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Modern protesting has adopted a new tactic: frontlining. Frontlining is, in short, an innovation that the article claims came out of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. It is mass, decentralized, organized action wherein protesters engage with police in what looks like battle lines. The front lines contain armored protesters, and lines behind the front support all the other protesters. Roles behind the frontlines include: medics, people who put out tear gas, people who hold signs and chant, etc.
This article compares and contrasts the protests that are occurring in the wake of the murder of George Floyd with the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and what American protesters can learn from people in Hong Kong.
In the protests across the US a number of Hong Kong-esque tactics have been deployed against police, including:
these tactics are so prevelant that Chinese officials have claimed that Hong Kong protesters have infiltrated the United States!
The āfrontlineā is the front of agitation, where people are quite literally putting their life on the line
Hong Kong protesters created tactical positions and battle lines against the police
[[Protesters in Chile]] were quick to pick up on the tactics that they saw coming out of Hong Kong
Chuang posits that the advances made by Hong Kong protesters are an advancement of the [[black bloc]] tactic
The Hong Kong protests managed to blur the line between āgoodā and ābadā protesters
In the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and Chile, however, in different ways and at different speeds, the assertion that the bloc protects others was turned into a clear and undeniable piece of common knowledge. This was possible partly through an erasure of any previous meanings attached to black bloc protesting and its replacement with the role of the frontliner: that protester who, by subjecting herself to grave danger and ever-present tear gas, was acting in no other capacity than the defense of everyone else in the protest from the police. This represents a shift: there is no longer a large geographic separation into two bodies of protesters (one zone for peaceful protest and another for confrontation), but instead a single body coalesced, protected at the frontline by those who have made it their role to be there. In an even broader sense, and perhaps even more importantly, the Hong Kong and Chilean protests totally reconfigured the role of black-clad, masked, and militant protesters willing to fight the police. Unlike the situation in the US, where it is often possible for media and police to collaborate in isolating militants, portraying them as separate from the main body of āgood protestersā and even further distanced from the body politic at large, frontliners also came to be widely (if not completely) understood as acting in defense of everyone else, protesters and non-protesters alike, by making it possible to resist an untenable status quo.
The tactics used by the Hong Kongers in 2019 is an advancement of what was learned in 2014 and 2016 protests
This led to the Umbrella Movement, a student-founded group focused on ārational nonviolenceā, which ended up failing
This ārational nonviolenceā was employed at the beginnings of the Anti-Extradition Movement as well, although out of necessity descended into outright violence
The Anti-Extradition movement was extremely decentralized: protesters utilized the internet to communicate and coordinate
The large anonymity and coordination led to cops assuming everyone was a participant
NOTE There is an image in this article that I cannot copy out of the article at this time but itās well worth preserving and spreading
The Hong Kong protests were so broad based that they included right-wing sentiment, and destruction of property didnāt cause them to leave
Protesters, should they make demands, will have to address the bigger picture rather than settle for reforms
The movement that cohered around the [[2014 Ferguson protests]], Black Lives Matter, is an assertion rather than a demand