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Hong Kong worshippers beat Xi Jinping, Carrie Lam in ‘villain hitting’ ritual

蘋果日報 2021/03/06 05:24


Scores of Hongkongers vented their anger at Chinese President Xi Jinping and Hong Kong officials for their repression of the city’s freedoms during a traditional “villain hitting” ritual.
A large crowd lined up under the Canal Road flyover in Causeway Bay waiting to perform the ritual, where customers write the names of their adversaries or badly behaving people on paper effigies and hire elderly women to beat them with slippers.
The ritual takes place around March 5, which marks the awakening of insects in the traditional Chinese solar calendar. People believe the ritual can dispel ill fortune by curbing the inauspicious impact of “villains.”
For some in the queue, the mainland and Hong Kong governments’ repression of freedoms and rights in the city was the reason to hire villain hitting services.
A man surnamed Chan paid a woman to thrash paper effigies marked with the nicknames for Xi, Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam, justice minister Teresa Cheng, Hong Kong Police and Beijing loyalists.
The authorities’ persecution of 47 pro-democracy politicians who took part in unofficial primaries for a legislative election last year had prompted him to perform his first ever villain hitting ritual, Chan said.
Police officers at the scene came over and inspected Chan when he showed one of his paper offerings, on which he had written his support for Hong Kong protesters, to an Apple Daily photographer.
The 47 have been charged with “conspiring to subvert state power” for their involvement in the primaries, with most of them denied bail.
Such treatment was as though they had already been convicted, and Lam and Cheng were responsible for this, said another man, surnamed Li, who ordered a villain hitting on the two officials.
Some other customers paid for a ritual to wish for their good fortune this year and for an early end to the COVID-19 pandemic. One man surnamed Ma said he wished the city’s economy could recover from COVID soon so he had a better chance of changing his job.
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