‘A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong
nytimes.comI live in Hong Kong. Arrived here right when the second wave of protests started, in 2018. The speed with which China is changing the face of the city since then has been incredible, if disheartening. In a mere three years, we went from having a free press, district council elections, a vibrant online community, a combative but reasonably effective LegCo.
All that is gone.
Head over to the South China Morning Post and see the comments in the articles. All dominated by mainland Chinese, possibly working for the central government. Companies are leaving in droves, taking valuable people with them. Schools are being told to teach National Security Law to kids as young as 5. Even international schools are facing the challenge of allowing discussion in the classroom, under the risk of breaking the NSL.
Last week, HK won a medal in fencing at the Olympics. During the medal ceremony, at a packed shopping mall, many people booed the Chinese anthem. They were deemed to be breaking the NSL and were arrested. FOR BOOING THE ANTHEM.
https://apnews.com/article/2020-tokyo-olympics-sports-arrest...
The National Security Law also prohibits any kind of chants during (now non-existent) protests. People then found a creative way to protest by holding out empty signs in the streets - turns out they're outlawed now too. Yes, empty signs break the National Security Law.
This city has been destroyed in the span of months. It's depressing and heart-breaking. I am moving out with my family next summer.
Similar situation here. Moved here a bit more recently than you, national security law became a thing after I arrived, and it’s been more and more aggressively enforced since.
If you’re leaving to the US, can I ask how you’re going about it? My email is in my profile if you don’t want to post here. I’m trying to leave as well but my fiancée is facing what looks like a year or two long immigration process.
It’s a bit of a shame that the U.S. government passes so many proclamations of support or “it’s dangerous in HK” statements, but makes it hard to actually return.
If you are a U.S. citizen, your fiancé should be able to apply for a K1 visa. Then you'll need to get married within 90 days of entering the U.S. I'm sure you were planning on having some type of celebration of your marriage, but I highly recommend getting legally married asap. Once married, your fiancé will be eligible for a green card. Married green card holders can get citizenship after 3 years, so it's definitely helpful to get the clock ticking.
We spoke with some legal counsel, and they told us that K1 wait times have gone through the roof, 8 months to a year just to even get the consulate interview. As far as we understood, we would have to wait until the visa was approved before entering the states and getting married.
I am actually relocating to another Asian country, not to the US. I totally agree the US has pledged support but right now with zero practical effect.
I wish you luck.
I hope the UK visa (and other safe havens?) is quick & easy enough?
I read an article the other day that CCP is not surprisingly taking advantage to get party members (e.g. spies) in so I really hope that doesn't um up the process.
The US is making this mistake with Afghanis but seems like there is enough political pressure now that at least we're getting them to a safer intermediary country. Not quick enough though.
It's our moral responsibility, just as it is UK's after their colonization and then abdication of power.
Canada is accepting democracy activists as refugees from Hong Kong:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-star...
Human rights are not a thing in communism. The only thing that matters is success of the party. Its accumulation of power is the measuring stick. Capitalist economics are only allowed because it helps the party succeed and not for any other reason. That's why they execute and fire billionaires all the time. If they are not helping the party succeed in its quest for global domination, they get fired and lose all their assets, rights and even their lives.
Isn’t this a property of autocracy? It’s true that pretty much every implemented communist society became autocratic but there are systems - like the one in Iran - that similarly care only about the success of the party in power. The problem is not communism as such but of unchecked, concentrated power.
Turns out when you philosophically align your country around the idea that the state and the collective are more important than the individual, autocracy always flourishes.
Just like Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Singapore? Or on the other side, pretty much the entire Middle East?
Collectivist Asian cultures can definitely manage separation of powers and democracy.
I always wonder whether Japan, Korea, Taiwan would be able to preserve separation of powers without US support. I feel like if US one day declines in power and won't be able to support then, they would fall into autocracies pretty quickly.
