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By Elizabeth M. Lynch, October 6, 2022

Originally published in Commonweal

About three years ago, before the onset of the COVID pandemic, I attended a talk in New York City given by a Hong Kong activist. Back then the city was deep in the throes of massive pro-democracy protests, with millions of Hong Kongers taking to the streets and enduring the sticky summer heat to oppose the increasing authoritarianism of the Chinese government. Despite his obvious weariness, the speaker talked hopefully about the prospective outcome of the demonstrations: the rule of law, freedom of speech, and human rights would prevail over China’s attempt to undermine them. “If we don’t fight for our freedom,” he said, “that is self-destruction.”

Fast forward to now, and even revealing that activist’s name would be enough to land him in prison. Just one year after the protests began, the Chinese government—without consulting Hong Kong officials—imposed a harsh national security law on the city-state. According to the statute’s vague wording, any expression of discontent, countervailing views, or conversations with “foreign forces” could result in a prison term of three years to life. Since the Hong Kong police are increasingly applying the law retroactively, the activist whose talk I attended is still very much at risk—even though he spoke in New York in 2019. For Hong Kongers, accustomed as they are to inhabiting a free society governed by the rule of law, the new law comes as a shock.

How did Hong Kong, a former British colony with an independent judiciary that protected personal freedoms, come to find itself under the heavy dictatorial thumb of Beijing? In her beautiful and timely new memoir, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, journalist Louisa Lim does more than simply answer that question. She fills a gap that has long been missing in books about Hong Kong: an account of the city’s long history of defiance, told from the perspective of Hong Kongers themselves.

Click HERE to finish reading this review.

Rating:

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, by Louisa Lim (Riverhead Books, 2022), 320 pages. 

China Law & Policy reviewed Lim’s previous book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, perhaps one of the best books we have read about the 1989 Tian’anmen Massacre.  To read our review of The People’s Republic of Amnesia, please Click Here.

Interested in purchasing the book? Consider supporting your local, independent bookstore. Find the nearest one here.

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By Elizabeth M. Lynch, May 31, 2021

For 30 years, the night of June 3 has been special in Hong Kong.  On that night thousands – and at times hundreds of thousands – of Hong Kongers descend on Victoria Park to remember the peaceful protesters killed by the Chinese government in the early morning hours of June 4, 1989.  Since 1997, when Hong Kong “returned” to China as a semiautonomous, democratic city, it has been the only place within the borders of the People’s Republic of China where the 1989 Tiananmen massacre could be publicly commemorated. 

But with Beijing’s increasingly harsh, autocratic, and illegal rule in Hong Kong, the act of remembering the Tiananmen massacre has now become a crime.  Last year’s vigil was banned because of COVID.  Thousands though defied the ban, meeting in Victoria Park for the silent, candle-lit protest, all sitting more than six feet apart, all wearing masks.  But instead of balancing the attendees’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly against the government’s complete ban, 25 were indicted, and five of the most prominent protestors, including Joshua Wong, Tiffany Yuen, Lester Shum and Jannelle Leung, recently received prison terms ranging from four to ten months for violating the ban. 

And if those prison sentences – issued only a few weeks ago – were not enough of to scare off participation in this year’s commemoration, the Hong Kong police have again banned the Tiananmen vigil, but this time noting that the prison sentence for violating the ban could be up to five years and, for those who just advertise the vigil, they could face up to one year in jail. Again, the Hong Kong government uses COVID as the reason to infringe upon speech and assembly, even though Hong Kong’s coronavirus cases are at an all-time low and the event is outdoors.

While the Chinese government stamps out any memory of Tiananmen within its borders, it is the government’s own actions in Hong Kong over the last year that shows that it will never forget Tiananmen.  As Louisa Lim, author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, pointed out at a recent event to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre, what the Chinese government is doing in Hong Kong to squelch dissent is a page from its Tiananmen play book.  Blaming “foreign forces” for the 2019 Hong Kong protests, requiring more political and ideological indoctrination in Hong Kong schools, referring to Hong Kong’s peaceful protests as “riots,” these were all tactics used by the Chinese government after Tiananmen to vilify the peaceful student protests and to justify its murderous crackdown.  32 years later and the Chinese government is doing the same thing.

This Friday the world will again mark another anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. But it’s not enough that the rest of the world “remember.” Rather, it must publicly draw the connections between what happened to the protestors after Tiananmen and what is happening in Hong Kong today.  To do anything less would be a disservice to the many who lost their lives on June 4, 1989, would ignore the bravery of the many Hong Kong protestors who now sit behind bars, and would enable the Chinese government to again succeed in silencing its people’s demand greater freedom.