Hong Kong 2024 slides into an Orwellian vision of ‘1984’
‘We dared to confront the regime with the question: will democracy be possible within such a structure?’
Hong Kong is engulfed in an Orwellian nightmare. For the 1984 dystopian novel, read 2024 and the glittering skyline of wealth, privilege, grinding poverty, and political repression. Hovering above is Big Brother in Beijing.
“Doublethink,” “Thoughtcrime,” and “Thought Police” have taken on a whole new meaning in China’s crucial financial center. They were at the heart of a controversial national security trial in the city, where 45 pro-democracy campaigners were jailed today.
Gwyneth Ho Kwai-lam, a Hong Kong activist and former reporter at the now-defunct Stand News, captured the mood perfectly. “Our true crime for Beijing is that we were not content with playing along in manipulated elections,” she wrote in a Facebook post.
“We dared to confront the regime with the question: will democracy ever be possible within such a structure? The answer was a complete crackdown on all fronts of society,” Ho, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, added.
Political prisoners:
- Benny Tai, a major pro-democracy activist, legal scholar, and politician, was handed a 10-year sentence.
- Pro-democracy campaigner Joshua Wong, who spearheaded the student-led Umbrella Movement in 2014, received a four-year sentence.
Delve deeper: Protest erupted in Hong Kong in 2019 over a contentious extradition law with Beijing. The move was seen as eroding the “One Country, Two Systems” agreement signed by the United Kingdom and China before the 1997 handover of power.
There are also other issues bubbling beneath the surface.
China Factor
Between the lines: Nearly two million people took to the streets in a peaceful mass march in June 2019. Demands for greater political freedom and democratic elections followed before Beijing imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong in 2020.
Bottom line: “Today’s harsh sentences against dozens of prominent democracy activists reflect just how fast Hong Kong’s civil liberties and judicial independence have nosedived in the past four years,” Maya Wang at Human Rights Watch pointed out.
Big picture: There are also other issues bubbling beneath the surface as Hong Kong is “one of the most unequal cities” in the world. “Universal suffrage is one part of this,” Toby Carroll, who was an associate professor at City University of Hong Kong, pointed out.
What was said: “In a city characterized by vast inequalities in economic and political power, this challenge is nothing short of revolutionary in the genuine sense of the word,” he wrote in a commentary for The Conversation in 2019 about the protest movement.
China Factor comment: Almost 500,000 people out of a population of 7.4 million have left Hong Kong since the beginning of 2021. They have moved to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States to evade Big Brother in Beijing.