“Hong Kong identity isn’t just based on the rejection of Chinese identity, but a collective sense of resilience and autonomy and saying no to oppression,” Johnson Yeung, a veteran activist and former student leader who was arrested during a protest last month, told me. “Hong Kong people are putting up a fight to save their unique status.”

Yeung’s sentiments are reflected across the territory, especially among the young. A University of Hong Kong poll in June, when these latest protests began, found that 75 percent of people ages 18 to 29 identified as “Hong Konger,” as opposed to “Chinese,” “Chinese in Hong Kong,” or “Hong Konger in China,” the highest proportion since the poll began tracking identity sentiment, in 1997. Overall, 52.9 percent of respondents across all age groups identified this way, according to the survey, up from 35.9 percent in 1997.

(The term Hongkonger was itself added to the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2014 and is defined as “a native or inhabitant of Hong Kong,” though a common spelling style has not yet been agreed on. Both Hong Konger and Hongkonger are prevalent. Shirts with the dictionary entry printed on them are sold in gift shops and have been a common sight at recent protests.)

Much of the organizing of demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience has taken place on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. In one of the many protest-related groups on the app, I put a question to users: “What does being a Hong Konger mean to you?”

The first responses came within a few minutes and continued for days. Nearly two dozen people—frontline protesters, Hong Kongers living abroad, students—sent back messages detailing their thoughts. Some were succinct (“We are not Chinese,” one 40-year-old man wrote), while others sent lengthy paragraphs. One related his sadness that his young son would grow up to see a city fundamentally different from the one that he experienced; another said she thought Hong Kong’s films, which blend humor and traditional Chinese themes, best represented the territory; a man in his 20s talked about recently becoming enraptured with Hong Kong history and digging through old maps of the territory; some poked fun at the stereotypes of Hong Kong people as buttoned-up workaholics focused on money.

All spoke with immense pride for Hong Kong and its community spirit—and nearly all told me that the recent protests had served to harden their position of being distinct from the mainland.

“This anti-extradition-bill movement enhanced my Hong Kong identity, where I saw Hong Kongers’ unity and how high quality Hong Kong people were,” said one protester, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the authorities (another by-product of the protests has been a growing unease among demonstrators with identifying themselves in articles or photographs, despite this city ostensibly having a free press and the right to protest). This demonstrator spoke of being deeply moved by protesters helping one another with supplies and organization over the past months: “How can you not love this place when you see people unselfishly helping each other?”