Shibani Mahtani is an international investigative correspondent for The Washington Post. Tim McLaughlin is a contributing writer to The Atlantic. They are the authors of Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy, a new book that follows the lives of four pro-democracy Hong Kongers, tracing how their upbringing shapes their identities and political beliefs, their role in the 2019 protests, and their fates in its aftermath. In this lightly edited Q&A, we discuss their new book, the evolution of U.S. foreign policy on Hong Kong, and how reporting on the city has changed since the enactment of the 2020 National Security Law.

Illustration by Kate Copeland
Q: How did you choose who to write about in Among the Braves?
Shibani Mahtani: We pitched the book in the first week of January 2021 and within that week there was the mass arrest of pro-democracy advocates under the National Security Law (NSL). So almost immediately we were constrained by the reality that so many people were jailed, and in increasingly difficult positions under which they probably wouldn’t consent to being written about. That necessitated us focusing primarily on people outside of Hong Kong.
We were very glad to have the consent of Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, [a 79-year old pastor and longtime pro-democracy activist], whose interview transcript with us is more than 150 pages long. In terms of Tommy, [a young frontline protestor exiled to the U.S.] one of the main reasons we wanted to do this book was that we came across this insane narrative of kids escaping by boat to Taiwan. That’s something that people generally associate with refugees fleeing stateless situations or really dire economic crises. We knew we wanted that to be a central narrative. With Finn Lau, [a wanted political activist living in the U.K.,] he represented the movement’s online nature. He also connects with Jimmy Lai, who is seminal for the Hong Kong government and Beijing as this huge boogeyman.
Tim McLaughlin: Lastly, with Gwyneth Ho, [an outspoken reporter-turned-political candidate currently jailed and on trial for conspiracy to commit subversion], we were both drawn to her as a person and a character. During the protests it seemed like every day there was a person who was elevated above the crowd for some reason. The 721 incident at Yuen Long put her in this position1On July 21st, 2019, a mob attacked commuters in a Hong Kong subway station while police looked away. Gwyneth Ho was livestreaming the attack when she was assaulted by one of the assailants., and tried to direct her experience back into the movement itself. She’s also a prolific writer, so there was a lot of material from when she was jailed that helped us put together a better picture of her.

Illustration by Kate Copeland
Is there a message you hope to deliver in telling the stories of these four very different people and their fates?
TM: We tried to capture a cross-section of the movement and to anchor it in history. Reverend Chu serves as a through line from 1989, through the Umbrella movement to 2019, and is now in Taiwan. Tommy was just a kid. Finn anonymously popularized the ‘laam caau’ mantra online.2Laam caau was a ‘scorched earth’ strategy embraced by many protestors, under which activists could pressure the international community to punish the Hong Kong authorities if Beijing crushed the pro-democracy movement. And Gwyneth was very forward looking in talking about what would be possible if the movement was allowed to move off the streets into more formal halls of power in Hong Kong. She was very aware of the limitations, but also what could be possible if that was allowed to happen.
SM: We also wanted to show the changing of identity of how Hong Kongers see themselves, whether more as British-Hong Kongers, Chinese-Hong Kongers and then just Hong Kongers by the end. That shift in how people see themselves has happened throughout the history of Hong Kong, and the characters help us see this strong sense of Hong Kong identity that ends up in complete opposition to the mainland. It was so important for us to show that the birth of the pro-democracy movement happened in solidarity with Chinese democracy and aspirations for it, as opposed to this being a separate identity. Showing that generational shift between our characters tells a story of identity as well. A lot of people will be surprised to hear that Gwyneth studied in Beijing at Tsinghua, as opposed to the University of Hong Kong (HKU) or elsewhere. Tommy’s family was shaped by the process of migration from the mainland. Finn comes from an indigenous family with protected rights. We wanted our characters to say something about Hong Kong identity and how it was shaped.

