So long as we ignore Hong Kong, a global commitment to fundamental human rights and dignity will remain unrealized. If you cherish what Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism calls “the right to have rights,” or the right to belong to a political community where we can articulate thoughts and be understood, you are a Hongkonger. We are fighting not only against, but within, a double silence: one imposed upon us by the propaganda machine of the Chinese state and one we have imposed upon ourselves by way of self-censorship, apathy, and misinformation. From Hong Kong residents to international sympathizers, we must actively engage in open dialogue and solidarity for a common human cause.
In May 2024, 32 tracks of “Glory to Hong Kong”—the unofficial anthem of the 2019–2020 protests—were removed from multiple streaming platforms due to a local court order, reflecting the broader effort to silence not just political dissent but voices of resistance in music and art. In that hollowed void rang the crushing silence brought on by the National Security Law, quietly enacted in 2020 by Beijing, bypassing the Hong Kong legislature. Under its vague provisions, permanent residents of Hong Kong who commit “secession,” “subversion,” “terrorism,” or “collusion with foreign forces” can face penalties as severe as life imprisonment. With such a broad definition, any media Beijing disfavors can be immediately “disappeared.”
The invisible cloak of silence ever thickens as a city once known for its cacophony seems to settle into harmony: Since 2021, all K-12 schools in Hong Kong, under a mandate by the Education Bureau, must perform weekly flag-raising ceremonies and sing the official Chinese national anthem alongside a new nationalist curriculum. The dichotomy of voices could not have been starker than on October 1, 2024, when the People’s Republic of China marked its 75th anniversary with a grand banquet in Beijing, while Hong Kong commemorated the 10th anniversary of the pro-universal suffrage Umbrella Movement in the diaspora, from the “Treasure in Decade – Hong Kong Protest Archival Exhibition” in The Hague, Netherlands, to an intimate Zoom panel discussion hosted by Global Hong Kong Studies at University of California, Davis that drew around 200 attendees.
Poignantly, literary and media censorship is a well-worn fact in Chinese history, as it is in global histories of censorship growing out of the processes of nation-building. The dismissal of literary works between 1949 and 1966 during the Maoist Cultural Revolution and the 1951 murder of journalists hearkens back to third century BCE Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s “burning of books and burying of scholars (焚書坑儒).” Before the 2015 kidnapping of Causeway Bay Books staff and the closure of pro-democratic outlets like House News in 2014 and Apple Daily in 2020, Hong Kong was a safe haven for Chinese writers publishing critical political commentary. Now, the Hong Kong government, complying with the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party, has thrust us back into another wave of ideological purges, sending Hong Kong communities into a panopticon. Seventy percent of journalists in the city have self-censored in 2023, and 900 have lost their jobs.
Since the 2020 crackdown on the months-long pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong—a movement fueled by broader demands for democracy and sparked by then-Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s proposed law allowing the extradition of Hong Kong suspects to mainland Chinese courts—Hong Kong has been narrated as a lament. After months of police brutality and counterforces demonstrating in streets and train stations, residents have resorted to self-censorship and exile, and the international community has mourned the loss of freedom in Hong Kong. Reports of activists being arrested and charged proliferated. Communities and families in exile sit around their dinner tables, shaking their heads at the sobering news on the television. But dwelling on these jeremiads alone serves no purpose—especially when we are urgently facing a government imposing upon the city an illusion of peace, even as participating in primary elections could be considered a crime. We cannot afford a narrative of defeatism—one where the struggle for Hong Kong’s freedom is reduced to an abstract tragedy rather than a political struggle demanding immediate action.
The action takes place in the subaltern—where resistance thrives beyond the spotlight. Pro-democracy voices, finding local publications and news outlets increasingly impenetrable, have sought refuge in less conventional spaces: Zoom rooms, advocacy and art venues in the diaspora, and private conversations among family and friends. As scholars Fred Moten and Stephan Harney articulate in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, it is in these spaces that alternative knowledge and new forms of resistance can emerge. However, unlike the poet Li Bai, who exiled himself to escape political turmoil, we cannot retreat forever. Our subaltern space is a temporary refuge—a springboard from which to amplify our voices and press for governmental action. Self-censorship can, if used strategically, become a form of resistance.
The term “Hongkonger” has evolved into a dynamic political and cultural symbol, constantly shifting in meaning. It represents solidarity, resistance, and an identity shaped by Hong Kong’s complex history. Unfortunately, it has also been co-opted by some to signify separatism—whether geopolitical, cultural, or ethnic. When ethnically Chinese Hongkongers reject their Chineseness, they neglect a history marked by dynastic China’s Century of Humiliation, the struggle of a fledgling republic to unify under socialism, and its eventual descent into authoritarianism. On the other hand, the degree to which they reject Chineseness—an act partly rooted in sinophobia, a cousin of Orientalism, one of the West’s most harmful ideological constructions that has now infiltrated even the minds of those it seeks to ridicule—may more likely be a reflection of the level of oppression imposed by the authoritarian government. The despotism of the Chinese government, in other words, has reached a point where individuals feel compelled to disown their ethno-national identity altogether. The radicalism of the government fueled the radicalism of the revolution. Meanwhile, the United States, with its own contradictions, watches the drama unfold through lenses of both detached amusement and McCarthyist paranoia. The global tendency to compartmentalize Hong Kong’s struggles—treating them as distant or unrelated to our own or simplifying them for ideological convenience—represents a deliberate erasure, a refusal to engage with the full complexity of the situation.
It is not worth it to silence ourselves this way—through misinformation and apathy—especially when it is a silence we can choose to break. In doing so, we lose the true meaning of being a Hongkonger. It is not about whether one is Chinese or not (which does not even begin to address Hong Kong’s ethnically diverse population); it is about the act of speaking out. As novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen said, “What seemed to be dissonance at some point in the past will become common sense in the present.” In this unfolding dialectic, the voices of the oppressed—once dismissed as noise—will shape Hong Kong’s future. Nguyen also coined the term narrative plenitude to describe how marginalized communities must fight to tell their own stories. Hong Kong urgently needs its own narrative plenitude. We cannot allow the state, the illusion of the panopticon, or our own ignorance to silence us.