#12 Protests

Hong Kong is considered by many to be a relatively passive place when it comes to politics. This is actually incorrect. As the following set of photographs show, Hong Kong people are as politically active as anywhere else in the world, even though we don’t have “the vote”.

 

 

 

This photograph, taken in the mid-1980s, shows one of several old folk setting up their bi-lingual banners outside the Legco Building in Central. I believe they are protesting about the loss of their land.

 

 

This picture is of the Cenotaph in Central, adorned with banners and floral tributes to the fallen after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The event significantly changed the political landscape in Hong Kong, with greater calls for democracy – the echoes of which are beginning to slowly fade.

 

 

 

This shot from the early 90s is of a protest in Central, which is organized every year. The demonstrators are asking for donations to fund various causes. In this case, they are going without food for 30 hours in the name of democracy.

 

 

The final photo, taken this year, is of the standoff between demonstrators and the police over the planned demolition of Queen’s Pier in Central. The demonstrators wanted to preserve the pier because of its unique place in Hong Kong’s history (i.e. the official landing point of former Governors, and the point at which my wife and I boarded our launch to cross the habour after our wedding ceremony at City Hall etc).

 

A final point, two of the four photographs were originally black and white. I have made the other two the same, because 1) the photos somehow gain more character when viewed in black and white, because we are programmed to understand that black and white images are serious 2) until quite recently serious newspapers were printed without colour (the Asian Wall Street Journal still upholds this practice, because the editors believe that colour detracts attention from the main issues, which are written around the image) and 3) black and white photos are mysterious because of their lack of colour (eg what colour is the old woman’s clothes in the first picture? what about the sleeping bag or the tents in the other pictures? do we need to know this?).

 

#11 Military signs

Since 1997, the Hong Kong government has been slowly removing the vestiges of its colonial past. In particular, any military symbols. The Cenotaph in Central (see post #12 Protests) and gravestones in several cemeteries around town (see post #4 Esperanza) are basically all that’s left. However, there is a colonial symbol on the gate of a small park in Central that someone in the Government’s “unofficial” Department of Decolonalization seems to have missed. The Latin reads: Nulli secundus in Oriente, which translates as Second to none in the Orient, which was the motto of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Corps – renamed Royal Hong Kong Regiment in 1970.

I have a vested interest in military symbols in Hong Kong because my father was in the British army and was posted here twice. The first time he arrived he left with my mother and myself. The second time he left was just after my marriage. The military angles to both of these pivitol events were 1) I was born in a military hospital on Bowen Road, which has since been converted into a kindergarten and 2) after my marriage at City Hall, my wife and I boarded a military vessel for the trip across the harbour, on our way to our wedding reception in Osborn Barracks in Kowloon Tong. This is where the statue (shown below) had stood, before its removal ahead of the 1997 change over. The photograph is part of a series I took, at my father’s request, which he planned to use for a new shop sign in the barracks. They also served as a record of the statue before it was put into storage.

The story of the statue is as follows. In 1981, a statue of a World War I soldier, which had formerly stood in the grounds of Eucliffe Castle, at Repulse Bay was unveiled at Osborn Barracks. The barracks are named after Hong Kong’s only recipient of the Victoria Cross – WOII John Robert Osborn. The statue was donated by the Eu family, and the plaque, which was unveiled by Mr. Allen Kilpatrick, past Canadian High Commissioner, reads: “Erected here in memory of WOII John Robert Osborn VC, Winnipeg Grenadiers, and through him all those men and women, service and civilian, and of every race, colour and creed, whose secret acts of gallantry and self-sacrifice in the defence of Hong Kong, December 1941, went unnoticed and unrecorded”.

 

 

The personal connections of these two military symbols are that they were present at both my wedding  registration (at City Hall) and reception (Osborn Barracks). The visual link between the two symbols is that they’re both rather confident/arrogant (in words and posture), aren’t they?.