by Vinton Poon

During this movement, apart from “five demands, not one less,” citizens also chant the slogan “free Hong Kong; revolution of our time.” This “free Hong Kong” slogan was first introduced by Edward Leung during his Legislative Council campaign in 2016. He probably did not expect that his slogan would be taken up millions of people in 2019.

Even though he is currently in jail, this slogan seems to have made him the spiritual leader of a leaderless movement. During the last few weeks, people have also been circulating the campaign debate he participated in with two other candidates: Christina Fong, and the eventual winner of the seat Alvin Yeung. Netizens were surprised by how ahead of his time he was, proposing ideas that were seen as too radical then, but reasonable now.

A snippet of his exchange with Alvin Yeung summarises my feelings.

Yeung asked, “As a leader, do you agree that you should set a bottomline for protest, in order to protect your followers?”

Leung answered, “I agree, but I do not lead the crowd. I am one of the crowd, and I walk amongst them.”

Very often, when we discuss the notion of “leader,” and explain why someone can be a leader, we often identify the qualities she possesses. We frequently see books about success that detail the personalities that make one a leader, or highlight the features that a certain leader possesses. But what’s interesting is, if we compare these books, we will see that authors have very different opinions when it comes to what makes a person a leader. More interesting is the fact that, when analysing the same leader, authors may come up with very different opinions. One book may say that Jesus was a leader because he was low key; while another may say that Jesus’ success relied on his active self-marketing.

In the book The New Psychology of Leadership, the authors Haslam, Reicher and Platow propose a new way to understand leadership. They argue that instead of looking at personal attributes, to understand a leader, one needs to look at her followers. This is because, for a person to be a leader, she needs to show that

1. she is one of us: she possesses the attributes that members of the group has;
2. she does it for us: what she does, she does for the group;
3. she crafts a sense of us: she highlights what marks us as a group, and allows us to realise our group identity;
4. she makes us matter: not only does she express our ideals, she works on turning these ideals into reality.

If we take a look at Edward Leung, we will see why what he said and did in 2016 makes him a spiritual leader in 2019. Three years ago, the ideal he expressed, and the actions he took may not have been accepted by people, but because of the change of circumstances, we have started to agree with his ideas, and he has become the spiritual leader of the crowd today. First, as Leung said, he belonged to the group and marched with the group, he was one of the Hong Kong people; second, epitomised by the “Fishball Revolution,” he fought against the authorities for Hong Kong people; third, he emphasised local-ness, and stressed the local Hong Kong identity and, last but not least, he worked to turn what we believe in as a group (freedom and democracy) into reality.

Of course, each Hong Kong person has a different ideal, but whether you support the rule of law; whether you want Hong Kong to maintain the one-country-two-systems paradigm for the next thirty years or whether you want Hong Kong to be independent, you will find something from him that echoes with you. A good leader is the stereotypes ascribed to his followers. If what Edward Leung believes in has not changed since 2016, then it is we who have become more like Edward Leung in 2019.

On the other hand, the woman who is supposed to be the leader of Hong Kong does not fulfil any of the aforementioned criteria. She may possess certain outstanding personal qualities (e.g. performing well at school and at university, and climbing up the career ladder in government), but not only does she lack the four qualities listed above, she has the opposite attributes:

1. she doesn’t show she’s one of us. She didn’t even know how to use an Octopus card to get through an MTR turn-style;
2. as she confessed in a closed-door meeting, she worked not only for the Hong Kong people, but also for Beijing;
3. she hasn’t promoted Hong Kong identity. She instead encouraged us to merge with the Big Bay Area
4. she did not respond to people’s demands, and insisted on passing the extradition law.

This despicable woman may be talented, and highly intelligent. But even if she could fly, she wouldn’t be the true leader of Hong Kong people. At the moment, the Hong Kong people’s true leader may in actuality be the guy who shouted “Free Hong Kong; Revolution of our time,” and who is now detained in Shek Pik Prison.

Vinton Poon graduated from Edinburgh University and worked for a number of years in Hong Kong as a lecturer. Academically, he is interested in how language interacts with identity and power. In 2019, he moved back to Edinburgh for love and is now an independent scholar. In June 2019, he started a blog on Facebook named Vinton’s Art of Language (雲吞博士的語言藝術) and he continues to write short articles about making sense of current affairs using theories in linguistics, sociology, social psychology, and political science. The blog has attracted more than ten thousand followers. Vinton is also a co-editor of Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary (Palgrave, 2018).