police were aware of the planned attacks, as were government officials close to Hong Kong’s political leadership. Yet they did nothing to stop it.
As Beijing has systematically snuffed out Hong Kong’s democratic ambitions over the last four years, while rewriting the story of the 2019 protests, the official narrative of what happened in Yuen Long has been manipulated too — exonerating the police, who have faced no consequences for their failings, while the victims have been prosecuted as perpetrators.
Millions first took to the streets on June 9, 2019, a Sunday, following a route that had been walked by countless other marchers over Hong Kong’s history. Demonstrators gathered at Victoria Park, then ambled down the roads of Wan Chai towards Admiralty, the administrative center, and dispersed into Central, where bank logos decorate skyscrapers. The peaceful tone of the protests changed on June 12, when police responded to demonstrators disrupting a second reading of the extradition bill with tear gas, rubber bullets and beatings, then an unprecedented use of force. Protesters almost uniformly began covering their faces, at least with a surgical mask.
Ahead of July 21 — the seventh Sunday since the movement began — protesters, journalists, the police, and the city’s government had their focus again on central Hong Kong, where another mass demonstration had been called. That afternoon, around 430,000 people had joined.
By nightfall, a coordinated attack would shift focus away from that part of the city. Within hours, Yuen Long and the date, 7/21, would become shorthand for the lengths that pro-Beijing thugs — men wearing white clothing — would go to terrify the city into submission.
Up in the northern New Territories on the edge of Hong Kong, close to the border with Shenzhen, Yuen Long was an insular, rural community that was also a historic stronghold for triad gangs — organized crime groups with deep roots in the city and in mainland China. In Yuen Long, elements of Hong Kong’s underworld intermingled with local officials and rural power brokers, creating a form of informal self-rule largely tolerated by the authorities. The demographics, however, had started to shift, as young couples and others moved into relatively affordable housing developments. The modern condos butting up against aging village houses were a physical representation of the multitudes contained in Hong Kong.
Calvin So, 23, was a lifelong Yuen Long resident. He too had heard the rumors in the days before July 21, but paid them little mind. He was preoccupied that Sunday with his long shift cooking at the Le Grand Pokka Café, a family restaurant inside a large shopping mall.
When So checked his phone before helping close up the restaurant at 9 p.m., he saw a post about a group of men gathered in a nearby park that he passed daily on his walk home. When he neared the park, So saw that the loitering group of men had swelled in size. There were dozens now, maybe more than a hundred milling about. All wore white shirts. More troubling than the coordinated outfits was the fact that many held thin wooden rods. A few were adorned with the Hong Kong or Chinese flag.
As he passed, So remarked to no one in particular, “Wow, really so many white shirt people.”
The banal comment was enough to attract one man’s ire. “What did you say?” he yelled. So kept walking, but the man and others started to keep pace alongside him. They heckled as they walked. People nearby began to record what was happening. When the first blow thudded across his back, So tried to ignore it. Another hit followed; within a moment the street was the scene of a violent frenzy. The men lashed So across the back. Some pounded his head and neck with their fists. “Hit him! Hit him!” a man screamed over and over. So pleaded with them to stop. The attack lasted just minutes, but the men had transformed his back into a grotesque latticework of deep purple welts.
‘This is Yuen Long station’
Gwyneth Ho, a journalist for Stand News, was at her parents’ home in Yuen Long when she noticed a clip of So’s assault spreading online. The video circulating was a horrifying scene, but not the biggest news of the day. Over on Hong Kong Island, protesters had upped the stakes by refusing to disperse in Central and instead continuing west. Their target was Beijing’s Liaison Office, the most prominent symbol of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. They spray-painted the walls with graffiti and pelted the gaudy gold and red emblem of China affixed to the building with paint-filled balloons until it was all but unrecognizable.
The incident was the first direct attack targeted at Beijing, rather than symbols of the Hong Kong government. Ho urgently needed to get there to relieve her colleague, who had been covering the day’s protests for hours. She headed to Yuen Long station to catch the train.
As Ho entered, it became immediately apparent that something was wrong. Groups of men in white shirts, like the one she saw in the video beating So, rushed past her. They freely roamed the halls of the vast station, hitting people with bamboo sticks seemingly at random.
Ho looked around and didn’t see any police officers, not the regular patrol cops dressed in blue or the riot police in their green fatigues. She dipped into a bathroom. Inside, she saw a middle-aged woman with blood pouring from her head. She told Ho she had been hit two or three times by men with wooden canes before they sprinted off. Ho slipped on her fluorescent yellow vest with PRESS stamped across the back; she was the only reporter in the station.
Ho positioned herself in the relative safety of the station’s paid area, separated from the main publicly accessible hall by turnstiles and a waist-high metal and glass barrier. Standing with the journalist was a crowd of demonstrators returning home from Hong Kong Island, along with everyday commuters. On the other side were dozens of the men in white shirts. Some kept pitching forward, waving their sticks in the air and menacing people.
Stand News’s preferred form of disseminating news that summer was live-streaming. It offered an unfiltered, immersive view of the protests in real time, and had made stars of reporters like Ho who could offer their own commentary as they broadcast. She held up her phone and began streaming to Stand News’s Facebook page at 10:40 p.m.
“Hi, everyone, this is …” Ho hesitated for a beat before restarting her introduction. “Stand News viewers, this is Yuen Long station,” she said. She sounded like a dispatcher radioing for help. “I will repeat again,” she said a few moments later, as if to convince viewers, and maybe herself, that what they were seeing was indeed real, “this is live from Yuen Long station.”
