Amid the Pandemic, Is Hong Kong Facing a Different Kind of Death?

Riot police in Hong Kong detain a group of young people.
Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong believe they are fighting for their rights and identity, but Beijing maintains that they are “hooligans and terrorists.”Photograph by Isaac Lawrence / AFP / Getty

In the middle of a pandemic that has killed more than three hundred and fifty thousand people worldwide, what does it mean for a city to die? Last Friday morning, at the annual meeting of China’s National People’s Congress, the Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, put forward a national-security law that would ban “treason, secession, sedition, and subversion” in the semiautonomous city of Hong Kong. Under the law, Beijing has the authority to bypass the territory’s own parliament to crack down on any activity that it defines as threatening to its political legitimacy. Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State, called the measure a “death knell.” On Twitter, journalists, pundits, and politicians made similar pronouncements. Lo Kin-hei, a leader of the Democratic Party, tweeted, “No matter how prepared we are to witness the death of our loved city, and no matter how many times it felt like it is dying, it still pains me to see another part of the remaining flesh is gone.” On Sunday, thousands of people, wearing protective masks, took to Hong Kong’s main thoroughfares in demonstrations similar to those that have convulsed the city since last year, when Beijing proposed an extradition bill that would have allowed people arrested in Hong Kong to be tried on the mainland. On Wednesday, protests erupted again, when the local legislature began debating a bill that would criminalize disrespect of the Chinese national anthem. Police in surgical masks fired repeated rounds of pepper pellets into the air and rounded up dozens of people, including schoolchildren.

Lo’s words echoed a sentiment I heard many times in Hong Kong last year: a city dies when it can no longer determine its fate. By that standard, of course, Hong Kong has been dying for a long time. A Fortune magazine cover story titled “The Death of Hong Kong,” published in 1995, begins, “It’s time to stop pretending. Supposedly, Britain’s handover in less than 750 days of Hong Kong, the world’s most aggressively pro-business economy, to China, the world’s largest still officially communist dictatorship, is going to be a nonevent.” Predicting many of the erosions of judicial independence that have come to pass in the twenty-five years since, the piece characterized Hong Kong as “a captive colony of Beijing” that will increasingly resemble “just another mainland city, governed by corruption and political connections rather than the even-handed rule of law.”

In Hong Kong, the question of laws—who gets to make them and what ends they should serve—is an existential one. “Whether we have a say in how we live defines whether we live,” is how a young protester put it to me in September. A previous version of the new law, which also sought to criminalize subversion against the mainland, was proposed in 2003 and abandoned after half a million Hong Kongers marched against it. “In 2003, there was anxiety about Beijing’s governance, but we weren’t empty of hope,” a retired schoolteacher told me. But Hong Kong’s resilience prevailed; until now, it always has.

The situation in the city has deteriorated in the past decade, as critics of the Chinese leadership are “spirited away” to China, and pro-democracy legislators are “disqualified” without explanation. Last year, when millions of people marched against the now shelved extradition bill, the central government in Beijing began losing patience. A battle of the wills between protesters and the government occasionally led to chaos and violence. I found myself going back and forth between the drama on the streets and the various theatrical productions around the city that were documenting it on the stage. One of the most memorable pieces I saw was “Luting: Goodbye History, Hello Future,” part of a quartet of plays that contemplates the meaning of Hong Kong’s evolution from a backwater village to a British colony to an international metropolis to a besieged city.

At one point, the play became a satire, depicting two imagined futures, presented on twin stages. One laid out the dangers of democracy (populism), and the other portrayed the implacability of autocracy (the erasure of history). Sure, one might seem preferable to the other, but neither future was perfect: democracy was not presented as an unimprovable utopia. At the time, the piece struck me as an expression of Hong Kong’s new self-awareness, a sign that it was alive and committed to forging its own identity.

