Fictional Story Deemed to Violate NSL

Chan shut down the Cantonese association soon after the raid

It is hard to understand and accept the absurdity that is happening in Hong Kong now.

The latest? A Cantonese-language advocacy group has shut down because the national security police found a fictional story submitted to a contest it held three years ago has violated the NSL.

A made-up story. Three years ago.

If the story was submitted just after the national security law was implemented in July 2020, then one might be able to understand, but then again it's a fictional story.

Chan is currently traveling in Australia

Andrew Chan Lok-hang, 28, is the founder of Hong Kong Language Learning Association. He is not in the city, but the national security police raided his family's home without a warrant and asked to meet him.

The police also demanded that a short story be taken down from the association's website or he would be the ninth person to have a HK$1 million bounty over his head, so Chan complied out of fear.

"My biggest concern is the safety of my family members and friends in Hong Kong. I found out that if I did not shut down the organisation, they could keep using the materials online, and harass the people I care about," Chan said, who teacher Chinese and Cantonese online.

He founded Hong Kong Language Learning Association in 2013 with the mission to protect the "language rights of the Hong Kong people".

Did he or did he not know protecting the Cantonese language would become a form of resistance?

The offending story is called Our Time and it is about a man who emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom with his parents in 2020, the year the national security law was imposed on the city's residents. 

A short story apparently violated national security

After the death of his parents 30 years later, the man visits Hong Kong only to find the city's history has been wiped out by authoritarian rule. The story ends with this line: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting", which was written by the late Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who has written many books around the theme of Czechoslovak Communism.

If Chan failed to take down the story, he could have been wanted by the national security police.

The incident happened while Chan was on holiday in Australia, and now believes he cannot go back to Hong Kong.

"I am now travelling in Australia. I did not plan to stay. It was just a vacation. I still haven't figured out where I can settle as I cannot get back to m hometown," he said.

It is possible that Chan got into trouble as his association received funding from the government. 

"Supporting Cantonese had become an excuse for them to report us under the national security law," he said.

It looks like Beijing is waging war against Cantonese, in an effort to wipe it out and its speakers...