In Hong Kong today, falsehoods, gaslighting, and endless fabrications
such as these are equaled only by the cowardice of the people partaking
in this insulting ruse, an infectious cascade of lies used by Hong
Kong’s leaders, and their overlords in Beijing, to reimagine the past
and justify the retooling of the city. One would think that the
“patriots” deemed worthy of running Hong Kong and their swelling ranks
of collaborators would be proud of their role in the dismantling of the
city’s freedoms, jailing of its opposition, and overhauling of its
institutions. Instead, they hide their motives behind unbelievable
excuses and make their moves under the cover of darkness, treating Hong
Kongers with visceral contempt, like a pack of gullible idiots devoid of
agency and free thought.
The narrative of the 2019 prodemocracy movement—in
which millions defended their liberties and pushed for more freedom—now
recounted by Beijing and its loyalists in Hong Kong is one of paid
protesters, foreign agitators, and unpatriotic internal opposition.
Claims that once resided in the mind of unhinged propagandists and on
the fringes of the internet are now accepted wholesale in many parts of
polite society, a story line being cemented in the city’s courts, where
scores of activists and former lawmakers are on trial for violating Hong
Kong’s national-security law...
It is a struggle to try to keep up with the lies, which arrive at a furious volume and pace: New school textbooks proclaim that Hong Kong was never a British colony, for example, and heavy editing was deployed earlier this year to make a set of postage stamps appear more patriotic.
All of these fictions serve the city’s leaders and officials, and help
perpetuate one of the biggest, most enduring falsehoods about Hong Kong:
that it is a city where people simply don’t care about politics. One
needs only to look at the events in the city for the past decade to know
that this is untrue. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, few places did more in recent years to stand up for freedom and democracy in the face of an unending autocratic assault.
While focusing on Claudia Mo, the piece's writers attempts to bring readers up to speed about what's been happening in Hong Kong in recent years with lines like these: "In response to the sometimes violent 2019 protests, a newly empowered
police force arrested more than 10,200 people and prosecuted over 2,800
of them, spanning the breadth of Hong Kong society, from students and
waiters, to gym owners and physicists".
They also of course pointed out that in June 2020, "Beijing introduced the vaguely worded security law under which the 47
were eventually charged. It outlaws subversion, terrorism, secession and
“collusion with foreign forces”. It overhauled school and university
curriculums, and forced children as young as six to take national
security lessons. Residents fear they may cross red lines without even
realising it. In June, the new police commissioner, Raymond Siu, said
people could have broken the security law if they simply watched a
documentary on the protests."
And that: "More than 60 civil society organisations, including unions with
thousands of members, have closed — some after threats to the safety of
their leaders’ families. Multiple news outlets have shut down,
journalists have been prosecuted and political cartoonists have fled. A
snitch line was set up for citizens to report possible breaches of the
security law, with police saying they had received more than 260,000
tips."
The sections about Claudia Mo herself are also informative, and touching. A sample passage: "In August last year, a friend of Mo's named Shiu Ka-chun received a letter from her, which he shared excerpts
from on social media. Mo said she had been teaching English to other
prisoners and that her Christian faith was helping her. She thanked
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, for
visiting. “I may be stumbling but not falling,” she wrote."
The article concludes as follows:
Mo has been a prolific writer, authoring at least 10 books over the course of her life, including a couple on raising children — “essentially sharing my experiences throughout my, ahem, reasonably successful motherhood”, she joked on a personal website many years ago. Her publisher Jimmy Pang misses her presence at the city’s annual book fair where she was known as the “mic queen” for standing at his stall for hours introducing her books and speaking to passers-by.
“She would quote this line as she signed her new book for her fans, especially young people: ‘It’s not the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog,’” Pang told me. “[She meant] the fight between two dogs is not about their sizes, but more about the spirit that they hold in the fight. When you fight, relying on pure violence is futile. Focus on how to hold on.”