But, when I spoke to writers and artists in Hong Kong, many said that any feeling of hope they had was tinged with foreboding. “There’s a sense that, whatever we create, we are trapped in another’s narrative of what Hong Kong should be,” a theatre director told me. The events of this week are another clash of narratives. Pro-democracy demonstrators may believe that they are fighting for their rights and their identity, but Beijing maintains that the protests are led by “hooligans and terrorists” and are largely the work of foreign governments—particularly the U.S. government—set on undermining the Communist Party. As Prime Minister Li put it on Friday, establishing a “sound” legal system to “safeguard national security” and “fulfill the government’s constitutional responsibilities” is in the interest of maintaining peace and stability for the Hong Kong people.

The Chinese media, under the aegis of the government, have already begun reframing the narrative. “Yes, there would be a death knell,” an editorial in the nationalistic newspaper Global Times announced, “but for the U.S.’s interference in Hong Kong affairs.” According to an editorial published by the state mouthpiece Xinhua News, Hong Kong is the “ ‘main card’ for external forces to hinder the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Tensions between the United States and China have been building in recent months, to a degree that has many observers alarmed; on Tuesday, President Trump warned of a “strong response” to Beijing’s actions.

Over the weekend, I spoke with the playwright Candice Chong and Chan Chu Hei, the director of “Luting,” over Google Meet. Both expressed shock, but not exactly surprise, over the recent events. They have been working on a production of a play that Chong wrote last year, “May 35th,” which centers on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Three decades later, even mentioning the massacre is still taboo on the mainland, and details of the events surrounding it are scrubbed from history books and the Internet. (May 35th is code for June 4th, the date the government cracked down on the student-led pro-democracy protests, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of people dead—the exact death toll is still unknown.)

In 2017, Chong went to Beijing to interview parents of some of the students who had died. She was born in Fujian and immigrated to Hong Kong with her parents when she was two; she was twelve at the time of the massacre, and remembers reading about it in the newspapers. “My mind wasn’t politically oriented then,” she said. “But I think I always wanted to make sense of the story.” Chan, a native Hong Konger, was a student at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 1989—he was the same age as the young leaders in Tiananmen. “I was very naïve and stupid before June 4th,” he said. “But the incomprehensible violence of that day has informed every project I’ve worked on since.” For both Chan and Chong, the theatre has provided a way to examine the relationship between their personal narrative and the historical one, of reckoning with the past and preserving it.

In the past, Chan and Chong have attended the annual candle-lit vigil in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, the only commemoration of the massacre permitted on Chinese soil. “I never thought that writing about the incident could become prohibited in Hong Kong,” Chong said. “But, in the last few days, the possibility is verging closer and closer to a probability.” To both the playwright and the director, this shift in narrative is significant, and the documentation of it even more so. With the latest proposed security legislation, if you dare to question Beijing’s version, you are liable to be accused of subversion. But to Chong and Chan the real fear is not knowing where the line might lie, and the danger, as a result, is policing one’s own imagination. Neither has much interest in promulgating a particular political ideology. “It is in the nature of art to be boundary-less,” Chong said. “But, if parameters are set on what I can think on the page and the stage, then the project of creation itself becomes futile, because you are a captive inside your head. Fear is the end point. It annihilates everything that came before and after.” As Chong spoke, she bounced her eight-month-old daughter on her lap. “I’ve already been an immigrant once,” she said. “My parents came to Hong Kong with so many fears but also hopes of making a better life here. Now that I have made this place my home, is it my fate to be always uprooted from home?”

Chan said that the experience of watching men and women his age dying to defend their vision of patriotism, in Tiananmen, led him to discover an attachment he had not known that he felt to his birthplace. He said, “I knew I was neither mainlander Chinese nor British, but what did it mean to call Hong Kong my home?” The question had been both an inspiration and a source of anxiety. Hong Kong’s story has never been straightforward, Chan said. And the fact that he could play some part in its telling felt like a privilege and a testament to the city’s vibrancy. But, in the past few days, he has felt for the first time that, to continue telling Hong Kong’s story unmolested, he may have to leave it. “If you ask me what the future might bring me or this place that has made me,” he said, “I can frankly say that, at this moment, I am afraid to imagine.”


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