Back to the Olympics Newsfeed

‘Retake Hong Kong’: A Movement, a Slogan and an Identity Crisis

Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

HONG KONG — He has been locked up for more than a year in a secluded island jail, but the bespectacled 28-year-old inmate, Edward Leung, is the closest thing Hong Kong’s tumultuous and leaderless protest movement has to a guiding light.

He coined the protesters’ most widely chanted and, for China, most subversive slogan; he pioneered some of the movement’s rougher tactics; and he gave voice to the identity politics at the heart of Hong Kong’s struggle, now in its 10th week, to avoid becoming just another Communist Party-run Chinese city.