Speak Truth to Madness
By Ching Kwan Lee
Four years have passed since the world was transfixed by Hong Kong's six-month-long popular uprising, the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement. The global media has since moved on to other headlines: the pandemic, global inflation, the wars in Palestine and Ukraine, the climate crisis, AI, and more. For many, the striking imagery of the 2019 protests—million-strong peaceful marches, ninjalike, black-clad youth on the frontlines, the bloodshed, and the tear gas and rubber bullets that turned Asia's global city into an urban battlefield—has become blurred memories, soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet, for millions of Hong Kongers, the protests and their aftermath are more real than ever.
The Hong Kong and Beijing governments have not only used the 2020 National Security Law as an all-purpose legal instrument to criminalize political dissent and annihilate civil society; they have also, in the years since, expanded the scope of its application. This reign of terror, like a contagious virus, now supercharged by an annual budget of HK$57.3 billion (US$7.3 billion), has haunted all quarters of society. As if three years of arrests, prosecutions, and intimidations targeting political activists, opposition political parties, newspaper publishers, journalists, civil society organizers, and trade unions are not enough, we are now witnessing a new campaign taking aim at “soft resistance.”
The term was first mentioned by the Chinese Liaison Office Director Luo Huining on National Security Education Day in April 2021. A year later, the Hong Kong government parroted and weaponized the term to describe “indirect” or “cultural” antigovernment resistance via the media, education, songs, and other cultural activities. Books were arbitrarily removed from public libraries, NGOs not directly sponsored by pro-China forces were shut down, independent radio stations had their bank accounts frozen, a protest song was deemed illegal, and pollsters announced the voluntary removal of sensitive questions from their surveys. But this hasn't been the end of it, and to say the regime is going after “cultural resistance” is to accord it a level of rationality it utterly lacks. In recent weeks, to justify its claims to power and resources, the national security apparatus has launched a search for new enemies, any enemy. Having crushed all political and cultural opposition, soft resistance is no longer restricted to observable behavior or tangible objects, but can now include anything that “incites citizens’ hatred and negative emotions against the government.” The list of soft resistance denounced by the chief executive, the secretary for security, and the Communist press includes some senseless entries: complaints lodged by subdivision housing concern groups about the housing crunch; water sprayed at police during the traditional water festival in a Thai-dominant neighborhood; citizens withdrawing their organ donation registrations; and senior citizens (ab)using their subsidized transportation cards! Basically, any criticism against the government is soft resistance.
Absolute power has brought with it absolute madness. Much more so when the regime is consumed by self-inflicted paranoid and moral bankruptcy. The existential challenge Hong Kongers are facing is emphatically worse than one-party authoritarianism. It is an everyday struggle against insanity. For people living in this world of madness, Justin Wong's art has become a lifeline. A single frame, a few strokes, a gentle scene, a spark of wisdom: these pieces tell simple truths from the heart. His forced departure from the city, like his art, speaks volumes about the tragedy befalling Hong Kong.
Wong's The Books of Hong Kong is an ongoing series of drawings depicting books of his own imagination, published for the first time here. With their direct titles and whimsical covers, these hypothetical volumes allow us to imagine all the histories and stories that cannot be pictured or written today, even if we all know very well their contents.
