Hong Kong’s protesters learn from Bruce Lee

“BE FORMLESS, shapeless, like water”, said Bruce Lee in his role as Li Tsung, a martial-arts instructor in “Longstreet”, an American television series broadcast in 1971. Lee died two years later in Hong Kong, where the iconic actor’s musings on the nature of water are being re-examined today by fighters of a different kind: demonstrators who, for more than a month, have been roiling the territory with protests against a proposed extradition law. The government shelved the bill last month, but protesters cite Lee in their efforts to keep up pressure on the local government with a new tactic: formless, shapeless protests in scattered parts of the territory, aimed at wearing the authorities down.

The demonstrators want bigger concessions. These include the formal withdrawal of the bill—which would have allowed criminal suspects to be handed over to Communist Party-controlled courts in mainland China—and a judicial inquiry into police violence against protesters. But they do not want to repeat the tactics of the “Umbrella Movement” of 2014, which involved weeks of sit-ins and protests in busy commercial areas aimed at securing full democracy in the territory. That campaign secured no concessions from the government and caused resentment among some residents whose lives were disrupted.