Consider This from NPR - Unraveling The Evolution of Hong Kong's Civic Life

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Back in March, roughly 80 people in Hong Kong marched in opposition to a land reclamation project that protesters say would increase pollution. Police were watching closely. Demonstrators had to wear numbered badges around their necks as they walked in the rain. It was a different image from the hundreds who protested in 2019. Back then, the people of Hong Kong showed up in unprecedented numbers. They were opposing what they saw as mainland China's latest efforts to impose authoritarian restrictions to chip away at Hong Kong autonomy.NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with Louisa Lim, author of Indelible City: Dispossession And Defiance In Hong Kong. They discuss the long history of friction between Hong Kong and China, and the state of freedom of expression in Hong Kong today.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. This is sound from Hong Kong's first authorized protest in three years. The protesters are chanting, the government must listen to the people. Back in March, roughly 80 people were marching in opposition to a land reclamation

project that protesters say would increase pollution. As the protests went on, police were watching closely, and the demonstrators had to wear numbered badges around their necks as they walked in the rain. It was a far cry from the hundreds of thousands who protested back in 2019. On Hong Kong's side street, the police were still chasing the protesters. The officers jumping out of vans to tackle whoever they could catch, in some cases violently. Back then, Hong Kongers were loud in speaking out against a controversial bill that would have allowed extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China, a move that many in Hong Kong saw as effectively abolishing an agreement between the city and mainland China that had allowed Hong Kong to control many of its own governmental systems.

But at that point, many in Hong Kong had already felt their autonomy had been slipping away ever since 1997, when the UK formally handed Hong Kong over to the People's Republic of China. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the handover ceremony for Hong Kong. Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is the promise, and that is the unshakable destiny. In that handover deal, Hong Kong's foreign affairs and national defense would be guided by Beijing. Everything else would be controlled by Hong Kong. But after the handover, friction with Beijing tested Hong Kong's autonomy, and many people in Hong Kong started voicing their concerns more loudly. In 2014, the so-called Umbrella Revolution poured protesters into the streets for nearly three months.

The protesters here in Hong Kong are afraid that the central government in China will impose a more authoritarian system of government. As police fired as many as 87 cans of tear gas, determined demonstrators shielding themselves with umbrellas. Fears of China's tightening grip peaked in 2019. Participation in protests grew to unprecedented numbers. Former lawmaker Li Chuk-yen spoke to NPR back then. He led a fairly peaceful march that year, and he said the struggle underway in Hong Kong was a global one.

If the people of Hong Kong win against dictatorship, then it's also a lesson for the world that, you know, with a spirit like the people of Hong Kong, we can finally overcome the impossible. But now, many feel that that spirit has been crushed. Consider this. China's parliament enacted a national security law in Hong Kong in 2020 in response to the 2019 protests. That law bans subversion, secession, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Chinese leaders say the law strengthens national security,

while others see it as restricting the last remnants of freedom of expression in Hong Kong. From NPR, I'm Elsa Cheng. It's Monday, May 29th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt

through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all on the web at theschmidt.org. It's Consider This from NPR. Journalist Louisa Lim covered China for the BBC and NPR for a decade, and she remembers covering what she calls boisterous protest rallies in Hong Kong. She wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about how drastically things have changed there. And she says that seeing that footage of Hong Kongers protesting quietly in the rain was shocking. Protests are really a hallmark of what Hong Kong has been.

You know, it's been a city of protest, even tiny issues. People have come out on the streets and really made use of the freedoms that had been available to them. And I think, you know, what we see now is that ability to protest has been so drastically constrained. I mean, they were not allowed

to have too many people. They had to carry like a police tape around them as they marched, moving it like a moving flight. Coordining themselves. Coordining themselves off from other people. And they were also warned, you know, not to wear black or yellow, the colors of the massive protests four years ago. So it was a very different kind of protest. And I mean, that may be the future of protest in Hong Kong. Well, you write that authorities, I mean, they're not just changing the way people in Hong Kong protest now, they're rewriting Hong Kong's history, right? You call it, quote, state-induced amnesia. Can you tell us what you mean by that phrase? It's really interesting because we are seeing history being rewritten in real time.