You could say the same about a lot of non-Asian countries, though. Australia/NZ for a start, but I can imagine much of Eastern Europe too.
well, history in general shows autocracy flourishes whether or not the individual or the collective is primary, not sure you can claim a correlation there
Taiwan used to be an autocracy too yet turned itself into a liberal democracy. At least "right wing" autocrats have goals, albeit misguided ones, and power is a mean to an end; but communist are obsessed by power and power alone.
>At least "right wing" autocrats have goals, albeit misguided ones, and power is a mean to an end; but communist are obsessed by power and power alone.
I don't think that's true at all.
Most of the Middle-Eastern dictators are "right wing" and have no goal apart from seizing and holding onto power.
On the communist side, while that would be the case for many leaders, both Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro come to mind as exceptions. Keeping it strictly to "CCP-style" communism, Wen Jiabao jumps out as someone who saw the CCP beauracracy as a positive means to an end.
> both Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro come to mind as exceptions
What do you mean?
I may be wrong, but from what I understand they had other goals than the pursuit of power and power alone. Specifically national independence, in both cases.
Yeah, those are called excuses.
Notice how the global plague to free speech and innovation dictates anyone critical of this murder legion gets the on no no negative karma online? Why don't we change that? Every day. For the rest of our lives?
The city was almost destroyed in 2019. Remember the molotov cocktails? The petrol bombs? The universities that turned into war zones? The vandalism of all kinds of public property?
I don't like many of the things the Hong Kong government is doing, but I can understand why they feel they need to do it.
I wouldn't bother replying due to your submission history, but I will. The city was not "almost destroyed" in 2019. There were months-long protests with hundreds of thousands of people, and they only became violent after the government saw the need to repress violently instead of negotiating. Remember the Yuen Long attacks? The triads brought from Shenzhen? Legislators all in white saluting the gangs before they attacked people who were not armed? That's what caused the violence.
The Hong Kong government isn't doing anything. It's all the CPG.
I am glad someone not actually from HK to point out all every single one of these incidents.
I think a major point here is that it's not the HK government anymore it's CCP.
No one burned down an AutoZone.
So here's a fun fact about the "security" laws China forced down Hong Kong's gullet recently: they apply to everyone on the planet. They're vague and "subversion" pretty much includes anything you want to include. It's anything that makes the Chinese government or Chinese officials look bad, basically.
So, if you're not even a citizen of China and you're sitting in Europe or the USA and you make some critical post about China to such a degree that the Chinese government deems it "subversive" and you then make the mistake of transiting the Hong Kong airport, you can be arrested and sent to the Chinese mainland for trial.
Interestingly, Qatar has a similar law but it's more limited in scope at least. If however you have a job in Qatar, I'd highly suggest you don't say anything negative about Qatar or the royal family, even on a Facebook post while in a completely different country. People can and have been arrested for this.
Also, Qatar is one of the few countries that require an exit visa to leave the country so think twice about working there regardless of that.
But I digress. I think it's fair to say that any notion of Hong Kong independence or sovereignty is a thinly-veiled illusion at this point.
1. The 'princess' of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, was transferring flight in Canada when she was arrested on behalf of US.
2. China realizes this is a serious advantage and want to arrest foreign dissidents when they transfer flights in China. But no one transfers flight in any Chinese territories except in...Hong Kong, with its international airport.
3. China pressured the HK government to pass a security law that allows HK government to arrest anyone on behalf of PRC for extradition purposes, even for transferring flights.
4. The HK civilians revolted against the law for obvious reasons.
5. PRC flipped the table, suppressed HK, declared the Sino-British Joint Declaration to be invalid, and changed all the HK government's security officials to ones from the mainland. Oh, and the brainwashing starts.
Meanwhile, Meng Wanzhou is relaxing in her multimillion dollar mansion in Vancouver arguing Huawei has no ties to the PRC. roll eyes
The Meng Wanzhou case is an interesting parallel. She is a Chinese citizen who was arrested in Canada en route to Mexico for allegedly breaking American laws regarding Iran while in Hong Kong. No country comes even close to US when it comes to projecting power and having the power to bend the world to their will. It makes sense for another superpower to try to at least move in the direction of acquiring said power.
