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Hong Kong’s Chinese emigrants “love” the rapidly disappearing freedoms of the new Hong Kong protests

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Hong Kong, China – While teaching in Hong Kong in 2011, filmmaker Ying Liang was banned from going home to the Chinese mainland after making a documentary about a Beijing mother trying to save her son from the death penalty.

Ten years after he accidentally became an immigrant, Ying tried to make the most of the city’s freedoms, even though he was under threat. National Security Act and repression of pro-democracy politicians and activists.

Just last month, Ying screened an offensive film for two dozen viewers at an art center.

“We need to take care of our freedom while we are still there,” he told Al Jazeera.

For most Hong Kong-born residents, the law has long placed an obstacle in the freedoms they once held under “one country, two systems,” in the framework of the former British colony that returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

China promised the territory “great autonomy” for at least 50 years.

Before Beijing intervened last year, the people of the territory were free to protest against the authorities and run in the elections to organize political parties.

For migrants on the mainland who have embraced freedoms they have never enjoyed growing up, regressing in a more repressive way of governance causes fear and anxiety.

“I think the repression is going to be harder and stronger than what you would normally see on the peninsula, it’s better to scare everyone,” said Ying, a 34-year-old documentary filmmaker.

“This wasn’t something I experienced growing up in Shanghai.”

As the father of three, including a two-month-old baby, Ying says he is most concerned about being pushed by the government. patriotic education.

“What’s happening in schools is what I find most troubling,” he said. “I think all the kids would come out completely clean. I know from my experience how it will mark you for life. It scares you to care about politics. When the students came out to protest, there was still hope in this city.”

‘Promised Land’

For most of the past century, Hong Kong has been described by millions of Chinese as “promised land,” both on the mainland and in the diaspora.

Although China was torn apart by numerous cataclysms (regime change, military invasion, world war, civil war, famines, and political cleansing), the British colony stood out as an island of peace and relative opportunity.

After successive waves of immigration from the mainland, just over half of the city’s 7.5 million people are born.

Since its relocation, more than a million Chinese have migrated to Hong Kong under the family reunification scheme.

In a 2016 study of new adults, Hong Kong political scientists found that “immigrants from China are generally more politically conservative and in favor of a pro-Beijing governing coalition in the elections.”

But not all of them.

Flora Chen, 35, has spent the last 10 years outside of China and vowed never to return

A university job brought him to Hong Kong, and he “saw it as an alternative Chinese society, where law and order and social norms are protected by institutions.

“For the generations of Chinese liberals on the mainland marked by Tiananmen, the Hong Kong vigil [shone] like a beacon of hope, ”Chen said slyly.

The memory of the 1989 repression was not allowed anywhere else in China.

But last year, for the first time, the Hong Kong government he banned the annual vigil Citing the risks of COVID-19. Organizers, as well as a few thousand who defied the ban, are on trial.

After arriving in 2018, Chen took part in protests against the government a year later. As an academic in the social sciences, Chen said his research is “socially engaged” as well.

Hong Kong has long expelled emigrants from the mainland: to reunite with family, earn money or enjoy the freedoms that are disappearing from the territory [File: Anthony Wallace/AFP]

What worries him most is that a reduction in his academic freedom will drown out his scholarship.

“In the countries of the peninsula we know how real the fear is. We learned to be careful and see what we were saying, ”Chen told Al Jazeera.

“But now I’m starting to notice the fear on my students’ faces. Their faces are marked with anger and pain, through power. “

Although China’s economy has progressed over the past quarter century, Hong Kong has maintained its appeal to many of the continent’s residents as a territory of opportunity, under a system based on rules that are fairer than usual.

Outside the family visa regime, the largest contingent of migrants on the peninsula has reached higher education.

All local universities are now dominated by postgraduate students from the mainland, after graduating when they take advantage of the opportunities they offer in the territory.

Jacqueline Zhang, Jacqueline Zhang, Jacqueline Zhang, Jacqueline Zhang, when she left her master’s degree in media studies to study less than 300 kilometers away, thought she was out of her hometown.

But almost 10 years later, 32-year-old Zhang says he enjoys living in a society where fair play and transparency are the norm. On the peninsula, he says, it is “guanxi” – a network of connections and family ties – that account and responsibility is rare.

When he handed over Hong Kong to Beijing, Zhang says it has “increased fear” for people on the mainland who have family and friends on the northern border.

It is known that the authorities are persecuting politically active Chinese relatives on the mainland in order to use the resource of family pressure to control these “conflict agents”.

Zhang says he knows many mainland Chinese in the exiled highway in Hong Kong, fearing that their political involvement will put them on the horror list. They are concerned that traveling home could result in a departure ban that could prevent them from traveling outside the country.

Former journalist Zhang is not sure if he is on any of the lists, but he does not want to take advantage of the opportunity.

For now, he has found comfort and companionship in the “tribe” he found in Hong Kong – people who are not afraid to discuss so-called taboo issues and back down from the idea of ​​censorship.

“Freedom and the rule of law are like air. You don’t feel that much while he’s there, ”Zhang said.

“You only feel it after you remove it.”



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