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As Xi Jinping, China’s leader, visits Hong Kong to mark the 25th anniversary of the handover from Britain, he arrives in a city vastly transformed from three years ago, when millions took to the streets in the biggest challenge to Beijing’s rule in decades.
Mr. Xi’s ruling Communist Party quashed that challenge by tightening its grip. The authorities arrested thousands of protesters and activists, imposed a national security law that silenced dissent and rewrote electoral rules to shut out critics of Beijing.
“This is a significant trip for him,” said John P. Burns, an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Hong Kong. “Of course, this is about celebrating the 25th anniversary and all of that, but he is also declaring victory over the pan-democratic opposition and their supporters.”
On Friday Mr. Xi installed a handpicked former security official as the city’s next leader. He had earlier met with lawmakers selected after Beijing’s electoral overhaul ensured only “patriots” could take office in Hong Kong.
“Political power must be in the hands of patriots,” Mr. Xi said in a speech on Friday after overseeing the new government’s swearing-in ceremony. “No country or region in the world will allow unpatriotic or even traitorous or treasonous forces and figures to take power.”
Hong Kong and Chinese officials attended a brief ceremony Friday morning where a police honor guard raised the flags of China and Hong Kong to mark the anniversary. A strong wind blew, and the skies were overcast and threatening rain. A government helicopter with a large Chinese flag, followed by another with a smaller Hong Kong flag, flew down Victoria Harbor as the ceremony was held at 8 a.m., followed by a fire department boat spraying water from its hoses.
But the pomp and ceremony was a stark contrast to the relative quiet on the streets under a pronounced security presence. Groups of police patrolled neighborhoods near the venue of the ceremony, and rows of police vans lined the entrances to several subway stations. To many residents of Hong Kong, the handover anniversary and Mr. Xi’s visit held little significance besides a day off.
“The central government doesn’t have to do much for Hong Kong. Just let Hong Kong fix things by itself. It’s a free economy right? It wasn’t under much governance before,” said Joeson Kwak, a 33-year-old interior design contractor who was in the district of Wanchai getting breakfast. “I don’t feel anything special today. I’m happy I don’t have to go to work today.”
Mr. Xi’s visit is as much a message intended to reinforce Beijing’s rule over Hong Kong to the city’s 7.5 million residents as it is a message of defiance to the Western governments that had denounced his crackdown. The United States, Britain and other nations have accused China of breaking its promises to allow Hong Kong to preserve its protections for individual rights for 50 years under an arrangement known as one country, two systems.
Subduing Hong Kong also has personal significance for Mr. Xi. It will help burnish his standing among the Communist Party elite at a key moment as he pursues a third five-year term in office, which he is widely expected to secure later this year.
“We can expect at the party congress in October he will highlight the success of one country, two systems,” said Sonny Lo, a Hong Kong political commentator.
To local activists, July 1 has been an anniversary of pivotal demonstrations. But a combination of pandemic restrictions and the political crackdown has largely eliminated such gatherings. One leftist group, the League of Social Democrats, had continued to mark significant dates with small demonstrations of just four people, which is technically allowed under social distancing rules.
But after visits from national security police, the group announced this week it would not hold a protest on Friday. Members of the group have been under constant surveillance and their organization was threatened with closure if they tried to demonstrate, said Avery Ng, the group’s secretary general.
“It is just like China,” he said.
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Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese control, Beijing has appointed either businesspeople or members of the bureaucratic elite to lead the city. John Lee, who was sworn in Friday as Hong Kong’s next chief executive, is the first former police officer to take the job since the handover.
His selection in a process tightly controlled by China sends a clear message. After the enactment of a tough security law and a sweeping crackdown on the political opposition, Beijing believes safeguarding China’s interests remains the top priority for Hong Kong’s leadership.
Mr. Lee, 64, joined the Hong Kong police after high school, saying a childhood encounter with street thugs taught him to value justice. He climbed the ranks, handling some of the city’s biggest criminal cases before he transferred in 2012 to the security bureau, which oversees the police.
Five years ago, he was named security secretary. In that role he crafted legislation that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China, a bill that set off massive pro-democracy protests in 2019. After China imposed a national security law on the city in 2020 that effectively prohibited dissent, he oversaw its implementation. Last year, the police arrested dozens of pro-democracy activists and politicians and charged them with subversion under the new law.
Mr. Lee, who was sanctioned by the United States in 2020 along with several Hong Kong and mainland officials, has remained an outspoken defender of the security law. He told the United Nations Human Rights Council in March that it “restored peace and stability” and stopped the “violence, destruction and chaos” of the protests.
Mr. Lee rose to the No. 2 job in Hong Kong, chief secretary, just one year ago. While in that role he led a committee that vetted candidates for public office, part of a new system of electoral controls enacted by Beijing. That body, which is tasked with ensuring the loyalty of office holders, also approved members of the committee that picked Mr. Lee to run Hong Kong in May.
