Commemorate what? The history that is distorted?
It’s disgusting to read all the news about how the CCP Chinese government and the Hong Kong government prepare for the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to CCP China, particularly speechless with the photos of the PRC flags and HKSAR flags displayed in various parts of the city and the videos of students of elite schools singing disgusting brainwashing “patriotic” songs.
I’m now living in Tokyo after staying in the UK (first three months in Scotland and later in London and Cambridge) for nearly one year. It feels extremely strange to look at what’s happening in Hong Kong nowadays. Apart from the fact that my family is still in Hong Kong, I don’t feel that Hong Kong is my home anymore. Hong Kong has just become so unfamiliar to me now.
Some people (especially the pro-Beijing camp and expats in Hong Kong) claim that Hong Kong is business as usual as they simply don’t consider freedoms and democracy as anything more important than exploiting business opportunities. They just want to reduce Hong Kong to a place as nothing more than only doing business. People in Hong Kong should only be concerned about making money?
My grandparents and parents’ generations, who needed to survive in the Hong Kong society during the 1930s to 1980s, might have no choice but to only focus on making ends meet. However, for those of us who were born in the 1970s and later (particularly my generation who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s — during Hong Kong’s economic heydays), we are the lucky ones who can develop our interest and build our careers with much more resources and opportunities. As we have more opportunities to obtain tertiary education, we have learned more about how other values, like freedoms and democracy, are even more significant in improving our society.
Would people hate having more freedoms and options? Why would people hate that? So, why would people embrace a dictatorship and thank the dictators for taking away their freedoms and democracy? Why would people need to show how “patriotic” they are by showing how much they only want to make money and turn a blind eye to fellow citizens being sent to jail for merely expressing their views, participating in primary elections and taking to the streets to express their grievances and angers?
Needless to say, it’s difficult to do any work on human rights and democracy in Hong Kong after the so-called “National Security Law” was forcibly imposed in June 2020 without any public consultation. Some people might still claim that freedom of expression and freedom of the press still exist in Hong Kong. Certainly, that’s sheer nonsense. The CCP’s usual tactic is to arrest a certain group of people as a way to “scare the monkeys by killing the chickens”. While some people still try hard to do whatever they can within the extremely narrow space in the civil society, it’s just shameless for some to maintain that it’s still business as usual and things are still fine in Hong Kong. Those are just lie and the distortion of history and reality.
So, what to commemorate for the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover? What to celebrate? Stop insulting us Hongkongers. There’s nothing to celebrate. Some people even attempt to distort the fact that Hong Kong was never a British colony. So, what to celebrate if Hong Kong wasn’t a colony? What’s the meaning of handover then? If we want to stick with the historical fact, Hong Kong should be returned to the Qing Dynasty. There wasn’t even CCP China when Hong Kong was occupied by the Brits as a colony. Returning Hong Kong to a regime that even didn’t exist when Hong Kong was occupied by the colonizers. We should be happy? Again, what to celebrate? I’m not interested in celebrating the distortion of fact and history.
