‘Hong Kong society is still highly patriarchal’

A Hong Kong women’s rights group focusing on labor issues has abruptly called off an event ahead of International Women’s Day after local police cited concerns that “violent groups” would participate. The cancellation has dealt a blow to feminist activism in the city, where the erosion of civil society has intensified after Beijing’s national security law.

Organized by the Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association (HKWWA), one of the city’s oldest nonprofit groups working toward equality for women through fair labor practices, the demonstration was originally scheduled for Sunday in commemoration of International Women’s Day, which falls on Wednesday this year. However, on Saturday night, the organization announced the cancellation of the rally at the last minute in a Facebook post — without giving any reason behind the decision.

The organizer initially planned for participants to march from Wan Chai to government headquarters in Admiralty, with the aim of raising awareness about labor rights, women’s rights, and gender equality. It would have been the first major civil rights rally to be authorized by Hong Kong police since large-scale protests ebbed in early 2020, when the city was first hit by COVID-19.

At a press conference on Saturday night, Dennis Cheng Wai-kin (鄭威鍵 Zhèng Wēijiàn), acting senior superintendent of the Hong Kong Island regional headquarters, said that although the authorities approved HKWWA’s application to hold the rally earlier last week after conducting risk assessment, the association decided to drop plans for the march because “violent groups” had expressed interest in taking part.

“Although the police hope that no one will violate the law, we still found that a lot of people, including some violent groups, have expressed their eagerness to answer the call [of the organizer],” Cheng told reporters, adding that HKWWA came to the decision after “balancing the interests of all parties.”

Cheng did not answer a question about whether the police wanted to avoid the protest, which might have embarrassed the central government during the “Two Sessions” conference, China’s annual parliamentary meeting that is currently underway in Beijing. He stressed that with the cancellation, the “letter of no objection” issued by the authorities was no longer valid. He warned that those attempting to attend may risk committing the crime of “participating in an unauthorized assembly.”

On Sunday, there was a large police presence around Wan Chai, as reported by the Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP). A video shared on Twitter by Xinqi Su, Agence France-Presse’s Hong Kong correspondent, showed police vehicles and scores of officers patrolling and stationed near Southorn Playground, the planned gathering location. “By far the atmosphere has been Sunday-ly calm except the police presence one can’t possibly miss,” she wrote.

While Cheng did not elaborate on what “violent groups” he was referring to when facing the press, the League of Social Democrats, a radical pro-democracy political party in Hong Kong, revealed over the weekend that the police questioned four of its members on Friday and warned them not to participate in the march. “The League of Social Democrats is very angry about being threatened and hindered by the national security police over joining a legal protest. But it has decided to be absent under such pressure,” the group told the Associated Press.

COVID-19 and Hong Kong’s anti-mask law dilemma

Established in 1989, HKWWA used to be a member of the Civil Human Rights Front, a local non-governmental organization behind some of the largest pro-democracy demonstrations and rallies in Hong Kong’s history. But in August 2021, HKWWA left the coalition before it was disbanded, citing “unprecedented challenges” posed by Beijing.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Hong Kong, prompting local officials to enforce one of the world’s strictest social-distancing policies, protests and demonstrations have been rare in the city. According to HKWWA’s executive director Wu Mei-lin (胡美蓮 Hú Měilián), the association had a tradition of organizing rallies to call for better policies to protect female worker’s rights around International Women’s Day each year, but it had to suspend most of its activities in the last few years due to the anti-epidemic rules (such as a limit on the size of public gatherings).

On March 1, Hong Kong finally dropped its mask mandate, ending the last major restriction in the city’s sweeping virus-control policies. However, many Hong Kong locals still choose to mask up in public, citing lingering concerns about the virus.

The normalization of wearing face coverings has put Hong Kong officials in a strange mask-related dilemma: In 2019, as a series of anti-Beijing, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in the city, Hong Kong introduced a regulation banning face masks, which were widely used by protesters to hide their identities and protect themselves from tear gas. The law is applied to both legal gatherings and unlawful rallies.

Now, with pandemic-induced mask-wearing no longer required by the Hong Kong government, questions have been raised over whether it’d be acceptable for people to wear face coverings at authorized events in a post-COVID world. When asked about the issue, Chief Executive John Lee (李家超 Lǐ Jiāchāo) said at a media briefing late last month that the mask ban and the COVID-19 mask mandate were “two different homes.”

“The mask mandate was for public health matters. As for the mask ban, we will review it at a suitable time. At this moment, we will not handle it,” he said at the time.

It’s unclear if HKWWA canceled the rally because of the awkward situation surrounding mask-wearing. At Saturday’s press conference, officer Cheng said that the police had talked to the organizer about the matter, but he didn’t disclose what conclusion they landed on in terms of whether participants of Sunday’s march would be allowed to wear masks.

“Hong Kong has always struggled to sustain a robust feminist movement”

Following the anti-government protests of 2019 and the imposition of the national security law in 2020, the space for Hong Kong’s once-vibrant civil society has shrunk significantly under the weight of the legal risks. Feminist activism is among the affected, according to Jessie Lau, a feminist journalist from Hong Kong and an editor at international editorial collective NüVoices.

“The national security law has had a chilling effect on civil society on the whole, and gender-based activism has largely been one casualty of this tightened landscape,” Lau told The China Project. “Beijing’s clampdown on feminist activism in the mainland these past few years has also heightened the sensitivity of gender rights issues in Hong Kong, particularly in the LGBTQ+ sphere.”

Even before Beijing’s intervention, Hong Kong always “struggled to sustain a robust feminist movement” due to a lack of public support and understanding. In a 2020 op-ed published in The Nation, she argued that because Hong Kong has never fostered a long-lasting or radical feminist consciousness, even the global #MeToo movement failed to gain traction there.

“The city has always been a challenging environment for gender rights advocacy and promotion not only because Hong Kong society is still highly patriarchal, but also because there remains a misguided perception among locals that we have already achieved gender equality, which is an issue that is frequently subsumed by other topics deemed more critical,” she said.

Despite the growing representation of women and gender minorities in Hong Kong’s political, business, and cultural spheres, individuals’ success “has not translated into genuine equality, respect, or rights,” Lau added. Meanwhile, sexual harassment and violence remain pressing problems, as reflected by the recent gruesome murder of 28-year-old socialite Abby Choi (蔡天鳳 Cài Tiānfèng), which is “a tragic reminder of that fact,” she said.

Grace En-Yi Ting (丁恩宜 Dīng Ēnyí), an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Hong Kong, told The China Project that although small groups in the city “continued with activities that challenge gender and sexual norms” in an unfriendly environment, and there’s “relatively plentiful room for discussion of gender and sexuality” in the realm of art, “it’s possible that such activities can exist only so long as organizations and individuals carefully skirt direct references to politics at large.”

“I don’t believe this diminishes the efforts of those who continue to make Hong Kong a relatively vibrant place for expression and discussion when it comes to gender and sexuality,” Ting said. “However, feminist and queer activities have taken different paths and will continue to evolve differently compared to how they have in places with contrasting political contexts.”