During his brief campaign Mr. Lee pledged to emphasize livelihood issues like access to housing and creating job opportunities for young people. But security remains paramount. He has said he intends to win passage of Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, a package of legislation against acts of secession, sedition, subversion and treason. A previous effort to enact the legislation was dropped after mass protests in 2003. The government hasn’t tried to pass it again since.
While many observers expected him to pick a deputy with experience in business and economics, he instead named Chan Kwok-ki, another law enforcement veteran, to replace him as chief secretary. Mr. Chan spent most of his career with the immigration department, rising to director of immigration before becoming the director of the chief executive’s office in 2017. He has also served as the secretary general of the powerful national security committee that was set up under the security law in 2020.
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After they arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday, Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, and his wife, Peng Liyuan, traveled to separate venues, with Mr. Xi visiting a science park and Ms. Peng, a former singer, going to a performance venue for Chinese opera.
While media coverage was restricted, and reports on what they saw and did at the two sites not immediately available, the choice of destinations was telling, with each representing part of Beijing’s goals for Hong Kong.
“Hong Kong will definitely make new and greater contributions to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Mr. Xi said upon arriving in Hong Kong, tying the future of the former British colony to his vision for China’s restoration of its former glory and global prominence.
Mr. Xi went to the Hong Kong Science Park, which is run by a public corporation to house high-tech companies. Its tenants include biotech, robotics and communications technology companies. While the neighboring mainland city of Shenzhen is far better known as a technology center, Mr. Xi’s visit reflects plans by Beijing to integrate cities in the region more tightly.
That would help draw Hong Kong closer to mainland China and improve access to each city’s leading industries, such as high-tech manufacturing and telecommunications in Shenzhen and finance, services and higher education in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government has proposed developing extensive new urban areas in the less densely populated north of the city, in part to ease economic cooperation with Shenzhen.
Ms. Peng, who was a performer in the Chinese military and a nationally popular singer of traditional-style music, visited the Xiqu Center, which opened in 2019 to host Chinese theater and opera performances. Her visit stressed Chinese culture in a city where the perceived encroachment of Beijing has galvanized many among the younger generation to reject ties to mainland China and to assert a distinct and separate identity.
At the theater Ms. Peng watched rehearsals of two troupes, including the Tea House Rising Stars, who perform short excerpts from Cantonese operas to introduce newcomers to the genre.
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After antigovernment protests erupted in Hong Kong in 2019, posing the biggest challenge to China’s rule over the city in years, Beijing moved swiftly to crush dissent. The authorities have arrested, imprisoned or detained thousands of people, including dozens of leading opposition figures, including lawmakers, activists, academics, newspaper editors and a Catholic cardinal.
Since June 2019, more than 10,000 people have been arrested and nearly 3,000 people convicted on protest-related charges, including rioting, unlawful assembly and arson, according to police statistics. Nearly 200 people, including 47 prominent democracy figures who participated in an unofficial primary election for the city’s legislature, were charged under a national security law that could impose life sentences on broadly defined political crimes, such as subversion, secession and collusion with foreign forces. Many of the 47 candidates have been awaiting trial behind bars since February of last year.
In May, national security police arrested Cardinal Joseph Zen, 90, along with other prominent leaders of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, an organization founded in 2019 that had subsidized the legal expenses of those who had been arrested after participating in anti-government protests.
Among the others arrested in May were Denise Ho, a pop singer; Margaret Ng, a former lawyer and lawmaker, and the scholar Hui Po-keung, who was detained at the airport while en route to Europe, where he had intended to take up an academic post.
Numerous civil groups have disbanded after their leaders were arrested, including the Civil Human Rights Front, which had organized annual pro-democracy marches on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover. The Confederation of Trade Unions, an umbrella group made up of 70 affiliate unions with a pro-democracy bent, disbanded after two former leaders were imprisoned on separate charges.
The authorities also targeted the city’s most hard-hitting independent news outlets. One popular newspaper, Apple Daily, was forced to close in June of last year after the police froze its accounts, raided its offices and arrested top editors. Stand News and Citizen News, two news outlets led by veteran journalists, also closed abruptly after two editors at Stand News were charged with publishing seditious materials in late December.
Films and documentaries touching on the protests have faced censorship. In some cases, the authorities warned directors that their work could incite hatred for the government, ordering them to cut dialogue and scenes sympathetic to the protest movement to avoid breaking the law.
International human rights groups and several western governments have decried the crackdown as a severe deterioration of civil liberties in the city and urged the authorities to release political prisoners and restore freedom of speech, assembly, and other rights. Hong Kong’s leadership has denied repressing freedoms.
“When people complain there’s no freedom, this is not the situation in Hong Kong,” the city’s former leader, Carrie Lam said in an interview with CNBC in June before leaving office. “Hong Kong is as free as ever, whether it’s in the freedom of expression, in the freedom of assembly, in the media, and so on.”
