30 Jun 20 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”113563″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]The fear was palpable on social media. Days before Hong Kong’s National Security Law was passed people started to delete their Twitter accounts.
“It is already corroding our freedom and rights,” wrote Alex Lam, a reporter for Apple Daily, who remained on the platform.
The fear was felt by journalists. “I’m keeping a low profile” people told Index as they refused to be interviewed “on the record”. Soon the word “anonymous” appeared with great frequency on articles from the city.
And the fear was felt in the streets, as far fewer took to them to protest, in stark contrast to last year when threat of a similar bill saw millions on them.
The National Security Law, which Beijing announced in May and passed today, has already done exactly what it intended – it has paralysed pro-independence and pro-democracy advocates in the city.
The opacity of the law is part of its success. It criminalises secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, but none of these have yet been clearly defined. Anthony Dapiran, a lawyer in Hong Kong and author of City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong, told Index that “no Hong Kong lawyer will be in a position to advise on the law and its impact with any certainty, which is clearly a concern for Hong Kong’s rule of law.”
Mainland China, of course, provides some clues.
“On the mainland, national security laws are routinely used to arbitrarily detain, prosecute and jail a wide range of critical voices, including journalists. Right now we have no guarantees beyond some vague assurances from an authoritarian one party state with a dismal track record of respecting press freedom,” a journalist told Index. The journalist works for a major global media organisation. They requested anonymity for fear of retaliation on themselves or their company.
Echoing their views, writer and Hong Kong resident Tammy Lai-Ming Ho wrote in a letter published yesterday on Index’s site that “we only have the worst case scenarios to look forward to”.
“A similar law has been used in mainland China to attack dissidents, including democracy advocates such as the late Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and human rights lawyers such as Wang Quanzhang, not to mention academics and labour activists who are not household names,” she said.
“For decades Hong Kong has been a major media hub for Asia. But international media will have to think long and hard about whether Hong Kong can remain a safe and viable place to host regional headquarters or major newsrooms. If foreign and local journalists start having to self-censor, watch what they write or who they interview, what talks they host or attend or which organisation they work for, then many organisations may well relocate to freer environments with stronger legal protections,” added the anonymous journalist.
David Schlesinger, former chairman of Thomson Reuters China, who lived in Hong Kong on and off between 1982 and 2017, concurs. He told Index:
“It will certainly affect coverage of Hong Kong itself. It’s been a completely free reporting environment, whereas now people will have to look over their shoulders. They will have to treat it like they would if they were reporting in Shanghai or Beijing.”
Schlesinger says local reporters will be most affected. Reporters from Ming Pao and Apple Daily, for example. But he also says it will affect where international news organisations base their headquarters. Schlesinger cites the case of Bloomberg. In 2012, while researching an explosive story on the wealth of incoming president Xi Jinping’s extended family, key members of Bloomberg’s normally China-based staff left Beijing and researched out of Hong Kong itself, and then, once the story blew up, moved to the territory as a safe refuge, something that now would be unimaginable.
One thing is clear: it deals a devastating blow to Hong Kong’s autonomy as promised under the “one country, two systems” framework, the terms of the former British colony’s handover to Chinese control in 1997 which were meant to last until 2047. Over the last week a meme has spread online by the city’s youth. It reads: “I expected to be older when 2047 came”. Beneath the humour lies sadness and desperation.
Chinese cartoonist Badiucao told Index: “The passage of the National Security Law in Hong Kong marks the end of a free city and may just as well open the curtain of the new Cold War between China and the world.”
For those who have been watching Hong Kong closely over the years the law has not come out of nowhere. In a special for Index on Censorship magazine in January 1997, just ahead of the handover on 1st July 1997, Index noted:
“Beijing’s strident policies on Hong Kong seems to be confirming some darker fears about the continued protection of freedom of expression after 1997. Over the past year the Chinese authorities have shown themselves to be concerned not with protecting the right to freedom of expression, about which they have grave misgivings, but with eroding it.”
Index has raised concerns periodically since. A major turning point was 2014 when Beijing issued a decision regarding proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system that challenged Hong Kong’s political autonomy. The reforms sparked the Umbrella Movement. Back then, Index reported on how self-censorship had become “insidious” in the city.
“It’s a creeping, insidious type of thing. If you want to keep your job, you tow the line. I work with guys who are pro press freedom, but they are still censoring constantly,” said a reporter from a prominent local newspaper.
It wasn’t just self-censorship. The same article spoke of violent attacks on journalists who were critical of the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, including Kevin Lau, former chief editor of Ming Pao, who was stabbed in his back and legs as he got out of a car.
