I did not think much about tear gas for the first few decades of my life. It was simply not a matter of much concern to me. This pleasant insularity came to a sudden end last June 12th, when police fired tear gas on crowds gathered outside the Legislative Council building. That afternoon, along with thousands of others on Rodney Street, I inhaled my first breath of air saturated with 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, the active agent in tear gas.

As tear gas shifted from a once unthought absence to a curious omnipresence in Hong Kong in the months that followed, I have been forced, like many others throughout the city, to inhale this gas far more often than I would have ever imagined. At the same time, I have also been forced to think about and through this substance far more than I ever would have expected, a condition undoubtedly shared by many others whose life experiences may differ greatly from my own but can perhaps find commonality in the reflections that follow.

Tear gas is supposed to work as a crowd dispersing agent, and this is indeed what it achieves in the short term. Perhaps everyone experiences the inhalation of this gas slightly differently, but in my case I felt a sharp burning sensation, extending from my nose and throat down into my lungs: a feeling vaguely resembling my memory of accidentally touching a cooking range as a child, but stretching suddenly across my exposed skin and eyes and down through my respiratory system. As the burning extended across and into my body, the only thought in my mind was to exit this cloud of smoke and seek a breath of newly precious fresh air.

A heavy dose of tear gas can have lasting effects: after June 12th last year, I was haunted for weeks by a tight cough. Yet the most pronounced changes are found in one’s thinking. The air that one once inhaled without a thought, the source upon which one is reliant at each moment of one’s life, is suddenly disclosed by this gas as subject to the uncertain but also increasingly predictable political whims of the government and its police force.

And just as the air becomes a substance upon which one can no longer simply rely unthinkingly, so the legally guaranteed right to assemble suppressed by this chemical becomes even more precious than ever: the distance produced by the initial dispersal of a gathering ends up producing an unprecedented proximity precisely to the ideals and aspirations of this gathering fleetingly repressed but in many senses magnified by this gas.

Tear gas, imagined as a dispersal agent, then ironically functions in the long run as an anti-dispersal agent. We all watched this reality unfold in the second half of 2019 in Hong Kong as protests grew ever larger, more determined, and more resistant. People outraged by the police violence on June 12th came out in the days and weeks that followed to voice their opposition. And the police responded with further rounds of tear gas. People were outraged and gathered together yet again.

Amid this repetitive process, while police knew only the eternal return of their failed tactics, protesters’ tactics dynamically evolved: already by mid-June ever more people were making small but necessary investments in professional gas masks and goggles. As a result of this evolution, tear gas increasingly failed to have any effect on its targets in the moment, affecting instead only passersby without protective gear. I remember a moment in Prince Edward in early September in which the only people obviously affected by tear gas were passersby walking through this busy area on a Saturday evening. Alienating both protesters, whose right to assemble the police attempted to suppress, as well as passersby, whose right to breathe air unpolluted by tear gas was taken away from them, the police force’s bumbling attempts to suppress protests suddenly left the force even more universally despised than the extradition bill that had launched the protests.

Tear gas thus no longer worked for dispersing crowds, only ever bringing new crowds together in opposition to the state’s abuses. It was no longer an imaginary crowd control solution to deeper political and social dilemmas but a genuine political and social dilemma in and of itself.

The tens of thousands of rounds of tear gas unleashed in 2019 are echoes of the failures of each and every repressive measure that the puppet government has attempted to enact since 1997: Article 23 in 2003, national education in 2012, the end of political reform in 2014, the ban on the Hong Kong National Party in 2018, the extradition amendments in 2019, and the National Security Law currently being forced on the city in 2020. The gasps of air that one takes in frantically as one tries to escape a cloud of tear gas are a natural mode of resistance against its smothering effects, just as the resistance that these polices have produced is also natural, near instinctive.

Yet in the back and forth of this continually escalating process of suppression and resistance, the disclosive effects of tear gas for one’s relationship to one’s environment, forcing one to think about the previously unthought air, have had a similarly disclosive effect with regards to Hong Kong’s relationship with China. Just as all of us have no choice in life but to be reliant on the air that we breathe, so the city of Hong Kong, without any consultation or choice, has been forcibly made reliant on China, both politically and economically over the past two decades. And although this reliance was taken for granted as inevitable at times, each of the increasingly repressive steps taken in recent years has disclosed this forced reliance and its tragic effects on the city’s political and legal systems as an object of growing reflection, concern, and resistance.

One is forever changed by inhaling tear gas, rendering realities once unthought as objects of critical reflection, pushing one to seek paths out of its torture. Hong Kong has also been forever changed by the experiences of the past year, forced to reflect upon the once unthought and to seek new paths out of its own torture.

As the authorities’ failed yet unchanged repressive approach escalates with the National Security Law currently being forced on the city, the type of protective filtering defenses that have maintained the city’s breath over the past two decades may become increasingly difficult to preserve. When one is submerged in a cloud of tear gas with protective filters striped away, one can choose to either collapse in submission to this agent or find a path to run away. China’s hard-line approach to Hong Kong today, surrounded by clouds of tear gas, similarly risks forcing either a final complete collapse and surrender in a smothering noxious cloud or a final and resolute break with this toxicity.

(Kevin Carrico, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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