After the Fall — Hong Kong Apostasy in 2024

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium

 

Our humble bellies have ingested a surfeit of treachery,
eaten their fill of history, wolfed down legends —
and still the banquet goes on, leaving
an unfilled void in an ever-changing structure.

On 1 July 2017, China Heritage marked the twentieth anniversary of mainland China extending suzerainty over Hong Kong with a series of translations, commentaries and art works. We began by quoting ‘Cauldron’ 鼎 dǐng, a poem by the celebrated Hong Kong writer P.K. Leung (梁秉钧, 1949-2013) from which the lines above are taken.

Written a year prior to the 1997 takeover, ‘Cauldron’ was a meditation on the return of P.K.’s home town to the embrace of China. This was followed by the menu of the welcome banquet held for China’s party-state leader, Xi Jinping, on 30 June 2017, the day prior to the formal celebration and fireworks on the 1st of July. That day marked the beginning of the end of the Beijing’s subjugation of the former British colony.

At the time we still celebrated Hong Kong under the rubric of The Best China. Soon, we were recording what we would call the Hong Kong Apostasy — the popular rebellion of 2019 that flared up for a moment before the lights of the territory were snuffed out by the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020.

In 2024, as Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, observed,

In yet another violation of the Joint Declaration treaty between China and the UK, which was intended to ensure that Hong Kong’s autonomy and way of life would be safeguarded until 2047, Chief Executive John Lee’s puppet administration recently enacted its own repressive national-security law. The new law, known as Article 23, came into force on March 23 after being pushed through the local government’s rubber-stamp legislature, along with a series of other oppressive measures. Ostensibly, it aims to curb treasonous or seditious activities. In reality, the law’s goal is to suppress any remaining democratic activism in the city and sever all contact between freedom advocates and the outside world.

A process of Umvolkung — ‘partified Sinification’ — imposed on the territory by the Hong Kong surrogates of Beijing, continues apace.

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In the first instalment of ‘Hong Kong, The Best China’, we introduced readers to recent commentaries by the veteran journalist Lee Yee 李怡 (李秉堯). Founding editor of The Seventies Monthly 七十年代月刊 (later renamed The Nineties Monthly) Lee Yee was a prominent commentator on Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan politics, as well as the global scene, for over forty-five years. Over time, his evolved from that of being a sympathetic interlocutor with the People’s Republic in the late 1970s to that of outspoken rebel and man of conscience from the early 1980s.

For decades Lao Lee analysed Hong Kong politics and society with a clarity of vision, and in a clarion voice, rare among the territory’s writers. From 2017 to 2020, we translated essays from ‘Ways of the World’ 世道人生, the regular column that Lee Yee wrote for Apple Daily 蘋果日報, until its demise under the National Security Law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong from 1 July 2020 (see Lee Yee, Apple Daily, “The Four Noes” & the End of Chinese Media Independence).

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On this day, 1 July 2024, we remind readers of that period by reprinting the contents of Hong Kong Apostasy. We do so in memory of Lee Yee.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
1 July 2024

中共建黨103年黨慶

淪 lún, ‘to sink, to be lost, submerged’, as in 淪陷 lúnxiàn, ‘to fall to the enemy’ or ‘to be occupied’

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Hong Kong Apostasy

Starting in March 2019, mass protests against legislation proposed by the territories political leader gained momentum over the summer months. Faced by the insurmountable political nexus between the Hong Kong authorities and their Beijing masters, protests, and the demands of protesters, escalated until the city was overshadowed by a popular uprising. The protests were, in essence, a rejection of the Official China of Xi Jinping and a celebration of The Other China, or The Best China, one repeatedly ignored, misunderstood and threatened by the Communist party-state.

Our humble bellies have ingested a surfeit of treachery,
eaten their fill of history, wolfed down legends —
and still the banquet goes on, leaving
an unfilled void in an ever-changing structure.
Constantly we become food for our own consumption.
For fear of forgetting we swallow our loved ones,
we masticate our memories and our stomachs rumble
as we look outwards.

— from P.K. Leung 梁秉鈞, ‘Cauldron’ 鼎
Translated by John Minford and Can Oi-sum

— The Editor

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Proem

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The Black Bauhinia 黑洋紫荊, a symbol of the Hong Kong resistance

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Contents

The Best China

Contents

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The character 淪 lún in various hands