As anger over a deeply unpopular extradition bill with mainland China erupted into the most serious violence Hong Kong had seen in years, one protester, Hailey Kok, found herself amid clashes between police armed with rubber bullets and beanbag rounds outside the territory’s parliament building.

“My parents came from China, they took a big risk to bring me to Hong Kong and escape the fear,” she told me. “And now what’s happened? Where is the freedom to speak out?”

Five years after the 2014 Umbrella Movement brought parts of the city to a standstill, anger has returned with a vengeance. Back then, it was students who were demonstrating for the right to elect Hong Kong’s leader. This time, it wasn’t just the young teeming the streets.

The protests, which have now been going on for a fortnight, have electrified the city and saw two million marchers all clad in black flood the canyon-like streets of Hong Kong Island on 16 June. That’s almost a third of the population. So overwhelming were the numbers, they killed the bill stone dead. Carrie Lam, the city governor whose determination to ram through the extradition agreement was the catalyst for the protest, has been left with her career hanging by a thread.

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The awesome scale of the march did force an apology from Lam, but the marches have now moved beyond the bill to become a wider expression of malaise about life in one of the world’s wealthiest – but also most unequal, expensive and crowded – cities.

The past five years have seen a steady worsening of many of Hong Kong’s deepest-rooted problems – despite an expanding economy, astronomical cash reserves and one of the world’s biggest budget surpluses.

Inequality is at its highest in 45 years. As Hong Kong’s top tycoons pocket (tax-free) billions in dividends, elderly women are dragging stacks of cardboard through the streets to sell for HK50 cents (5p) per kilo. The housing crisis, too, is intensifying. More and more people are being forced into squalid, illegally subdivided flats. With one in five people below the poverty line, many are reduced to living in notorious ‘cage’ homes, enclosed by wire mesh with only room for a single bed.

There has been precious little political will to confront any of this; Asia’s financial capital is at pains not to hurt its reputation as the world’s freest economy. And it has all fuelled the growing impression of Hong Kong as a once futuristic city now stuck in the past.

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Its extraordinary post-war boom is now but a memory. Year after year, in e-commerce and the digital economy, it falls further behind the Mainland, which boasts the rise of tech giants and financial markets in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. It has also been left trailing by Singapore in areas such as fintech.

Hong Kong built its glittering wealth on its unique status as a city which enjoys the rule of law and freedom of speech on the doorstep of the world’s second largest economy – which allows neither. Yet the city’s future expansion is focused on integration with the Mainland, and in particular the fast-growing province of Guangdong which borders Hong Kong. How the tension between integration and independence is resolved will be pivotal.

Beijing, in concert with the Hong Kong government and leader it effectively appointed in 2017, has been cracking down in the years since the Umbrella Movement, as it steps up attempts to integrate ahead of 2047, when the “one country, two systems” agreement expires.

Leaders from 2014 have been jailed, one foreign journalist expelled, pro-democracy lawmakers disqualified and a party advocating independence banned. But combined with the chipping away at the agreement that was designed to guarantee the city’s autonomy for 50 years after its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the extradition bill proved a step too far.

As Tom Lai, a 23-year-old protester told me, “The government is no longer a Hong Kong government, it is a China government. They are not thinking about Hong Kong people.”

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This partly explains why, for a society that remains conservative in many aspects, the marches of the past two Sundays have been far more diverse than their 2014 predecessors. The young and the old, students, families, office workers and manual workers, those living in homes they own and those in public housing – this affects them all.

Their activism has been about defending something Hongkongers already have: the supremacy of the common law system, which has underpinned the city’s prosperity and freedom for decades and which stood as a beacon for millions of refugees who fled to the city from the chaos of Mao’s China. That’s why so many hundreds of office workers walking home on the network of high-level walkways spontaneously chanted their support to demonstrators honking car horns on the streets below.

It’s unclear, though, where the movement on the streets of Hong Kong goes from here. Organisers have insisted the marches will continue until Lam steps down, but she would only be replaced by another Beijing apparatchik. Antony Dapiran, a lawyer and author of City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong, said all eyes were on the administration of President Xi Jinping, which has repeatedly backed the bill, on how it responds to the current volatile situation.

