In Hong Kong the silence has set in far more shortly. The gagging of dissenting voices and enhancing of the previous has occurred at warp velocity, mirroring the blink-and-you-miss-it fashionable information cycle. This has its personal logic; the quicker the blanket of silence is thrown over Hong Kong, the much less time there’s for criticism to take root, and the quicker the subsequent part of transformation — no matter that could be — will be launched. The cycle of unmaking accelerates.
I labored in Hong Kong’s once-cacophonous newsrooms and coated its boisterous protest rallies. Now most Hong Kong journalists I do know have fallen silent. Some are in jail, some are in exile, and a few not write, as no publications are left that can publish them. After a draconian nationwide safety legislation was imposed on Hong Kong in 2020, at the very least 12 information retailers closed down, together with the favored, pro-democracy Apple Day by day. Its founder, Jimmy Lai, might face life in jail on nationwide safety prices, and 6 of its executives have pleaded responsible to conspiracy to collude with overseas forces, a imprecise cost launched with the brand new safety legislation. A few of the shuttered retailers pulled their archives from the web. That is how historical past is erased, each just about and actually.
Those that proceed to publish are beneath scrutiny. One in all Hong Kong’s best-known political cartoonists, Wong Kei-kwan, higher identified by his pen identify, Zunzi, has been repeatedly criticized by prime officers, together with one who chastised him for “critical deviation from the reality.” His plight remembers George Orwell’s remark that “each joke is a tiny revolution.” On this local weather, the one assure of security is silence.
The amnesiac playbook contains mass indoctrination by “patriotic schooling.” New college textbooks state that Hong Kong, which Britain handed again to China in 1997, was by no means a British colony, as a result of Beijing doesn’t acknowledge the Nineteenth-century treaties that ceded Hong Kong to Britain, although some roads and parks are — for now — nonetheless named after British colonial figures.
Historical past is identification, and to problem this foundational tenet of Hong Kongers’ expertise is to assault their identification. Britain didn’t set up full electoral democracy in Hong Kong, however it left behind a cussed respect for civic values, a free press and a need for political participation that fueled the large protests of 2019. The act of rewriting historical past whisks away the cornerstone of that legacy, recasting Hong Kongers as victims of an occupying drive somewhat than as brokers of their very own destiny.
