Opinion | If the Hong Kong National Party is banned, could any two people who mock mainlanders be next?

Supposing you and I tipsily talk politics in a bar after a few drinks. You fume about the flood of mainlanders virtually colonising shopping districts, yelling in Mandarin, driving up property prices, and blocking MTR trains with oversized suitcases.

I nod in agreement, chiding them for changing our city’s culture. We reminisce about the time when riding the Peak Tram didn’t require lining up for hours. Supposing you then taunt them as locusts. I drunkenly salute whoever came up with that description. We discuss distributing leaflets telling mainlanders to go home.

Bar talk? Free speech? Hate speech? Or hatred of mainlanders? If I were mumbling all that to myself in a bar or a Central street corner, people would think I was wacko. But if it’s you and I, that’s a different a story. Just two people can make up a society if the authorities so choose under our Societies Ordinance.

No one knows nowadays where the ever-shifting lines of our freedoms lie as Hong Kong morphs slowly but surely into being just another Chinese city. That’s why I am so spooked by the government’s move to ban the pro-independence Hong Kong National Party.