At the Edge of Empire - by Edward Wong
Published:
At the Edge of Empire - by Edward Wong
Read: 2024-10-21
Recommend: 6/10
This is a Hong Kong edition that corroborates the ideas from three other books: Age of Ambition - by Evan Osnos, Red Roulette - by Desmond Shum, and 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrow - by Ai Weiwei
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Hong Kong was much more than a geopolitical question for me. My connection had manifested itself in myriad ways throughout childhood. Imagination and immigration: the two are intertwined. Those migrating imagine the new homeland before arriving, while their children imagine the old one. Hong Kong was the city of my imagination when I was growing up. I had heard stories from my parents about their lives in the territory. They had left behind family members when they moved to the United States, relatives with whom they talked during late-night phone calls every few months. I grew up speaking with my parents in Cantonese and English, the two languages of the colony. My mother’s Cantonese cooking was, of course, something she had brought across the ocean with her. Rice congee for breakfast and shrimp dumplings and bitter melon stir-fried in black bean sauce. Language and food, the most portable forms of nostalgia, bind you to places like nothing else can.
At the summit of Victoria Peak, 1,811 feet above the sea, a deejay scratched at turntables in a corner of a restaurant. The room throbbed. Party guests stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows with panoramic views of the harbor and Kowloon beyond. Keep an eye out for the celebrities, Eugene said. Men in dark suits with hair slicked back chatted with slim women holding champagne flutes. I looked around for the so-called four kings of Cantopop, singers-turned-actors with the English names Andy and Aaron and Jacky and Leon, or for the director Wong Kar-wai, whose film about a gay Hong Kong couple in Buenos Aires was opening that summer. Like Wong’s other movies, Happy Together was a story of dislocation and solitude, of nostalgia and longing for a vanishing Hong Kong.
I knew nothing about that part of Father’s past. Growing up, I had not thought much about the details of my parents’ lives before their move to America. I knew only the vague contours and a few specific events, and it had felt like spotting stars in the night sky without seeing the constellations.
I stood before the tombstone and held the sticks in front of me as I bowed three times. Eugene did the same. Then came Wan Heung. We placed the sticks in the incense holder. The smoke curled upward, and the breeze carried it and the fragrant scent along the rows of other grave sites to the trees at the edge of the cemetery. I imagined it drifting out to the South China Sea.
A registration sheet for village elections was posted on the door of the ancestral hall at the south end. Years ago, journalists and scholars had kept an eye on these kinds of elections for any signs of the budding of democracy at the grassroots level in China. Now, people knew the reality: the elections were a way for the Communist Party to stay in power while projecting the appearance of citizens having a choice in picking local leaders. In almost all cases, the local party apparatus ensured that their favored candidate won.
From their base in Yan’an, in the dry loess hills of northern China where villagers lived in cave homes, Mao and his compatriots planned their campaigns against the Nationalists. The two sides had agreed to a truce in 1937 to turn their focus to repelling the Japanese. Mao had watched as the Nationalists, who governed China, did the hard fighting, saving his guerrilla troops for the inevitable rekindling of the civil war.
At Guangya, political indoctrination took place every Monday morning. The students crowded into an auditorium to hear about the philosophy of Sun Yat-sen, who had served as the first president of China after helping catalyze the 1911 revolution and the overthrow of the Qing. Sun was revered by the Nationalists and respected by the Communists. During the assembly, which was led by the school principal, the students would listen to lectures on the ideas and politics of both Sun and the Nationalist Party. Father and his fellow high school students memorized and recited the three principles of Sun, called the ideology of the three min 民: ethnic nationalism, people’s authority, and people’s livelihood. They sang the anthem that the Nationalists had adopted for China. In 2020, when I talked with Father about his high school years, he could still recall the lyrics and sing them. He said there was no way to forget them since he had sung the song every week for four years in his youth.
Over the years, the museum had become a focal point for the Communist Party’s telling and retelling of history, its depictions of victimization and dominance. It was at the front of the museum that the party erected the digital clock in the years leading up to the return of Hong Kong in 1997, the red numbers counting down to the end of Western colonial occupation in China.
Over dim sum, Father heard about the lives of these men he had not seen in six decades. One man in a tan jacket had worked as a doctor. Another wearing a scarf had been a police officer. They passed memories of school life back and forth, like handing polished jade stones to each other to gaze at: how they would all wake up in the dorm room to music played on a phonograph; how the other students called Father by the nickname Gweilo, or foreign devil, because he had curly hair, rare in China; how he loved swimming and photography, walking around campus with a camera. Father smiled, and his eyes glowed as he listened to it all.
The earthquake that struck at 2:28 p.m. on May 12, 2008, measured 7.9 on the scale, the most powerful one in China since 1950. Even in my office in Beijing, 950 miles northeast of the epicenter in Sichuan Province, I felt the ground tremble.
