Editor’s note for Monday, September 19, 2022

My thoughts today:

I am in the U.K. this week to do a podcast and some other things. On my flight over, the British Airways steward said a little speech in memory of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The local version of Google displays a black logo instead of the usual bright mix of colors.

Last night, there was nothing but the Queen on TV, on the radio, and in the newspapers. London was a ghost town this morning, as quiet as Christmas morning, or the first day of the Chinese new year in Beijing. The U.K. declared today a public holiday for the Queen’s funeral. I was originally supposed to take part in a course on media literacy and China organized by Professor Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the SOAS University of London today, but it had to be canceled. Most businesses, including many restaurants, as well as pubs and sporting and entertainment venues, closed for the day.

The atmosphere in London today reminded me of North Korea. I had a meeting for lunch at a café: All the customers were facing a large TV screen on one wall showing the funeral. The customers were watching the procession of the coffin in complete silence. I felt bad attracting the waiter’s attention to order food. The last time I was in such an atmosphere was visiting the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang.

So I was quite determined to think no more of the Queen and also, dear reader, to give you a break from the nonstop royal coverage, but then I saw a tweet by Mei Fong, the first Malaysian-born journalist to have won a Pulitzer Prize, and the author of One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, reminding me of a Q&A I did with her way back in 2016, in which I asked her how she became a journalist. She answered:

When I was 16, I won a prize in an essay competition, which resulted, in a roundabout way, in meeting Queen Elizabeth of England. Nothing so exciting had ever happened in my dull, humdrum life before, so I decided to see if I could earn a living with my pen, and if it could open doors for me.

Rereading that answer, my cynical heart grew three times brighter today. It’s also a reminder of why the death of Queen Elizabeth II has brought forth such strong emotions around the world. Her passing will become a mark for future histories of the early 21st century. We have entered the second post-Elizabethan age.

That is a Eurocentric way of putting it, and of course, memories of the Queen are not so fond in some parts of the world, especially those that experienced the worst of British imperialism and colonialism. To appreciate some of the contradictions in one former colony, see the following stories:

• Queen Elizabeth was no friend to Hong Kong’s democratic struggle by Promise Li on the Lausan Collective: “The death of Queen Elizabeth should remind Hongkongers that the lack of democracy in the city is an outgrowth of British colonial rule.”
• In Hong Kong, public grief over queen doubles as dissent by Zen Soo and Alice Fung of the Associated Press.

Our word of the day is state funeral (国葬 guó zàng), which is how the Chinese state media refer to today’s memorial activities in the U.K.