Lim’s The Indelible City (Riverhead, Apr.) documents the fight to preserve Hong Kong’s unique identity in the face of a brutal Chinese crackdown.
How has British and Chinese rule shaped perceptions of Hong Kong?
The stories the British and then the Chinese told are the same, this idea that Hong Kongers are economic animals and not interested in politics. This was a fiction that was told over and over again. I don’t think it was ever true, but that’s the power of narrative control. What I wanted to do was center Hong Kongers’ own voices in the telling of their own stories.
You also tell your own story, including how you painted protest banners while covering the 2019 demonstrations as a reporter.
I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to set that story down, because the way we have been trained as journalists is absolutely rooted in neutrality and objectivity, as though one is floating above what is happening—as though it doesn’t affect you. For someone from Hong Kong, that simply wasn’t possible. It sort of felt immoral to do that when what you were seeing required a moral stance.
The most visible faces of those protests weren’t even born when Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule. Why do you think younger people were so engaged and willing to be confrontational?
It’s partly a question of political maturity on the part of Hong Kongers. The British intentionally did not give Hong Kong democracy. Its first political parties and elections were in the 1980s. In 2019, people were willing to come out and march for those values. Those protests were not just youth protests. They were across the full spectrum of society. I think one reason was that people had seen the benefits of a relatively free society. Fully two million out of the seven million people in Hong Kong were coming out weekend after weekend. They were an expression of pure political idealism.
And now Beijing has closed independent media and stripped away even a pretense of electoral freedoms.
In recent weeks they had what they called “elections” in Hong Kong. But by all dictionary definitions, it’s not an election if half the people who want to stand are in prison and lots of people are barred from standing. It’s not an election, it’s a selection. Who would have thought that any of these things would have happened? From 2019 onwards, the protest, the crackdown, the national security laws—all of this has been completely outside our imagination. It’s been so shocking and so sudden. The remaking of Hong Kong has just been so brutal. What we’ve seen in the last few months is this absolute rooting out of civil society. Every day, every week, something else is being lost—the culture we’ve grown up with is being unmade and remodeled and reshaped.
