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Guest Essay
By Maya Wang
Ms. Wang is the China director at Human Rights Watch.
“What do I do with those copies of Apple Daily?”
A Hong Kong user I recently spoke to on the phone suddenly lowered his voice to ask this question, referring to the pro-democracy newspaper that the government forced shut down in 2021.
“Should I throw them in the trash or give them to you?”
My conversations with my friends in Hong Kong are peppered with whispers those days. Last week, the city enacted a draconian security law, its second serious legislative attack on Hong Kong’s freedoms since 2020. Known as Article 23, the new law expands national security. and penalizes habits as indistinct as the possession of “direct” or useful information for an outside force.
Hong Kong was once a position where other people didn’t live in fear. There is a rule of law, a noisy press, and a semi-democratic legislature that kept the hardliners at bay. The result is a city with flexible power unrivaled in China. Anyone who grew up in China in the 1980s and 1990s and may simply sing the cantopop songs of Hong Kong stars like Anita Mui, and that’s a challenge for Beijing: glamorous and desirable freedom.
When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the city’s citizens accepted, with intelligent faith, Beijing’s promises that its capitalist formula and way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years and that the city would move toward universal suffrage when its president was elected. .
No more. Today, Hong Kongers are quietly taking precautions, getting rid of books, T-shirts, film footage, computer files and other documents from the heady days when this foreign monetary center was also known for its residents’ passionate preference for freedom.
I used to joke that I would never watch dystopian movies like “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “The Hunger Games. “Having lived and worked for years in Hong Kong and China, I know what it feels like to plunge into deepening repression. remembering our loose lives.
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