Hong Kongers Are Purging the Evidence of Their Lost Freedom
www.hrw.org
Last week, the city enacted a draconian security law — its second serious legislative assault on Hong Kong’s freedoms since 2020. Known as Article 23, the new law criminalizes such vague behavior as the possession of information that is “directly or indirectly useful to an external force.”

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10433386

Hong Kong was once a place where people did not live in fear. It had rule of law, a rowdy press and a semi-democratic Legislature that kept the powerful in check. The result was a city with a freewheeling energy unmatched in China. Anyone who grew up in China in the 1980s and 1990s could sing the Cantopop songs of Hong Kong stars like Anita Mui, and that was a problem for Beijing: Freedom was glamorous, desirable.

When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the city’s people accepted, in good faith, Beijing’s promises that its capitalist system and way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years and that the city would move toward universal suffrage in the election of its leader.

Not anymore. Now Hong Kong people are quietly taking precautions, getting rid of books, T-shirts, film footage, computer files and other documents from the heady days when the international financial center was also known for its residents’ passionate desire for freedom.

  • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
    411·
    8 months ago

    “People are throwing cringe shit from 40 years ago away” is the weirdest counterpoint to “Brits brutally put down riots demanding letting people vote” to come from “Human Rights Watch”.

    • spacedout@lemmy.ml
      31·
      8 months ago

      Are there anyone that takes HRW seriously, especially when decrying non western states? This article in Monthly Review describing HRWs support for the right wing coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia, also brings up its less than flattering history of supporting Western human rights violations.

      Human Rights Watch’s deep ties to U.S. corporate and state sectors should disqualify the institution from any public pretense of independence.
      • Bernie Sanders’ Communications Director Keane Bhat