The Hong Kong Historical past Museum was the place to go to know the town’s transformation from a fishing village to a glittering metropolis. It housed a life-size duplicate of a standard fishing boat and a recreation of a Nineteenth-century road lined with retailers.
This exhibition, often known as “Hong Kong Historical past”, is being renewed. As an alternative, individuals are lining up for a brand new everlasting gallery on the museum that tells a unique, extra ominous story concerning the metropolis – that Hong Kong is consistently prone to being undermined by hostile international powers. The exhibition consists of reveals about spies who’re in all places and photographs of anti-government road protests within the metropolis which have been described as Western-instigated.
Whereas opening the exhibition this month, John Lee, Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed chief, made it clear that its foremost goal was to function a warning to the town. “Defending nationwide safety is all the time an ongoing effort. There is no such thing as a completion,” he stated. The gallerywhich is run by Hong Kong’s high nationwide safety authority, opened to the general public on August 7.
The exhibition factors to a brand new aspect of the Hong Kong authorities’s crackdown on the town after anti-government protests in 2019 posed the most important problem to Beijing’s rule in a long time. Over time, authorities have launched safety legal guidelines to quell dissent. Now they insist on controlling how individuals will bear in mind the current political upheaval.
The federal government says the protests are usually not an natural expression of residents’ democratic aspirations, as opposition activists within the metropolis have stated, however a part of an ongoing plot by Western powers to destabilize China.
The nationwide safety exhibit opens with a brief video highlighting the unfair Nineteenth-century treaties that pressured China to cede Hong Kong to the British, in addition to the Japanese occupation of the town throughout World Warfare II. Describing the 2019 protests, the video highlights footage of protesters throwing Molotov cocktails. “Legislation and order are gone,” stated the narrator. He then credited new nationwide safety legal guidelines imposed by Beijing within the ensuing crackdown for turning the tide “from chaos to order.”
The show reveals the battered shields, helmets and boots utilized by the riot police who quelled the protests. It listed the casualties and injury allegedly attributable to the protesters: 629 injured law enforcement officials and greater than 5,000 Molotov cocktails thrown by violent protesters.
There was no point out of tear gasrubber bullets, cartridges and hot spray deployed by the police. The show didn’t point out attack on protesters at a subway station by a mob armed with golf equipment and rods and the police slow reaction to this violence.
“One of many factors of this exhibition is to stoke fears of social ‘upheaval’ and ‘chaos’ in order to steer Hong Kongers to just accept the social stability that the Chinese language Communist Social gathering claims to supply,” stated Kirk Dentonprofessor emeritus at Ohio State College and creator of a a book on the politics of history museums in contemporary China.
Winnie Lu, 61, a Hong Kong resident who works in gross sales and was visiting the museum on a weekday, stated the exhibit reminded her of how troublesome it was for her to get to work through the protests when demonstrators blocked roads and paralyzes the subway. “How can extraordinary individuals stay a superb life with out nationwide safety?” she stated.
In some ways, the nationwide safety exhibition seems to have taken a web page out of the Chinese language authorities’s playbook, after the Chinese language navy’s brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy motion in Tiananmen Sq. in 1989 left widespread disillusionment. Within the months and years that adopted, the authorities pushed an intensive patriotic schooling marketing campaign in mainland China that portrayed Japan because the enemy of the Chinese language individuals and the Communist Social gathering as the one engine of progress in Chinese language historical past.
Rowena Toi, a Senior Analysis Fellow on the College of Texas at Austin, and a historian of the Tiananmen bloodbath who has taught in Hong Kong, stated the brand new nationwide safety exhibit was a part of a wider marketing campaign to “manipulate historical past” by Beijing after the Tiananmen crackdown. China’s management desires to seal “the official historical past of historical past within the nationwide reminiscence, highlighting China’s sacrifice by the hands of the West and Japan,” she stated.
Within the identify of patriotic schooling, the Hong Kong authorities can be turning the Coastal Protection Museum, a navy museum that traditionally centered on dilapidated British fortifications, right into a memorial to China’s World Warfare II battle with Japan. He’ll rename it the Hong Kong Museum of the Warfare of Resistance and Coastal Protection, referring to the battle with the phrase utilized by China: “The Warfare of Resistance of the Chinese language Individuals towards Japanese Aggression.” The federal government additionally plans to construct a museum specializing in Chinese language achievements, the historical past of the Communist Social gathering and the founding of the Individuals’s Republic.
The brand new nationwide safety exhibit provides to broader issues concerning the chilling impact imposed by China’s crackdown on the opposition, which has led to the arrests of dozens of veteran democracy activists on nationwide safety fees. Public libraries have withdrawn books associated to native pro-democracy figures or actions. Gatherings commemorating the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Sq. bloodbath in Beijing have been banned and a sculpture that was a monument to this has been removed. Scientists are additionally underneath strain; Ms. He, a Canadian citizen, was lately denied a visa to return to her job as an affiliate professor on the Chinese language College of Hong Kong.
Some Hong Kongers are involved about what they see as the federal government’s efforts to rewrite the previous. When the Historical past Museum’s everlasting exhibit, The Historical past of Hong Kong, was closed for renovations in 2020, guests packed the gallery, fearing that authorities would use the deliberate redevelopment to erase the town’s colonial historical past and references to the annual vigils of candles commemorating the victims of Tiananmen, now thought-about delicate.
Consultants stated the exhibition on the historical past museum sought to attach Hong Kong much more intently with Chinese language historical past. The authorities additionally organized patriotic examine journeys to mainland China and revised college curricula to counter a rising native id distinct from the mainland.
A number of the new reveals within the nationwide safety exhibit intently resemble those who can be present in equally themed museum reveals on the continent. A Chinese language flag hung from the ground to the ceiling on the scarlet partitions. Subsequent to it was a 13-foot duplicate oil portray of Mao Zedong as he proclaimed the founding of the Individuals’s Republic of China in 1949 in Tiananmen Sq..
