Schedule 80. StuTS

In 2019, Hong Kong protesters adopted Bruce Lee’s “Be water, my friend” as a tactical slogan. Lee had drawn on Daoist philosophy of water in developing his martial art, Jeet Kune Do. A previous qualitative study (Wong, 2023) mapped how protesters projected the source domain WATER onto new target domains, but its analysis drew on a limited set of sources. This paper revisits these mappings at a larger scale, asking how users of r/HongKong applied the metaphor, which discussion themes it appeared in, and which mappings the earlier study may have overlooked. First, collected all posts and comments from r/HongKong published in 2019 and 2020 and filtered them for protest relevance using a validated dictionary with 561,471 comments. I then examined 634 candidate instances of BE WATER, identified 623 metaphorical uses, and used BERTopic to identify 31 discussion themes in texts where WATER was masked. The metaphor occurred more frequently than expected in discussions of anthems, students and universities, international responses, and violence versus peaceful protest, but less frequently in discussions of police brutality. Approximately 70% of uses endorsed or advised the tactic, while others reported on it, used it to name the movement, or referred directly to Lee. The findings confirm the tactical mapping identified in the earlier study and reveal naming as an additional mapping. They also show how the metaphor was used in debates over violent and peaceful resistance, and how topic modelling can help reveal the role it played in these discussions.