Today, on the sidelines of the sit-ins, small groups of older people wave the Chinese red flag and sing the Chinese national anthem, with its archaic, ponderous opening: "Arise! All those who refuse to be slaves! Let our flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall!" The protesters bellow back with the stirring "Do You Hear the People Sing?" number from the blockbuster musical "Les Mis�rables," hoping for a happier ending than in the original. In 1964, while China was preparing for the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong was hosting the Beatles.
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It is known for celebrating a certain degree of freedom in Hong Kong: "It's true we have no democracy / One day we'll choose leaders / But we can say anything we like / Our free speech has freed us."
On social media, a sugary 2007 song by an obscure group called the Wokstarz (disclosure: my daughter was a member) had 50,000 Facebook views in three days recently. "Forgive me for loving freedom all my life," goes the band leader Wong Ka-Kui, who, like John Lennon, died before his time.
The song they most often sing is "Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies," a 1993 ballad by the local Cantonese group Beyond. These days, the protesters are saying as much, and are rejecting the influence of Beijing over Hong Kong's next election by invoking a combination of local Cantonese cultural references and global musical hits. That goes for everything, including democracy. Hong Kong is an international city, and ever since the former British colony was swallowed up by China in 1997, its residents have expected to live by global, not Chinese, standards. The choice of a Western pop song was also defining. The protesters' ranks soon swelled so much that journalists stopped trying to estimate the numbers.
The students responded by daubing a quote from John Lennon's "Imagine" over various parts of the main sit-in site in the Admiralty neighbourhood: "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." In the first few days of the pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong, haughty newspaper editorials branded the demonstrators as na�ve dreamers.
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