Your book also offers new details about the conversations happening within the Hong Kong government and pro-Beijing political parties during the protests. Regarding former chief executive Carrie Lam there is a quote about her, attributed to a person close to Lam, that: “she embraced this valueless mindset, which is actually a colonial legacy.” Would you say that is true of many Hong Kong politicians?
TM: With Carrie Lam in particular, she’s part of a set of people within the government who follow their marching orders no matter what, and that may explain why things have progressed the way they have, with such little dissent from the establishment. Lam embodied that in that she was very good at pleasing the people above her and moving up the ladder. When you talk to people about what her core values and beliefs were, or her vision for Hong Kong, it’s always unclear. That’s because she didn’t have a good idea of that herself.
Was the extradition bill — a proposed law that would empower Hong Kong to extradite wanted people to mainland China, whose tabling in 2019 ignited the protests — Carrie Lam’s idea?
SM: During 2019 this was a very muddled question. Some people said it was her idea, some people said that there were signs that Beijing had wanted it. One of the things we wanted to do when we set out to do this book was to get that right. Essentially ten out of ten people, whether in government or close to Carrie Lam in the Executive Council or in LegCo, or diplomats outside the system with close relations with the Liaison Office, all unequivocally said that this was initiated by her. Beijing had questions about whether she could deliver, but she convinced them that she could because she was so closely watching Hong Kong sentiment following key events in 2018.
SHIBANI MAHTANI: AT A GLANCE | |
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BIRTHPLACE | Singapore |
AGE | 35 |
CURRENT POSITION | International Investigative Correspondent, The Washington Post |
FAVORITE BOOK | Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe |
FAVORITE MUSIC | Bon Iver |
FAVORITE FILM | My Neighbor Totoro |
MOST ADMIRED | Carlos Tejada |
Carrie Lam is obsessed with statistics and data and she really believed that that pushback would not be so great. The rest of it was just her personality. People on the record have said that she’s an extremely stubborn and strong headed person. Then the bill got too far along, so Beijing had to say it backed her. And as more and more opposition coalesced, nobody felt like they could turn back, even after the first million-strong protest, and the rest is history. We really wanted to put it on the record that, actually, the Hong Kong government did have a lot of agency before 2019. And this is what they did with it.
At what stage did Beijing take control over the handling of the protests?
SM: It was probably around July, when things got so out of control. You had the U.S. explicitly backing the protest movement. Once there was that direct support coming from Washington, you could see a real hardening from Beijing. Then there was a big meeting where all of the Hong Kong lawmakers were dragged to Shenzhen and were told, basically, that this process was no longer being controlled by them. The international element and then the hardening of the movement itself worked together to convince Beijing that this was a color revolution, and that Hong Kong was being used as a base for infiltration. They truly believed that: We concluded from our reporting that they weren’t just saying it as an excuse.
For a long time, the Hong Kong Police Force was regarded as “Asia’s finest,” a reputation that is now pretty clearly in tatters. Could you talk about how the Hong Kong police have changed since the protests began?
TIM MCLAUGHLIN: AT A GLANCE | |
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BIRTHPLACE | Newton, Massachusetts, USA |
AGE | 36 |
CURRENT POSITION | Contributing writer, The Atlantic |
CURRENTLY READING | Last Call at Coogan’s by Jon Michaud |
FAVORITE MUSIC | Warren Zevon |
FAVORITE FILM | Minding the Gap |
MOST ADMIRED | My mom |
TM: During the protests there was always a fixation with whether there were mainland police mixed in. I get where that intrigue came from, but the contact between the Chinese police and different arms of law enforcement in Hong Kong was quite out in the open. There’s all this training that happens now, with delegations that go to China, that really increased in the years leading up to 2019. There’s still a lot of international commingling between Interpol, Hong Kong and different law enforcement types from different countries. But certainly the contact and learning experiences from the mainland has increased.
SM: From speaking to police officers who quit because they really hated the environment they were in, there was such a siege mentality that started in 2014, heightened in 2016, and then just blew up in 2019. Police officers really did believe they were the last stand between everything falling apart. The most interesting thing was how even the expat cops believed that. [The police leadership has] managed to breed this culture within this formerly Western, colonial police force to become one that’s really been hardened through the years. We had a contact tell us that all of his friends — these expat, white and retired Hong Kong police officers — only wanted to get Sinovac [China’s homemade Covid vaccine] during the pandemic because they believed it was their patriotic duty. After the movement ended, police officers were sat down with senior management and told, basically, “believe you did nothing wrong, you’ve never done anything wrong. You are totally exonerated,” creating an atmosphere of impunity. This, by the way, is not unique to Hong Kong. These institutions can create this kind of mentality, especially when you have this belief that “if not for us it would be total chaos.”