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After the Jumbo Floating Restaurant capsized in the South China Sea in June, many saw its fate as symbolic of the struggles that businesses in Hong Kong have experienced for the past three years.
First, antigovernment protests in 2019 scared off tourists. Then the pandemic — and border closures — all but ensured they stayed away for two more years.
Jumbo, a 260-foot eatery, closed in 2020, a victim of social distancing measures. The boat’s owners said they had lost nearly $13 million on the restaurant over the years, and the government declined to step in and save the tourist icon. The restaurant capsized after it was towed away from the city.
A Covid-19 outbreak earlier this year delivered the hardest blow to Hong Kong’s businesses. Even tougher pandemic measures meant to contain the highly transmissive Omicron variant caused the city’s economy to shrink by 4 percent in the first three months of the year.
Hundreds of restaurants closed permanently, and thousands of bars, restaurants and hair salons suspended their businesses — some for months — during the most recent outbreak. Unemployment climbed to 5.4 percent during the outbreak but has come down slightly since then in the city of 7.4 million. The number of homeless people is expected to rise, one lawmaker has warned, because many businesses will be slow to rehire.
The property market remains out of reach for many residents. Some have no choice but to live in subdivided apartments sometimes called “coffin homes.” Others spend years waiting for public housing as the wait time stretches to its longest in two decades.
These statistics worry officials in Beijing, who have long blamed protests in Hong Kong on the economic pressure faced by residents. China’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office has told John Lee, the new chief executive, to take stronger measures to tackle the world’s most unaffordable housing market.
While Mr. Lee has offered few details about how he will approach Hong Kong’s economic woes, his political manifesto has outlined a goal of creating more public housing and improving living conditions in the city.
The city’s richest tycoons, all of them property developers, have fallen in line, promising to build more affordable housing.
Officials have also catered their message to Beijing.
Paul Chan, the financial secretary who will remain in the position in Mr. Lee’s administration, told Chinese state media that the city was “in the best position to grow and focus our attention on economic development and also on improving people’s livelihoods.”
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The July 1 protests in Hong Kong began in 2019 like any other year, with hundreds of thousands of people marching on the streets demanding democracy. But hours later, protesters stormed the city’s legislature, a dramatic escalation in the city’s challenge to Beijing that set a more confrontational tone for the months of protests that followed.
Ignoring calls for restraint, dozens of protesters who had gathered outside the city’s legislature began ramming its entrance with metal bars and a utility cart. They later peeled away sheets of shattered glass and charged inside, damaging symbols of China’s central government and spray-painting the walls with protest messages and profanities.
The weeks of protests had at first centered around public opposition to an extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be tried in courts in mainland China. The protesters’ demands expanded to include calls for democracy and greater freedom, amid widespread concern that China was chipping away at the civil liberties Hong Kong enjoyed since China reclaimed the territory from Britain.
In the legislature, protesters left angry anti-police and anti-government slogans.
“It was you who taught us that peaceful marches are useless,” read a message, sprawled around a pillar.
The slogan “abolish functional constituencies” was also scrawled on the tables in the legislative chamber, referring to the 30 seats, out of 70 total, that had been reserved for the representatives of select industry groups and pro-Beijing interest groups. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy figures had long enjoyed a greater share of the vote in the city’s limited direct elections, but the system was stacked against them, ensuring the pro-Beijing camp controlled the legislature.
In the years since, Beijing has moved to wipe out what little opposition was left in the legislature.
In 2020, Beijing forced the ouster of four pro-democracy lawmakers from their elected offices that then prompted the rest of the opposition to resign en masse. Months later, many of the former lawmakers were arrested, and they remain in custody awaiting trial on national security charges.
Last year, Beijing imposed a drastic overhaul of the political system to allow only “patriots” to run as candidates. The city held an election in December under the new rules, drawing a record low number of voters. Most of the city’s popular pro-democracy candidates were either in police custody or in exile.
Pro-establishment candidates won all but one seat.
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The most important question facing John Lee, Hong Kong’s incoming chief executive, is which approach to take with Covid-19: live with the virus or try to eliminate it.
The answer will define Hong Kong’s future and whether it can regain its title as “Asia’s World City” or close itself off further from the world.
Hong Kong is in a precarious position, caught between China’s strict policy to eliminate the virus and the rest of world’s decision to live with it. As Carrie Lam, the city’s outgoing chief executive, put it: “We are standing in the middle.”
For most of the pandemic, Hong Kong has stuck with China’s approach of zero tolerance to Covid, a policy that was originally very successful. It allowed the city to go back to normal life while keeping its borders closed to most nonresidents and requiring some of the toughest quarantine measures in the world.
Then Omicron hit. For several months earlier this year, the city was thrown into turmoil. Officials lurched from one drastic policy to another as they tried to get cases under control. The city’s hospitals were inundated. The dead piled up in hallways while the city’s mortuaries tried to deal with overcapacity.
