The Streisand Effect in Hong Kong, including with regards to June 4th commemorations and national anthem controversies!

 

 This Pillar of Shame used to be on display at the University of 

Hong Kong's main campus but few people know where it is now

 

I spent a good part of yesterday outside of my apartment and not online yesterday.  In the afternoon, I went to view a movie.  Then I met up with friends for dinner and conversation.  It was all pretty pleasant.  Sadly, my mood took a turn for the worse after I got back home and went online to find two developments capturing the attention of a good part of Hong Kong Twitter.    

 

The first of these involved the "Hong Kong police [having] seized an exhibit... in connection with what they said was an attempt to incite subversion, with media reporting it was a statue commemorating Beijing's Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy protesters in 1989.  Media reported the exhibit was the "Pillar of Shame," an 8-meter-tall statue depicting dozens of torn and twisted bodies that commemorates protesters killed in the crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square more than three decades ago." 

For those who didn't know: "The two-ton copper "Pillar of Shame" was first exhibited at a Tiananmen Square commemoration in Hong Kong in 1997, the same year Britain handed the city back to China.  In 2021, the University of Hong Kong dismantled and removed the statue "based on external legal advice and risk assessment for the best interest of the university."" Until yesterday, it had "been kept in a cargo container on university-owned land" but few people now know its current whereabouts.

 

In seizing Dutch sculptor Jens Galschiot's creation less than one month ahead of June 4th, the police have reminded people that the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is coming up -- and how the public commemoration of it in Hong Kong used to be allowed but no longer is the case in the national security law era. (By the way, ever heard of the Streisand Effect? I had not until it got regularly applied to actions by the authorities in Hong Kong in recent years.)

 

As a matter of fact: topping my Twitter search this evening for "Streisand effect" is this Tweet about the Pillar of Shame's seizure.  Meanwhile a Twitter search for "Streisand effect Hong Kong" will also yield multiple entries about what has come to be known as "anthemgate" like this one.  

 

For those who didn't realize: there have been a series of incidents involving protest anthem Glory to Hong Kong being played at international sporting events at which teams representing Hong Kong were present instead of March of Volunteers.  The Hong Kong government has also been pressuring Google to remove Glory to Hong Kong from searches on the search engine as the protest anthem was topping searches for such as "Hong Kong national anthem"!

I wonder how the Hong Kong government feels about Wikipedia's "national anthem of Hong Kong" entry.  To be sure, it does mention that ""March of the Volunteers", the national anthem of the People's Republic of China, is the official anthem of Hong Kong after the handover from 1997 to [the] Present".  But it also notes that Hong Kong had other national anthems at other times (i.e., God Save the King (or Queen, depending on the gender of the reigning monarch) in the British colonial period, and Kimigayo, when Hong Kong was occupied by Japan during the Second World War).  And that Hong Kong has had a number of "unofficial" national anthems over the years.

 

For the record: the songs that fall into that latter category are Glory to Hong Kong (natch) along with Below the Lion Rock (aka Under [the] Lion Rock) and Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies.  But there's no mention of Dreams (be it sung by The Cranberries or Faye Wong) -- for good reason.  Specifically, until yesterday, when this ridiculous excerpt from a MUBI podcast about Chungking Express was brought to my attention by a number of people on Twitter, I had not heard of it being described as "the national anthem of Hong Kong"!

 

As human rights activist Xun-ling Au Tweeted: "It's a good song can't deny that... but to call it "national anthem of Hong Kong"... well that's some shit. Who told you that @emmy_the_great? You stepped into a bigger discussion, clearly without enough info." ("Emmy the Great" being Hong Kong-born indiepop singer Emma-Lee Moss who had been the guest on the MUBI podcast who had made that assertion.)

I wonder whether the Hong Kong government will hear of this and will step in to protest to MUBI; starting yet another episode of Anthemgate.  I'm guessing not because Glory to Hong Kong is not involved this time around.  But you never know, considering how sensitive it now is!