Many Chinese citizens still admired the United States and would go live and work there if given the chance. Top Communist Party officials were sending their children to be educated there, including Xi Jinping, then the vice president, whose daughter would soon enroll at Harvard under a pseudonym. Yet there was a new sense of pride in China that, at its most defensive, took the shape of overt hostility to the United States and its allies and institutions.
Murong and I decided to sit on his balcony, a setting I appreciated once I realized he was a chain-smoker. He recited for me lines he had written late the previous year for a speech to be delivered in accepting his first literary award. “Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder. I am not a Chinese writer so much as a person with a mental disorder.” He went on: “I call this ‘castrated writing’—I am a proactive eunuch. I have already castrated myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.”
Ai knew there was no place now for him or his ideas in China. But the police had kept his passport. He had been let out of jail, but the country had become his prison.
a fundamental part of the problem lay in the concentration of power in a single man. Mao had an endless appetite for power, and for the exercise of it in the most brutal and callous ways, with little regard for the lives of millions of his own countrypeople. Never had that been more apparent than during the famine, which was still persisting.
Throughout China, the authorities controlled where people lived by a system of residential permits called hukou 戶口. Citizens needed to show their permits to get food and rations. The system allowed officials to keep track of people and limit who could live in a place at any given time.
After my story on the glacier ran, the scientist, Qin Xiang, called to say that the police had contacted him and asked why he had granted me an interview. That was a sign of another trend in China that prodded me toward leaving. The journalism work had become harder, with sources and colleagues coming under greater risk. Years earlier, a story on a glacier wouldn’t have been deemed sensitive by the authorities. Now, a wide range of topics were potential trip wires: the economy, the environment, the entertainment industry, and so on. The party sought to tighten its control over all facets of the narrative. In the coming years, Xi would command people to “tell China’s story well” to the outside world.
The detentions of dissenters happened quickly after that. The most notable arrest of the summer was that of Jimmy Lai, the publisher of Apple Daily. Almost one year later, in June 2021, the newspaper’s managers were forced to shut it down, ending the twenty-six-year run of the city’s premier pro-democracy publication. Lai was convicted on two charges of fraud the next year, and the court sentenced him to five years and nine months in prison.
In the eyes of many people outside China, Hong Kong became synonymous with Xinjiang and Tibet as another symbol of the repression of the party, a victim of its drive to establish a new Chinese empire. Beijing defined itself through its command of the frontiers, the same ones where Father had once lived and toiled, and from which his family—my family—had come. That control affected millions of lives. It was the great leveling force of the idea of empire through time and space, ensuring the subjects remained in their proper place. Father and Mother had learned that. Some of the people bridled at the rule while others embraced it, seeing it as necessary for the restoration of a strong nation. I had witnessed all this, in so many different corners of the land, through so many different lives. I had seen the people fighting to play their role, to shape their land, to be more than what the rulers wanted of them.
All that resulted in mass protests in November, when people held up white sheets of paper to signify their discontent with the zero-Covid policy, considered Xi’s personal initiative. The Chinese government was failing both to keep out the virus and to provide a sense of stability for many citizens. Economic growth lagged. Just one month earlier, Xi had compelled the party to extend his leadership for a third term, at least another five years—something no leader had done since Mao. The move made many of my liberal Chinese friends nervous. They knew the horrors that an aging Mao had inflicted on the country, even though Xi was only sixty-nine. Their anxiety was borne out through the fall by Xi’s misguided lockdown and vaccine policies and the failure to contain Covid, a failure that echoed the mistakes in late 2019 and early 2020 by local officials in Wuhan that had allowed the virus to spread across China and the world.
Chinese officials stopped posting cremation statistics. America had had one disastrous reaction to Covid, which had led to more than one million deaths, and now here was another. Epidemiologists outside China, sifting through data, estimated to The New York Times that between one and one-and-a-half million people died in China during the Covid surge that peaked in January 2023. That estimate was supported by cremation statistics from eastern Zhejiang Province that someone had posted online briefly despite a nationwide ban on the public release of cremation numbers.
Perhaps it was a prelude to the Mao-style counterespionage campaign that the Chinese government would roll out in 2023. Perhaps it was a manifestation of zealous officials acting on Xi’s famous dictate about journalism: China’s party and state media organizations must “take the party as their last name”—meaning demonstrate complete loyalty to the Communist Party in their work.
If you’re in China, you have to obey the Communist Party, he said. There’s no choice. Under democracy, you have choices and you have freedom. It’s adaptable. Communism is inflexible. It doesn’t allow free thinking. In the Communist system, you have to show your loyalty to the party. If you’re not in the party, you can’t get ahead.