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Lord Alton: As a slow motion Tiananmen Sq unfolds, will you stand with Hong Kong?
HONG KONG FREE PRESS
8 November 2019 08:58
By Lord Alton of Liverpool
Watching the Tiananmen-style assault on Hong Kong universities and their students, I looked again at a postcard I recently received from a student in Hong Kong. It included some words from the Les Misérables classic refrain “Can you hear the people sing, is there a world you long to see? …Will you be strong and stand with me?”
It’s not just about a future world which HongKongers want to see: it’s about their familiar world which they are seeing destroyed.
A student emailed me from one of the universities to say:
[T]he intensity last night was a completely new level when the firing of tear gas has been literally non-stop; I later realized that the HKPolice fired more than 1000 tg overnight. I don’t know how to describe the suffocating-ness, the burning-ness in eyes and on skin, the screams out of injured and fear; It had to be a hell. Yes, it was a hell, …in front of us were students hit by rubber bullets, in their eyes, in their heads, in their chests…
One of Asia’s truly great cities, a free city, is now under de facto martial law, convulsed by previously unimaginable scenes. Three months ago, inspired by Jean Valjean and the students in Les Mis, some Hong Kong school children, during their morning Assembly sang the plea to stand against oppression and dictatorship – instead of singing the National Anthem.
In its characteristically authoritarian, heavy-handed, way, China responded by removing the song from music platforms. Like most of the counter-productive things that authoritarians do, it simply helped to further popularise the song – into Cantonese and Taiwanese. The most popular version is translated as “Asking Who That Hasn’t Spoken Out” ?
It’s not just about a future world which HongKongers want to see: it’s about their familiar world which they are seeing destroyed.
A student emailed me from one of the universities to say:
[T]he intensity last night was a completely new level when the firing of tear gas has been literally non-stop; I later realized that the HKPolice fired more than 1000 tg overnight. I don’t know how to describe the suffocating-ness, the burning-ness in eyes and on skin, the screams out of injured and fear; It had to be a hell. Yes, it was a hell, …in front of us were students hit by rubber bullets, in their eyes, in their heads, in their chests…
One of Asia’s truly great cities, a free city, is now under de facto martial law, convulsed by previously unimaginable scenes. Three months ago, inspired by Jean Valjean and the students in Les Mis, some Hong Kong school children, during their morning Assembly sang the plea to stand against oppression and dictatorship – instead of singing the National Anthem.
In its characteristically authoritarian, heavy-handed, way, China responded by removing the song from music platforms. Like most of the counter-productive things that authoritarians do, it simply helped to further popularise the song – into Cantonese and Taiwanese. The most popular version is translated as “Asking Who That Hasn’t Spoken Out” ?
More at link---
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/11/18/lord-alton-slow-motion-tiananmen-sq-unfolds-will-stand-hong-kong/?fbclid=IwAR1QFMpOJ09xcYLb64s5FVNTEhwLDCxrtlzs7T1s7Ut37zLEGwg9F5T5sCs
