A requiem for Hong Kong
With recent events fundamentally threatening the political autonomy of Hong Kong, Asia risks losing one of its key strongholds of democracy.
Image from Unsplash.
I remember quite clearly the first time I visited Hong Kong. I was six years old, shocked by both the humidity in the air when we stepped out of the airport and the towering giants in the morning fog–their skyscrapers.
Over the years, whenever I visited during the summer holidays, I wandered around on my own while my mother was working. I developed routines: visiting the beach in Repulse Bay, strolling–quite uselessly–through one of the endless malls, hunting for English books in small indie bookstores, looking for antiques, the shop on Cat street (arguably, a touristic place) filled with tiny figurines of Mao. Street food in Mong Kok. Chinese doctors with pickled snakes. Mong Kok was also where I started taking photos, lifting my camera to ask for permission before taking someone’s picture. There are remarkable faces in that area of Hong Kong, especially older people, with drawn lines on their skin, eyes exceptionally clear and focused. In that sense, like many other temporal visitors, my experience of Hong Kong is a strange one, each year a slice of time, a temporal portrait of a city.
When I was 16, I wrote a paper on Hong Kong’s politics and interviewed Professor Benny Tai, one of the Occupy Central with Love and Peace initiators. This movement, though taking on part of the name from the Occupy movement in New York, was much more fundamental in its objectives–it fought for basic democratic rights. And, just like Occupy in the US, it struggled to define a set of clear demands; there were too many separate groups, which is arguably one of the key reasons why it failed. Unity is a difficult thing to achieve when pressing issues are so varied and complex.
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Professor Tai was the former law professor of one of my mother’s friends. When I asked her about him, she said how surprised she was that he had emerged as one the key leaders, since he never struck her as overtly political or opinionated during her time at university. Indeed, extraordinary circumstances make extraordinary people, and even more unlikely heroes. Professor Tai is calm, very composed, yet lively in discussions. His office on the Hong Kong University campus was filled with stacks of books and papers, a disorderly order. He often quotes Martin Luther King, and there are in fact some similarities between them. He has the knack for summing up big political issues in short, evocative sentences. Luther King’s politics were massively informed by his faith and it is the same for Professor Tai.
Since becoming actively involved in the debate on democracy, Professor Tai has often been harshly criticised. In 2018, when he made decidedly hypothetical comments regarding independence and a future democratic China, some asked Honk Kong University to seriously consider whether it was appropriate for Professor Tai to teach there, when he could be voicing similar views to students. Criticism of academics who choose to voice controversial opinions has been gaining more and more ground. Even though the decision was heavily criticised, Professor Tai has now ultimately been fired from his teaching post due to a criminal conviction (“conspiracy to cause public nuisance and inciting others to cause public nuisance”) over his role in the 2014 pro-democracy protests. Efforts by the Hong Kong University student council to retain Professor Tai’s tenured job were unsuccessful.
The fact that university students and academics play such an integral part in democratic movement seems reminiscent of the democratic movement in China in the late 80s. Joshua Wong, one of its most prominent activists, stepped onto the scene when he was only a teenager, founding the student activist group “Scholarism”. The students successfully opposed the implementation of “Moral and National Education” curriculum, aimed at polishing over the Chinese Communist Party’s rather tarnished history in school lessons.
Hong Kong has often been at the apex of power plays between the West and the East: in the opium trade and with its strange status of having been “leased” to the UK in 1898 for 99 years. When the lease approached its end the UK and Chinese governments entered into a contract, the Joint Declaration. Combined with Hong Kong’s Basic Law (basically, its constitution), it allows Hong Kong to effectively govern itself, while also protecting basic rights. Many arrangements, however, are decidedly undemocratic. The chief executive is elected via an election committee (about 1,200 people), which consists predominantly of people who are loyal to the Beijing government. This only goes to show that Hong Kong’s rather unconventional arrangements make for a tense political situation at the best of times.
The author Jason Y. Ng has described Hong Kong as the city of protests. People do not put their trust into the political system, going out onto the street to make their voices heard seems like a very legitimate and more trustworthy mechanism.