Could you say more about how the Trump administration’s approach to the Hong Kong crisis evolved over the course of the movement and in its aftermath?
TM: There is sometimes a perception, including in Beijing, that U.S. lawmakers and the different branches of government have the same view, when really that isn’t true. There were different feelings about how to react inside the government, and whether to punish Hong Kong or change things. The other part that made [the Hong Kong issue] unique was there were so many people inside the U.S. government, whether it was the State Department or congressional aides or congresspeople or in the administration, who had personal connections to the city. They may have studied abroad there, or worked there for a while, or been on congressional delegations there. There were a lot of personal feelings about what was going on, because so many people had spent so much time and had great memories there.
…so many people got arrested and their mindsets [about speaking to the media] changed very quickly. Most of them believe now that it’s better not to say anything…
Shibani Mahtani
Early on, there was so much rhetoric from the Trump administration on China, also during the campaign and the election: but really what he was fixated on was his trade deal, and everything was seen through signing that. So the first Trump reactions to what was happening in Hong Kong were kind of bizarre. He mentioned standing with Xi Jinping and the protesters, it was pretty nonsensical.

SM: We write in our book that Hong Kong was seen as a fringe show even within the broader U.S.-China dynamic. Obviously that began to shift a little bit in the early days of the extradition bill, but not really until the images of the protests and the media coverage made it to the front pages in June or July 2019. One thing we realized doing this book is that Washington is extremely reactive to whatever is seen as the big thing in the spotlight, and you can really see that in how much the Hong Kong issue has continued to be on Washington’s agenda. The idea emerged in Washington that Hong Kong tells us this big story about the schism between authoritarians and democracy, so we’re going to go all in. Then, the National Security Law came in and they said, okay, well our hands are tied and there’s nothing much we can do. The story is finished, so let’s move on.
TM: There was also always an eye on Taiwan throughout this, and it was always an important part of this discussion. From Deng Xiaoping and One Country, Two Systems [which Beijing proposes as a formula for unification], to the use of the Hong Kong movement to help get Tsai Ing-wen elected, to what’s going on now with Washington and Taiwan. Now, as Shibani said, the focus [in Washington] has totally shifted. It’s like: we tried in Hong Kong and failed, so let’s shift to Taiwan.
At one point you write about the personal toll that covering the protests took on you both as well, taking over “everything you spoke about, dreamed about, and wrote about.” As reporters so deeply immersed in the protests, how did you preserve your journalistic objectivity?
SM: I would say that for a lot of Hong Kong journalists, things really started to shift when the police started treating us as the enemy as well as the problem. I was very involved in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) through 2019 and was doing a lot of advocacy around press freedom and how journalists shouldn’t be targeted out on the streets. There were many times that there would just be yellow vests [uniformed reporters in high-vis clothing] milling around after the protestors had dispersed, and the police would turn around and fire a few parting shots of tear gas [at us]. There were instances documented by photographers where they themselves were getting pepper sprayed in the face. In those circumstances, it’s very hard to not have any reaction or feel animosity.

One of the things we can do with hindsight, especially being out of Hong Kong, is to look in a very clear-eyed way at the movement and what went right and wrong. It’s an approach that even more “political” journalists took — for example, before Gwyneth Ho explicitly became an activist, she was unflinching and straight-up in her reporting. As journalists, we still have that responsibility to look at this holistically. There were very ugly moments that we highlighted in our book. It’s important for us to bring some distance, even though it was personally moving and emotional, and continues to be. The reality of us being in Singapore is a direct consequence of what we have written and the deterioration of Hong Kong. So many of our friends have had to move to be able to do their work, whether they’re artists or working for NGOs or anyone else. When your life becomes so intertwined, it becomes hard to be totally and purely objective.

