City protesters are matching the speed with which Hong Kong has descended to a repressive authoritarian government, which is moving just as fast to get ahead of the censors.
Just two days after the national security law was enacted on Tuesday (June 30), the Hong Kong government officially created the city’s first mental crime: it banned the protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times “(光復 香港, 時代 革命) declaring it secessionist and subversive, and therefore in violation of the new law.
Legal experts have already questioned the validity of the government’s blanket ban on the slogan without regard to the intent and scope of different interpretations of the phrase. But whether the ban is ultimately upheld in court is irrelevant. Its very existence at this time fundamentally undermines freedom of expression, expression and thought.
True to the reputation of the Hong Kong protest movement for being resilient and creatively versatile, people have already come up with all kinds of ideas to circumvent the ban on their rallying cry. Where Cantonese creatively unfolded last year as an expression of satire and identity, it is now used as an antidote to political repression. On the Telegram chat app, protesters have shared different ways of speaking in code. As Cantonese is a tonal language, there is a great opportunity to exchange similar sounding characters to create a phrase that sounds like the forbidden catchphrase, but means something completely different.
Here is an example. The eight characters below are almost homonyms of “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” in Cantonese, which in its original would be pronounced “gwong fuk hoeng gong, if doi gaak ming”. Here, it is slightly modified to read “bacon and sausages, vegetables and noodles”, pronounced “jin juk hoeng coeng, if coi zaa min”.
Instagram / @ highsauce_words
Another example makes use of the pictorial features of Chinese characters to create graphics that look like the characters in the forbidden catchphrase, but are actually made up of cartoon illustrations. Another example traces the rough contours of the eight Chinese characters in the slogan, but turns them into mere rectangular and triangular shapes.
“He is smart, but he is also sad,” wrote Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. “Little by little, people adapt to speaking in code. In the end, you don’t know how to talk and think like a normal person anymore. “
Mainland Chinese citizens have long deployed creative tactics to avoid state censors. Blur photos to censor image censorship in WeChat chat app. They use items like rubber ducks and cigarettes to recreate the “Tank Man” from Tiananmen Square. They have used “Martian,” a coding language based on Chinese characters that was very popular many years ago, to discuss sensitive topics, including the coronavirus pandemic. And they’ve even used song lyrics as a code to show their support for Hong Kong protesters.
In another example of defying censorship, after police officers warned a store that its Lennon wall (colorful displays of Post-It notes with messages related to protests scrawled on them) possibly violated national security law, several other businesses were left empty. Post-it notes in protest. Others are urging people to put blank pieces of paper everywhere to fight what they call the “white terror” that is engulfing the city.
Lian-Hee Wee, a professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University who studies Cantonese phonology, is a little more optimistic in the case of Hong Kong. “We could see that the Cantonese becomes more expressive,” he said. “And there is a need to express so much now. The need arises because there is no room for it: it is precisely because you do not have permission to speak that you need to speak. “
Wee cited a Chinese language that he translated more or less as: “To stop people’s mouths it’s like you’re trying to fill the river’s mouth.” The fact that this saying exists suggests that the Chinese have long struggled with ways to express themselves despite censorship. “Speaking in code is not new, and Hong Kong people are getting used to the fact that they have to,” he said, while during last year’s protests and the 2014 Umbrella Movement, “they didn’t have to, but they enjoyed doing it.” . ”
