Hong Kong, changed overnight by a new law, navigates a new reality
HONG KONG — A barge draped with red banners celebrating China’s new security law sailed across Hong Kong’s famed Victoria Harbor only hours after the legislation passed. Police now hoist a purple sign warning protesters that their chants could be criminal. Along major roads throughout the city, neoncolored flags hailing a new era of stability and prosperity stand erect as soldiers.
In recent days, as China took a victory lap over the law it imposed on the city Tuesday, the defiant masses who once filled Hong Kong’s streets in protest have largely gone quiet. Sticky notes that had plastered the walls of pro-democracy businesses vanished, taken down by owners suddenly fearful of the words scribbled on them.
Seemingly overnight, Hong Kong was visibly and viscerally different, its more than 7 million people left to navigate what the law would mean to their lives.
For some who had been alarmed by the ferocity of last year’s unrest, which at times transformed public areas into smoke-filled battlefields, the law brought relief and optimism. For others, who had hoped the desperate protest campaign would help secure long-cherished freedoms, it signaled a new era of fear and uncertainty.
“This is home,” said Ming Tse, sitting in the cafe he manages, which once supported the protesters. “But I don’t think this place loves us anymore.”
For months, Tse’s love for his home was advertised at his shop in the working-class neighborhood of North Point. The oat milk carton at the cash register sat behind postcards of protest art. A poster condemned the police shootings of two student demonstrators. Even after opponents of the movement threatened to vandalize the shop last fall, the decorations stayed.
But on Thursday, Tse, 34, took everything down. News reports said police officers had interrogated owners of restaurants with similar protest paraphernalia. The security law criminalizes “subversion” of the government, a crime that the police say encompasses political slogans.
That the lines of criminality had been redrawn became clear Friday, when authorities charged a 24year-old man with terrorism and inciting separatism — the first person to be indicted under the new law. With a “Liberate Hong Kong” flag mounted on the back of his motorcycle, the man careened into a group of police officers on Wednesday, the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China from British rule.
Most years, that holiday draws large pro-democracy rallies. But this time, they were banned. Protests were scattered, and police swept in and arrested hundreds. Ten people, including a 15year-old girl, were accused of “inciting subversion,” a vaguely-defined crime under the new law; some had merely waved flags, bearing slogans that had never been explicitly outlawed.
Police collected DNA samples and searched the homes of the 10 people arrested on suspicion of inciting subversion — measures that seemed excessive when applied to people accused only of possessing pamphlets, said Janet Pang, a lawyer who is helping some of them.
The Hong Kong government has insisted that free speech is not under threat. But Saturday, the city’s public library system said books by some prominent activists had been removed from circulation while officials reviewed whether they violated the new law.
Even as old markers of resistance have come down, subtler ones have surfaced. Some protesters have turned to puns and created new meaning from well-worn phrases, a tactic long adopted by mainland internet users to skirt government censorship.
On Wednesday, in one of the city’s commercial hubs, someone spray-painted “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves” — the opening line of China’s national anthem.
And one shop hung up nearly 24 posters of propaganda from Mao-era China, including one that read: “Revolution is not a crime, rebellion is reasonable.”