Recent scenes from Hong Kong might have come from an 1980s gangster film, with hundreds of white-shirted triad members rampaging through subway trains brutally beating all in their path with bamboo poles and metal rods.

Yet this was no movie. The police were mysteriously absent and emergency services didn’t answer the 24,000 phone calls seeking help. By the end of last Sunday night, 45 people were in hospital.

The absence of authority reflects the disappearance of governance during this political crisis, which has allowed a spiral to pick up speed, shattering confidence in all that Hong Kong holds dear.

Within the space of two months, Hong Kong has remade itself into something profoundly discombobulating for its residents. Its civil service, once feted for its neutrality and professionalism, has been left floundering and riven by dissent, as hundreds of civil servants threaten industrial action if the administration continues to ignore demands to withdraw the controversial extradition bill that sparked the crisis. The judiciary, once considered neutral and impartial, has been handing down sentences that call its independence into question. The police force, once touted as Asia’s finest, is widely hated, while Hong Kong’s reputation as the world’s safest city has been undermined.

The transport system, a model of speed and efficiency, has become the latest theatre of civil disobedience, with protesters pulling the emergency handles on subway trains in protest at the lack of protection from the operator on the night of the attacks. Aviation workers occupied the city’s airport on a wildcat sit-in to spread their message to incoming visitors.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police fire tear gas during an anti-extradition bill rally in Yuen Long, New Territories, Hong Kong, on 27 July 2019. Photograph: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA

Even the ancient practice of ancestor worship has been touched by this crisis, with the controversial pro-Beijing legislator Junius Ho, who was caught on camera shaking hands with white-shirted thugs the night they ran amok, complaining that his parents’ graves had been defaced with political slogans.

It is as if Hong Kong has come unmoored and the unspoken social contracts that govern life no longer hold true. The unanchoring of this city is reflected in a mass mental health crisis for residents thrown into this sudden new reality. The fallout is eroding the very institutions that distinguish Hong Kong from mainland China. So how did things unravel so quickly in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan, most orderly, most law-abiding cities?

The eye of the storm is the still, silent centre of an administration that has withdrawn into itself, refusing public dialogue with protesters or students. Its initial mistake – which kicked off the firestorm of protests – was attempting to ram through legislation that would allow Beijing to extradite anyone accused of a serious criminal offence to face trial in China. In an attempt to expedite the process, the government shrank the consultation period and ignored the correct legislative process, sparking massive public outrage. After more than a million people attended the first round of marches, the Hong Kong government has seemed to disappear from view.

The inaction of the administration has left the police, normally the agency of last resort, as the only public interface between the authorities and those they govern. That “contact” has increasingly taken the form of teargas, rubber bullets and bean bags fired at the people, as a hard core of radical protesters have stayed on after peaceful marches have dispersed, occupying streets and besieging government offices. On 1 July, they even stormed Hong Kong’s legislative council, desecrating emblems linked to China. A recent survey shows that more than 80% of marchers are sympathetic to such actions, indicating widespread radicalisation. In a rare move, the police banned one march, increasing fears that the city’s cherished freedoms are under threat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam. Photograph: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images

Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, has said that the offending extradition bill is “dead”, but is refusing to declare that it has been withdrawn. When Lam has emerged, she has unsettled politically attuned Hongkongers. She has been seen flanked by police, praising police actions or visiting injured policemen in hospital. She has not, as yet, visited any ordinary citizens injured by the gang members. Her stiff, defensive, clearly choreographed appearances increasingly ape mainland China’s political culture.

Lam’s language has also raised hackles in Hong Kong, by blatantly adopting the political rhetoric of the mainland. After protesters defaced the national emblem of Beijing’s representative office in Hong Kong, she accused them of “hurting the feelings” of 1.4 billion Chinese people and of challenging Beijing’s sovereignty. Such phrases are completely alien to the political lexicon of Hong Kong. More predictably, Beijing has been shrill, angrily blaming “foreign forces” for the unrest and issuing veiled threats that the People’s Liberation Army could be called in to restore order.

The breakdown in governance has undermined the administration’s performance legitimacy, while Hongkongers, through their acts of civil disobedience, have shown they are withdrawing their consent to be governed. In truth, that consent was always resting on the promise of future political reform and the well-worn mantra of “one country, two systems”. But the past 22 years under Chinese rule have shown that this formula was never an equation: one country always took precedence over two systems.

As the Hong Kong government barricades itself in, pro-Beijing forces have filled the leadership gap with violence: the lawlessness of the thugs, the institutionalised violence of the police force. This has fuelled a weekend insurgency among a very small number of radical protesters, whose methods are increasingly supported by desperate and disenchanted peaceful demonstrators.

In the absence of dialogue, violence is the only conversation between the two sides and every weekend the stakes are ratcheted higher. Nobody can predict what Hong Kong will look like at the end of the summer. What is certain, though, is that the city can no longer return to the way it once was.

• Louisa Lim is an author and a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and journalist based in Hong Kong