For the first two years of the pandemic, Hong Kong recorded just a few thousand cases. But once Omicron took hold in 2022, the number of total cases ballooned to more than a million and deaths rose to thousands by mid-March. Many of the dead were older and unvaccinated residents.
Mixed messaging from officials and fears of a citywide lockdown prompted many expatriates to leave. Even the city’s normally quiet foreign business community found a voice, as several foreign chambers of commerce complained that global businesses were unable to operate because top executives could not visit the city and talent was leaving.
As the government gained control over the outbreak in May, it began to lift social distancing restrictions, allowing foreigners to visit for the first time since March 2020. Many restrictions remain, like mandatory masks and rules that no more than four people are allowed to gather in public, but daily social life has returned even as the number of daily cases are higher than at most points in the pandemic.
Now some experts are making the case for Hong Kong to transition to quietly learning to live with the coronavirus.
Health officials have said they don’t expect any more restrictions for now despite rising cases because the hospitals are no longer overwhelmed. By at least one estimate, half the city’s 7.4 million population has already had Covid.
Mr. Lee has promised to open the border for international travel, and he has also said he would prioritize opening the border with China. It’s not clear that both can be achieved as long as China maintains its own tight policy on Covid-19 that has left its borders mostly closed until now.
Foreign business chambers recently solicited by Beijing’s office in Hong Kong for recommendations for how to revive the local economy had a unanimous answer: open the borders fully and scrap the mandatory requirement of hotel quarantine for travelers. The incoming health secretary last week said he would consider shortening hotel requirements to five days or even less from the current seven days.
But on Monday, the government also said that it would continue its current social distancing measures — which include providing evidence of a negative Covid test taken within 24 hours prior to visiting a bar, pub or nightclub — until at least July 13.
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Five years ago, when Xi Jinping, China’s leader, swore Carrie Lam in as Hong Kong’s chief executive, the city had yet to be upended by the huge protests of 2019 or the tough security clampdown that followed. But Mr. Xi’s visit during the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China lay the groundwork for much of what was to come.
Mr. Xi’s message was blunt: He visited the People’s Liberation Army garrison in Hong Kong and inspected the troops while standing in the back of an open-topped jeep, a rare display of the normally low-profile Chinese military presence in the city. China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, also visited the city during that anniversary, highlighting the growing strength of the country’s armed forces. It now has two more carriers, the newest having been launched two weeks ago.
At Mrs. Lam’s swearing in, Mr. Xi delivered a tough speech that warned against challenging China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong. Mr. Xi said that any attempt to “use Hong Kong to carry out infiltration and sabotage against the mainland is an act that crosses the red line and is absolutely impermissible.”
Shortly after Mr. Xi delivered those stern remarks, tens of thousands of Hong Kongers marched in the streets, where many called for expanded direct elections. Some raised the case of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner imprisoned in China, who had at the time recently been hospitalized for cancer treatment. He would die in custody two weeks later.
While some protesters dismissed Mr. Xi’s warning, others said at the time that they were concerned about the future and the potential loss of rights they long enjoyed.
“Hong Kong originally had freedom of speech,” Shandi Leung said as she stood alongside the slow procession of protesters. “But in the future, under the influence of the Chinese government, it won’t be so easy to speak out.”
Years later the weight of Mr. Xi’s warning can be clearly felt. After antigovernment protests convulsed the city over the second half of 2019, Beijing enacted a tough security law that has throttled political opposition in the city. The Chinese authorities were particularly incensed by protesters who called for Hong Kong’s independence or attacked symbols of the central government’s sovereignty, which Mr. Xi had warned against.
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When Hong Kong returned to Chinese control in 1997, Beijing at first treated the former British colony with a light touch.
Members of the city’s pro-democracy camp feared the Chinese authorities would order them thrown in jail, close newspapers and repress the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion that residents had grown to expect under British rule. In the early years after the handover, that didn’t happen.
Beijing had promised the city 50 years of “one country, two systems,” allowing it to keep its own legal, political and economic systems while China handled foreign affairs and national defense.
But halfway through that half-century, those pledges appear badly bruised, if not broken. While Hong Kong is still more free than mainland China, the differences have shrunk drastically in recent years.
“The government would say they are running Hong Kong according to the Basic Law and one country, two systems,” said Surya Deva, a professor at Macquarie Law School in Australia whose research areas include Hong Kong. “But the Basic Law has less and less real meaning in practice, because it will mean what the Chinese government would like it to.”
Perhaps the most striking example is in how Hong Kong chooses its leaders. Under British rule, governors were appointed by London. But the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s local constitution, says that the chief executive and legislative council should be chosen by universal suffrage. After 25 years that never came to fruition.
The system has always favored pro-government candidates. It now returns them almost exclusively.
