September 28, 2014
“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,”
Hong Kong Edition
Recovering from Photoville, I just have a brief thought about the Hong Kong version of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” as thousands of tweets yesterday were drawing a connection between Ferguson and the “Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.” I don’t have any doubt the latter was inspired by the former. At the same time, however, I don’t see the translation running very deep.
As exercised by African-Americans, the expression is deeply ironic and all about racism. The hands in the air (as I wrote about from the get-go) expresses the fact that even in the act of total submission, given the cop and the zip code, it won’t save your life. From the photos I’ve seen, the youth in Hong Kong are deploying the gesture in a less complicated way. Yes, the message speaks to their subjugation by the Chinese. In this case, though, both the circumstances and the more confrontative posture and gaze seems to function more as an act of defiance and empowerment. There’s actually some evidence of this right in the photo retweeted thousands of times yesterday. You might need to click to expand, but it sure looks like the kid in the purple scarf (in the right third of the shot) is flipping the bird.
(photo: Alex Ogle/Getty)
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Monday, September 29 2014
‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’
in Hong Kong Protests?
Demonstrators chant, ‘Hands up, Don’t shoot,’ as they protest the shooting death of Michael Brown during a march through the streets on August 22, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty
by Carla Murphy
Observers of this weekend’s youth-led demonstrations in Hong Kong have noticed a familiar gesture: Ferguson protesters’ “hands up, don’t shoot.” Coming little more than a month after some Palestinians Tweeted teargas advice to Ferguson’s protesters, “hands up” in Hong Kong appears to confirm that Ferguson’s influence has gone global.
Vox reports however, “It’s impossible to say the degree to which protesters are using the gesture as a deliberate nod to Ferguson, or borrowing something they’d seen on the news for their own purposes, or using it coincidentally.” And Quartz’s Lily Kuo, reporting from the ground in Hong Kong, has this to say:
Most Hong Kong protesters aren’t purposefully mimicking “hands up, don’t shoot,”as some have suggested. Instead, the gesture is a result of training and instructions from protest leaders, who have told demonstrators to raise their hands with palms forward to signal their peaceful intentions to police.
Asked about any link between the gesture and Ferguson, Icy Ng, a 22-year-old design student at Hong Kong Polytechnic University said, “I don’t think so. We have our hands up for showing both the police and media that we have no weapons in our hands.” Ng had not heard of the Ferguson protests. Another demonstrator, with the pro-democracy group Occupy Central, Ellie Ng said the gesture had nothing to do with Ferguson and is intended to demonstrate that “Hong Kong protesters are peaceful, unarmed, and mild.”
In Ferguson, where street demonstrations are still happening, reporter Amanda Wills found one protester with a soldarity message for Hong Kong. Read more at Mashable.com. And learn about Hong Kong’s democracy demonstrations, which have drawn thousands, through the eyes of Joshua Wong, one of its 17-year-old leaders.
>via: http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/09/hands_up_dont_shoot_in_hong_kong_protests.html