The World Post: Reclaiming Hong Kong's June 4th

(Excerpt from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yuen-chan/reclaiming-hong-kongs-jun_b_5517027.html)

Recolonisation


[...] college lecturer Franklen Choi readily concedes that June 4th is his business. "June 4th has something to do with me because the regime responsible for June 4th has something to do with me. Even today, that regime is still standing in the way of our [Hong Kong's] progress," he says.

Choi, who teaches social policy and social studies, has taken part in every Victoria Park vigil and has taken his son there every year since he was born in 2008.

But in May last year, Choi suddenly found himself at the centre of a storm when a Facebook status he posted went viral on social media. In it, Choi said he had attended every candlelit vigil but the organiser's theme of "Loving the country and the people is the spirit of Hong Kong" would keep him away.

"I'm not going because I don't love the country," said Choi's post.

Barely a year after mass demonstrations forced the government to shelve plans to mandate patriotic education in Hong Kong's schools, Choi's message struck a nerve. The Hong Kong Alliance quietly dropped "loving the country" from the theme.

While he admires Chinese philosophy, Choi says he has never really felt Chinese. He grew up working class "during the golden age of Hong Kong, in the 1970s and 80s when Hong Kong's economy was taking off and popular culture was at its peak."

Choi's vision of Hong Kong is a diverse one made up of ethnic minorities and migrants alongside the majority ethnic Chinese. He has been involved in social activism and supports migrants' rights. Although he is staunchly pro-Hong Kong, he is far removed from the stereotype of a xenophobic Mainlander-bashing Hong Kong'er sometimes portrayed in overseas media.

What he is angry about is the impact of the sheer scale of the flow of mainland visitors to Hong Kong on its culture and way of life; about Hong Kong's lack of a say over who is permitted to settle here under the Mainland's One-Way Permit immigration scheme; the creeping use of Putonghua as a teaching language in Hong Kong's schools and Beijing's increasingly heavy-handed intervention in Hong Kong's daily affairs.

"Since the handover, what we have seen is the re-colonisation of Hong Kong," he says.

For Choi, the meaning of June 4th in Hong Kong needs to be more explicitly linked to Hong Kong's own fight to preserve its autonomy and struggle for real democracy - something the Hong Kong Alliance and mainstream pro-democratic groups have failed to do.

"There is [not much] we can do to further democracy in mainland China. We have to work on Hong Kong first. We need universal suffrage, we need democracy in everyday life," he says.

Yiu and Choi's discontent and disillusionment with the old ideas of pan-Chinese democracy are shared by a growing number of Hong Kong'ers, especially those from the younger generation, some of whom are attracted to the idea of Hong Kong independence.

Neither Yiu nor Choi will go that far. Although they would broadly describe themselves as localists, they refuse to call Mainlanders locusts or accuse Hong Kong'ers who support Chinese democracy movements of being "traitors".

Both chose to mark June 4th in their own ways - Yiu arranged a gathering of individuals who simply wanted to remember and pay their respects. Choi, despite his misgivings, attended the Victoria Park vigil, just as he eventually did last year.

In the end, Choi's wavering over whether to attend was settled by his [six] year-old son, who insisted he wanted to go, "to commemorate the students who were killed [by] the government."

Indeed in recent years, many of the faces at Victoria Park on June 4th, have been those of young people, born after the events of 1989 and increasingly, after the 1997 handover.