Hong Kong (CNN) No one predicted this.
When the final protesters were cleared from Hong Kong’s streets after 79 days of pro-democracy protests in 2014 — many of them forcibly carried off by police — they promised they’d be back.
For years this seemed like a pipe dream. The Umbrella Movement, so-named in reference to the umbrellas used by protesters in defense of police pepper spray, changed Hong Kong forever.
The movement awoke a whole generation of new activists and politicians, some of whom would go on to be elected to the city’s legislature, but in many ways it felt like a failed last stand, with everything that came after it seeming more like a desperate rear guard action against ever-increasing Chinese influence and control over the semi-autonomous city.
Protest leaders who were elected were expelled from office on dubious grounds, and many others were arrested and jailed for their part in the unrest. Demonstrations and marches never attracted the numbers seen in 2014, and it seemed like the pro-democracy movement was on life support.
Now, four years, eight months and 12 days after the Umbrella Movement ended, ongoing protests have surpassed it in duration and massively overtaken it in terms of disruption and political turmoil — and they show no signs of stopping.
The roots of the current unrest can be traced back to that summer five years ago, both in the radicalizing effect it had on a whole generation of young Hong Kongers and in the government’s failure to do anything.
With the collapse of the protest movement in December 2014, a lid was placed on the disruption, leaving the underlying frustrations boiling and ready to explode.
James Griffiths 