How a free and open Hong Kong became a police state

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Original Article: How a free and open Hong Kong became a police state Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod Follow me on Twitter to find out more. ---- An anatomy of erasure Image: Terri Po A quarter of a century after Britain returned Hong Kong to China, the texture of the city, its sights and sounds, are little changed. In its thrumming wet markets, carp still lie under red lamps, fishmongers extolling their freshness. Shoppers worship the gods of purse and phone at upscale malls. Construction workers sweat in the wet air, their jackhammers a rhythm section to the chimes of the trams. The topography of the island still makes the heart pound. Behind a cavernous convention centre that squats beside Victoria harbour, the jungled ridge running up to the famous Peak sparkles with lights from some of the priciest living rooms on Earth. A steep tram still pulls day-trippers up for the view. Far below, the iconic Star ferries chug across the busy harbour. On the territory’s mainland, a knuckle-shaped mountain called Lion Rock stands guard over the more populous, less privileged conurbation of Kowloon. Slightly lower than the Peak, Lion Rock looms larger in Hong Kongers’ imaginations. A squatter settlement at the foot of the mountain provided the setting for “Beneath Lion Rock”, a popular television drama which first aired in the 1970s, celebrating the grit of a generation of Hong Kongers, most of whom had left China to escape turmoil and poverty. It told stories about struggling to feed the family and building a future in a new home. Start singing its theme tune to a Hong Konger of a certain age and there’s a good chance they will join in: “Of one mind in pursuit of our dream/All discord set aside, with one heart on the same bright quest…/Hand in hand to the ends of the earth.” It was the people beneath Lion Rock who had, by the late 1960s, made Hong Kong one of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs. Ching Cheong, who was five years old when his family fled to Hong Kong in the 1950s, dreamed of returning to the mainland as he grew up living off church provisions in a housing estate. The dream vanished when, as a teenager, he saw corpses floating down the river from China, their hands and feet bound, victims of the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966. “Many of us remember the marine police picking up these dead bodies,” he recalls. “After that, none of us thought about returning to live in China.” He and his peers built a new Hong Kong identity based on hard work, solidarity and a pride in the new life they were making. If they turned their back on China, they never forgot that they were Chinese, especially as Hong Kong was still governed by British administrators. Since seizing the island more than a century before to serve as a trading depot (from which to smuggle illegal opium into China) its colonial rulers had preferred to manage things with, as the historian Elizabeth Sinn put it, “the least effort and the greatest economy”. They had little interest in seeing the colony’s people pursue their dreams with one heart. Under their neglectful, but not utterly repressive, rule, protest was inevitable. The most violent was that of 1967, when the chaos of China’s Cultural Revolution spilled across the border. Supporters of Mao, backed by the underground party, set off bombs, slaughtering children playing in the streets. By September, 51 people (including ten police officers) had been killed. The majority was firmly against the protesters, and developed a new affinity for the police. Yet these protests also increased the government’s awareness of social problems and laid the foundations for the decades of protests which followed. Most of them aimed to move things not towards the chaos of China but towards the sort of Hong Kong people wanted to see. They fought for improvements in education and social services. In the late 1960s and 1970s the administration reduced working hours, created a c...