John Lee, the former security official who will be sworn in as chief executive on Friday, faced no competition when he was selected in May. He took 99.2 percent of the vote from the tightly vetted committee of more than 1,400 people that chooses Hong Kong’s leader.
An election in November for the Legislative Council was also one-sided. Of the 90 seats, 20 legislators were directly elected by the public. One self-declared independent won, and the opposition camp was shut out of the legislature.
Those votes for the council were the first after Beijing revamped the electoral system, giving the security services extensive power to vet candidates. The government said the change was necessary to ensure “patriots administering Hong Kong.”
Mr. Lee and other Hong Kong officials have said the city maintains its freedoms. But since Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020, media outlets have been forced to close, outspoken scholars have lost their jobs, unions and civil society groups have disbanded, and activists, opposition politicians and media executives have been arrested.
The crackdown many had feared in the early years of Chinese rule is being carried out now.
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A dozen independent bookshops in Hong Kong are trying to preserve the legacy of the city’s independent streak, after the authorities in Beijing stamped out antigovernment demonstrations in the city and the annual June 4 vigil to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre.
They are selling documentation of the protests and the 1989 crackdown, and memoirs by pro-democracy activists and reform-minded Chinese political figures.
One of the stores, Have A Nice Stay, opened in the bustling shopping district of Prince Edward in May. It was founded by five former journalists, some of whom lost their jobs as pro-democracy media closed last year under pressure from Beijing’s national security law. It focuses on Hong Kong and distinguishes itself with Chinese-language collections related to journalism. The shop’s name addresses customers as well as people who have remained in Hong Kong when so many others have left.
In the store’s first month, revenue exceeded its owners’ expectations. “We’re in a honeymoon period with the readers,” said Sum Wan Wah, an owner and news media veteran who is also a part-time journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Nonfiction work by local reporters has been in high demand, he said, and a book examining the suppression of Hong Kong’s journalism industry has been particularly popular.
Hong Kong’s bookshops must toe the line. In 2015, sellers of books banned in mainland China about the country’s political feuds and the personal lives of Chinese leaders disappeared from Hong Kong and other places and spent months in custody in the mainland.
“We’re aware of the potential risk,” Mr. Sum said at the homey 600-square-foot store, hidden in a walk-up building. He added that if the government tells the owners not to sell something, they won’t sell it. “But before that, we don’t have to take certain books off the shelf.”
Mr. Sum said he hopes the bookshop will serve as a place for like-minded people, including journalists, to get together and as a way to educate the younger generation.
Recently, he said, a schoolteacher brought in his high school students to talk to them about the history of Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China and show them the newspaper archive on exhibit at the shop.
The material about Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong’s textbooks has been cut down in recent years, and the Tiananmen Square Museum in the city closed last year because of a licensing problem. It moved its collections online and is likely to remain closed permanently after being raided by the national security police.
Mr. Sum said middle school teachers have donated to the shop books that schools have deemed unsafe to keep in their library.
Mr. Sum called on his fellow Hong Kong residents to keep reading and to write down their own thoughts and experiences. He is not worried about the bookshop: “If there’s a possibility I won’t be able to sell some of these books later in the future, why don’t I sell more now while I still can?”
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Herbert Chow, a vocal supporter of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, is shutting down his children’s clothing store business in the face of what he says was an aggressive campaign of harassment in retaliation for his politics.
Mr. Chow will close his last store in Hong Kong on July 9, marking an end, for now, of his 32-year old Chickeeduck clothing brand. He also says he has left his home city indefinitely.
Over the past nearly three years, Mr. Chow said, landlords have canceled leases for 12 of his stores, leaving him with just one. Last year, dozens of police officers cordoned off one shop, while special security officers picked through T-shirts, baby jumpers and towels looking for evidence that he had violated national security.
“They are telling the business world that you don’t have to violate the law,” Mr. Chow said, referring to the authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing. “If you express political views against us, we know how to kill you.”
The harassment began in 2019, after he started publicly supporting the pro-democracy protest movement. Many mom-and-pop businesses like his formed what informally became known as a yellow economy — named for the color of umbrellas protesters had once used to defend against pepper spray — that dotted Hong Kong’s urban landscape.
Mr. Chow prominently placed large white statues of a protester wearing a gas mask and holding a “free Hong Kong” flag and umbrella — known as Lady Liberty Hong Kong — in many of his storefronts. It wasn’t long before his landlords began to ask Mr. Chow to leave, canceling his leases and citing clauses stipulating that landlords have the right to approve displays before a store can make changes.
“In Hong Kong, no businessman likes to speak up, and the only ones who speak up against small injustices are small-business owners,” said Mr. Chow, adding that in 2019 small businesses like his employed nearly half of the population. “They do not want these numbers of small businesses to join forces, so they are using me as a demonstration.”
