As Hong Kong Marks Handover Anniversary, A Push And Pull With China Over Identity
There's anxiety in Hong Kong over things appearing from mainland China. But the continued presence of things not found on the mainland shows there's still a gap between this and other Chinese cities.
On Monday, a group of protesters in Hong Kong did something unusual. They slipped by security guards to climb on a large gilded statue and wrapped it in black cloth.
Their target was an object associated with state power: the Golden Bauhinia statue, a floral sculpture more than 15 feet high that Beijing gave to Hong Kong, a symbol of the city's 1997 transformation from a British crown colony into a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. A shiny and alien-looking presence near the Hong Kong convention center, it is a landmark that mainland Chinese tourists love to visit, but is mostly, a leader of Hong Kong's pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, managed to obscure the statue from view.
