In a city where China has made some ideas suddenly dangerous, people are trying to figure out where the boundaries lie, and how their lives have changed.
A barge draped with enormous red banners celebrating China’s new security law was sailing across Hong Kong’s famed Victoria Harbor only hours after the legislation passed. The police now hoist a purple sign warning protesters that their chants could be criminal. Along major roads throughout the city, neon-colored flags hailing a new era of stability and prosperity stand erect as soldiers.
In recent days, as China took a victory lap over the law it imposed on the city Tuesday, the defiant masses who once filled Hong Kong’s streets in protest have largely gone quiet. Sticky notes that had plastered the walls of pro-democracy businesses vanished, taken down by owners suddenly fearful of the words scribbled on them. Parents whispered about whether to stop their children from singing a popular protest song, while activists devised coded ways to express now-dangerous ideas.
Seemingly overnight, Hong Kong was visibly and viscerally different, its more than seven million people left to navigate what the law would mean to their lives. The territory’s distinct culture of political activism and free speech, at times brazenly directed at China’s ruling Communist Party, appeared to be in peril.
For some who had been alarmed by the ferocity of last year’s unrest, which at times transformed shopping districts, neighborhoods and university campuses into smoke-filled battlefields, the law brought relief and optimism. For others, who had hoped the desperate protest campaign would help secure long-cherished freedoms, it signaled a new era of fear and uncertainty.
“This is home,” said Ming Tse, sitting in the cafe he manages, which once loudly supported the protesters. “But I don’t think this place loves us anymore.”
For months, Mr. Tse’s love for his home was advertised at his shop in the working-class neighborhood of North Point. The oat milk carton at the cash register sat behind postcards of protest art. A poster condemned the police shootings of two student demonstrators. Even after opponents of the movement threatened to vandalize the shop last fall, the decorations stayed.
But on Thursday, Mr. Tse, 34, took everything down. News reports said police officers had interrogated owners of restaurants with similar protest paraphernalia. The security law criminalizes “subversion” of the government, a crime that the police say encompasses speech such as political slogans.
All that remained was a small plastic dinosaur on the counter, wearing a yellow hard hat. That inexpensive yet tough headgear, worn by protesters who fought with the police, had become a symbol of their scrappy fortitude.
“I don’t know if they are so sensitive,” Mr. Tse said. “It’s just a helmet on a dinosaur.”
He paused, then reconsidered: “Actually, everything is sensitive.”
That the lines of criminality had been redrawn became clear on Friday, when the authorities charged a 24-year-old man with terrorism and inciting separatism — the first person to be indicted under the new law. With a “Liberate Hong Kong” flag mounted on the back of his motorcycle, the man careened into a group of police officers on Wednesday, the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China from British rule.
