38 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
AREPORTER AT LARGE
THE ACT OF PROTEST
Struggling against Beijing, Hong Kong tries to define itself.BYJIAYANG FA N
A
cloudless mid-September after-
noon in Hong Kong. At City
Hall, two flags—one of the
People’s Republic of China, the other
of Hong Kong—flap halfheartedly in
the wind coming off the harbor. Inside,
university students are engaged in in-
tense debate. A moonfaced young man,
his thick hair pulled up in a bun, rises
from his seat at a long white table to at-
tack the formula known as “one coun-
try, two systems,” which was deployed
in the early eighties, by the Chinese
leader Deng Xiaoping, as he negotiated
with Britain for the handover of Hong
Kong. It seemed to guarantee that after
the handover, which took place in 1997,
Hong Kong would continue to enjoy
distinct political and socioeconomic free-
doms for at least fifty years. The young
man, however, declares that the formula
is nothing but a “rhetorical coverup” for
an erosion of liberties. Given the city’s
compromised autonomy, hasn’t the cen-
tral government, in Beijing, broken its
promise to the people of Hong Kong?
Suddenly, a bell rings, and a woman
sets out with prosecutorial vehemence
the dangers of rejecting the “one coun-
try, two systems” principle. “If we fight
the current framework, we will lose the
existing rights and freedoms,” she says.
“What happens after fifty years?”
the man counters. “Should we bid fare-
well to our current way of life?”
“We still have twenty-eight years to
find a path of survival,” she replies, re-
ferring to the end of the fifty-year tran-
sition period, in 2047. This date, when
Hong Kong is likely to be wholly in-
tegrated into the People’s Republic of
China, inspires enormous foreboding.
Debates about Hong Kong’s fate are
convulsing the city—at family dinner
tables, online, and, above all, in the streets.
Since June, demonstrations sparked by
a bill to allow extraditions from Hong
Kong to the mainland have drawn un-
precedented numbers of protesters de-
termined to resist Beijing’s influence.
But the debate at City Hall—which, de-
spite its name, is mostly a performance
venue—was actually a piece of semi-
documentary theatre called “The First
and Second Half of 2047.” Much of the
script was written by the students who
performed it, in a process that the direc-
tor, Wu Hoi Fai, described to me as
“sometimes like shooting a documen-
tary on the stage.”
As the show progressed, it reached
back in time. Suitcases were strewn
around the stage, and then stacked to
represent the city’s skyline, conjuring
the land of opportunity that drew suc-
cessive generations of immigrants and
refugees from mainland China. Wu ex-
plained that this material came from
interviews with older people; one actor
had interviewed his father, a staunch
opponent of the pro-democracy pro-
tests, and now spoke his words onstage.
Wu, who is fifty, said he has become
increasingly aware that young people
have only vague notions about Hong
Kong’s past. Many of the actors in the
play hadn’t even been born at the time
of the 1997 handover.
After the show, I talked to the cast.
A graduate of the Hong Kong Acad-
emy for Performing Arts mentioned
that work on the play had started in
the summer, not long after the begin-
ning of the current wave of protests.
She found herself thinking how odd
it was to be inside rehearsing a play
about protests when you could just go
outside and join a real one. Many of
the actors were involved in the street
demonstrations, and some rehearsals
had been rescheduled to accommodate
particularly significant rallies. Taking
off their stage costumes at the end of
a show, they donned others: the all-
black clothing, gas masks, and helmets
that have become the de-facto uniform
of the uprising.
The company’s motto was “We work Pro-China demonstrators in Tamar Park in July, dur