An appeals court has granted a Hong Kong government request to ban a popular protest song. The ruling deepens concerns about the ebbing away of freedom in the semi-autonomous territory.
Hong Kong’s appeal court on Wednesday banned the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” — an anthem popularized during the territory’s widespread democracy demonstrations in 2019.
The decision makes the song the first to be prohibited since Britain handed the former colony back to China in 1997.
Why has the song upset authorities?
Demonstrators often sang the anonymously written piece during their pro-democracy protests.
Its lyrics include the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong; Revolution of our times,” and it had already become dangerous to play or sing after authorities crushed the demonstrations.
Officials have lobbied Google to remove the song from search results and video platforms, although with little success.
In one mix-up that particularly embarrassed officials, the song was played as the city’s anthem at an international sporting event instead of China’s “March of the Volunteers.”
Hong Kong was never a vision for what China could be though. British rule was also very authoritarian. Much of the repression of free speech today is being done using laws the British enacted. Even when the British decided to introduce democratic reforms to HK, they explicitly gave outsized control of the city to corporations.