But of course, they're things that just happened four years ago. So they're things that we saw playing out. And now we're seeing this attempt to change the narrative from the top down. of journalists, at least 12 media outlets have been shut down or have had to shut themselves down for fear because of this national security legislation that was imposed in 2020. And, you know, when they shut down, some of them removed all of their archive from the internet. So, you know, that was literally the disappearance of history. And we're also seeing history books literally being rewritten, children being taught different history in schools.

And the biggest example of that is Hong Kong was a British colony for 156 years. Now China is saying Hong Kong was never a colony because China did not accept the treaties. It calls them unequal treaties under which Hong Kong was ceded to the British. And so it's describing Hong Kong as not a colony, but more like occupied territory. By the British. By the British. I think Beijing's really trying to impose its narrative in Hong Kong and doing it in a very coercive fashion. You have pointed out that these tactics, these most recent tactics in the last few years,

they're reminiscent of a playbook that the Chinese government has used time and time again, specifically after the pro-democracy protests in Beijing back in 1989. Can you tell me what specific characteristics of this playbook are so familiar to you as someone who covered the aftermath of those pro-democracy protests in 89? Well, that idea of imposing amnesia, it's a kind of a process of many steps. And what happened after Tiananmen was that there was a huge flood of propaganda, really the government trying to teach the population how to view what had happened. We're seeing a similar process in Hong Kong,

except that it's much, much faster. You know, the news outlets that might have criticized have all been shut down. And we're seeing also this process whereby the state is kind of requiring people to perform these kind of loyalty pledges and acts of allegiance. So it's really sort of performative to show they understand the new order. So they've introduced flag raising ceremonies in schools. And that was something also that happened after Tiananmen. That flag raising in Tiananmen Square didn't used to happen before 1989. It was brought in in order to foster the sense of patriotism. So we're seeing that in Hong Kong,

we're seeing civil servants having to take oaths of allegiance. So there's this real attempt to use that same playbook. But I think it's happening a lot faster than it happened in 1989. And also, you know, it's happening in 2023, when we can all see it happening and playing out in real time. And I think that's the thing that I find quite extraordinary. I mean, you live in Australia right now, but you have friends who still live in Hong Kong. What do they tell you about like how their day to day life has changed just in the last few years? I think there's a lot of fear. I hear from people that even with their closest friends, they often don't talk about politics anymore, often with family members because there are

generational differences and often because they simply don't dare. You know, I had a friend who told me that they wanted to like a Facebook post about my book, but they didn't dare. You know, I had a friend who told me that they wanted to like a Facebook post about my book, but they didn't dare because they just didn't know if their internet was being surveilled. Wow. And that really brought it home to me, just how even the most simple action, people are now having to sort of second guess, should I do this? Is there a consequence? Yeah. Well, over time, what do you think, because of these attempts to not only change the culture of Hong Kong, but literally

its history, how do you think the identity of this place, of Hong Kong, will change in the years going forward? I mean, I think all of these are aimed at undermining that Hong Konger identity. And that Hong Konger identity was so strong. That was at the core of the massive protests that we saw, was this idea that Hong Kongers wanted to protect the freedoms that they had, the identity that they had distinct from China. And so, you know, when you start trying to revise the history and rewrite that and stop Hong Kongers from doing the things that really have distinguished them from mainlanders, I think it's something that Hong Kongers don't like. And that's why we're seeing this massive outflow of Hong Kongers. You know, hundreds of thousands have left in the past few years.

Population has shrunk for three years in a row. Some schools are facing closure because they've lost so many students. So I think what we're seeing is that people are just voting with their feet. And for those who remain inside Hong Kong, you know, life just looks more and more constrained. This new order is being imposed. And I think the space to resist it is shrinking very, very fast. Louisa Lim is a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Melbourne and author of Indelible City, Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation,

providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.