Hong Kongs Protesters and Artists Count Down To 2047 - The Atlantic

12/12/2019 Hong Kongs Protesters and Artists Count Down to 2047 - The Atlantic
GLOBAL
e Date Hong Kong Protesters Can’t Escape
e year 2047 is a deadline that has come to symbolize the end of the territory’s
way of life.
LAURA MANNERING NOVEMBER 11, 2019
"Countdown Machine," showing a countdown to July 1, 2047, the date Hong Kong's special status expires. (KIN CHEUNG / AP)
HONG KONG—It was after one of the many pro-democracy protests here this
year that the lmmaker Jevons Au, having been engulfed in tear gas, beaten with a
police truncheon, and run for safety, began thinking, If Hong Kong is like this before
2047, what will it be like after 2047?
It is a question—and a date—that has hung over this city and its demonstrations
these past several months. When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in
1997, the two countries agreed on a 50-year transition period in which its liberties
would be maintained. But as those freedoms have come under increasing threat
from Beijing, including in the form of an extradition law that has triggered the
worst political crisis in Hong Kong since the handover, 2047 has become more than
just a distant deadline. It has come to symbolize the end of Hong Kong’s way of life
and fundamental identity, the specter of its subsumption into mainland China.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/hong-kongs-protesters-and-artists-count-down-2047/601768/ 1/8
Re ected in art, lm, political discourse, and the way people see their lives, the idea
of 2047, the prospect of a nightmarish nal curtain, is an important factor in the
persistence and intensity of the city’s current unrest, now in its sixth month. Hong
Kong has long prided itself on being home to a well-trained police force, an
independent judiciary, and a relatively free society, but responses to the current
protests have upended that sense of security. A lack of accountability over police
aggression, attacks on protesters and bystanders by police and triad gangs, as well as
mass arrests, have fed into the notion that freedoms are being eroded at an alarming
rate, that 2047, and life controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, are already
happening. e death of a student who fell near a police clearance operation has
sparked an escalation in violence in recent days: On Monday, a protester was shot
in the stomach by an officer who red a live round, and a man was set on re after
arguing with demonstrators. ere is the sense of a last stand.
Five years ago, when demonstrators occupied roads in the heart of Hong Kong to
demand (ultimately in vain) democratic reforms, the urgency of the moment was
already coming into greater focus. After the movement failed to win any
concessions, new political parties emerged, calling for more radical measures such as
self-determination or even Hong Kong’s full independence from China, and faith
in the city’s political system fell precipitously.
[ Read: Meet the spiritual leader of the Hong Kong protests ]
One young protester I spoke to, who asked not to be identi ed because she feared
retribution, told me how those 2014 protests, the Umbrella Movement, awakened
her to the political complexities at play. Born in the year of the handover, she spoke
of how the 2047 deadline had determined the way she saw her own future. “In very
few situations do you have to plan for the next 50 years when you’re 20,” she told
me. “It’s not because of some career advancement; it’s because you literally don’t
know whether your home is going to exist in 2047.”
She is not alone in that view: When members of the public were invited to put
questions to Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, at an event in September, a
young man pointed out that she would be 90 years old in 2047, but he would be
only 55. e expiration date might not matter to her at that age, he said, but it
would still matter to him. “After 2047, do we have a future?” he asked.
Au himself has spent a great deal of time and energy considering what the future
might look like for the city’s residents. Dialect, a short lm that he directed, was
one of ve works by different directors featured in Ten Years, a 2015 movie that
depicted Hong Kongers’ worst fears as the clock ticks toward the end of the
guarantee on the territory’s semiautonomous status. In Dialect, a taxi driver
struggles to make a living because of new rules that stipulate he must speak
Mandarin, the official language of mainland China, rather than Hong Kong’s
dominant language, Cantonese.
Set in 2025, Ten Years resonated with Hong Kongers; at the showing I attended
when it was rst released, a young primary-school teacher sitting next to me was in
tears. Envisioning events such as the imprisoning of activists and the quashing of an
independence movement, the lm has already proved prescient. Somewhat
unsurprisingly, it was banned on the mainland, where it was declared a “thought
virus” by the state-controlled Global Times newspaper and struggled to get a proper
run in Hong Kong cinemas, despite sold-out shows. Au still sees the lm as relevant
now. “e taxi driver is the Hong Kong people if we lose this battle,” he said.
Fears for Hong Kong’s future were not always so prevalent. e origins of the 2047
deadline date back to the 19th-century Opium Wars, when China ceded parts of
Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity and leased one area, the northern New
Territories, for 99 years, a period that ended in 1997. As that date drew near, the
two nations opened talks to decide Hong Kong’s fate, eventually signing the Sino-
British Joint Declaration in 1984. at treaty laid out the terms of the handover,
stipulating that Hong Kong would fall under the direct authority of Beijing, but
also awarding it a high degree of autonomy, a “one country, two systems” formula.
Its capitalist system and liberties unseen on the mainland, including an
independent judiciary and freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, would be
protected for a half century.
[ Read: What is Britain’s responsibility to Hong Kong? ]
Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party’s most powerful leader when the
1984 agreement was signed, proposed the 50 years as a “bridge” that would foster
stability and re ect commitment to Hong Kong's special status, says John Wong,
professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Sydney. It also set a line
in the sand that made clear Beijing’s ultimate sovereignty. e agreement gave no
speci cs about what exactly would happen after 2047, but liberalization of the
Chinese economy under Deng had cultivated a view internationally that its political
system would surely follow. Life in Hong Kong then was superior to that on the
mainland in almost every respect, Wong told me, and so “there was a great deal of
hope that Hong Kong would democratize China.”
ose expectations were ultimately undone by the massacre of pro-democracy

protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. And while Hong Kong’s
transition to Chinese sovereignty initially appeared to go smoothly, unsuccessful
attempts by the government to pass an anti-sedition law and impose a patriotic
curriculum on schools, both of which triggered huge protests, foreshadowed future
unrest.
[ Read: e infamous date that looms over the Hong Kong protests ]
Over time, some of the city’s artists have focused on the theme of the countdown to
2047. In his 2004 lm, 2046, the legendary Hong Kong lmmaker Wong Kar-wai
tells the story of a novelist who writes of a train that time-travels to the year of the
title, where people go to recapture lost memories. Although Wong insisted that he
did not want to make a political movie, he nevertheless posed this question in an
interview with e Guardian: “e Chinese government promised Hong Kong 50
years without change; 2046 would be the last year of this promise. Will there be
change?”
More recent works of art have also sought to tackle the subject. Oxygen, a short lm
by Yip Yuen-ching that won a youth- lm award in Hong Kong in 2016, portrays
the city 50 years after the handover as a wasteland where surveillance devices are
implanted in people’s necks and the internet and media are fully controlled. at
same year, the artist Sampson Wong was part of a group behind an installation
called Countdown Machine, one of the starkest visualizations of the deadline: It
projected onto the facade of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper a countdown in seconds
to July 1, 2047, when the 50-year guarantee on Hong Kong’s status expires. “Fate
and time is so central to the discussion of Hong Kong,” Wong told me. Part of an
exhibition by the city’s arts development council, the installation was removed by
organizers once its political message became clear to them.
While some believe that the time to discuss 2047 has passed, the theater director
Wu Hoi-fai sees the deadline as important shorthand for relations with mainland
China and the issue of Hong Kong’s identity. “We are almost halfway there. It’s
high time for us to really think about it before it’s too late,” he says. In September
of this year, he staged a work titled e First and Second Half of 2047, drawing on
real-life predictions of young and old Hong Kong residents for what would happen
then. He has also commissioned eight playwrights to pen their visions of 2047 for a
new production scheduled in 2020. Wu says that while the predictions given for his
September production were almost universally bleak, he took heart from the fact
that the different generations were more united in their aspirations for Hong Kong
than he thought they would be.
With China a global superpower under the hard-line leadership of President Xi

Jinping, the signi cance of 2047 in the minds of Hong Kongers has no doubt
changed, says the University of Sydney’s Wong. “e deadline has become real—it
has been made real by circumstances unforeseen in 1984,” he said. e current
protests were sparked by a now withdrawn bill that would have allowed Hong
Kongers to be extradited to China for trial, but they have grown into a much
broader movement re ecting outrage at incursions on the city’s liberties and a
renewed demand for real democracy. Au, the Ten Years director, told me of his fears
that, as time went on, artists would nd it harder to speak out on the issue as
Beijing exerts greater control over Hong Kong, and the space for freedom of
expression here shrinks. (Already, protest marches are routinely declared illegal,
demonstrators have been ordered not to hide their identities with face masks, and
journalists report a worsening climate for the press.)
For Wong, the artist behind Countdown Machine and a regular participant in Hong
Kong’s protests, that still doesn’t mean he will stop. “What we do now will
determine our ending,” he told me. “e ending could be the worst ending. But
still we’ll have a footnote in history that we did something.”
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write
to letters@theatlantic.com.

Hong Kongs Protesters and Artists Count Down To 2047 - The Atlantic

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hong Kongs Protesters and Artists Count Down To 2047 - The Atlantic

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

12/12/2019 Hong Kongs Protesters and Artists Count Down to 2047 - The Atlantic

[ Read: Meet the spiritual leader of the Hong Kong protests ]

[ Read: What is Britain’s responsibility to Hong Kong? ]

ose expectations were ultimately undone by the massacre of pro-democracy

With China a global superpower under the hard-line leadership of President Xi

You might also like