Coping with PTSD in Hong Kong|Michelle Ng
After defecting to Hong Kong in the mid 1950s, CCP official Zhou Jingwen (周鯨文) became the first party insider to spill the beans about China under communist rule. In his depiction of the political movements that Mao unleashed in the country, Zhou likens the party’s torment to its people to the way a cat torments a mouse:
“The cat won’t allow its captive to have the luxury of a quick death: it makes a show of sinking its fangs into the mouse as if to deliver a fatal blow, only to suddenly release it and allow it to scurry away. Just when the mouse thinks a dash for freedom is within the bounds of possibility, the cat sweeps it up again. This catch-release cycle is repeated several times, until the mouse collapses out of exhaustion. At this point the cat finally puts it out of its misery by feasting upon it. Under Mao, the CCP hounded its ever-burgeoning ranks of class enemies exactly this way.”
I imagine Zhou would have reacted in disbelief if he had known not only does the regime he had once so passionately railed against still exist; it has also in recent years given unfettered power to a leader who, in his desperation to keep his party in power in the face of a weakening domestic economy and worsening international relations, has set his mind on staging a revival of Mao’s policies.
I wonder how it would have grieved Zhou to learn what has happened to the city that had formerly granted him refuge. Last year’s anti-CCP protests and the police brutality that followed have left a third of its adult population with PSTD, a percentage experts say is “
comparable to those in conflict zones".
Mistrust of Hong Kong’s legal system has prompted young protesters (estimated in the low hundreds) to flee to Taiwan, though this trend is unlikely to continue, now that 12 youths have been caught by the mainland marine police midway along this escape route. Since then, marooned in mainland’s murky legal system, they have remained incommunicado, prompting Taiwanese reporter
Edd Jhong (鐘聖雄) to observe “frankly I’m not sure it’s whether they are lucky to have been caught alive, for relentless torture may await them.”
I’m pretty certain what Zhou would have made of the new national security law - it’s simply an old trick up CCP’s sleeve, a way for CCP to play cat and torment Hong Kong people under the guise of law. When Agnes Chow, a 23 year-old activist already arrested under this law,
confessed on Facebook on the eve of a routine police appointment that she is “in deep distress,” for “if the police charge me tomorrow, I may be immediately remanded in custody and ( should I be found guilty) may have to spend an untold number of years behind bars”- to the CCP, such display of sentiment already constitutes “mission accomplished,” for Chow’s plight is sure to strike terror in others.
The fact that Chow and the 12 youngsters who are currently locked up in a mainland prison are in such hot water does strike terror in me. Yet even less extreme cases can already do such a job. Every time I read about people going to court for having participated in last year’s protests, a scene from the Starz production of Spartacus replays itself in my mind: thousands of slaves who have joined Spatacus in his uprising against the Romans are captured after losing the final battle; the Romans crucify them en masse. One by one, the crosses on which each slave is to suffer a slow death line the hillside, extending into the horizon as far as the eye can see. The message to the rest of the slave population is clear: rebel, and you’ll end up like them.
Back in the 1950s, after emerging from CCP’s thought control programs, mainland intellectuals must have suffered PTSD too, for they exhibited the classic symptoms of learned helplessness. One told Zhou “now that someone else is doing my thinking for me, my mind has lost its suppleness. Intellectuals have the worth of excrement.” Another was even more despondent: “All I do is wait for death. Knowledge is useless.”
It is when I compare myself to these mainland intellectuals that I see the advantages I have over them: after 70 years of ruthless rule, the only legitimacy the CCP has left is its ability to deliver economic benefits to its people; with the U.S. now depriving the CCP of the foreign currencies and technology it needs to run the country with an iron fist, its demise is probably in the cards.
This means Hong Kong people are likely to be the CCP’s last shipment of victims. So, paradoxically, along with the endless replaying of that crucifixion scene in my head, I also constantly see with my mind’s eye the message a Gulag prison victim once inscribed on a camp latrine: “may he be damned who, after regaining freedom, remains silent.” The trick is to believe I’m so close to regaining my freedom that I might as well speak truth to power straightaway.
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