We reported on the forced disappearance of Hong Kong booksellers in 2015 and how the city had gone from a place that would publish daring, critical books on China to somewhere where editors said no.
Then in 2018 we investigated a novel intimidation tactic that was moving beyond Hong Kong. Specifically, threatening letters were landing on the doorstep of people in the UK who were critical of the human rights record in Hong Kong. And not just them, their neighbours were receiving letters too. Hong Kong native Evan Fowler, himself a recipient of threatening letters, told Index how Hong Kong was “a city being ripped apart”.
2018 was the same year that the FT journalist Victor Mallet had his working visa denied after chairing a talk with Andy Chan, a pro-independence political activist. This marked the start of more aggressive action towards journalists at international media, who until then had mostly been shielded from the threats that their local counterparts had faced. Two years on and, as Index has covered in its map on media violations during Covid-19, China recently expelled a handful of journalists at the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal whose credentials were up for renewal this year. In an unprecedented move, they were not allowed to work from Hong Kong or Macau either.
But no matter how bad it has become in the city over the years, it has always remained far more free than across the border in China. The city was not, and is still not, behind the Great Firewall. The city is a place where until this year large-scale Tiananmen Square vigils are held, a place that even had a museum dedicated to the massacre (read our article with the curator here). It is a place where millions come out year after year to fight for their freedoms.
“Protest remains a fundamental part of the Hong Kong identity,” said Dapiran, who believes that this “spirit will continue”.
And even as peaceful protest turned into scenes of police violence, the demolition of freedoms was not a given. Until now.
Hong Kong matters. It matters to the more than seven million who live there. The offer by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to grant visas to three million people from Hong Kong is a welcome gesture, but moving is not an option for most. What of those who speak little or no English? What of those without the financial means to move abroad? What of those who have elderly relatives in Hong Kong? What of those who see Hong Kong as their home?
Hong Kong matters to the 1.4 billion just across the border. If people in Hong Kong can’t speak up then what hope is there for those in mainland China?
“Throughout the decades Hong Kong has always been a clearing house for information to make its way back into the mainland news ecosystem,” Louisa Lim, who reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC, told Index.
Last year, the Chinese journalist Karoline Kan wrote in the magazine that despite the best attempts by the Chinese government to block news on the Hong Kong protests word was still reaching people in China. And the news was sending a powerful message. These messages end if Hong Kong is silenced.
And Hong Kong matters to the rest of the world. On 27 January a cartoon by Niels Bo Bojesen appeared in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten that portrayed coronavirus particles in place of the stars on the national flag of China. The Chinese embassy in Copenhagen demanded a public apology. Fortunately Danish politicians were vocal in their defence of the paper. Will we continue to see such defences of free expression? Or will acquiescence when it comes to Hong Kong embolden China further and erode our resilience?
Ma Jian wrote in the 1997 Index special that “from 1 July, the drift begins: Hong Kong becomes a floating island, migrating on the map.”
Today is a terrible day, but tomorrow is a new one. We all need to make sure that we raise our voices – individually and collectively – so that Hong Kong remains an island both spiritually and physically separated from China’s mainland.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
29 Jun 20 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”114095″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]The Covid-19 pandemic has been largely contained in Hong Kong, with only about a dozen community cases over the past two months and all imported cases detected and isolated upon arrival. I was beginning to allow myself to feel less depressed about the situation in the city, even though I continued to worry about how coronavirus was affecting the rest of the world. And then, in late May, Beijing announced the National Security Law for Hong Kong, bypassing the city’s Basic Law and Legislative Council.
The law came out of nowhere, with the stated targets of so-called secession, terrorism, subversion, and collusion with foreign governments. When did they start planning it? Who was involved in drafting it? How is it going to be implemented? It was a devastating day in Hong Kong when the news was released, and I am certain many were plunged into yet another emotional and psychological abyss. I myself felt angry, helpless and wistful for ‘simpler’ days when the news wouldn’t break your heart or make your blood boil on a daily basis.
If last year’s extradition bill, which was withdrawn in September after mass protests, didn’t drive people away, the national security law has already sufficiently frightened many to make plans to leave. Whatever confidence they might have had in the city’s democratic future has been crushed. Like a skull being smashed against the wall by the Chinese Communist Party. The opacity of the law, combined with the severe sentencing—the city’s sole delegate to the National People’s Congress Standing Committee Tam Yiu-chung has even suggested life sentences for some infractions—are making people relocate. Those who have no means to leave are like silent lambs under knives that can fall at any time.
