Freedom of Speech
By Amanda Liaw
Freedom of speech, as many people in contemporary society are aware, is a heavy contender in debates about democracy. The very idea of being able to debate democracy is contingent on the conditions imposed by a nation's authority on the public's ability to debate, the effectiveness of debate on political life, and the spaces in which such debate is allowed, tolerated or encouraged that inevitably shape the nature of discussion. The right to freedom of speech as fought for by numerous people around the world is, I argue, a key site of understanding the various ways in which language and discourse define worldviews and lifestyles.
Hong Kong, with its unique history of democratization under colonial rule and its semi-recent handover to a famously Communist China, is a case primed to demonstrate the effects of a healthy civic society undergoing transition with a new authoritarian regime in control. The 2012 student-led occupation of Civic Square in opposition to a proposed National Education system that was argued would destabilize the core of Hong Kong identity by imposing the ideology of Communist China was one of Hong Kong's most significant civic successes since the handover. Later, in a response to increased force by local police during the supposedly peaceful Occupy Central street protests that campaigned for universal suffrage, many more Hong Kongers took to the streets in solidarity, even occupying areas outside of the original boundaries of the protest. This movement transformed organically into a message that exemplifies the importance of freedom of speech to Hong Kong, and the people's recognition of the lack of freedom of speech as a visible threat to their fundamental identity and democracy. However, Wong, in his book Electoral Politics in Post-1997 Hong Kong, raises the counter-point to civic society that critiques its ineffectiveness in defending against Beijing's more insidious grassroots strategy. In this manner, Beijing-sponsored parties have managed to expand aggressively on the District Council level, thereby swaying moderate voters who do make up a fair majority of Hong Kong's voting population. Because pro-Democrat protests are coded in such a way that distances moderate voters from the Left, be it through media coverage or the very language used by the protesters, they have contributed to a widening divide between civic and political society that could threaten Hong Kong's success in maintaining or deciding its democracy.
The flip-side of this is, of course, China itself where censorship has become the de facto way of life for most, if not all, Chinese citizens. Famously or infamously, digital platforms that have become global methods for communication such as Facebook and Google have been banned from China, with this level of censorship even being dubbed 'The Great Firewall'. Interestingly, this situation has done little to quell an emerging Internet counter-culture that uses parody and satire to offer political commentary. The Grass Mud Horse lexicon, for example, is an online dictionary that explains the vernacular used by netizens to circumvent China's censorship policies. If Hong Kong, then, is an instance of freedom of speech being contested in ways that only parallel freedom of ideology, the question for China - where the reverse is true and an overarching Communist ideology has yet to erase the people's belief in their right to freedom of speech - should be whether this vernacular culture can at all be interpreted as a rising oppositional ideology.