Erasing Hong Kong

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hong Kong's history is being revised and erased - it's early origins, colonial legacy, post 1997 handover period and the crucial years since the mass 2019 democracy protests are being uprooted, overturned and rewritten by a government guided by the ruling Communist Party in Beijing. This 'rewriting' of history is being enforced in schools, universities, libraries, the local media and online. This process has seen library shelves raided, museums closed for 'review', art galleries censored, media archives wiped, commemorations and memorials banned. Every department of government seems affected - library users asked to scour the shelves for 'banned' books, the arts sector to purge itself of 'anti-China elements', the annual commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre shut down. Democracy activists, authors of children's books, students, and newspaper owners have been jailed for holding contradictory views, telling alternative narratives. All in the few years since 2019 and Covid-19. Hong Kong is a changed place - a place where memory wars are being fought, where history and your interpretation of it can lead to long prison sentences or exile.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the documentary Erasing Hong Kong from the BBC World Service.
0:04.4	I'm Paul French, a writer on China, and we're looking at the battles in the ongoing memory wars in Hong Kong.
0:10.6	As the idiom goes, the fight Kong, the unofficial anthem of the 2019 Hong Kong democracy protests.
0:32.0	It rang out through the streets, shopping malls and
0:34.4	subway stations of the territory throughout the demonstrations between June
0:38.0	2019 and mid-2020. Today, four years later, you'd likely be arrested under Hong Kong's new national security law for singing that song in public,
0:48.0	as well as maybe wearing a black t-shirt in the wrong place at the wrong time, or having a picture of a Tiananmen Square
0:54.8	massacre commemorative candle on your phone. The authorities are actively attempting to
1:00.1	erase and rewrite history, both the recent history of pro-democracy protest, as well as
1:05.5	Hong Kong's 180-year-old history as a British colony.
1:09.5	But erasing Hong Kong is also the story of how ordinary people are trying to resist and
1:13.9	preserve their historical narratives from erasure, even as the laws preventing them
1:19.0	fighting back are tightened ever further.
1:21.4	Protest leader and former elected Hong Kong legislator, Nathan Law, now in exile in London.
1:27.8	Before 2020, the Chinese authority was not as aggressive in reshaping Hong Kong's culture, weight of life or even memories.
1:37.0	I go to work each day and you notice things slowly change.
1:41.0	Tom Grandy, editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong Free Press, one of the last truly independent
1:45.8	media organisations left in the city.
1:48.3	In some cases you literally see the erasure because you will see evidence on a street lamp of a faded sticker or a botched effort to remove some graffiti that once call for democracy.
2:00.8	Or you'll just see a smudge on the side of a wall and you will know what that means.
2:05.6	It does seem like the government's pursuits of civic memory, public memory knows no boundaries.
2:12.9	Mary Hui is a Hong Kong-based writer for the online news service,
	...

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