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Hong KongCNN — As the scattered patrons hop from one deserted bar to the next, it’s hard to believe the near-empty streets they are zigzagging down were once among the most vibrant in Asia.
It is Thursday evening, a normally busy night, but there are no crowds for them to weave through, no revelers spilling onto the pavements and no need for them to wait to be seated. At some of the stops on this muted bar crawl, they are the only ones in the room.
It wasn’t always this way. It might seem unlikely from this recent snapshot, but Hong Kong was once a leading light in Asia’s nightlife scene, a famously freewheeling neon-lit city that never slept, where East met West and crowds would spill from the bars throughout the night and long into the morning – even on a weekday.
Such images were beamed around the world in 1997, when Britain handed over sovereignty of its prized former colony to China, and locals and visitors alike welcomed in the new era with a 12-hour rave featuring Boy George, Grace Jones, Pete Tong and Paul Oakenfold.
China’s message at the time was that even if change was coming to Hong Kong, its spirit of “anything goes” would be staying put. The city was promised a high degree of autonomy for the next 50 years and assured that its Western ways could continue. Or, as China’s then leader Deng Xiaoping put it: “Horses will still run, stocks will still sizzle and dancers will still dance.”
And for long after the British departed, the dancing did indeed continue. Hong Kong retained not only the spirit of capitalism, but many other freedoms unknown in the rest of China – not just the gambling on horse races that Deng alluded to, but political freedoms of the press, speech and the right to protest. Even calls for greater democracy were tolerated – at least, for a time.
But little more than halfway into those 50 years, Deng’s promise now rings hollow to many. Spasms of mass protests – against “patriotic education” legislation in 2012, the Occupy Central movement in 2014 and pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019 – led China to restrict civil liberties with a sweeping National Security Law. Hundreds of pro-democracy figures have since been jailed and tens of thousands of residents have headed for the exits.
That crackdown and Hong Kong’s fading freedoms have been well-documented, but it is only more recently that a less-reported knock-on effect of China’s crackdown has started to emerge: In the streets and the bars, the trendy clubs and Michelin-starred restaurants, the city that never slept has begun to doze.