Indeed, the specter of death seems to have been hanging over this protest movement—prompted by legislation, since withdrawn, enabling the extradition of criminal suspects to face trial in mainland China—almost from the moment it began.

The protesters’ demands were initially summed up in a three-character slogan: “Fan song zhong!” A direct translation is “Oppose sending to China,” but digging a little deeper, one finds a darker core. Song zhong is a homophone for the phrase meaning “to see off a dying relative.” (It is also incidentally a homophone for the phrase “to give a clock,” which is why a clock is always considered an unlucky gift in China, effectively wishing death upon the recipient.) The slogan thus has death embedded in it, and so could be understood to mean “Oppose sending us to our death”—whether by extradition to China, or through the death of civil liberties in Hong Kong.

For the first mass rally of these protests—on June 9, in which more than 1 million people took to the streets—participants dressed in white, the traditional color of mourning in Chinese culture, and chanted their death-laced slogan. A week later, at an even larger rally of 2 million people, the largest in Hong Kong’s history, participants dressed in the West’s traditional mourning color of black. This time there was an actual death to mourn. The night before, a protester had climbed scaffolding erected outside a shopping center, strung up a banner bearing the movement’s slogans, and appeared to be threatening to jump; in what seemed to be a tragic accident, rescue workers had slipped trying to save him, and the demonstrator fell to his death. The next day, protesters carried white flowers—markets across the city reportedly sold out their entire stock—and a shrine grew outside the mall as people piled those flowers in tribute, lit candles and incense, and left messages of condolence. More suicides would follow; some left messages supporting the protests before leaping to their deaths. In total, as many as eight such deaths have been associated with the protest movement.

Then, when Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam initially announced that the extradition bill would not be proceeding, she also turned to mortality-tinged metaphors. In her English statement to the press, she said bluntly, “The bill is dead.” The phrase she used was also death-related: The bill was “shou zhong zheng qin,” meaning that it had “died a natural death in its bed,” something that online critics were quick to point out did not reflect the true state of affairs surrounding a bill that effectively had been killed by the protesters.

This willingness to invoke death so directly—in words and imagery—is significant. Hong Kong is traditionally deeply superstitious, and death-related symbols are anathema. The number four is considered unlucky because it is a homophone for death, and many apartment blocks, for example, lack a fourth floor; it is considered inauspicious to stick chopsticks vertically into a rice bowl, because it is reminiscent of incense sticks burning to commemorate the dead.

But death is something protesters now appear willing to contemplate. In recent weeks, violence on the part of both demonstrators and police has reached levels not seen in Hong Kong since the Cultural Revolution riots of the late 1960s. The Umbrella Movement was sparked by outrage at police using tear gas during a single incident. For over a month now, tear gas has been deployed almost every single weekend. Police have also turned to rubber bullets, pepper pellets, beanbag rounds, and—debuting them at a recent weekend protest—water cannons. Officers have on several occasions drawn their service weapons and, in a couple of instances, fired warning shots into the air.