A chill, physical and political, has descended upon Hong Kong

Seasonal decorations, featuring the LIHKG pig, 

on the wall of a yellow restaurant

 

Hopefully longer lasting Bruce Lee-themed street art 

brightening up a Sai Ying Pun alley

 

A Tweet went out from Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) yesterday which began as follows: "A chill is descending on #HongKong and people need to take precautions..."  From the reactions that followed, I saw that I was not the only that thought that it was a political comment rather than, as it turned out, their relaying a message from the Hong Kong Observatory about the temperature dropping in the next few days!    

 

Sure enough, it feels significantly colder today; so much so that I finally feel able to state that winter's arrived in Hong Kong once more.  At the same time, there's most definitely also something to the feeling many people are having that worrisome developments are continuing to occur here to seriously concern those of us who care about freedom (including of speech) and democracy, and wish for Hong Kongers to not be deprived of them.

 

Take, as an example, the revelation today that Hong Kong bookstore chain Bookazine had refused to stock a political title over security law concerns; this despite the fact that, as its author, Kent Ewing reported, the tome's publishers "had paid a group of lawyers to go over the proofs of the book with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it contained not a word that could potentially put us all in jail for violating the new, Beijing-imposed legislation... [and] the lawyers found nothing that they deemed a violation of the new law. 

In addition, "following the implementation of the national security law on June 30, [the book's publisher] could not find a designer willing to be associated with the project, nor a printer willing to print it"; and consequently decided to jetison the project, which had been commissioned before that law had come into being.  While no books have been outright banned in Hong Kong (yet), we are sadly seeing that self-censorship (couched in an email by a Bookazine staffer as "trying to star under the radar") has become a thing in local bookstores.  

Then there was the reports which emerged yesterday that a 15-year-old girl has become the youngest Hong Konger to have gone into exile.  The girlfriend of the teenaged protestor whose shooting at close range by a policeman sent shockwaves through Hong Kong on October 1st of last year spoke of feeling so unsafe after being followed by unknown men since her own arrest during the protests (though she has not (yet) been charged with any crime) that she's now left for Britain and applied for asylum there.

 

Also disturbing in its own way was the report that came out yesterday of the Hong Kong Police Welfare Fund having received close to HK$180 million (~US$23.219 million) of donations over the past year; a 26-fold increase compared to the previous year.  Considering how unpopular the police have become, this is hard to fathom.  And in view of the actions taken against various pro-democracy organizations and individuals for alleged money-laundering and such, you'd think that there's cause to investigate and freeze accounts for something similar here -- only, of course, this won't happen since those actions tend to be reserved for those who have incurred the authorities' wrath (as opposed to actually having done something really wrong).      

 

And here is the crux of the way things are looking to be in Hong Kong these days: "It matters less what you've done than who you are."  Put another way: it's now rule of man rather than rule of law.  Which, in a perverse way, is why I reckon that self-censorship is not going to help you if they really are out to get you, so one might as well just not censor oneself and, instead, keep on speaking out, sincerely and without fear or favor, as long as one is allowed to do so!