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ABSTRACT
Following a particularly violent police operation inside the Prince Edward subway station on August 31 2019, during the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong, a group of older women performed mourning rituals for the possibly dead outside the subway exit for almost one hundred days. In view of increasing police surveillance, violence, and arrests, these women’s religious practices and the sociality they generated constituted a form of infrapolitics. By carefully performing their gendered roles as funerary experts, these women created a makeshift shrine that operated symbolically as a public sphere of dissent. This paper examines the making of their shrine in the context of widespread public discontent about police brutality, and by extension, state violence in a broader political-economic context. Without knowing who was being memorialized, the continuous flow of mourners to the Prince Edward Station shrine compels scholars to consider what these possible deaths could mean and what other losses they were accounting for. Through the lens of infrapolitics, these women’s creative appropriation of mourning rituals directs our attention to the amebic vitality of resistance and its persistence against great odds.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Acknowledgements
I would like to express gratitude to the women who generously shared their experiences and thoughts with me. Earlier versions of this article were presented on the panel entitled, “Public Space through Gendered Perspectives: Boundaries as Site of Resistance,” at the 2021 Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, and at the Gender and Social Movements International Conference in 2021 organized by the Gender Research Center, part of the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I also thank Minna K. Valjakka, anonymous reviewers, and the journal editor for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Notes
1 The date is significant because on August 31, 2014, the National People's Congress passed the “831” framework on electoral reforms that indefinitely postponed universal suffrage (the direct election of the territory's chief executive), leading to the Occupy Central Movement, also known as the Umbrella Movement.
2 Most of the footage broadcasted by mainstream media outlets has been removed from online archives. What remains has been preserved on various digital commons sites. See, for example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HK_police_storm_Prince_Edward_station_and_attack_civilians_20190831_11pm.webm.
3 Only on September 10, did MTR officials provide a few screenshots in a failed attempt to dispel claims that people had died inside the station on August 31.
4 CCPOS, CUHK, Citation2020.
5 The Hungry Ghost Festival takes place during the seventh month of the lunar calendar. In 2022, this will be on Friday, August 12.
6 San Uk Ling was an abandoned detention center near the border with mainland China that was used to detain and, according to detainees' reports, torture and sexually abuse people who had been arrested during the protests. See Tong Citation2019.
7 Martin Citation1988, 168.
8 Watson Citation1982, 173.
9 Watson Citation1982.
10 Turner [Citation1969] Citation2008.
11 According to Victor Turner, rites of passage provide a moment of anti-structure, suspending existing differences between participants, thereby generating communitas as a sense of “homogeneity and comradeship” in recognition of a “an essential and generic human bond.” See Turner [Citation1969] Citation2008, 109–110.
12 On September 2, the police “rejected categorically” the allegation that “people had been killed during (sic) the incident in Prince Edward that night;” and on September 7, the government issued a press release titled “No deaths resulted from enforcement actions in the last three months.” Hong Kong Government Press Release, September 7 2019.
13 Ip Citation2020.
14 Wu Citation2020, 322.
15 Vukovich Citation2020, 1.
16 Ho Citation2020, 1020–1024. Police violence had not been a public concern in Hong Kong since the British colonial government introduced a “community policing” model in the 1970s. This explains the public's shock during the 2014 Umbrella Movement when riot police deployed teargas and pepper spray to disperse protestors, forcing unprepared and unarmed protestors to use umbrellas to protect themselves.
17 Center for Communication and Public Survey, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2019.
18 Ho Citation2020; CUHK 2020,106.
19 Protest chants in the fall of 2019 included “721(Police) Nowhere to be Seen [721,” “831, [Police] Beat People to Death!” See also BBC News Citation2020.
20 Samuels Citation2015.
21 Scott Citation1990.
22 Scott Citation1990, 183.
23 Chan Citation2020, Holbig Citation2020.
24 Scott Citation1990, 192.
25 Bourbeau and Ryan Citation2018, 235.
26 Bourbeau and Ryan Citation2018, 231.
27 Bourbeau and Ryan Citation2018, 233–234.
28 Scott Citation1990.
29 Moghadam Citation1995
30 Naples Citation1992.
31 Nikolayenko Citation2020, 743.
32 Johnson Citation2014, 583–590
33 Athanassiuou and Bury Citation2014, 148. FEMEN members protested such male-dominated national team sports events on the grounds that they promoted sex tourism and prostitution.
34 Kim Citation2021, 76.
35 Kim Citation2021, 82
36 Kim Citation2021, 77.
37 Athanassiuou and Bury Citation2014, 1.
38 Cheng and Chan Citation2017, 222.
39 Choi Citation2020, 279.
40 Huo Citation2020.
41 Choi Citation2020; Chung Citation2020.
42 All romanizations of Cantonese here follow the Jyutping system developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK).
