Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Temporal Rifts in Hong Kong: The Slow Arts of Protest

2019; Volume: 4; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/asa.2019.0042

2381-4721

Elizabeth Ho,

China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance

Temporal Rifts in Hong Kong:The Slow Arts of Protest Elizabeth Ho (bio) Time-lapse video amplifies the speed of traffic, people, and their movement around the cityscape of Hong Kong. In a video, "The Best Is Yet to Come," dedicated to promoting Hong Kong as "Asia's World City," for example, writers used the magnification of speed to emulate the dynamics of capital's never-ending flow.1 Time-lapse brands Hong Kong and creates a visual metaphor for the elusiveness of "connectivity" that depicts Hong Kong culture as one of rapidity and instant gratification. Recently, speed has been foremost on the mind of Hong Kongers caught in the political quagmire surrounding what has been lambasted as "white elephant" projects devoted to more speedy connections to mainland China. Time-lapse forms the idealized mirror image of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, which, without station stops cuts traveling time to Guangzhou from two hours down to forty-eight minutes. The fantasy of uninhibited speed occludes the controversy of the co-location agreement that ceded Hong Kong territory to the mainland allowing for the practice of Chinese law on Hong Kong soil in direct counter-indication of Hong Kong's mini-constitution. "One train, two systems" directly challenges "One country, two [End Page 619] systems." Plagued by financial woes and construction setbacks, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau mega bridge connects Hong Kong to the Pearl River Delta and puts each city within an hour's commute of each other. Faster and more efficient connections between locations in southern China cemented a new geographical and economic proposition envisioned by officials as the Greater Bay Area. In the context of Hong Kong, faster connections also compress space by supposedly bringing "two systems" closer in a more harmonious temporal and political network. Time-lapse video has also emerged as the preferred way of representing the volume of marchers at annual protest rallies at their starting point in Victoria Park. Once sped up, dramatic scenes of people streaming in large groups like clockwork from the park under varying extremes of weather became synonymous with political motivation and endurance. The time-lapse video of the July 1, 2014 rally gained popularity in the media because the protest drew the largest crowds since 2003, when the government was forced to withdraw its plans to enact national security laws under Article 23 of the Basic Law.2 The 2014 march, which predated the Umbrella Movement by two months, drew an estimated half million people voicing their dissatisfaction with a White Paper released by Beijing that radically redefined Hong Kong's autonomy under "One country, two systems." Because time-lapse can conveniently shrink a day's march into a few minutes, it also highlights the city's temporal and political asynchronicity by drawing attention to the snail's pace of change and rendering invisible the obstructive forces at play in the depiction of a homogeneous, fast landscape. But the time-lapse hid the experiential reality of the march: what was meant to be a fairly smooth three-hour march to mark the anniversary of the city's return to Chinese rule from more than a century of British colonial administration dragged on late into the evening as police refused to clear roads in order to accommodate the number of demonstrators. Bottlenecks choked traffic throughout the city and frustrated marchers did not reach their destination until after midnight. As determined demonstrators attempted to give spatial shape to a variety of agendas and motivations, the police moved in to restore spatial order by reinforcing the official regulations of rational planning. Thus, the police emphasized univocality over the carnivalesque. This march in [End Page 620] particular became a metaphor for the rocky road ahead for social movements in Hong Kong, citizens' frustration over a stalled democratic process, and antipathy toward the government as an obstacle to reform. The march illustrated the failure to "synchronize disparate temporal logics" in Hong Kong wherein, for example, political change cannot happen fast enough to satisfy either reformers or advocates of Article 23 on national security laws.3 At the same time, the process of so-called mainlandization is happening far too fast, contradicting...