TM: There were times where there were things that were going on, especially from the police side, that were just crazy, where they tried to gaslight us or just lie. There’s videos of police officers throwing trash cans at people. The protestor getting kicked by the police, [who denied the incident, describing him as] the “yellow object”. There were these moments where they just tried to tell you that what you saw wasn’t what you saw. That’s probably only become heightened now. The press releases have gone from Carrie Lam saying that people have legitimate grievances, and thanking peaceful protestors for coming out and voicing their views, to [current Hong Kong chief executive] John Lee’s screed about how this is just a black clad color revolution. We saw that building, and it was important for us to go to the protests every day and put it all together in a way that was clear eyed and as straightforward as possible.
Can you talk about how the reporting process has changed after the passing of the national security law?
TM: For one, so many people got arrested and their mindsets [about speaking to the media] changed very quickly. Most of them believe now that it’s better not to say anything, with the trials ongoing and their futures very uncertain. And that had a chilling effect on everybody else that you could see. There is also a real reluctance to talk about the NSL itself among academics and people involved in the legal profession. So in that way, the reporting process has certainly gotten more challenging. There were shifts in the pro-Beijing camp, as well in their interactions in the media, that have made it less fruitful to talk to them or gain genuine insights the way you used to be able to.
We also got around the challenges of reporting this book by essentially promising everyone that, after the book is published, we will not go back to Hong Kong.
Shibani Mahtani
SM: We also got around the challenges of reporting this book by essentially promising everyone that, after the book is published, we will not go back to Hong Kong. We amassed a lot of information while reporting this book. So we’re doing the best we can to not make ourselves vulnerable to the Hong Kong government. In the end, that was what convinced a lot of people to speak to us. We did go back to do some reporting a couple of times over the last year, and every single time our sources would say “tell me when you’re back [in Singapore] and that everything is okay.”

The recent bounties [the Hong Kong government is offering HK$1 million rewards for information leading to the prosecution of certain pro-democracy individuals] have really underscored the risk in a massive way. It’s impossible to fully predict how far this [crackdown] will go. Everybody who has watched other assertions of Chinese statehood in Tibet and Xinjiang will attest to the fact that every time they think there’s an end [to the repression], it just keeps going and going. Hong Kong is different, but from a security point of view, it is not that different.
TM: The other thing that has changed is that reporters in Hong Kong have done a very good job shifting from being out on the streets, to covering the NSL and COVID, to becoming court reporters. That’s not easy with so many ongoing trials. For a lot of reporters, there was a steep learning curve of getting to know the prosecutors and defense lawyers and trying to get new sources and understand all the legal wranglings going on.
Did you encounter any specific threats yourselves? For example, in the book you mentioned a HKU student reported you to the police.
TM: That wasn’t related to reporting for the book, but to my reporting for The Atlantic. A HKU student reported me to the national security police for a story I did about academic freedom in Hong Kong. I have some of the police documentation, but they never contacted me and nothing ever came of it. But it also shows the way the NSL can be used to just harass people. It’s an example of what people talked about when the NSL passed, of using [the law] for personal grudges or against people you don’t like.
SM: We also encountered some challenges during our last visa renewal that indicated to us that if not then, eventually we would have a limited ability to stay. This, by the way, has already happened to other journalists. Different organizations have been public about this to varying degrees, but the tightening of visas for foreign journalists in Hong Kong is a very real thing.
What role do you see foreign correspondents playing in Hong Kong in the future?
SM: I will say from the get-go that foreign correspondents should be pushing far more than they have because they have protections of big institutions and foreign passports that Hong Kong reporters will never have. Just compare the resources of, say, CNN, to the resources of The Witness [an independent local media outlet founded in 2022, dedicated to court reporting]. The pushback you would get as a foreign correspondent versus as an independent new media outlet is totally different.
I have so much respect for Hong Kong Free Press, The Witness and Bao Choy’s The Collective. All of them are pushing as hard as they can, and it is incumbent on foreign correspondents and the institutions they represent to keep pushing in the same way, because they have far more protections and ability to do that, due to the unwillingness of the government to go after them in the same way. That’s true in Hong Kong, but also in Myanmar or Thailand or anywhere. That’s also why we try to keep pushing, no matter where we are. As foreign correspondents we have that responsibility. Our utility is limited if we don’t use our massive publications and platforms to push as hard as we can.

Eliot Chen is a Toronto-based staff writer at The Wire. Previously, he was a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Human Rights Initiative and MacroPolo. @eliotcxchen