The 2019 protests prompted Beijing to impose a sweeping national security law in 2020 that silenced much of the city’s once freewheeling expression of speech. Protesters and pro-democracy lawmakers were hauled off to jail. But Mr. Chow persisted in selling items that quietly supported the movement, both online and in newly opened pop-up shops.
Then, last August some of his suppliers in mainland China told him that they had been harassed and threatened by the local authorities. Many of them cut ties with his business.
He said that Chinese officials also seized Chickeeduck shipments headed for Hong Kong, including one product featuring fabric depicting five ducks swimming and another one sitting with a black flag. The authorities said the graphic advocated violence, Mr. Chow said.
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To understand how China is reshaping Hong Kong, consider how the city’s textbooks are changing.
China has long asserted that Hong Kong was never a colony, even when the territory was under British colonial rule. That narrative — which rejects how the British saw their relationship to the city — will be explicitly taught to Hong Kong high school students through new textbooks that will be rolled out in the fall.
The dispute over whether Hong Kong was a colony centers on the question of what should happen when the colonizer gives up control. In the 19th century, Britain took over what is now modern-day Hong Kong via two wars and a series of treaties that the Chinese government called unequal and coerced.
In 1946, the United Nations included Hong Kong on a list of “non-self-governing territories,” and in a 1960 resolution said the people there should be granted “the right to self-determination.” After Beijing took over China’s seat in the U.N. in 1971, it successfully pushed to remove Hong Kong from the list, arguing that it was within China’s sovereign right to decide Hong Kong’s future.
“Beijing never recognized that China had given up her sovereignty over Hong Kong, that British rule in Hong Kong had legitimacy and that 1997 is the time China resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong,” Lau Siu-kai, a senior adviser to Beijing on Hong Kong policy, said in an interview.
He added, “Beijing only admits that Britain had imposed ‘colonial rule’ on Hong Kong. Textbooks, of course, have to reflect Beijing’s position.”
The textbook material appears to be the linchpin of a revamped high school civics course that Beijing had repeatedly blamed for radicalizing Hong Kong’s students. The course, known in years past as liberal studies, used to emphasize critical thinking and taught students to be objective and analytical. Some teachers discussed democracy, civil rights and even the Tiananmen Square massacre as part of their lesson plans. The older curriculum, which was developed in 2007 and periodically updated, did not appear to address the circumstances that led to Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule.
The new course, which was renamed Citizenship and Social Development last year, lists “Hong Kong’s return to China” as part of the first lesson plan. It places greater emphasis on patriotism, China’s “indisputable sovereignty and jurisdiction” and the national security law.
The schoolbooks are part of a wider campaign to overhaul Hong Kong’s schools, “protect young minds” and raise loyal, patriotic citizens with a stronger Chinese identity.
Hong Kong education authorities last Wednesday released a music video of “My Motherland and I,” a song performed by high school musicians from eleven elite secondary schools. The footage included scenes of students playing Chinese and Western orchestral instruments and singing in Mandarin Chinese, the language spoken on the mainland, and not Cantonese, the dominant language of the city.
“My motherland and I cannot be separated, not even for a moment,” they sang.
Steady monsoon rains soaked Hong Kong 25 years ago Friday as Britain ended its 156-year colonial rule of Hong Kong and handed over the reins to China, an occasion marked with fireworks, parties around town and an elaborate ceremony replete with symbolism.
The handover took place with the stroke of midnight, at the same convention center as Friday’s swearing-in. China’s then-president, Jiang Zemin, arrived from the mainland to swear in Beijing’s choice for leader, calling the handover “a festival for the Chinese nation and a victory for the universal cause of peace and justice.”
The departing British were far more somber. The last colonial governor, Chris Patten, said in his final speech as rain mottled his shoulders: “Our own nation’s contribution here was to provide the scaffolding that enabled the people of Hong Kong to ascend: the rule of law, clean and light-handed government, the values of a free society.”
The Union Jack and the British colonial flag were lowered, as “God Save the Queen” rang out in the hall. A few seconds of pregnant pause passed before a trumpet sounded the first bars of China’s anthem and the five-star Chinese flag was raised, along with the new five-petal flag of Hong Kong.
Outside the Legislative Council building downtown, thousands of pro-democracy protesters gathered, concerned about rights and freedoms under Chinese rule. Martin Lee, the leader of the democracy faction of the legislature that was disbanded with the handover, addressed the crowd from the balcony.
“If there is no democracy, there is no rule of law,” he said. “We want Hong Kong and China to advance together and not step back together. We are proud to be Chinese, more proud than ever before. But we ask: Why is it our leaders in China will not give us more democracy?
Hong Kongers around the city — who were given a five-day holiday — watched history in the making with a conflicted mix of celebration and wistfulness, pride and trepidation.
“The old landlord is going, and a new one is coming,” one resident, Vincent Kwan, told The New York Times at the time. “We’re just the tenant, and we have to pay rent.”