The National Security Law is particularly chilling for the following reasons: the speed of its introduction; the top-down approach, which has completely disregarded the opinions of people here; the way it has been cloaked in secrecy for spurious reasons – not even Hong Kong’s puppet chief executive Carrie Lam has seen the text, and nobody will until it is passed. The lack of means for Hongkongers to express their views and push back—and the inevitability of the law being passed (although I have to admit I still harbour some naïve belief that some miracle might happen and reverse the situation). Most worryingly, there is the way a similar law has been used in mainland China to attack dissidents, including democracy advocates such as the late Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and human rights lawyers such as Wang Quanzhang, not to mention academics and labour activists who are not household names. I fear we only have the worst case scenarios to look forward to.
What we are witnessing is the rapid evisceration of “One Country, Two Systems”, the principle by which Hong Kong has been governed since the 1997 handover. By removing the legal firewall between the mainland and Hong Kong, Beijing is reneging on its pledges in the 1984 Sino-British Declaration. While Hongkongers have long come to distrust the Chinese government, this is the final betrayal, after their concerns voiced repeatedly in popular protests, and elections in 2016 and 2019, have been dismissed.
This also has implications for a world that is turning increasingly authoritarian. And China, with its overseas initiatives such as Belt and Road, is pulling other countries further into its ambit and dependency on it. The Chinese government does not hesitate to interfere in other countries, demanding publishers and organisers of events withdraw items that displease it, such as a recent photography exhibition in Belfast, where the Chinese consulate requested a photograph of the Tiananmen “Tank man” be removed (the request went unanswered). As China’s economic heft in other countries increases, such demands and interference will only become more common.
History has shown how precipitous change for the worse can be. Countries in the West and elsewhere have long accommodated China out of economic pragmatism; only now are many of them waking up to the dangers of appeasement. The Chinese Communist Party has no intention of yielding any power, either at home or abroad, and what it has done in Hong Kong with the National Security Law should be a wake-up call for countries everywhere.
Monday 29 June 2020[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
15 Jun 20 | China, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”113563″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]An extraordinary event in the history of not just Hong Kong but of the world took place exactly one year ago. A massive crowd, which according to some estimates was around two million strong, marched through the streets of the most cosmopolitan city on the China coast to call for the withdrawal of a proposed extradition bill that many felt would undermine the rule of law in Hong Kong. They also took action to express their anger at the brutality police had shown in dealing with a protest a few days before. And they demonstrated to show, more generally, that they were concerned that key features of local life that made the city different from its mainland neighbours, including greater freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, were under threat.
The marchers marched because they felt that the Chinese Communist Party leadership was failing to respect the second two words in the “One Country, Two System” framework that was supposed to structure relations between Beijing and Hong Kong for the first 50 years after the 1997 Handover that changed the latter from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. Xi Jinping and company were failing to respect the promise that Hong Kong would enjoy a “high degree of autonomy” until 2047. The marchers marched because they felt that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam, chosen through an election in which fewer than 2,000 local residents were eligible to vote, was aiding and abetting this process. She was, in fact, the one who was championing the hated extradition bill, which would allow activists to be taken over the border to stand trial on the mainland if Beijing wished this to happen.
What made the march extraordinary in world historical terms? Even in an era that is witnessing wave after wave of protest struggles, the size of the crowd was unusual. There are few if any examples of roughly a quarter of the members of a sizeable political community taking to the streets at once. Yet, as Hong Kong is home to fewer than eight million people, that is what happened on 16 June 2019.
To mark that anniversary, we are publishing an excerpt from the closing pages of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, a work written by historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom, with contributions by the journalist Amy Hawkins. Published earlier this year by Columbia Global Reports, it places that massive mid-June march and related 2019 events into historical and comparative perspective.
Vigil – whose lead author has recently contributed both a short story and two commentaries to Index and spoke last year at an Index event on a panel with the Guardian’s Tania Branigan that focused on the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen – makes particularly fitting reading right now. This is because in recent weeks Beijing and its local allies have made their most disturbing moves yet to destroy what little is left of the “autonomy” Hong Kong was promised. Showing disrespect for the Chinese national anthem has been criminalised, for example; highly respected figures in the democracy movement known for consistently advocating moderate tactics have been arrested; and Beijing has announced it will impose a sweeping new anti-sedition law on Hong Kong.
Resistance continues. Activists face greater risks than ever, however, as mass arrests and police brutality have become routine. In line with arguments in Vigil, the Hong Kong democracy movement increasingly resembles the against-long-odds efforts to combat autocratic rule waged in Poland after martial law was imposed there late in 1981 or the protracted anti-colonial struggle against powerful, recalcitrant empires that have been carried out in many parts of the world.