1.) There's a difference between suppressing civil liberty and breaking international sanctions. Meng Wanzhou and China dared the US to enforce its sanctions on Iran. They did. That's not at all equivalent to disappearing people who dare to criticize China or its communist dictatorship.
The whataboutism and misdirection in your response invalidates any point you may have buried in there. Just... stop.
Humans have rights. The sooner China grows the fuck up and comes to terms with that basic tenet of civilization, the better things will be for all of humanity.
This is correct. If you live in America and you say something that suggests Hong Kong should be independent or that the CPG shouldn't have authority here, you can get arrested when transiting via Hong Kong.
It’s not just Qatar. All of the Gulf monarchies operate in a similar fashion, with the possible exception being Kuwait (closer to a constitutional monarchy than the rest).
I realize this isn't a high value comment, but I lived in Hong Kong for a couple years during the handover. The socio-political turmoil over the past few years has been painful to observe.
I lived in HK for the better part of a decade (I still do, technically, despite COVID fencing me outside of HK and inside Singapore) and it's hard to articulate just how distressing it is to watch a place that you dearly love literally disappear before your eyes.
I have permanent residency and had planned to make HK my long-term home; those plans have evaporated. My friends who've been there even longer than me - many of them from the colonial days - are in the same boat, trying to work out how to sell property they thought they'd always hold and decide where to set up what are effectively completely new lives.
At the same time, I feel like this sense of melancholy is almost fraudulent, because I have an option, unlike a lot of the people I know.
I can just leave; that avenue isn't available to the lady who's sold flowers on the corner outside my flat for longer than I've been there, or to my local friends whose families didn't take part in the pre-1997 passport arbitrage or who were born too late to get a BNO.
Their entire way of life is fundamentally changing in a way they have no control over, and it's heartbreaking.
I used to go there for business. It is a city with rare combination of the eastern and the western values. Hong Kong culture affected me in ways I cannot describe in words. I took photographs on film that I sometimes browse to remind me of those days.
I highly recommend Greg Girards albums (esp the ones from Kowloon days): https://www.instagram.com/gregforaday/
All that is being washed away. I foresee Hong Kong will be a regular mainland, primarily Mandarin-speaking city within a couple of decades.
Underrated comment.
It’s interesting to live long enough to see a (relatively) free and open society like Hong Kong get consumed by an authoritarian country that is growing more bold every year.
The targeting of the education system is insidious. Hong Kong youths may be known for being outspoken about democracy today, but Hong Kong youths tomorrow will become passionate about the CCP. We are seeing a turning point in history.
Take a look at some of the things being done:
Under the guidelines, students as young as six years old are expected to learn the names of the four offences under the national security law – subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces – as well as the national flag and anthem and the city’s law enforcement agencies. Schools have also been advised to call police under “grave or emergency” situations involving pupils’ staging campus protests, displaying slogans or forming human chains, while teachers were told not to approach the national security law as a debatable matter.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/312320...
>The targeting of the education system is insidious.
The rise in HK liberal values among youth itself was engineered via "insidious" introduction of political education by UK to influence the city's overton window post handover. Curriculum under colonial rule was much more apolitical. Hence why PRC tried so hard to introduce patriotic education to counter such influence. CCP knows better than anyone that education is the greatest propaganda tool of them all. There was early recognition that new generations of HKers would be lost to "foreign" influence ~10 years ago when HK perception of Mainland was highest. Culture war are long wars. The situationw as never tenable. Whether it's insidious brainwashing or mental decolonialzation is matter of perspective, but propaganda works. The HK youths of tomorrow will be sympathetic to PRC / One Country interests. Which for a Chinese city is arguably the way things ought to be.
You have zero data to back up what you just said. Zero.
Plenty of papers analyzing developments in HK education curriculum pre/post handover from PRC/HK/western academics. Or demographic data on HK identity which diverge sharply by age cohorts pre/post as result of reforms. Or polling of HK sentiment of PRC stretching back since post handover. Or analysis from the mainland of why patriotic education was necessary to decolonize HK before culture fractures formed along generational lines. This is all 101 knowledge on the subject matter for anyone following HK/PRC dynamics since handover and before. Your knowledge level seems to match someone that self professed to have moved to HK in 2018 - negligible.
