HONG KONG – A barge covered in huge red banners celebrating China’s new security law was sailing through Hong Kong’s famous Victoria Harbor just hours after the legislation was passed. Police are now holding up a purple sign warning protesters that their chants may be criminal. Along the city’s main highways, neon-colored flags heralding a new era of stability and prosperity rise as soldiers.
In recent days, as China took a victory lap over the law it imposed on the city on Tuesday, the defiant masses that once filled the streets of Hong Kong in protest have fallen silent. The sticky notes that had plastered the walls of pro-democracy companies disappeared, knocked down by owners who suddenly feared the words scrawled on them. Parents whispered about whether to prevent their children from singing a popular protest song, while activists devised coded ways to express now dangerous ideas.
Apparently overnight, Hong Kong was viscerally and viscerally different, its more than seven million people leaving to navigate what the law would mean for their lives. The territory’s distinctive culture of political activism and freedom of expression, sometimes blatantly directed at China’s ruling Communist Party, seemed to be in jeopardy.
For some who had been alarmed by the ferocity of last year’s riots, which sometimes transformed business districts, neighborhoods, and university campuses into smoky battlefields, the law provided relief and optimism. For others, who had hoped that the desperate protest campaign would help secure such cherished freedoms, it signaled a new era of fear and uncertainty.
“This is home,” said Ming Tzu, sitting in the cafe he drives, which once supported the protesters out loud. “But I don’t think this place wants us more.”
For months, Mr. Tse’s love for his home was announced at his store in the working-class neighborhood of North Point. The carton of oat milk at the cash register was behind protest art postcards. A poster condemned the police shooting of two student protesters. Even after opponents of the movement threatened to tear the store apart last fall, the decorations remained.
But on Thursday, Mr. Tse, 34, knocked everything down. News reports said police officers had interrogated restaurant owners with similar protest paraphernalia. The security law criminalizes government “subversion,” a crime that police say encompasses speeches like political slogans.
All that was left was a small plastic dinosaur on the counter, in a yellow helmet. That inexpensive but tough headdress, worn by protesters who fought with the police, had become a symbol of their strong strength.
“I don’t know if they are so sensitive,” said Tse. “It is just a helmet on a dinosaur.”
He paused and then reconsidered: “Actually, everything is sensitive.”
On Friday, when authorities accused a 24-year-old man of terrorism and inciting separatism, he was the first person to be charged under the new law. With a “Free Hong Kong” flag mounted on the back of his motorcycle, the man appeared in a group of policemen on Wednesday, the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China from British rule.
Most of the years, that holiday attracts large demonstrations in favor of democracy. But this time, they were banned. The protests dispersed, and the police intervened and arrested hundreds. Ten people, including a 15-year-old girl, were charged with “inciting subversion,” a crime loosely defined under the new law; some had simply waved flags, with slogans that had never been explicitly prohibited.
A dozen family members and social workers waited Thursday in front of a police station in North Point, where more than 100 of those arrested were detained. Such vigils had become a rite for the loved ones of the protesters.
But he felt more dangerous, with crimes under the security law punishable by life imprisonment in the most serious cases. A Chinese official said Wednesday that the law was intended to hang potential troublemakers like Damocles’ sword.
Police collected DNA samples and searched the homes of the 10 people arrested on suspicion of inciting subversion, measures that seemed excessive when applied to people accused only of possessing pamphlets, said Janet Pang, an attorney who is helping some of they.
“You are only supposed to use the power that is necessary, and this is how the law should be,” he said.
Shortly after noon on Thursday, a pro-democracy activist, Tam Tak-chi, left the station, where he had spent the night after being detained. Tam met a young man who said he had been arrested after police found a banner in his bag that said “Hong Kong independence, the only way out.” The man cried over his shoulder, said Mr. Tam.