“There is a feeling that ultimately Beijing decides what happens,” he said. The central government could either react aggressively as it did after 2014, or seek to build bridges as happened after mass protests in 2003 against a proposed national security law.

There is, he adds, “no sign Xi Jinping will back down over exerting control within China’s borders, or even beyond”.

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But nor is there any sign that the new generation of protesters is willing to stand down. “It’s the youngest activists, the younger generation who are the future of Hong Kong in the coming decades, who have shown themselves to be the angriest and the most radical,” Dapiran said.

“They have a huge appetite for change, and no trust in Beijing.”

With the Communisty party fixating on national sovereignty, unity and control and a new cohort of Hongkongers resisting, who knows how far either side will go. As Lai told me last week: “We will still fight. This is Hong Kong, this is my home. We must protect it.”

The glorious picture of Alaa Salah, the 22-year-old captured against the evening skyline in long white robes and gold jewellery, woke the world to seismic events taking place in this huge north African nation. An insurgency, that began with street protests over rising bread prices four months ago in the city of Atbara, has led to the sudden deposing of Sudan’s strongman leader, Omar al-Bashir, after 30 years in power.

The generals stepped in to remove him, the only world leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Even some soldiers joined the protests. A military council will now remain in control for two years before elections supposedly take place.

The extraordinary sight of exuberant Sudanese crowds waving flags and chanting for freedom, peace and justice comes just days after mass demonstrations led to the departure of another long-serving and elderly north African autocrat: Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria.

Rarely seen in recent years, confined to a wheelchair since a stroke, 82-year-old Bouteflika had nonetheless sought to cling to office by standing in a fifth election. But, in the face of rising unrest, the army that gave him power in 1999, after brutal civil war, finally dumped him. Bouteflika was replaced by an elderly ally as caretaker president and pledges of free elections were made.

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Unsurprisingly, these, too, failed to quell demands for more significant changes to end cronyism and corruption. After tear gas was turned again on crowds bearing placards reading ‘Systeme Dégage’ (System Get Lost), the army chief announced a July election date and promised that judges would investigate ‘the whole gang’ – the term used for Bouteflika’s cabal.

These are tense moments in nations that have been trapped for decades under grim regimes, and which are both still under the grip of generals. They are like belated echoes of the Arab Spring, which swept the region with such immense consequences eight years ago. The impression is intensified by the fact that one general in Libya is trying to grab the capital Tripoli with his tanks and planes, while another – the former spy chief who crushed Egypt’s revolution after a coup – has been visiting Washington.

Each country is different, of course, and each protest has local patterns. Activists are certainly more cautious than was the case eight years ago. In Algeria and Sudan, they say they have learned lessons of the past, when despots were ousted only to be replaced by bloody chaos or harsh counter-revolution.

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One country in the region did turn its revolution into positive change, though: Tunisia. And its former president, Moncef Marzouki has described the peaceful rotation of power in Algeria as “one of the most successful revolutions of the Arab Spring“.

It’s true that these uprisings all have a communality that reaches back to 2011, linking them directly to that revolutionary fervour that shook the world after a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire to protest corruption.

The roots of current discontent can be found in the same foetid swamp that gave birth to the protests of eight years ago, nurtured by the arrogance of self-serving autocracies. These young societies are frustrated by rampant youth unemployment, infuriated by state-captured capitalism, dismayed by corruption, inflamed by social media and angered by rich old men who refuse to share power or wealth.

In Algeria – Africa’s biggest country – more than two-thirds of its fast-growing population of 42 million is under 30 years old. These are the ones most affected by rising unemployment, with almost 30% of them jobless.

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Its well-trained army swiftly stopped riots in 2011 over corruption and economic dislocation, aided by painful memory of the savagery of its war against Islamists during the 1990s after elections were cancelled. The anger, though, over bad governance, economic woes and lack of freedom has remained profound.

The sparks vary from uprising to uprising. It was the tripling of bread prices and flour shortages amid rampant inflation in Sudan – a country where almost half the population lives below the poverty line and the end of an oil boom has devastated the economy. But the chant is the same. “Al-sha’b Yurid Isqat al-Nizam” (The people demand the downfall of the regime) was heard in Tunisia in 2011, and Sudan in 2019. It came from the mouth of one courageous army colonel in Khartoum. And was the potent phrase scrawled by teenage schoolboys on the wall of their school in Daraa one night after a game of football, which proved to be the innocent start of Syria’s conflagration.

