Attempts by the authorities to induce amnesia in Hong Kong

They want to turn this into a blur, if that

 

A few minutes before I started writing this blog post, the deadline mandated by the Hong Kong police came and went for the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China to  remove its website, Facebook page, Instagram page, Twitter account, and YouTube channel.  The data removal "request" was based of Article 43 of China's national security law for Hong Kong, so the Alliance felt that it had no choice but to comply with it.  

 

A sense of how much data has been wiped out in one fell swoop can be seen by the Alliance's Youtube channel containing videos of the June 4th vigil at Victoria Park dating back over a decade.  (At the same time, it's worth noting that the online June 4th Museum (which currently only is in Chinese but is planned to add English information in the future) remains because, the Alliance stressed, it is not owned nor operated by it.

 

Speaking of museums: I can't help but remember that the Imperial War Museum over in London has as its motto "That the past may serve".  I also can't help but recall the Sara Shephard quote (often attributed to George Santayana) that "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."

 

The occurence of another Tiananmen Square Massacre is something that Hong Kongers have long sought to avert.  Sadly, it seems that the authorities over in Beijing, and now also in Hong Kong, actually wouldn't mind too much it happening again.  Or, at the very least, wiping it off the memories of people in Hong Kong as well as Mainland China.

 

Something else the authorities want to get people to forget -- or, at least, not think about and discuss so much -- are the extradition bill protests that took place just a couple of years ago but in what can seem like a very different Hong Kong from now.  And the censorship of Hong Kong films is one way that they are going about doing so.   

Consider the thoughts of filmmaker Kiwi Chow, whose Revolution of Our Times will, in all probability, never ever be legally screened in Hong Kong, and who was in the audience when the police raided a screening of his Beyond the Dream at a district councillor's office last month.  A Los Angeles Times article on Hong Kong filmmakers under threat contains the following paragraphs: 

Police raids on movie screenings — unimaginable in Hong Kong a few years ago — are the latest reality in Beijing’s relentless suppression of the territory’s civil liberties. For filmmakers like Chow, 42, they are a sign of how China’s grip on Hong Kong is not only about asserting political control but also suffocating the cultural spaces where art can reflect truth and build solidarity in a society.   

 

“They are afraid of art, of people making connections, of organizations and groups — because essentially, they are afraid of the people,” Chow said. “We were having a conversation about art and humanity, sharing our lives, building a relationship. They are tearing it down.”

Another Hong Kong filmmaker (and former dean of film and television at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts), Shu Kei, also was interviewed for, and features in, the article.  It's not just what he is recorded as saying that's noteworthy but also what his comments imply:

“Films serve as a social record, or even a record of a nation,” said Shu. He loves watching Cantonese films from the 1940s and ’50s, he said, because they capture how Hong Kong was — and who its people were — at a moment in time.

“It reminds me of my childhood. It also depicts a collective memory,” Shu said. The suppression of films about the last few years, when millions of Hong Kongers rose up in a massive protest movement that was then brutally crushed, is also an attempt to suppress that collective memory and identity.

In her The People's Republic of Amnesia, Louisa Lim wrote that: "Memory is dangerous in a country that was built to function on national amnesia.  A single act of public remembrance might expose the frailty of the state's carefully constructed edifice of accepted history, scaffolded into place over a generation and kept aloft by a brittle structure of censorship, blatant falsehood, and wilful forgetting" (2014:105).  I guess that's why Hong Kongers' memories and memorialization of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is so threatening to Beijing.  Hence the Communist Chinese government taking such pains to wipe them away; with the wonder being that it's taken them so long to finally go about doing so. 

 

On the subject of wondering what took them so long: Raymond "Soft Beat" Chan was granted bail this afternoon, six and half months after being put behind bars with 46 other men and women involved in the July 2020 democratic primaries for the still postponed Legislative Council elections, all of whom now face national security law charges.  Chan is the 14th of the 47 to be granted bail; meaning that 33 people still remain in custody while awaiting their trial to actually begin.  

I'm not sure how many times he had appealed to be released on bail before he finally was granted it but my sense is that today's was by no means the first time that he had sought to be bailed.  And while there's a part of me saying I should be happy that Chan is now out, I also can't be disoncerted and discontented by how the wheels of justice sure do seem to move very slowly in Hong Kong these days and, increasingly, often seemingly in the wrong direction.