‘Hong Kong’s people need no bird cage designed by the central authorities. We are masters of our own fate.’
—Letter from the Hong Kong Christian Institute.
Hong Kong’s Victoria Park separates the city’s busiest shopping district from North Point; a suburb of decaying apartment blocks, rapidly constructed to house refugees fleeing the mainland post-war. Here, open-air markets—illuminated by red lanterns—sell shoes alongside racks of seafood and pyramids of vegetables. On Sundays, the birdsong chatter of ‘domestic helpers’ fills the air. Women crouch on the ground, not unlike me, as I wait inside the park for this year’s pro-democracy march to begin.
According to The New York Times, Hong Kong is riding out a ‘politically turbulent summer’. Half a million people took to the streets on 1 July, demanding democracy in Hong Kong and, for the first time, on the mainland. Less than a month earlier, a record number commemorated the 15th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. More than 80,000 people, carrying black banners and a coffin, called on Beijing to ‘vindicate’ the memory of the students who died.
Later that afternoon, I stopped to talk to some teenage marshals, distributing fans to the people slowly making their way towards parliament. One of the marshals said, with unrestrained glee, that the crowd already numbered 250,000. ‘Thanks for being here’, he said. ‘This is part of Hong Kong history today.’
What these protests will mean in terms of Hong Kong’s future is unclear, but there is a definite buzz in the territory that reflects the emergence of a new, more politicised, civic culture. ‘For decades the conventional wisdom was that Hong Kong was almost a commercial city—the politics could be left to Taiwan, thanks’, says Newsweek. In today’s Hong Kong, such stereotypes are under attack as a new breed of activists fight to make their demands heard.
When the last British governor, Chris Patten sailed off into the sunset with Prince Charles after 150 years of colonial rule, it was generally understood that within a decade Hong Kong would have its own democratic government.
But according to writer Kwok Nai-wang, things are now worse than when under the colonial system. ‘Over the past 50 years, but especially after the riots in Hong Kong in 1967, the British style and substance of government was extended to Hong Kong.’ Now, Beijing’s authoritarian style, paired with the untrammelled sway of local tycoons, is putting all that at