Not all Hongkongers celebrate the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to mainland China on July 1. Some prefer the Hong Kong Festival on Jan. 26, the day that marked the beginning of British rule as the British navy landed on Hong Kong island in 1841. The tenth Hong Kong Festival, held this year in the U.K., celebrated the 182nd anniversary of the opening of Hong Kong. My two friends, Chung Kim-wah, Benson Wong, and I, representing Citizens of Our Time Learning Hub, an education platform for Hongkongers, held a talk on “What is Hong Kong?”
After Wong mentioned Hong Kong’s geographical features, I pointed out it is used in a number of popular songs in Hong Kong. For example, in the 1990 Pearl of the Orient by Taiwanese singer Luo Ta-yu, the lyric “The small river bends to the south” describes Hong Kong’s location at the mouth of the Pearl River. A 1969 song, Hong Kong Song, which is not as well-known as the former, repeats the line “Victoria Harbor, from the peak we can overlook far away” six times.
By all accounts, this 1969 song is part of a campaign to promote Hong Kong’s recovery from the scar of the 1967 Riots, like what the Hong Kong government is doing now. “The export industry is famous, trade is flowing freely,” “Hong Kong is picturesque, and the people are happy,” “modest and courteous we are,” “Chinese and foreigners alike are peaceful and happy,” “it is a good paradise, beautiful and amicable.”
What made this song special is its ideological appeal. It highlights “freedom” and “democracy.” Hongkongers today may be bewildered by this part of the lyric, as it is quite a fact that we have had all kinds of freedoms with no democracy. Is it that Hong Kong in 1969 was like today, where lies are told for a good Hong Kong story?
Not really. Views differ when we have different definitions. Today, Hongkongers generally believe that democracy is characterized by an elected legislative body. Therefore, they hold the view that democracy began in 1985 with the introduction of elections in the Legislative Council. However, back in the 1950s and 1960s, people accepted that the legislature could not be elected; they were satisfied that with elected members to the Urban Council, which focused on municipal services, Hong Kong had achieved democracy.
Readers who are familiar with situations in Hong Kong at that time may question that corruption, especially that of police—in receiving bribes and exerting violence in the 1967 Riots—compromised the image of “democracy.” A stronger context of Hong Kong’s “democracy” was necessary, and that was the struggle against totalitarianism in the Cold War context. As a British colony, Hong Kong naturally formed part of the camp of democracy and acquired the identity of democracy as it was free from totalitarian terrors across the Shenzhen River, such as the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. In a 1950 essay in a pro-Taiwan newspaper, the writer expressed the hope that in the Window of Democracy in the East (Hong Kong), there would be eternal liberty and happiness. One year after the Kuomintang followers were moved to Tiu Keng Leng after being harassed by the communists in the Mount Davis camp, the new district was described as “a small democratic society.” Therefore, the praise of democracy in the 1967 Hong Kong Song conveys the meaning that Hong Kong lives better than China as a democratic city.
It is thus clear that the history of democracy in Hong Kong, or at least democracy as an identity and a value to pursue, is far long longer than we believe. Democracy as a core value of Hong Kong should not be underestimated. Even the communists have to pay superficial respect to democracy after Communist China was founded. If Hong Kong dares not pay lip service to democracy in, say, school education and avoids it in every possible situation, that means we are even worse than Hong Kong and China in the 1950s.
