Reflections | By targeting Maxim’s outlets, Hong Kong protesters recall China’s vengeful past
- The restaurant chain’s businesses have been trashed after the daughter of company’s founder denounced protest movement
- Throughout Chinese history, arbitrary punishments have been meted out for nothing more than familial ties
The logic that informs the protesters’ hostility and acts of violence towards the company is reminiscent of the way the Communist Party identified its enemies in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Individuals were labelled as class enemies purely by their association with what the party deemed as objectionable. These associations covered multiple areas of life and could be quite arbitrary. A person might have the wrong friends, they might have studied in the wrong school, or they could have worked for the wrong employers, or worse, foreign ones.
Perhaps the most abhorrent method of categorisation was the one that used a person’s family ties as the arbiter of their “class make-up”. Having a relative who had served in the Nationalist army, being born into a family of landlords, and so on, justified the discrimination and violence that was meted out to the unfortunate individual, whatever their political inclinations might have been. From 1949 until the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976, the sins of the fathers were visited on their children (and vice versa), resulting in persecution, incarceration, torture and, on many occasions, death.
One of the cruellest and most terrifying punishments in imperial China was the extermination of the nine families. Reserved for the most heinous crimes against the state and the emperor (which were one and the same in almost all cases), the punishment involved the execution of criminals and members of their extended family.