The Reckless Hopes of Hong Kong Teens
by Brian Hioe
Last month, news broke of the arrest of four members of a Hong Kong political party, the Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union. The youngest arrested was 15 years old. This type of arrest is increasingly commonplace in Hong Kong, but something jumped out at me about this one. Reports claimed that those arrested were accused of tearing up the Chinese national flag at an alleged flag-raising ceremony in Taiwan, where they had also sung the 2019 protest anthem, “Glory to Hong Kong.”
A while later it clicked for me; news outlets, including Chinese state-run media, were reporting on this flag-raising ceremony as an event that may have taken place in Taiwan. There were no pictures of the flag-raising ceremony anywhere, in any outlet. And yet I had seen the ceremony with my own eyes the week prior; I had just forgotten about it over the course of a week of overwork and getting over a cold.
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