Police officers removed royal emblems from their caps and jackets at midnight and replaced them with new ones.
Hours later, as dawn broke, a procession of Chinese Army vehicles carrying 4,000 soldiers crossed over the border and onto the streets of Hong Kong. Thousands greeted them in villages along the way despite the rain, waving flags and flowers.
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Residents were reminded of the importance of Friday, the 25th anniversary of the handover, in ads proclaiming a new era for Hong Kong of “stability, prosperity, opportunity” plastered on public buses and on skyscrapers that make up Hong Kong’s skyline, and the helicopters that flew across Victoria Harbor.
The pomp didn’t have much meaning for David Cheung, a retiree who was returning home from a dim sum breakfast with a copy of a local newspaper in hand.
“Today to me is like every other day. It is what it is,” said Mr. Cheung. “Hong Kong’s return to China is a fact.” Mr. Cheung has been living in Hong Kong for decades but still has family ties to the mainland’s Hunan Province.
One of the central arteries that runs through the center of Hong Kong and its business district was empty except for buses and trams. Three years ago, huge crowds of antigovernment protesters streamed through on July 1 making their way to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Complex.
Where residents were once eager to talk about their views of the government, few agreed to be interviewed on Friday, a sign of how Beijing’s crackdown has sent a chill across society. Those who did were cautious in what they said.
“The biggest challenge is the growing divergence between Hong Kong government and Hong Kong people,” said Joeson Kwok, a 33-year-old interior design contractor. “What the government is doing is going further away from what Hong Kong people want.”
Candy Leung, 62, who runs an outdoor eatery serving noodle soups and egg toast in an alley behind a pawnshop, indicated that economic concerns were her primary focus. “I don’t mind the handover either way, as long as I get my mouth fed,” she said.
The shop she runs has been in her family since her father opened it three decades ago. The pawnshop bought her tiny corner property, and she and her siblings will retire at the end of the year.
“Only some people have a bit extreme thoughts about the government,” Ms. Leung said. “Some think what government does is wrong. Some think otherwise,” she added, careful not to give away her political views.
Ms. Leung sat up straight as a line of six police officers carrying shields, walkie-talkies and small bags attached to their vests walked through the tight alley in single file.
At a nearby market, Chan Chiu-kwan, a 40-year-old butcher, said he could remember the celebrations when Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule.
“It was an exciting event back in 1997,” Mr. Chan said as he chopped fresh pork for a customer. But, he added, 25 years on, “My excitement has run out.”
Instead, he is more focused on the city’s economy. He said he hoped that Hong Kong’s border with the mainland, which has been largely sealed because of Covid concerns, would reopen soon. “Otherwise, there is no way out for Hong Kong, struggling like this. Hong Kong’s economy depends on the consumption of tourists.”
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Thousands of government officials, dozens of foreign dignitaries and a carefully selected group of journalists were asked to undergo a week of daily rapid antigen tests and be confined in a hotel for quarantine this week.
Office workers in a neighborhood that Mr. Xi was reportedly planning to visit were told to stay home. One school even asked parents earlier this month to volunteer their children for seven days of quarantine so that they might greet dignitaries upon their arrival in Hong Kong.
The stringent epidemic protocols Hong Kong has imposed for Mr. Xi’s visit are in contrast to many places with similarly high vaccination rates, which dropped such controls months ago.
But China is the last country in the world that maintains a policy of trying to eliminate Covid, and is most likely concerned by a surge in cases in Hong Kong, where more than 2,000 daily Covid cases were recorded on Wednesday for the first time since April.
As part of Mr. Xi’s visit, foreign consuls invited to attend were given instructions to undergo daily Covid testing starting June 23, and to limit their movements to a “point-to-point closed loop” system consisting of home and office. “Gathering activities and contact with other people are to be avoided,” the Celebration Coordination Office said in a booklet sent to various consulates and seen by The New York Times. Guests were told they would then need to go into hotel quarantine on June 30.
Some consulates did not receive the instructions — which did not provide any details about events or who would attend — until the early hours of June 24, causing some confusion over whether diplomats could even participate.
In addition to the guests attending events, hundreds of hotel workers, cleaners and other personnel who have helped to make the closed loop possible have had to quarantine as well.
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Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, defended Beijing’s tightening grip over Hong Kong on Friday during his first visit to the city since it carried out a sweeping crackdown on political dissent, saying no country would allow “unpatriotic or even traitorous or treasonous forces” to take power.
Mr. Xi spoke after the swearing in of John Lee, the former security official handpicked to be Hong Kong’s next leader, and he defended the new limits on the electoral system that saw Mr. Lee run unopposed and the opposition shut out of the legislature.
“Political power must be in the hands of patriots. This is a general political law across the world,” Mr. Xi said.
Parts of his address echoed the tough tone in his last visit to Hong Kong five years ago, when he warned that challenges to China’s sovereignty crossed the “red line.” But he also sought to focus on economic concerns, instructing the new local government to do better at addressing longstanding problems with housing and improve job opportunities for residents.