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In 2019, another set of demonstrations started regarding a proposed extradition law. The reason for this proposed law was a rather gory story of murder. A Hong Kong citizen was accused of strangling his pregnant girlfriend and stuffing her body in a suitcase while they were visiting Taiwan in 2018. The suspect fled to HK and could not be extradited for his trial because Hong Kong does not have an extradition treaty with Taiwan. The Hong Kong government promptly took this opportunity to propose amendments which would allow case-by-case extraditions to countries lacking formal extradition treaties with Hong Kong. China would be included, a country that is not really known for its high standards of procedural fairness. Many citizens worried that China could have used this to its advantage to detain dissenting Hongkongers. Even more critically, the amendments would have applied retroactively, a highly controversial proposal regarding the rule of law.
In June 2019, when protests against the law proposal started, I was in Hong Kong and went to one of the first demonstrations. It was very much a different feeling from the 2014 protests. There was a clear goal which united everyone. From a few streets away you could hear the crowd, chanting, moving along, their echoes further intensified by the skyscrapers. It was very moving. The power of those voices; they were peaceful and yet you could feel how determined they were, how easily it could all descend into violence if they were provoked.
Let me recreate the scene. One boy, perhaps of the age of five, whose photo I took, walked along next to his parents, camera in hand, awed by the crowd and the sense of being a part of something bigger. Sometime later I ascended a walkway crossing the street to have a better view. The crowd did not seem to end for miles. It was one red carpet, everybody holding up a red sign stating “no extradition!”
Image taken by Noëlle Gaumann at the 2019 protest.
Image taken by Noëlle Gaumann at the 2019 protest.
A man standing next to me smiled and nodded as if he were personally responsible for making this happen: “Everybody is so orderly. Nobody is trashing anything. We will not give the government an excuse to use violence. Everybody knows what is at stake.” Later, I saw an old lady with a walking cane, moving along slowly, determinedly, wearing bright colours and pants with a big peace sign across her buttocks. Unbelievably, after a couple of months the government retracted the proposal. It was like the city could exhale at last after holding its breath for so long.
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In many ways Hong Kong is dystopian. A very good friend of mine is afraid of partaking in the protests because he fears his university scholarship might be removed if he does. More than half of young people think about moving abroad. The unaffordable housing prices, which cause many families to live in cramped spaces, are part of the problem. Nathan Law, another young local activist and forcefully-unseated politician, once put it quite sardonically in an interview with DatelineSBS: “If you want to have intimate behaviour with your partner then you have no room to do so.” The interviewer laughed: “So the young people of Hong Kong have nowhere to hook up.” People who are even poorer have to resort to renting cages in subdivided apartments.
With the passing of the national security law in June, Hong Kong’s democracy has essentially been turned on its head. The new law criminalises any actions deemed by the Chinese government as subversion, secession, terrorism or collaboration with foreign forces. It also allows for closed-door trials and even the potential for suspects to be tried on the mainland. It is decidedly irreconcilable with the Joint Declaration. When I read about the new law, I remembered something that Professor Tai said to me in the interview when I asked him about the treaty with the UK, “They never intended to abide by it.” He was very clear about this. This blatant disregard arguably shows that international agreements are only as good as the “real-political” ties between the nations enforcing them.
During that interview I also asked him if he would ever consider moving abroad if the situation got too risky. His answer was a resounding no. I suppose in some ways he can be compared to Alexei Navalny’s approach in Russia. If the government you are opposing is so powerful, you have to make as much of an effort to keep the story in the news. Professor Tai also alluded to activists after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. “Most of them are abroad now. But what can good can they do there. The things I am opposing are here in Hong Kong.” Others take a different view. When the national security law took effect Nathan Law took a night flight to London. He fears he will get arrested should he return, but he is adamant about furthering the democratic cause abroad.
On the same day as the US was shocked by the Capitol riot, Hong Kong police arrested over 50 opposition figures. This constitutes the most sweeping crackdown on the democratic movement since the enactment of the new national security law. Most of those arrested had been involved either in running in or organising an unofficial primary in July last year to select opposition candidates for September’s legislative election. The election was later postponed, allegedly due to the pandemic. Those arrested have since been released on police bail as investigations continue. Authorities state that the campaigning for primary elections was aimed at overthrowing the government. Professor Tai was one of the key organisers of the primary. After being released, he emerged from the police station, saying: Hong Kong has entered a “cold winter”.
The city feels impossibly close to me. On the other hand, its citizens' experiences are so far removed from my experience of life as to constitute the actions in a city that I do not know at all.
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