The police throwing their weight around in Hong Kong and seeking to do so beyond

 

Some of the football pitches at Victoria Park that are 

usually full of people on the evening of June 4th

 

Come rain or shine, I expect them to be this empty tomorrow 

(the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre) though :(

 

I went to Victoria Park earlier this week and spent time on its football pitches -- not playing football but, rather, thinking back to the many times I had gone and taken part in the June 4th candlelight vigil along with tens, even hundreds, of thousands of other people determined to not forget that back on June 4th, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party had sent its army to massacre Chinese people.  Sadly, I don't think I'll be able to set foot on that space tomorrow evening -- or, actually, maybe even tonight and all day tomorrow -- as the authorities here are so intent on making sure that people don't gather to mourn there that they are set to have 3,000 police officers guarding the place and deploy some 4,000 other police officers across Hong Kong on a day that obviously is of no small importance to them as well as other Hong Kongers.

 

Only the most trustingly gullible of folks can believe that the authorities are doing this to prevent the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus; this especially since it is now 36 days since Hong Kong recorded a new local coronavirus case and 41 days since its last unknown source was reported.  Instead, what we have is a state of affairs whereby, in the words of historian Jeppe Mulich, "The authorities want so dearly to avoid even a single photograph of people gathering around lit candles that they would rather have thousands of jackbooted officers surrounding a public park. *That* is the image they want projected into the world."     

 

On the subject of academics: a plea was sent out this week by Hong Kong-based academics for their foreign-based colleagues to "Shun Hong Kong".  There's very little mincing of words in the open letter.  A couple of sample paragraphs reads as follows:

As things stand today, academics or professionals who take up new employment in Hong Kong are signing up to knowingly support an unaccountable, autocratic government’s attempts to gaslight the international community into accepting systematic, wholesale violations of international treaty obligations and of Hong Kong’s own Basic Law — the territory’s constitution — which guarantees freedom of speech, association, assembly, procession and demonstration.  

The Hong Kong government hopes to leverage its deep financial resources and the territory’s traditional commercial and institutional strengths to buy outsiders’ respect, or at least their silence. But in 2021 the trade-off is too dear. Cooperate with a vindictive, rogue regime, and you forfeit your own moral dignity. Authorities in Hong Kong, secure in their bubble of wishful thinking, see no reason they or the regime they serve should face any repercussions for their deplorable violations of civil and human rights. But actions must have consequences. It comes down to all of us, individually and collectively, to ensure they do. 

Right now, the authorities -- and its police arm, especially -- must feel that they are very much in the ascendancy.  They've managed to do so much to hurt the Hong Kong pro-democracy camp and movement -- especially in the less than one year that China's security law has been imposed on Hong Kong -- without suffering any substantial consequences.  (Even if she's not laughing all the way to the bank, Carrie Lam isn't exactly feeling bankrupt.)     

As the way it often goes with bullies, the more they get their way, the more they want to throw their weight around.  The latest revealed action on the part of the Hong Kong police appears to have involved invoking the security law to get a foreign company to take down a website it had been hosting that was run by Hong Kongers based outside of Hong Kong. 

At the time of writing, the 2021 Hong Kong Charter website launched in March by eight Hong Kongers, including Nathan Law and Ted Hui, is back up and running after what Wix, the site's Israeli domain host, purportedly took it down "by mistake" for three days.  The following facts remain though: that, as noted by the Washington Post's Shibani Mahtani, "the Hong Kong police requested a foreign company to take down a website, involving people *outside of Hong Kong* and they complied. When they said the NSL applies to anyone, everywhere, it was hard to imagine global companies complying — but here they are."     

As Hong Kong-based lawyer Antony Dapiran points out, "This is an act of global censorship beyond anything the PRC govt has attempted before. HK police are not just asking the site be blocked in HK: they are demanding the whole site be taken down."  For the Hong Kong police to attempt something beyond what the Chinese Communist government has done thus far is really something.  We're talking, after all, of a regime whose international incursions have included their: building artificial islands in disputed waters; establishing villages in another country (without asking that country's government for permission); and having its military planes fly in tactical formation into another country's airspace (again, without the permission of the authorities of the other country).      

At the same time, this is the same regime (or regimes -- Hong Kong's and Beijing's -- if we still believe in the existence of "one country, two systems") that bristle against any "foreign interference" into that which they look upon as its/their internal affairs.  This may include such as a British newspaper publishing an editorial asking people outside China to mourn the dead of the Tiananmen Square Massacre for those who cannot that contains the following points that people would do well to remember as we approach the 32nd anniversary of that tragic event on Chinese soil (and the second that Hong Kongers are being barred from publically observing):

The right to remember what happened in 1989 is also the right to know the truth more broadly: “Defending the memory of Tiananmen is the first line of defence,” one Hong Kong lawyer said this week.

What we should recall, however, is not only the slaughter 32 years ago, but the huge support for the protests which preceded it. There were marches in more than 300 cities; officials including police and judges participated in demonstrations calling for freedom and reform. Many of the hundreds, possibly thousands, who died in Beijing and elsewhere were not students, but ordinary residents attempting to protect them. To remember 1989 is to remember that there is an alternative, however impossible it might seem now: that Hong Kong could have kept its freedoms; that octogenarians could be allowed to mourn their slain children without harassment; that Uyghurs could live in dignity in Xinjiang; that human rights could be protected in China and its people trusted with the truth and the freedom to debate them.