What the world can do is allow immigration from Hong Kong, while that is still possible.
This is exactly the same playbook China used to Han-ify (Sinicize) Tibet and Xinjiang. I feel very sad that the people of all these areas are powerless to stop their culture, way of life, and right to self-determination disappear. To a lesser extent, I also see elements of the same - attempts to to police culture, thought, speech, and dissent - appearing elsewhere in the world. While the approaches may be softer and more decentralized (like deplatforming), they are nevertheless problematic. I also see increasing parallels to the loyalty pledges mentioned in the article - for example diversity pledges or corporate trainings that force people to admit their racial guilt, like a struggle session from Mao's cultural revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session) but without the physical violence.
We need to value individual freedoms and protect them at every turn to retain free societies. As for China, protecting and returning self-governance to Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan is an important human rights battle that the rest of the world needs to more actively engage on. Right now, it seems like everyone is on the sidelines letting all of it happen.
Anyone who values diversity or civil rights has to acknowledge that the Chinese Communist Party is the largest scale force seeking to destroy diversity and civil rights. Conquered people with culture different than the majority Han culture like the millions of Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uyghurs are often punished for practicing their culture or speaking their language. Uyghur families are forcibly separated, Uyghur adults are forced to labor in sweatshops far from home for little pay, and Uyghur women are forced to get abortions. These people used to learn their cultures and languages in local schools, but now are forced to learn Han culture and speak the language of the Han majority, Mandarin. If you are serious about civil rights and diversity, then you have to be fundamentally opposed to the Chinese Communist Party and their policy of violent forced assimilation of their minorities.
China's ability to completely control the domestic narrative is really really underappreciated in my point of view.
Not that it is positive from a personal liberties standpoint, but in that sense that it is an incredible strategic asset. Imagine if the second world war had been fought today in the era of entertainment journalism, twitter reactionism, and professional punditry. It would be laughable. The war effort would stall before it began.
My grandfather talks to me about how he would enthusiastically walk the streets with his friends after school looking for chewing gum and cigarette wrappers in order to pull the aluminum foil out of the discarded packaging and send the resulting accumulated metal scraps to recycling centers to be made into fighter planes. Things like that would never happen today.
25% the country would insist that Hitler doesn't actually exist, 25% would say the Axis powers are actually doing the right thing and that Pearl Harbor was deserved, 25% would maintain that all calls for intervention are propaganda from the military industrial complex looking to line their pockets at the expense of the public purse, and the remaining 25% would be branded war-mongerers by everyone else.
China does not have that problem. Whatever the government in Beijing wants, ~1.4 billion humans also genuinely want.
Good comment. Additionally, we can't forget the fact that, for all their external policy blunders (which are many), the Chinese leadership is extremely skilled in manipulating domestic public opinion. They have mastered the weaponization of online mobs and are using them to foster a nasty brand of ethno-nationalism that can force even the biggest corporations and foreign celebrities to bend to their will.
US citizens' desire to fight in WW2 perhaps largely came from propaganda to begin with - maybe in the absence of propaganda most of them would have been fine with doing nothing to help Britain, France, etc. About 60% of US WW2 soldiers were drafted, not volunteers. So it is not so much a question of no propaganda in the past versus propaganda today, it is more of a question of more tightly controlled propaganda in the past versus more diverse propaganda today.
But that is my point. Most people got the latest war news from the government sanctioned newsreels playing in the movie theaters. Any photos of the war were approved by the government before they were run in printed media. Letters home were famously read individually to cross out unacceptable content under the pretext of protecting frontline strategies.
The government had a very strong stranglehold on what information the population received. Today that is not the case, and there are very good reasons for it, but in the event that world war three occurred, it would put the West at a severe disadvantage.
World War Three is a dramatic thought, but it isn't even happening and the West is already feeling the pain of this situation. Destabilizing election and covid misinformation being spewed by China and Russia are prime examples.
