To understand what happened at the airport, you have to understand the summer that preceded it. In early 2019, the Hong Kong government proposed an extradition bill that would have allowed criminal suspects to be transferred to mainland China for trial. Critics feared it would expose Hong Kong residents to a legal system without the protections the city's Basic Law guaranteed. Millions took to the streets. The government eventually withdrew the bill, but by then the protests had grown into something larger: a sustained movement touching on democratic representation, police conduct, and Hong Kong's political future under Beijing. By August, the city was in a state of ongoing confrontation, and the airport had become a focal point for that tension.

Fu Guohao was a journalist with the Global Times, a Chinese state-affiliated newspaper known for its nationalist editorial positions. On August 13, he was at Hong Kong International Airport during the protest occupation. The crowd — suspicious of mainland journalists and of individuals they believed might be plainclothes police or government agents — detained him. His belongings were searched. He was beaten. Protesters used zip ties to bind him to a luggage cart, and the incident was broadcast live. During the assault, Fu made a statement that became widely known: "I support the Hong Kong police; you can beat me now." The phrase circulated extensively in mainland Chinese media and on Chinese social platforms, where it was met with widespread approval as an act of defiance.

The incident had legal consequences. Three people were convicted of rioting and related charges in connection with the events at the airport. A fourth defendant was acquitted: the judge determined that video footage of that individual's involvement in the assault was not sufficiently clear to support a conviction. The trials took place against the backdrop of Hong Kong's subsequent legal changes, as the city moved through the passage of the National Security Law in June 2020 and a broader transformation of its political and judicial landscape. The convictions represented one of many prosecutions arising from the 2019 protest period.

Fu Guohao died on October 25, 2021. His father told reporters that Fu had suffered from depression in the years after the incident at the airport, and that this depression was a contributing factor in his death. His father described the beating in Hong Kong as part of a "domino-like" chain — a phrase that captures something difficult to articulate about how a single violent incident can redirect the trajectory of a life. Fu was a journalist doing his job in a city at a crisis point. He was attacked. The attack was filmed and became a symbol in a political conflict that had little room for individual complexity. What happened to him afterward, in the years the cameras did not follow, was a private suffering that the public spectacle of that night at the airport did not foresee.