Why some Hongkongers who don’t like it in Hong Kong are staying

Name: How China censors the internet
Uploaded: 2020-09-08T00:15:11.000Z
Duration: 2 min 33 s
Description: How China censors the internet

Telling someone to leave if they don’t like what they see is the fallback position of a person who does not have a valid argument. While Hongkongers have to be realistic about the future, it doesn’t have to mean giving up on change

Reading Time:3 minutes

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A person buys a copy of Apple Daily at a news stand in Hong Kong on August 11, after the arrest of the newspaper’s founder, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, under the national security law. Photo: EPA-EFE

Peter Kammerer

Published: 8:15am, 8 Sep 2020Updated: 8:15am, 8 Sep 2020

A friend had an altercation with one of those cold-callers the other day that ended in a way I am familiar with: she was told, “If you don’t like it here, then leave.” The difference is that while I am a foreign-passport holder and could do that if I was willing to accede to such a cowardly remark, my friend was born and bred in Hong Kong and this is her one and only home.

The person she was having a debate of sorts with was a mainlander who was trying to sell her a flat in the Greater Bay Area, somewhere west of Shenzhen. Things took a nasty turn when she said she had no desire to live in a part of China that was governed by a dictatorship that did not allow basic freedoms like open internet access and civic and civil rights.

The telemarketer took offence, perhaps because his calls are recorded, or maybe he genuinely believes the mainland is the best place to live. If you don’t have a desire to know what’s really happening elsewhere, you are willing to have everything you say and do monitored and you neither want a say in how the government is run nor wish to question what it does, then all is fine and dandy.

Scandals involving tainted food and medicines, or poor air and water quality – why, they can happen anywhere and anytime, can’t they? Some Chinese firmly believe that Beijing can do no wrong and that the Communist Party has the right to rule without opposition forever.

02:33

How China censors the internet

My friend thinks otherwise. She has studied and worked overseas and travelled extensively, giving her the chance to compare and contrast systems. But Hong Kong is her home and she put her faith in Beijing living up to the promises it made in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, that the existing freedoms would be maintained, strengthened and broadened.

However, she now believes that the freedoms are being eroded, and she is willing to fight to protect what she has. When a mainlander tells her that if she doesn’t like what is going on, she should leave, it is confirmation that family lore, that communists plunder, loot and steal, is true.

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