What the Loss of Freedom Feels Like
From my home in Beirut, I think of Hong Kong all the time. Even though I’ve never been and have no real ties to it, I feel as though I have a stake in its future. I stare at news headlines that read, “Hong Kong Families, Fearing a Reign of Terror, Prepare to Flee the City,” and feel a strange, visceral sense of familiarity. I’ve become obsessed with trying to understand—to feel—Hong Kongers’ angst as their city undergoes a precipitous transformation.
Since prodemocracy protests erupted there in 2019, at the same time as anti-corruption demonstrations in Lebanon, I’ve witnessed my own country’s collapse under a plethora of crises: the implosion of its economy, the enormous blast at the Beirut port, and of course the pandemic, all of it wrapped up in endemically corrupt politics and meddling by foreign powers, notably Iran. Decades of progress since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 have been erased, and thousands of Lebanese are rushing for the exit.
Lebanon and Hong Kong have everything and nothing in common. Both are energetic creative centers of design, film, and music; refuges for those seeking freedom of thought and expression; places situated between East and West, with a culture of emigration. At one time, Lebanon was even described as Syria’s Hong Kong—more on that later. But their histories, their politics, and especially their economies could not be more different.
Still, today they seem bound together by a similar feeling of loss—not as the result of a sudden war or a natural disaster, but because of the disintegration of something much more complex.
Last month, Keith Richburg, a former foreign correspondent and the director of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, “the old Hong Kong of raucous debate and protest, of independent-minded activists and politicians and filmmakers, is an essay titled “Lebanon as We Once Knew It Is Gone.”
