Wednesday 9 October marked four months since of the start of the Hong Kong protests. For me, as a protester, it has been an exhilarating, exhausting and not infrequently bewildering time. Events unfold quickly, often at a massive scale, and the situation changes from day to day and week to week. It is difficult to predict where things will go next: Is this coming weekend the beginning of the end of the protests? I’ve asked myself that question every week now for eighteen weeks, and so far the answer has been no. Certainly, no one at the start thought the protests would go on for so long. And no one knows where they are going. The only thing we know is that if we relent, the crackdown will be swift and merciless. So we persist. But for how much longer?

You might think an infinite protest campaign unsustainable. You might think it’s unrealistic to have no endgame. But we do have concrete demands — five of them — and we do have clear political aspirations: real democracy and real autonomy. The core of the situation is that we exist in a system ruled by the most powerful dictatorship in the world, which refuses to even entertain, let alone accommodate, our demands and aspirations. On the other hand, we live in a semi-free society with a modicum of rights, so the dictator can’t just crush us directly but must use a variety of proxies — the Hong Kong government and police as well as Hong Kong’s allies — and other methods. So there is a stand-off, and the only way to deal with the stand-off is to persist....