***
Water by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Hong Kong has long been a place with varied and deep associations with water. “Harbor” is the second term in its two-character name, coming after a word most often translated as “fragrant”. Fish and seafood figure centrally in the storied local cuisine. Hong Kong first gained economic importance due to its role as a hub of trade involving vessels that moved goods across rivers and seas. Humid air, mist, and the torrents of water that lash the city during typhoons are key parts of the local climate. Umbrellas served as protest symbols in 2014. While the city teetered on the brink in 2019, activists striving to create a new alternative world in the streets and in malls and in airport arrival and departure halls in the midst of scenes of destruction, urged one another to “be water,” to adapt their tactics continually to changing circumstances. To resemble “water” means to be flexible in one’s actions, going one place but quickly heading to another if there is too much resistance. The idea can be traced back to longstanding Chinese philosophical traditions, especially Daoism (though metaphors linked to water are important in Confucian texts as well). It has a more specific referent, though, to perhaps the most famous Hong Konger, martial artist and movie star Bruce Lee. “Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow. Be like water,” he said. “Now water can flow, or it can crash! Be water, my friend.”
There’s also the metaphor of the hundred-year flood, the (inaccurate) myth that rivers overflow their banks once a century. Just as the 2019 protest movement was underway in Hong Kong, the author Adam Hochschild published a powerful essay about the parallels of American politics in the years 1919 and 2019. Hochschild conjured up the image of a very particular sort of hundred-year flood: the unleashing of ugly nativist rhetoric in America during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and now again during that of Donald Trump. Focusing as I have on the events treated in the preceding chapters on my mind, his essay set me wondering whether there were parallels and imperfect analogies linked to events of a century ago worth considering when trying to make sense of the current Hong Kong crisis. There are, I think—providing that we place the past of Shanghai, once the most cosmopolitan city on the China coast, beside Hong Kong’s present.
What exactly happened in that great port of the Yangzi Delta one hundred years ago? There was a dramatic series of protests in which young people took leading roles. There was a general strike. On the whole, the protesters behaved in peaceful ways, but there were some ugly incidents, during which they roughed up people they viewed as outsiders. One goal of the movement was to stop a widely disliked document from going into effect. The protesters directed much of their ire at government officials they viewed as immoral and too ready to do the bidding of men in a distant capital. They also called for the release of protesters who had been arrested and complained about police using too much force in dealing with demonstrators. The movement became in large part a fight for the right to speak out. The protests in the city were preceded by, built on, and expanded a repertoire of action developed during a series of earlier struggles, as some participants in the 1919 demonstrations had been part of shorter waves of activism in 1915 and 1918 and in some cases even in 1905. New tactics were added to the mix in 1919. So were new symbols: for example, a distinctive type of headwear became associated with the protests, as students eschewed wearing straw hats made in Japan for locally made cotton ones.
This analogy is far from perfect. The Shanghai protests of 1919 were part of a nationwide struggle, known as the May Fourth Movement, in honor of the day of the year’s first major demonstration, which took place in Beijing. The current crisis, by contrast, began and has stayed centered in Hong Kong, as did the 2014 Umbrella Movement before it. There have been many more arrests this year, and there were no paving stones thrown or fires set by activists in Shanghai a century ago. The document the protesters of 1919 disliked was not a local bill but an international accord: The Treaty of Versailles, the post–World War I agreement that they objected to because it passed control of former German possessions in Shandong Province to Japan rather than returning them to Chinese control. While one student died from the injuries he received at the hands of the police during the initial protest on May 4, 1919, many fewer demonstrators and bystanders were injured in any part of China one hundred years ago than have been injured in Hong Kong during 2019.
The protesters of 1919 even succeeded in gaining more concessions from the warlords in control of Beijing than those of 2019 have managed to secure. In the immediate wake of the Shanghai General Strike, which stands out as one of the most important of all May Fourth Movement collective actions, three officials that the students claimed were too cozy with Tokyo were removed from their positions and the protesters arrested in Beijing were released. The Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, who had a role in the proceedings as both China and Japan had come into World War I on the side of the Allies, refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. These successes by the protesters help to explain why the May Fourth Movement has long been hailed in China as a triumphant struggle. By contrast, while Carrie Lam withdrew the extradition law in September, there have been no moves toward concession regarding the other key demands of the protesters. The authorities have not released those who have been arrested, appointed an independent commission to investigate allegations of police violence, nor retracted their description of early protests as “riots.” Lam has not resigned. There is no universal suffrage in Hong Kong.