In the West, we focused on the Arab Spring’s failures, transfixed by the tragedy of Syria, the terror in Egypt and the meltdown of Libya. Yet we largely ignored that the conditions that lay behind the original uprisings remained firmly in place, fuelling that explosive desire for dignity, freedom and social justice.

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Revolutions take time to brew, says the Egyptian-born, Cambridge-based historian Khaled Fahmy. In an essay he wrote four years ago, he pondered how far back we might trace the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, finally asking if the Tahrir Square protests were really rooted in the foundation of the modern Egyptian state in 1805.

Fahmy concluded that five factors thwarted the transformation of Arab nations. These include the impact of foreign intervention, the scourge of petro-dollars funding despotic Gulf regimes determined to stop democracy, and the surge of political Islam. “Despite these deep problems, I remain confident that the future is ours and our revolution will prevail…it would be naive to expect its victory overnight with one decisive knockout blow.”

He is right. Just as the demands of the French revolution did not dissolve when Napoleon Bonaparte took control in 1799, so the pressures of these troubled societies are still bubbling beneath the surface.

There was naivety aplenty in 2011, not least from journalists such as myself who gave too much credence to middle-class protesters they met on the streets and too little weight to the impoverished masses slaving away in fields and factories. The dreams of democracy founded on protest were soon dashed on the rocks of reality.

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And some sceptics still dismiss hopes of democracy in these benighted societies, making bigoted assumptions about Arabs and Muslims, or sneering at their right to have the same freedoms that we enjoy as they endorse cruel and thieving regimes. We have seen the pendulum swing in the United States – still the global superpower despite mounting challenge from China – from a foolish president who thought he could impose democracy on despotic states, to an even more foolish president who flirts with vile autocrats.

But from Syria to Sudan to Saudi Arabia, the choice and issues remain the same for those of us lucky enough to live in democracies: do we support the people pushing for more open societies and stand up for human rights? Or do we espouse such ideals at home, while ignoring them abroad in a misguided search for stability and perhaps a bit more trade.

The answer is clear, as seen in both Algeria and Sudan: never expect the status quo to last in places where aspiration is stifled by autocracy. This is not historical determinism, simply a reflection of human desires and needs. For that brave female student in a protest in Sudan showed the same demand for basic dignity and fairness that led to the Arab Spring – and the pressures in places filled with frustrated young people cannot be contained for ever.

In truth, the Statement is one of the most boring manifestos ever published – 65 pages of self-important tosh written by students who knew a lot of big words but had no sense of melody, no clue how to inspire. That first sentence is nevertheless perfect because it describes something universal, namely the unease young people feel about the world their parents have bequeathed them.

The phrase – “looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit” – describes perfectly the anguish felt by activists in Parkland, Florida who turned their grief over the massacre of their fellow students a year ago today into a formidable protest movement. The Parkland student David Hogg titled his recent book #NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line.

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The phrase also encapsulates the unease felt by the 16-year-old climate change campaigner Greta Thunberg, whose solo protest outside the Swedish parliament last September is now a worldwide student strike. It also describes the fermenting discontent with Brexit among British youths. As John Major warned last week, the young “may neither forget nor forgive those responsible”.

‘Why Mummy? Why Daddy? Why?’ Every parent has heard that refrain repeated with the dependability of a dripping tap. Children find their world bewildering and look to parents for explanation. Three-year-olds ask why the sky is blue. Eight-year-olds ask why that man is sleeping on the pavement. Sixteen-year-olds ask why there’s no money for their education, why we’re destroying our planet, why it’s so easy for a lunatic to get a gun. For parents, providing credible answers gets harder as kids get older.

Most children accept their parents’ explanations, however flawed they might be. But some continue to question – and doubt. Their inquisitiveness morphs into righteous anger at groupthink, a refusal to accept the manifold imperfections of this world. We see this virtuous discontent in Hogg and Thunberg, or in 13-year-old Holly Gillibrand, who has spent the last five Fridays on strike outside Lochaber High School in Fort William, protesting inaction on climate change. For these youths, protest is an expression of hope.

