Crowds of Hong Kong residents have lined up to pay their respects to Britain’s late monarch this week, some expressing nostalgia for the city’s colonial past at a time when Beijing seeks to purge dissidents. Hundreds gathered outside the consulate on Monday night as Britain held a state funeral, sharing live streams from phones as well as laying candles and flowers. At one point, a man began playing songs on a harmonica, an AFP reporter at the scene said, including the British national anthem and Glory to Hong Kong, a popular song during massive, sometimes violent, pro-democracy protests in 2019. . Mourners outside the consulate applauded the performance and flashed their phone lights, with many later chanting the protest chant “Hongkongers add oil” and singing Glory to Hong Kong. Local reporters later photographed the harmonica player being questioned by police and being detained. On Tuesday, police said a 43-year-old man surnamed Pang was arrested outside the consulate for “subversive acts”. A police source confirmed to AFP that the man arrested was the harmonica player. After the 2019 democracy protests, China crushed dissent in Hong Kong using national security laws and sedition charges. The latter is a colonial-era law that had fallen into obscurity for decades until prosecutors reinstated it in the wake of the protests. The song Glory to Hong Kong contains the popular protest chant “liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times”, which has been declared by the courts as a threat to national security. A man in his 60s was charged earlier this year with performing without a license after playing the song on his erhu, a Chinese two-stringed instrument, at a bus terminal. Oliver Ma, a Filipino-Hong Konger, was arrested three times in 2020 and 2021 when he sang the English version of the protest song on the streets of Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a British colony for more than 150 years, and while the financial hub returned to China in 1997, the past is etched into its landscape, from street names and the ubiquity of English to the common law legal system. In the week since the Queen’s death, more than 13,000 people have signed a book of condolences at the British consulate in the city.
