Source: NYT (8/23/24)
A History Museum Shows How China Wants to Remake Hong Kong
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A new exhibit calls for the city’s residents to be patriotic, loyal to the Chinese Communist Party and ever vigilant to supposed threats to the state.
Tiffany May, Reporting from Hong Kong
A new exhibit on national security at the Hong Kong Museum of History. Credit…Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
The Hong Kong Museum of History was the place to go to understand the city’s transformation from fishing village to a glittering metropolis. It housed a life-size replica of a traditional fishing boat and a recreation of a 19th-century street lined with shops.
That exhibit, known as “The Hong Kong Story,” is being revamped. People have instead been lining up for a splashy new permanent gallery in the museum that tells a different, more ominous story about the city — that Hong Kong is constantly at risk of being subverted by hostile foreign forces. The exhibit features displays about spies being everywhere and footage of antigovernment street protests in the city that were described as instigated by the West.
As he kicked off the exhibition this month, John Lee, the Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, made clear that its overarching purpose was to be a warning to the city. “Safeguarding national security is always a continuous effort. There is no completion,” he said. The gallery, which is managed by Hong Kong’s top national security body, opened to the public on Aug. 7.
The exhibit points to a new aspect of the Hong Kong government’s crackdown on the city after antigovernment protests in 2019 posed the greatest challenge to Beijing’s rule in decades. The authorities have introduced security laws to quash dissent in the years since. They are now pushing to control how people will remember the recent political turmoil.
In the government’s telling, the protests were not organic expressions of the residents’ democratic aspirations, as the city’s opposition activists have said, but part of an ongoing plot by Western forces to destabilize China.
The national security exhibit opens with a short video highlighting the unfair treaties of the 19th century that forced China to cede Hong Kong to the British, as well as the Japanese occupation of the city during World War II. Describing the protests in 2019, the video highlighted footage of protesters hurling Molotov cocktails. “Law and order vanished,” the narrator said. Then it credited new national security laws imposed by Beijing in the crackdown that followed, for turning the tide “from chaos to order.”
An exhibition at the museum on the 2019 protests frames the events as part of an ongoing plot by Western forces to destabilize China. Credit…Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
The exhibit displayed the battered shields, helmets and boots used by the riot police who quashed protests. It listed the casualties and damage purportedly inflicted by the protesters: 629 police officers injured and more than 5,000 Molotov cocktails thrown by violent protesters.
There was no mention of the tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds and pepper spray deployed by the police. The display did not mention the attack on protesters at a subway station by a mob armed with sticks and poles, and the police’s slow response to that violence.
“One point of this exhibit is to stoke fears of social ‘turmoil’ and ‘chaos’ so as to persuade Hong Kongers to embrace the social stability that the Chinese Communist Party purports to offer,” said Kirk Denton, an emeritus professor at Ohio State University and author of a book about the politics of history museums in modern China.
Winnie Lu, 61, a Hong Kong resident who works in sales and who was visiting the museum on a recent weekday, said that the exhibit reminded her of how hard it was for her to get to work during the protests, when demonstrators blocked roads and paralyzed the subway. “Without national security, how can ordinary people live a good life?” she said.
In many ways, the national security exhibit appeared to take a page out of the Chinese government’s playbook after the Chinese military’s brutal suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement left widespread disillusionment. In the months and years that followed, the authorities pushed an intensive patriotic education campaign in mainland China that cast Japan as an enemy of the Chinese people and the Communist Party as the sole engine of progress in Chinese history.
Rowena He, a senior research fellow at University of Texas, Austin, and a historian of the Tiananmen massacre who used to teach in Hong Kong, said that the new exhibit about national security was part of a broader “history manipulation” campaign by Beijing after the Tiananmen crackdown. The Chinese leadership wants to imprint the “official account of history into national memory, emphasizing China’s victimhood at the hands of the West and Japan,” she said.
A video of Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, in the exhibition, which pushes the narrative that the Chinese Communist Party offers social stability to Hong Kongers through national security laws. Credit…Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
In the name of patriotic education, the government in Hong Kong is also turning the Museum of Coastal Defense, a military museum that has historically centered on semi-ruined British fortifications, into a memorial to China’s war with Japan in World War II. It will rename it the Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defense, referring to the war by the phrasing China uses: “The Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.” The government also plans to build a museum focused on Chinese achievements, the history of the Communist Party and the founding of the People’s Republic.
The new national security exhibit adds to broader concerns about a chilling effect imposed by China’s crackdown on the opposition, which has led to the arrests of dozens of veteran democracy activists under national security charges. Public libraries have pulled books associated with local pro-democracy figures or movements. Gatherings to remember the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre in Beijing have been banned, and a sculpture that was a memorial of it was removed. Academics have also come under pressure; Ms. He, a Canadian citizen, was recently denied a visa to return to her job as an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Some Hong Kongers have been concerned about what they see as the government’s efforts to rewrite the past. When the Museum of History’s permanent exhibit, “The Hong Kong Story,” closed for renovations in 2020, visitors filled the gallery, fearing that the authorities would use the planned revamp to erase the city’s colonial history and its references to the annual candlelight vigils commemorating Tiananmen victims, now deemed sensitive.
Experts said that the exhibit at the history museum sought to bind Hong Kong ever more closely to Chinese history. The authorities have also organized patriotic study tours to mainland China and revamped the curriculum in schools to counter a rising local identity distinct from the mainland.
Some of the new displays at the national security exhibit closely resemble that which would be found in similarly themed museum exhibits on the mainland. A floor-to-ceiling Chinese flag hung on crimson walls. Next to it was a 13-foot long replica of an oil painting depicting Mao Zedong as he proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 at Tiananmen Square.
Tiffany May is a reporter based in Hong Kong, covering the politics, business and culture of the city and the broader region. More about Tiffany May