But while the May Fourth Movement has a hallowed place in Chinese history now, it was for decades considered largely a failure. While the Chinese delegation to Paris refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles, the accord went into effect anyway. Former German territories in Shandong fell under Japanese control. The May Fourth activists were no more successful at preventing territory they cared about from going from the control of one colonial power to another. And the Japanese seizure of Shandong, which was preceded by its seizing of Korea and Taiwan, was followed in 1931 by Tokyo taking Manchuria and later moving further into China and other neighboring lands.
Japan asserted in many cases that it was not taking over territories, but freeing them from colonial rule, and allowing them to be governed at last by locals. They made this claim about Shanghai, proclaiming in the early 1940s that it was finally liberated from all forms of foreign control, even as Japanese troops and Chinese puppet officials control the city. They made this claim about Manchuria as they put Pu Yi, the ethnically Manchu former Last Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, on the throne, as a ruler beholden to Tokyo. They did not talk of a single empire with multiple systems, but rather of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Beijing, too, does not talk of having an empire, but its handling of Tibet and Xinjiang rhymes with Tokyo’s imperial approach. Beijing’s dreams for Hong Kong, which are nightmares to those on the streets, rhyme with Tokyo’s proclamations about Shanghai. The terms are new— “One Country, Two Systems,” “Greater Bay Area”—but when it comes to fantasies and raw power, there are disturbing echoes.
History does not repeat itself. In 1919, the Western powers actively aided Japan’s move into Shandong. Viewed within a hundred-year framework, the limited international concern about Hong Kong’s fate is deeply worrying. So, too, are the signals some world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Donald J. Trump, have been sending to Xi Jinping during the current crisis, which convey a sense that whatever he does will be just fine with them, as long as it does not impinge on their plans for their own nations. Hundred-year floods can wreak many different kinds of damage.
Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink was published in February 2020. To read more about the book click here[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
04 Oct 19 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”110170″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]“Every Hong Kong protester is my biggest inspiration. You guys think I am brave? Those young kids, 16 and 17 years old, are risking their lives at every protest. They are the people who inspire me, they are the people who motivate me to do more work to share their story with you guys.” These words, from the Chinese dissident artist known as Badiucao, were met with rapturous applause from the audience at the private screening of the new documentary about his life, China’s Artful Dissident.
The invitation-only screening was held at the Tate Exchange and hosted by Index On Censorship. Badiucao, who until recently had kept his identity a secret in an attempt to protect himself and his family from the Chinese government, was present, alongside the filmmaker Danny Ben-Moshe.
The film cannot fail to move and inspire. It documents Badiucao’s move into political activism after watching a documentary about the Tiananmen Square massacre, the details and death toll of which the Chinese government has done its best to suppress, and his move to Australia in 2009 to escape the censorship and artistic oppression in China.
The last part of the documentary shows the lead up to an exhibition of Badiucao’s work in Hong Kong. It ends on a heartbreaking note when the exhibition is cancelled following threats to Badiucao’s family in China. This was the reason Badiucao revealed his identity; it became clear that the Chinese government had already discovered it.
The screening was followed by a Q&A with Badiucao and Ben-Moshe, chaired by Martin Rowson, the political cartoonist and regular contributor to Index on Censorship magazine. Responding to a question about his safety in Australia, Badiucao described it as “a problematic country” and that he may have been naive to think he could entirely escape the influence of Beijing.
“Australia can be an example of how China is projecting its threat all over the world,” he said.
Addressing current counter-protests from the Chinese diaspora specifically, Badiucao said:
“You have to remember that when we grow up in China, we grow up with an entire machine of propaganda, it will take a very long time for people to walk out of this shadow.”
He expressed concern that people may view the Chinese population, the counter-protesters in particular, as brainwashed, aggressive nationalists who don’t deserve democracy.
“As a consequence, the far right will rise, xenophobia will rise, discrimination will rise, racism against China will rise. Ultimately this solution will not solve the problem, it just pushes the Chinese back to Beijing.”
Badiucao’s career goal, he explained, is to destroy censorship using art. He said: “I’m very proud and honoured that my work is recognised and used by the Hong Kong protesters.” He also said that his art is a way to record history to act as counterpoint to the Chinese government, who rewrite history.
Badiucao is now living in Australia and having revealed his identity, he is followed, sees strange cars outside his home and receives daily threats via social media. He made light of those that daily detract him.
“We call them 50 cent, because when they send me a death threat, they get 50 cent deposited into their bank accounts,” he said of China’s infamous trolls.
All of this is the price he pays for simply expressing himself through his art.
Click here to read more about Badiucao and to see an exclusive cartoon of his in the new magazine[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
