The group of about 80 protesters wore numbered lanyards around their necks and taped themselves off as they marched, like a moving crime scene.
This bizarre spectacle in March was Hong Kong’s first authorized protest in three years—highly choreographed, policed, and regulated, even if it was not an explicitly anti-government demonstration, and a world away from the crowds that filled the streets in 2019 to protest China’s tightening control of the city. One participant said that the protesters, who were opposing a land reclamation project, were “herded like sheep”.
It was just one example of how Hong Kong, a global and tech-savvy city whose protests were once broadcast live globally, is being transformed. But the authorities are not only quashing future protests; they are trying to rewrite Hong Kong history.
Revisionism is an act of repression. It’s the same playbook China employed after violently crushing the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. Then state-induced amnesia was gradually imposed. At first, the government produced propaganda branding these protests as a counterrevolutionary rebellion that had to be put down. But over the years, the state slowly suppressed all public memories of their murders.
In Hong Kong silence has settled much faster. The muzzling of dissenting voices and editing of the past has happened at lightning speed. The quicker the cloak of silence is thrown over Hong Kong, the less time there is for criticism to take hold and the quicker the next phase of transformation – whatever that may be – can be ushered in. The undo cycle speeds up.
I worked in Hong Kong’s once-vociferous newsrooms and covered its boisterous protest rallies. Now, most of the Hong Kong journalists I know are silent. Some are in jail, some are in exile, and some no longer write, because there are no publications left to publish them.
After a draconian national security law was imposed in Hong Kong in 2020, at least 12 news outlets shut down, including the popular and pro-democratic Apple Daily. Its founder, Jimmy Lai, could face life in prison on national security charges, and six of its executives have pleaded guilty to conspiring to collude with foreign forces, a vague charge introduced under the new security law. Some of the closed organizations removed their files from the Internet.
This is how history is erased. Those who continue to post are under scrutiny. One of Hong Kong’s best-known political cartoonists, Wong Kei-kwan, better known by his pen name Zunzi, has been criticized by officials, including one who chided him for “seriously deviating from the truth.” In this climate, the only guarantee of safety is silence.
The amnesiac manual includes mass indoctrination through “patriotic education.” The new school textbooks claim that Hong Kong, which Britain returned to China in 1997, was never a British colony because Beijing does not recognize the 19th-century treaties that ceded Hong Kong to Britain, though some roads and parks still bear named after British colonial figures.
History is identity, and challenging this principle of Hong Kong experience is an attack on their identity. Britain did not establish full electoral democracy in Hong Kong, but it left behind a stubborn respect for civic values, a free press and a desire for political participation that fueled the 2019 protests. The act of rewriting history takes away the cornerstone of that legacy, portraying Hong Kongers as victims of an occupying force rather than agents of their own destiny.
Hong Kong’s memory is not reformatted all at once. People cannot be made to believe what they are told, but they must salute the new order in acts of performative reverence, such as the recently introduced flag-raising ceremonies in schools and loyalty oaths to public officials.
More than 10,000 people were arrested during the 2019 protests. Some people were sentenced for allegedly having facilitated, assisted or simply encouraged the protesters. Words are used as weapons, and in Hong Kong the repeated use of the word “riots” erases a version of the past—that many protests were peaceful—and creates a retrospective alternate reality that serves the politics of the present.
Hong Kong is being redone almost faster than changes can be reported. Many key institutions—civil society organizations, political parties, and trade unions—have been dismantled in the ultimate act of degradation. Hong Kong’s population contracted three years in a row due to emigration and a drop in the birth rate.
In a clever comment on censorship, a digital art installation by Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Amadon included hidden references to the Hong Kong 47. It was projected on a giant screen onto a busy Hong Kong street once filled with black-clad protesters. Unsurprisingly, it was removed in March; those flashes of memory threatened the fragile exoskeleton of propaganda being built. Amadon sent me a message that this was his intention from the beginning. “The artwork needed to be removed for the art to be complete,” he said. “Art needed the government to paint the final brushstroke.”
Despite this, the Communist Party will not be able to completely erase the collective memory of Hong Kong. There is a growing Hong Kong community abroad, and rallies are taking place around the world in favor of the 47 facing trial. Hong Kongers don’t forget easily.
When the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen movement could not be publicly commemorated in China, people in Hong Kong took it upon themselves to hold annual vigils for the dead and imprisoned in Beijing and elsewhere. Now it falls to a new Hong Kong diaspora to keep alive the memory of what happened to their own City.
Louisa Lim, a former journalist in China, is a tenured professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Send your comments to [email protected].
By: Louisa Lim
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6697525, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-04 21:00:09
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