A History Museum Shows How China Wants to Remake Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Museum of History was the place to go to understand the city’s transformation from fishing village to a glittering metropolis. It housed a life-size replica of a traditional fishing boat and a recreation of a 19th-century street lined with shops.

That exhibit, known as “The Hong Kong Story,” is being revamped. People have instead been lining up for a splashy new permanent gallery in the museum that tells a different, more ominous story about the city — that Hong Kong is constantly at risk of being subverted by hostile foreign forces. The exhibit features displays about spies being everywhere and footage of antigovernment street protests in the city that were described as instigated by the West.

As he kicked off the exhibition this month, John Lee, the Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, made clear that its overarching purpose was to be a warning to the city. “Safeguarding national security is always a continuous effort. There is no completion,” he said. The gallery, which is managed by Hong Kong’s top national security body, opened to the public on Aug. 7.

The exhibit points to a new aspect of the Hong Kong government’s crackdown on the city after antigovernment protests in 2019 posed the greatest challenge to Beijing’s rule in decades. The authorities have introduced security laws to quash dissent in the years since. They are now pushing to control how people will remember the recent political turmoil.

In the government’s telling, the protests were not organic expressions of the residents’ democratic aspirations, as the city’s opposition activists have said, but part of an ongoing plot by Western forces to destabilize China.

The national security exhibit opens with a short video highlighting the unfair treaties of the 19th century that forced China to cede Hong Kong to the British, as well as the Japanese occupation of the city during World War II. Describing the protests in 2019, the video highlighted footage of protesters hurling Molotov cocktails. “Law and order vanished,” the narrator said. Then it credited new national security laws imposed by Beijing in the crackdown that followed, for turning the tide “from chaos to order.”

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.