43 Chan Citation2020; Chung Citation2020.
44 Choi Citation2020.
45 Chung Citation2020, 57.
46 Ku Citation2020.
47 Lai Citation2021.
48 Choi Citation2020, 278
49 Scott Citation1990, 184.
50 Chung Citation2020, 59.
51 Emphasis added.
52 Samuels Citation2015, 282.
53 Samuels Citation2015, 231.
54 An inquest jury concluded in May 2021 that Leung's cause of death was “misadventure.”
55 Lee Citation2007, 220.
56 Askanius Citation2013.
57 CNN Citation2019a.
58 Lee Citation2007, 31. According to political scientist Samson Yeung, “The protests are about continuing the wishes of those “who gave their lives.”
59 There was another foamboard tomb for the “Heroes of San Uk Ling,” but the claim that people died at San Uk Ling Detention Center did not gain much support. Police denied all allegations of sexual abuse and torture at the detention center and stopped using it in September. See Leung Citation2019.
60 Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) produced an 831 Prince Edward Station Special on September 19 2019. The original program has been removed from the RTHK website but is available at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2324597794518176. See also Los Angeles Times Citation2019; The Times Citation2019; Citizen News Citation2021.
61 Samuels Citation2015, 272.
62 Cf. “Fire Services were Lying!!!!!” [in Chinese], https://lihkg.com/thread/1557402/page/1. See also “Facts Tell: Did Anyone Die at HK”s MTR Prince Edward Station?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtY9HjYMHXM.
63 Vinton”s Art of Language Facebook page, September 17 2019.
64 The News Lens Citation2019. Official data showed no significant increase in suicide rates in Hong Kong during this time.
65 In addition to the preoccupation with involuntary death, there is also a subgroup of “frontliners” (those who use violence in the protests) that has declared their preparedness to die for the movement. See New York Times Citation2019.
66 Li Citation2018.
67 Ho Citation2020, 1015. Under British colonial rule, the Hong Kong police force was equipped with a paramilitary capacity to suppress social disturbances. However, a focus on professionalization beginning in the 1970s transformed the police into a civic force and a community partner.
68 Ho Citation2020, 1029.
69 Kwok Citation2020. See also New York Times Citation2019.
70 Evans Citation1997, 274
71 Evans Citation1997, 280–281.
72 Cheng Citation2019a.
73 The Guardian Citation2019.
74 The Guardian Citation2019.
75 The Standard, September Citation11 Citation202Citation0.
76 Lum Citation2019.
77 The Standard, January Citation9 Citation202Citation1.
78 Cheng Citation2019b.
79 Ho Citation2018. In 1898, the Qing government leased the area north of Boundary Street up to present-day Shenzhen to the United Kingdom for ninety-nine years, forming the Hong Kong territory we know today. See Wesley-Smith Citation1980.
80 Woo and Hui Citation2011, 111.
81 A Chinese book titled “Waiting for Vindication under the Heavens: A Spirit Medium Speaks with Suicided Hong Kong Protestors” by Mu-Dau (Mist Island) was published in 2020 by the Taiwan Times. Gary Kwan, a Hong Kong Youtuber, with 650,000 subscribers, posted a three-part discussion of “831-Prince Edward Station Apparition” on September 25 2019 (Cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUKFBaXYbro). Hong Kong Peanuts, a Cantonese language Youtube channel show devoted to discussing ghost-related stories in Hong Kong, carried two episodes related to alleged deaths in the Prince Edward MTR Station. One episode had a special guest, Jo-na, a middle-aged woman who said she was “very sensitive to these things” and had a lot of experience of having been “cursed” in the previous seven months. Jo-na shared the experience of herself and her friend at the Prince Edward shrine and how one side of their bodies went numb after acknowledging the dead – how they could feel the regrets of the many spirits around them at the shrine. See Hong Kong Peanuts Citation2019.
82 CNN Citation2019b.
83 Athanasiou Citation2017, 3.
84 Athanasiou Citation2017, 3.
85 Evans Citation1997.
86 Former District Councilor Orachi Ben Lam”s Facebook Post, March 17 2020. See also Question by Legislator Yip Kin-yuen and Response by Secretary for Security John Lee. accessed March 30 2022: https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202004/29/P2020042900288.html.
87 Athanasiou Citation2017, 3.
88 Topley [Citation1952] Citation2011, 59.
89 Turner [Citation1969] Citation2008, 110.
90 Derrida [Citation1990] Citation2015, 321.
91 Martin Citation1988, 164.
92 Wool Citation2020, 43.
93 Bourbeau and Ryan Citation2018.
94 Chung Citation2020, 61.
95 In her keynote address at the annual conference of the Taiwan Sociology Association on November 30 2019, Lee Ching-kwan said that “this revolution of our times will be a permanent revolution. This revolution has no end. We must continue to build Hong Kong, and this is also the process of building a community.”
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Sealing Cheng
Sealing Cheng is an anthropologist at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research engages gender, sexuality, and human rights. Her book, On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) received the Distinguished Book Award of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012. Her articles have appeared in Current Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Feminist Theory, Feminist Review, and Social Politics. She is currently working on a manuscript on intimate relations between asylum-seekers and Hong Kong residents.