Hong Kong, China – Whereas instructing in Hong Kong in 2011, filmmaker Ying Liang was banned from going dwelling to mainland China after making a documentary on a Beijing mom attempting to avoid wasting her son from the loss of life penalty.
Ten years since changing into an unintended immigrant, Ying strives to benefit from the town’s freedoms to the fullest, whilst they’ve come beneath menace from the Nationwide Safety Regulation and the continuing crackdown on pro-democracy politicians and activists.
Simply final month, Ying screened the offending movie to 2 dozen viewers at an arts hub.
“We have to cherish our freedom whereas we nonetheless have it,” he instructed Al Jazeera.
For many Hong Kong-born residents, the regulation has put a damper on the liberties they’ve lengthy taken without any consideration beneath “one nation, two programs,” the framework beneath which the previous British colony was returned to Chinese language sovereignty in 1997.
China had promised the territory “a excessive diploma of autonomy” for at the least 50 years.
Earlier than Beijing’s interference over the previous yr, residents within the territory had been free to protest in opposition to the authorities and organise political events to face in elections.
However for mainland migrants who’ve embraced the freedoms they by no means loved rising up, the backsliding right into a extra repressive type of governance is stirring worry and nervousness.
“I believe the crackdown will come down more durable and stronger than what you’d usually see within the mainland, higher to scare everybody,” mentioned Ying, the documentary filmmaker, who’s 34.
“This wasn’t one thing I skilled rising up in Shanghai.”
As a father of three, together with a two-month previous child, Ying says he’s most involved concerning the authorities’s push for patriotic schooling.
“What I discover most unsettling is what’s occurring in colleges,” he mentioned. “Whereas I don’t suppose each child would come out completely brainwashed, I do know from my expertise how this can mark you for all times. It makes you afraid of caring about politics. When the scholars got here out to protest, there was nonetheless hope for this metropolis.”
‘Promised land’
For many of the previous century, Hong Kong was hailed because the “promised land” for tens of millions of Chinese language, each from the mainland and the diaspora.
Whilst China was torn asunder by numerous cataclysms – regime change, army invasion, world battle, civil battle, famines and political purges – the British colony stood out as an island of relative calm and alternative.
After successive waves of immigration from the mainland, solely barely over half of the town’s 7.5 million individuals are native-born.
And because the handover, a couple of million mainland Chinese language have migrated to Hong Kong beneath a household reunification scheme.
That is why these “RIP Hong Kong” headlines annoy me.
It is as a result of people like @HongKongCTU‘s Mung Siu Tat are very a lot alive: “one of the best ways to guard our rights is to train them so far as we are able to. The main focus of ‘save one breath; mild one lamp’ is to mild the lamp” pic.twitter.com/2EjoyQj4BD— Yuen Chan (@xinwenxiaojie) April 24, 2021
In a 2016 research on the brand new arrivals, Hong Kong’s political scientists discovered that “the immigrants from China are on the whole extra politically conservative and extra supportive of the pro-Beijing ruling coalition in elections.”
However not all.
Flora Chen, 35, has spent the previous 10 years exterior her native China and has sworn off ever going again
A job at a college introduced her to Hong Kong, which she noticed as “instead Chinese language society the place regulation and order and social norms are protected by establishments.
“For the generations of mainland Chinese language liberals marked by Tiananmen, the vigil in Hong Kong [shone] like a beacon of hope,” mentioned Chen, wistfully.
Nowhere else on Chinese language soil was the commemoration of the 1989 crackdown permitted.
However final yr, for the primary time ever, the Hong Kong authorities banned the annual vigil citing COVID-19 dangers. The organisers, in addition to a number of the hundreds who defied the ban, now face prosecution.
After arriving in 2018, Chen took half within the anti-government protests a yr later. As a tutorial in social sciences, Chen mentioned her analysis is equally “socially engaged”.
What worries her essentially the most is that shrinking tutorial freedom will stifle her scholarship.
“As mainlanders we all know how actual the worry is. We realized to be cautious and watch what we are saying,” Chen instructed Al Jazeera.
“However now I can begin noticing worry on my college students’ face. Their faces are marked with anger and damage, by energy.”
Whilst China’s economic system has taken off over the previous quarter of a century, Hong Kong has retained its attract for a lot of mainland residents as a land of alternative, undergirded by a rules-based system that’s fairer than the one which they’re used to.
Outdoors the household visa scheme, the most important contingent of mainland migrants has come for larger schooling.
Postgraduate programmes in any respect native universities are actually dominated by mainland college students who benefit from the alternatives on supply within the territory as soon as they graduate.
When leaving her native metropolis simply 300 kilometres (186 miles) away to pursue a grasp’s diploma in media research in Hong Kong, Jacqueline Zhang, thought she could be away for under a few years.
However almost 10 years later, 32-year-old Zhang says she enjoys residing in a society the place honest play and transparency are the norm. Within the mainland, she says, it’s “guanxi” – a community of connections and household ties – that matter and accountability is uncommon.
As Hong Kong has come beneath the thumb of Beijing, Zhang says the “worry is compounded” for mainland residents who’ve household and associates north of the border.
Authorities are identified to harass the relations of mainland Chinese language who’re politically energetic, hoping to make use of the leverage of household strain to rein in these “troublemakers.”
Zhang says she is aware of a superb variety of fellow mainland Chinese language in self-imposed exile in Hong Kong, fearing their political participation has landed them on a watch record. They fear any journey dwelling may set off an exit ban that may bar them from ever travelling in another country once more.
A former journalist, Zhang isn’t certain if she is on any watch record however says she doesn’t wish to take the possibility.
For now, she has discovered consolation and camaraderie within the “tribe” she has present in Hong Kong – people who find themselves not afraid to debate so-called taboo topics and recoil on the thought of censorship.
“Freedom and the rule of regulation are like air. You don’t really feel it as a lot whereas it’s there,” mentioned Zhang.
“You’re feeling it solely after it’s taken away from you.”