His comments also reflected Beijing’s longstanding interpretation of the mass demonstrations of 2019. The party has largely dismissed the democratic aspirations of the Hong Kong public and argued that the residents’ anger over housing prices and a lack of social mobility made them an easy target for foreign manipulation aimed at subverting China.
His message points to the social model that the Communist Party emphasizes in the rest of China, where residents are promised stability and economic growth in exchange for a lack of political freedom.
“What Hong Kongers want most is the hope of a better life, a more spacious home, more business opportunities, better education for their children and better care in their old age,” he said.
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To keep the risk of Covid-19 transmission as low as possible for the two-day visit to Hong Kong by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, 3,000 government officials, Hong Kong legislators and workers entered a bubble for three to five days.
The group quarantined in hotels and were transported to venues by designated buses, with the city reporting about 2,000 infections each of the past two days, a high since April. The bubble operated similarly to the one used during the Beijing Olympics earlier this year.
Still, Covid was able to breach the bubble. Local media reported that Tam Yiu-chung, Hong Kong’s only representative to the Chinese legislature’s top committee, had tested positive and missed a photo shoot with Mr. Xi on Thursday.
In addition to the politicians and government officials, reporters, police officers and hotel workers who attended the events were subject to the restrictions. In quarantine, they were not allowed to open the doors of their hotel rooms other than to pick up the meals left in front of them. They had to be tested for Covid several times, including one test scheduled at midnight so results could be obtained in time for an early morning event on Friday.
Workers inside the bubble generally described themselves as patriotic and as wanting to contribute to celebrating Friday’s anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese control, though some said it took a toll on their personal lives.
For Cathy Cheng Yuk-ting, a 39-year-old hotel worker, Friday was the fifth day she hadn’t been able to see her three young children. She could have taken time off instead but decided to work to earn more money. “I miss them a lot,” she said of her children. “But this is my job. There is no other way.”
Ms. Cheng said it was meaningful to be one part of the anniversary celebration but that she felt sad when her daughters asked her in a video call why she couldn’t stop working and return home.
Noris Lee, a 50-year-old police officer, said she had always felt a strong attachment to China and that it wasn’t difficult to abide by the Covid restrictions. Her husband, son and daughter had been doing daily rapid testing for the week before she went into quarantine.
“Everyone in my family is very patriotic, and they all support my work,” she said.
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A new museum to exhibit works from the Palace Museum in Beijing was birthed in controversy, with many in Hong Kong complaining about a lack of public consultation in building another symbol of Beijing’s growing influence over the city.
But as the museum, which will open Saturday, has taken shape and expressions of dissent have grown more perilous in Hong Kong, that criticism has faded.
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, visited the site during his last trip to Hong Kong five years ago, when the museum’s development was starting. Local media has speculated he could make a return visit to inaugurate the Hong Kong Palace Museum, whose opening coincides with the anniversary of the city’s handover to Chinese control, but his itinerary has not been made public.
Since 2017 the West Kowloon Cultural District, which was built on reclaimed land at the western end of Victoria Harbor, has added several cultural sites including the M+ visual culture museum and the Xiqu Center for Chinese opera.
The Hong Kong Palace Museum takes many cues from its namesake in Beijing, with a broad entry pavilion and vermilion exterior walls that evoke of the vast expanse of the Forbidden City at the heart of the Chinese capital. But beyond the walls, boats bob in the harbor and the Hong Kong’s stunning skyline rises across the water.
Many of the hundreds of works on loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing date to the Qing dynasty, the last to rule China before the 1911 revolution. The collection includes several paintings attributed to Giuseppe Castiglione, the Jesuit missionary who served as an artist for the Qing court.
The museum was funded by a donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the nonprofit that holds the government monopoly on horse racing in Hong Kong. Horses are a particular focus, with one exhibit showing works from the Forbidden City and the Louvre that depict horses.
One object commemorates a particularly brutal episode, when the Qianlong emperor ordered the annihilation of the Dzungars, a group of Mongol tribes who ruled much of what is now the Xinjiang region. It is a jade plate that was used to hold mares’ milk for Dzungar ceremonies. Found on the battlefield, it was taken to Qianlong and inscribed with a poem he wrote to commemorate the Qing victory. That poem is also played in a nearby audio booth.
The exhibitions include paintings and calligraphic works from the Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, and ceramics from several periods. There is also a display of portraits of Qing emperors and empresses. Some of the most precious objects include Song calligraphy and scroll paintings depicting mountains, rivers and figures from classical poetry. These works, which date from the 11th and 12 centuries, are typically displayed for only short periods because of the risk of damage from light to such old works.
Several objects had not been installed during a preview last week. The museum was awaiting local permits to allow the display of objects made in part with endangered species such as rare corals and wood.
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