Got it, thanks for explaining so clearly. The way I see it, because of nuclear weapons, no other country can actually conquer the US, so I much prefer free speech to any sort of propaganda initiatives meant to strengthen the US against other countries. We are already basically almost completely protected from other countries by our nuclear weapons. We do not need censorship and propaganda to add any sort of meaningful further protection.
> We are already basically almost completely protected from other countries by our nuclear weapons.
US nuclear weapon stockpile will only be enough to neutralise just one military superpower.
A country with resources, and economy to survive the first strike, can realistically rebuild, and come back with vengeance.
I always retold my own variation on the Einstein's quote on WW3 as "WW3 will be started with nuclear weapons, but will be ended with trench warfare"
>US nuclear weapon stockpile will only be enough to neutralise just one military superpower
Well that's not true. And it's especially not true with the new ICBM fuses and bomber launched stand-off missiles. The newly equipped icbms are an approx. 3x multiplier compared to having the same number of weapons a decade ago.
Which frees up weapons to be shifted either to new targets, or from strategic use to potential tactical use, with the new lower adjustable yields.
So even WW3 trench warfare has a good chance of still being nuclear warfare.
>US citizens' desire to fight in WW2 perhaps largely came from propaganda to begin with - maybe in the absence of propaganda most of them would have been fine with doing nothing to help Britain, France, etc.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler foolishly declaring war against the US were the main reasons there was a great deal of support for the war.
>...About 60% of US WW2 soldiers were drafted, not volunteers.
It is misleading to put out that statistic without giving the context. The reason there weren't more volunteers is that the US stopped allowing most volunteers and just told people to wait to be called for the draft:
>...On December 5, 1942, presidential Executive Order 9279 closed voluntary enlistment for all men from the ages of 18 to 37 for the duration of the war, providing protection for the nation's home front manpower pool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Sta...
You know what other country didn't have the problem either? Imperial Japan. Didn't serve them well in the end.
You don't fight a modern war with patriotism - you may find a million soldiers ready to die for your country, but without weapons, fuels, and food, that's what they will do - die.
The comparison with modern America doesn't really work - nobody in the US is thinking of scrapping aluminum, precisely because the country's so rich that it can fight local warlords across the world, while its citizens barely even noticing it.
The security laws are sometimes called "public toilet laws" in local forums: they cover so broad in terms of behaviour and apply to everyone (not just on the planet the whole Universe).
I live in Hong Kong for over 3X years.
Feel free to ask me questions about Hong Kong (I am monitoring replies via RSS feed).
How scary is the thought of going back, if only for a short visit?
It depends who you are.
If you are a existing target/enemy of CCP, you will probably be grabbed secretly (happens before all these laws introduced but probably not that frequent) or grabbed publicly under "diversion" in NSL (most commonly used excuse).
If you are a citizen of a strong democratic country (e.g US, UK, Australia, Japan...), you should be fine for this few months. (I can only dare to predict the next few months)
If you are a citizen of a weaker democratic country (e.g Taiwan, some smaller Europe countries), you should avoid visiting. Not saying you will be immediate or imminent danger but no point risking it (depends on your purposes).
Since the big local press companies like Apple Daily are forced to be shutdown or scared away, corruption start spreading. Accidents and human errors become more covered up / under-reported. (e.g. deaths after vaccine shots, MTR station could be lethal accidents, murders rate raising)
There is less to no feedback once the powerful people (not just the government, local big companies too) misbehave accidentally or intentionally. I recommend against visiting HK unless your purposes are worth the increases risks.
Born and bred Hong Kong. I am supportive of this bill as usual western media making a mole out of a hill. As usual some western shrills and expats, masquerading as an expert in China policy, continue to cry foul when they are not on the ground. More than anything else, there are Hong Kongers who want peace and security which the western world will never comprehend. Period Hong Kong is part of China.
Nearly 60% of real Hong Kongers held the opposite view. Only about 31% supported the law.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-security-poll-ex...
Took me a minute to find the hidden message in there. Peace & Love
Hidden message? More like you are blinded by your own bubble.