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The great strength of student protesters is their youth. They’re still young enough to have dogmatic ideals; their perfect vision of the world has yet to be crushed by the heavy weight of impossibility.

They see politics in its purest form, not as cynical compromise or corruption, but as a righteous tool of reform. They reject the status quo, insisting that there are alternatives. What is so striking about the Port Huron Statement is the confidence of its authors in their unique capacity to reshape the world. It’s easy for jaded adults to dismiss that youthful optimism as hopelessly naïve, but how lovely it would be to have that faith in possibility again.

Yet the great strength of student activists – their youth – is also their greatest weakness. They are naïve. The world is complex; it does not conform to the monochrome sensibilities of youth. Students are also prone to immaturity, to youthful excess and attention-seeking display. “We were f**king obnoxious”, wrote Jerry Rubin, a leading protester against the Vietnam War. “And we dug every moment of it.” A massive anti-war rally in October 1967 is remembered not for its 100,000 earnest protesters, but for the drugged-up antics of Rubin and Abby Hoffman, who tried to levitate the Pentagon.

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An interesting trend was apparent during the Vietnam War: while mainstream support for the war steadily declined from 1965, so, too, did respect for students who protested. Suburban America hated the protesters as much as they hated the war. This was largely because the students had a peculiar talent for thumbing their noses at the masses.

That’s another weakness; students start from the assumption that they’re so much smarter than the hoi polloi. Their arrogance limits their effectiveness. It proves impossible to build a mass movement while shouting insults from the ivory tower.

Being smart makes them an elite. Elites are always a focus of suspicion among the masses. The Parkland protesters are formidable intellects capable of shredding any febrile gun nut’s argument. At Davos, Thunberg delivered a devastating critique of climate change policy – in English, her second language. Yet smart people make the masses uneasy, especially in periods of populist anti-intellectualism like today. The carefully reasoned arguments of Hogg or Thunberg seem suspicious in a world raised on soundbites and angry tweets.

Working people, many of whom have bitter memories of their schooldays, are often contemptuous of student protestors, who, in their eyes, live a comfortable life but still find cause to complain. They’re dismissed as freeloaders, spitting in the faces of the hard-working taxpayers who fund them.

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Ronald Reagan exploited this anti-student feeling to good effect when he launched his political career in California in 1965. He successfully turned the protesters into an out-group worthy of scorn. On one occasion, he told how a protester was carrying a sign that read “Make Love not War”. “The only trouble”, Reagan quipped, “was that he didn’t look capable of doing either. His hair was cut like Tarzan, he acted like Jane and he smelled like Cheetah.” That two-line putdown had considerably more impact than the 65 pages of the Port Huron Statement.

Students aren’t students forever. It’s difficult to sustain activism after graduation, when real life beckons. Protest is safe on campus, but less so out in the real world. Sticking it to the Man doesn’t look very good on one’s CV. Sixties protesters at least had the advantage of a healthy economy with jobs aplenty. It’s so much more difficult for today’s youths, knowing that activism might jeopardise their chances in an already precarious world.

For all these reasons, student protest is seldom successful. The Sixties protesters did not bring the Vietnam War to an end, nor did they realise their utopian visions of peace and love. One year after Parkland, it’s difficult to see much progress on gun control. There’s something awe-inspiring about Thunberg’s speech in the snow at Davos, but inside the warm conference centre it was same old, same old.

Spiro Agnew once dismissed student protesters as “an impudent corps of effete snobs who consider themselves intellectuals”. There’s a lot of truth to that statement, yet it’s still unfair. Students should protest; they have a duty to serve as the nagging conscience of their parents. Yes, they’re idealistic, but every great movement has been founded on ideals.

I’m encouraged by the way young people today are questioning the world they’re forced to inherit, the world their parents have mangled. There’s a yeastiness in the air that I haven’t seen since the 1960s. Hogg, Thunberg and the rest are also a lot more savvy than Rubin and Hoffman ever were. They’re sober, careful, committed and not prone to childish antics. They’re also enormously brave. There’s a rough road ahead for them, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll prove me wrong about the futility of student activism.