The Hong Kong government has insisted that freedom of expression is not threatened. But on Saturday, the city’s public library system said the books of some prominent activists had been withdrawn from circulation while officials reviewed whether they violated the new law.
Censorship has even infiltrated private homes.
In June of last year, Katie Lam brought her two young children to a large rally. Her oldest son was wearing a cap that said “Hong Konger” and held up a handmade sign that said, “Don’t shoot us.”
Now Ms. Lam, a data analyst, is eager for what her children are saying at home. One of them is having a birthday party in two weeks, and Lam wondered if he should hide a print on the piano that says “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times,” a catchphrase the government says could be considered. subversive. .
Children loved to sing “Glory to Hong Kong,” the unofficial anthem of the protest movement. You are concerned that the neighbors will hear you.
“Although we all knew it would happen one day,” he said of China’s intervention, “it is still painful.”
But in some corners of the city, China’s movement has been welcome.
Successive riot strikes, followed by the coronavirus pandemic, emptied shopping malls and ground flights, eviscerating Hong Kong’s economy. The security law, while unpopular, seemed set to end the months-long stalemate in the protests.
It was the prosperity and worldliness of Hong Kong that drew Harry He, 33, to the city from mainland China 10 years ago. He earned a master’s degree in finance and engineering and fell in love with his new home: efficient public transportation, high food safety standards. He got married, found a job as an insurance agent, bought a house, had a daughter.
Last year it shattered that serenity. Once, while eating at a restaurant with friends, masked protesters tore apart a nearby sushi restaurant owned by a company seen as pro-Beijing, he said. Its continental clients began to avoid Hong Kong.
Mr. He said that he had supported the protesters at first. But he soon became convinced that the authorities needed to restore stability and that the security law would.
“I just don’t want to see violence again,” he said in an interview at his office tower in Tsim Sha Tsui, a luxury shopping district that was hit by street fighting. “I just want Hong Kong to be as developed and prosperous as before.”
Still, even some who embraced stability wondered about its price.
As essential to Hong Kong’s identity as its rampant capitalism has been its pride, even cheery, openness. Street stalls were often lined up in the city’s busiest shopping districts, dueling political messages. Small bookstores filled with expensive commercial spaces sold volumes that were banned on the mainland.
Xu Zhe, a 22-year-old recent college graduate, said the law was necessary to address “terrorism” committed by some protesters. He had been horrified by a crash in November, when protesters poured gasoline on a man who had scolded them, and then set him on fire.
But Mr. Xu was also concerned that the law could be used to suppress dissent, including speech. Mr. Xu, who grew up on the mainland before attending university in Hong Kong, never had a chance to protest at home. Last year, he attended his first demonstration, a small anti-violence rally.
If Hong Kongers lost the right to protest, he said, “I would feel very, very sorry.”
Few people in the city know the price of the protest better than Rowena He, a historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For more than two decades, Professor He studied the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when Chinese troops shot dead protesters in Beijing.
His office is an informal museum of the massacre, with a miniature replica on his bookshelf of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue that Tiananmen protesters erected shortly before the killings.
On Wednesday, the day after the security law was enacted, one of Professor He’s students decided to walk around Hong Kong, documenting a city on the cusp of change. He sent her a photo of a row of Chinese flags blowing in the wind. On a nearby sidewalk railing, a banner holding a jailed pastor on the mainland had been torn in half.
“You are a true historian,” replied the professor.
Although the old resistance markers have decreased, more subtle ones have appeared. Some protesters have turned to word games and created new meaning from widely used phrases, a tactic long adopted by mainland Chinese internet users to circumvent government censorship.
On Wednesday, in one of the city’s shopping malls, someone had spray-painted “Get up, you who refuse to be a slave,” the opening line of China’s national anthem.
And a store, in lieu of protest slogans, hung almost two dozen Mao-era China propaganda posters, including one that proclaimed, “Revolution is not a crime, rebellion is reasonable.”
Bella Huang contributed to the investigation.
