The hidden wounds of the new Hong Kong

Hong Kong

From our special correspondent

The magic still works. Aboard the historic green and white Star Ferry that crosses the majestic bay and connects Hong Kong Island to the Kowloon Peninsula, the panorama of skyscrapers still enchants the visitor. At first glance, three years after the wave of massive – and sometimes violent – ​​pro-democracy protests in 2019, nothing seems to have changed. Hong Kong always remains Hong Kong, flamboyant, bubbling, full of energy. The illusion is almost perfect.

Walking through the main arteries of the Wanchai and Causeway Bay districts, where millions of Hong Kongers marched in the spring of 2019 to demand democracy, we see a greater number of Chinese flags, starry red, floating on top of the buildings. In small shops, you can increasingly pay in yuan, the Chinese currency, and not just in Hong Kong dollars. With iced coffee or lemon tea in hand, office workers, businessmen and bankers converse aloud on the street. Many of them now speak mainland Mandarin rather than Cantonese, the local language. So many small visible and audible details that reveal the accelerated process of sinicization of the former British colony of Hong Kong.

“Welcome to the new Hong Kong,” launches in Mandarin, a tad sarcastic Annie, 60, sociologist. We must learn to live in an oppressive environment, with our wounds hidden and our sadness contained. “Very involved in a humanitarian organization which brought aid to demonstrators injured during the police violence of 2019, Annie only communicates on encrypted messaging with her relatives. No interlocutor wants to speak openly in Hong Kong, all request anonymity.

The encounter takes place at a small teahouse in a quiet lane near Victoria Park, where commemorations of the now-banned Beijing June 4, 1989 massacre have gathered hundreds of thousands of people until June 2020 The fateful date when Beijing imposed a National Security Law (NSL) on Hong Kong criminalizing most dissent and crushing the pro-democracy movement at the same time. The organizers of this latest vigil three years ago were charged with “incitement to subversion” under the Security Act.

“We are changing eras, she laments, we no longer have control, our voices as citizens no longer count. We can no longer speak freely about politics or express ourselves on social networks which are under the control of public security. Certainly, we still have access to Twitter, Facebook or Google, unlike mainland China, and we have a passport that allows us to travel abroad freely, but the LSN has petrified the territory. This text was intended, according to Beijing, to suppress “separatism”, “terrorism”, “subversion” and “collusion with external and foreign forces”. In effect, the law shattered the “one country, two systems” principle established since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997: Hong Kongers were supposed to enjoy freedom of expression, freedom of the press and an independent judiciary until 2047. But Beijing has decided otherwise.

“Today, no one talks about 2047 anymore, explains a pastor who does not want to give his name, also very involved in the protest for public freedoms three years ago. Hong Kong no longer has any autonomy, today we live in “one country”, China, which imposes “one system” on us, communism. With its procession of repressions in all sectors of society: no more political opposition in Parliament, a judicial system under the orders of the regime, a totally muzzled opposition press, certain books “with unhealthy ideas” withdrawn from libraries… At least 60 organisations, including the two largest pro-democracy unions, have been dissolved in three years. More than 10,000 people have been arrested and nearly 3,000 have been prosecuted on charges related to the protests. Resistance is a futile fight.

Resigned, more than 300,000 of the brightest Hong Kongers have left the territory. “The Hong Kong of yesteryear will no longer exist,” adds the pastor who saw his temple empty of 30% of its faithful. “In my parish, testifies another priest living on the peninsula, it is the families of the middle classes who left to ensure a future for their children. At Saint Paul’s Hospital in Causeway Bay, this cardiologist shakes his head when he sees the bleeding of general practitioners, specialists and also nurses. In the college where Carmen teaches, located in the former industrial district of Kwun Tong, “the classes have been emptied by more than a third and many teachers have disappeared. We have to advertise to try to bring in students. Athena, a former social worker in a Catholic organization, on the front line of the 2019 protests, is worried about the closure of several Catholic schools for lack of students.

“Hong Kong is devitalizing, assures Chen, professor of history at the University of Hong Kong, it’s even worse than the ‘brain drain’ after Tian An Men in 1989.” Even more worrying in his eyes: the process of “great Chinese replacement” which is underway in the former British colony. “Inevitably, eventually, Hong Kongers will become a minority at home, it’s mathematical,” he said. Like what happened in Tibet and Xinjiang in previous decades. Nearly two million mainlanders already live in Hong Kong (out of 7 million inhabitants), under a 1997 migration law which authorizes the entry of 200 Chinese per day into Hong Kong. “In all the sectors in crisis of manpower it is Chinese who come to take the stations, assures our professor. Even at university. »

Mandarin becomes the language of instruction in kindergartens and primary schools, where the Chinese national anthem is sung once a week facing the starry flag. The new teachers must do a 180-hour political propaganda course and a two-week trip to the mainland to “learn the real history of China” and “love the motherland”. The Chinese steamroller crushes the memory of Hong Kong. “We can’t fight,” laments Carmen, the college professor, who says she has come out of a long depression. “But I resist in my own way: I won’t have a child so that he becomes a little communist! »

Source