Hong Kong’s year of protest now feels like a mirage

On July 21st 2019 Hong Kongers witnessed an attack so notorious that, like the felling of the twin towers or the Tiananmen Square massacre, they came to refer to it by numerical shorthand: 721. On that evening scores of gang members, known as triads, stormed Yuen Long, a rural metro station. There, in train carriages and on concourses, they set upon anyone they suspected of returning from that day’s pro-democracy protests.