About seven minutes later, most of the mob started moving to another part of the station. Ho tapped her subway pass, exited the paid area, and followed, filming as she walked. She was fixated on the phone, the world around her reduced to a tiny screen. A man in a peach-colored shirt, the buttons undone as if heading off on a beach holiday, appeared behind her. She swiveled to her left to capture him, smacking a bystander with a wooden rod.
The man noticed Ho recording him. He rushed toward her in a manic sprint, lifted his rod in the air, and struck her multiple times. Ho let out two screams as she fell to the tile floor. From the ground, she continued to film while trying to protect herself as the man flailed manically above her.
Scrambling back to her feet, Ho captured a group of men surrounding another in a black T-shirt and brown pants, standing directly in front of her. One of his attackers, dressed in a white shirt and a black Louis Vuitton belt, looked straight into her camera, waving a bamboo stick in his left hand like a deranged practitioner of martial arts. Someone slammed Ho to the ground a few seconds later. Her camera captured a swirl of fluorescent lights and tiles, and recorded her scream.
Elsewhere in the station, the savagery continued. Passengers hiding in the train above the main hall were easy targets. The men in white entered through the open car doors and bloodied them. One desperate victim fell to his knees and begged them to stop.
Two uniformed police officers who were dispatched to the station just before 11 p.m. glanced around at the scene and casually strolled away down a pedestrian bridge, not even turning back to see what was unfolding behind them.
By July 21, following violence at earlier protests, the Hong Kong police force had started to be perceived as occupiers doing mercenary work for Beijing rather than acting as a legitimate policing unit. At Yuen Long on July 21, police had the opportunity to reverse that growing perception and prove their professional, unbiased role. The public was begging them for help. Some 24,000 panicked calls were placed to emergency services over a period of three hours, alerting them to the scenes unfolding in Yuen Long.
The police also knew in advance that violence was likely in the neighborhood. A week prior, members of five separate triad groups joined a WhatsApp group to discuss plans to “defend their homeland,” Yuen Long. It was rare for these groups to come together, as they often clashed over their share of illicit business. As the triad groups coordinated their plans for July 21, a detective sergeant from the anti-triad bureau that oversaw the area was reading along. He had managed to gain access to the WhatsApp group chat, giving him unfettered insight into the plans.
It took 39 minutes from the start of the attack on July 21 for police to arrive. When around 40 officers equipped with body armor and riot-control gear gathered outside Yuen Long station, they were noticeably restrained when dealing with the mob of men compared to the protesters. There were no rubber bullets or beanbag rounds, not even a foot chase. Instead, officers allowed the men to exit without issue.
The police response would come to be defined by a photo: a riot officer with his hand amicably placed on one of the white-clad men’s shoulders.
The failure to intervene extended from the police to those who ostensibly controlled them. Inside the secure confines of Government House, Hong Kong’s leadership was blithely unaware of the crisis in Yuen Long. It would have remained so had Betty Fung not needed to use the bathroom.
Fung was one of Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam’s few trusted aides. She was huddled with Lam and a handful of advisers that night, monitoring the protests on television. For security purposes, the officials left their phones outside the room. When she checked her phone on her way to the bathroom, Fung saw that a group of young staffers were posting about an attack in Yuen Long station. She responded with surprise, and then incredulity. You “can’t just rely on YouTube clips,” she responded in a WhatsApp chat, warning that there was a lot of “fake news circulating around.” Her younger colleagues were stunned that after nearly two months of protests, top officials in government were just watching TV, seemingly unaware of live streams, online forums and Telegram channels.
Lam’s administration should not have needed Fung to alert them. The government already knew who some of the men were. Some 24 hours before the attacks began, the political assistant of a secretary close to Lam attended a banquet in a rural village in Yuen Long. It was part of a slew of festivities celebrating the inauguration of newly elected village leaders. Also present were members of Beijing’s Liaison Office, and pro-Beijing lawmakers.
At one point in the July 20 celebrations, Yuen Long village leaders posed for a group photo. Standing among a line of men arranged in a neat row behind three suckling pigs, laid out on a table draped with a red tablecloth, was a man identified as Stephen Ng. Ho captured Ng on her live stream from Yuen Long station the next night, wooden stick in hand, shouting at and then beating an unarmed, defenseless man. Ng was wearing the same Louis Vuitton belt, its “LV” hardware as clear in her footage as it was on the night of the banquet.
The government officials in attendance offered hints that the rumors had reached them, too. The political assistant to the secretary for mainland affairs had invited some others to join him at the banquet. He gave them a very specific dress code: “Wear only white.”
‘Teaching the kids a lesson’
What took place on July 21, 2019, unleashed a flood of emotion: denial, disbelief, shock, grief and anger. When emergency calls were ignored, when clips of the light-touch approach to the men in white went viral, trust in the police cratered.
On the streets, people began to call the police haak geng, combining the characters used to describe triad societies and the police, implying they were as “dirty” as the gangsters themselves. Many police officers sympathized with the men in white. On WhatsApp groups, front-line officers in unrelated units praised the men in white for “teaching the kids a lesson.”
Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that 43 percent of the Hong Kong public had zero trust in the police in the months following the Yuen Long attacks.
Both the police and the government initially admitted to some failings. The police commissioner at the time said he would review the force’s manpower deployment, and Lam branded the attacks “shocking.” Just over a year on from the attacks, however, the narrative started to shift. Police started by arresting victims from that night — including an elected lawmaker who was hospitalized with broken fingers and injuries to his face, arms and legs — and charged them with rioting. They then characterized the beating of commuters and unarmed protesters as clashes between “two evenly matched rivals.”
In a news conference announcing the arrests, a senior police official proclaimed they had “restored the facts.”