Is Hong Kong politics becoming like Squid Game?
- Both sides of the political divide have found comparisons and inspirations from the highly acclaimed Korean TV series, but unsurprisingly, have drawn very different conclusions
If counterpoint is a musical composition that plays two or more contrasting themes together, and the Hegelian concept of synthesis (Aufhebung) is the integration of opposites, then Squid Game is the television version that has magically mixed many different genres and tropes into a brilliant coherent whole.
And so, the anti-government yellows and the pro-China/establishment blues – the two opposing extremes of local politics – have found in the TV series a representation of each other’s predicaments, and Hong Kong’s.
In yellow online platforms, many discussions have likened Hong Kong to the Korean children’s games that look innocent from the outside but whose outcomes are the killings of many and the survival of the very few.
The blues, however, have compared how the show’s game players betray, trick, kill, and conspire against each other to the unscrupulous behaviour of anti-government/China rioters and protesters.
“The show’s portrayal of human nature is more terrifying than any of the gore and violence in it,” said Wat Wing-yin, the influential, bluest of the blues commentator in a video blog.
“Everyone is asking, how would you choose in such a situation? Between childhood best friends or a married couple, would they betray the other or sacrifice themselves?”
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Wat believes no one can really know until they are actually caught in such an extreme situation. But she observes some of the same behaviour among the yellow crowds.
While for them, the outcome was not life and death, she said, the losers ended up in jail or exile.
“They now rat on, neglect and ignore each other,” she said. “All the old romantic claims of ‘standing shoulder to shoulder’, ‘your life is my life’, etc, have been forgotten.
“Now they are in the end game, they are like those passengers 10 minutes before sinking on the Titanic, throwing each other into the sea, fighting for that last space in the last lifeboat.”
Some are doing fine, though. “Those noble yet clever legislators, barristers, former chief secretary and churchmen are living comfortably in their luxury homes. Suddenly they have nothing to say for their comrades, the many young people who face long jail sentences because they were urged to hit the streets and fight with police and turn the city upside down,” she said.
Jeff Tsui Sui-wa, who writes for such yellow outfits as Stand News and inmediahk.net and was once deputy editor-in-chief of Next Magazine, draws a different lesson from the Korean show.
“In Hong Kong today, all the ‘ghosts and goblins, snakes and cow-ghouls’ are fighting each other, just like they do in Squid Game,” he said on his YouTube channel.
“The political set-up in a violent dictatorship is exactly like that – you have to cooperate and work with some people to win, but in the end, you have to betray or kill them, if you are to survive.”
A dictatorship is built on violence, not rules or systems.
“So you have operators who don’t follow rules, but the basic principles of violence,” Tsui said. “This is the culture of political violence. Our former chief executive is exactly like that. More and more such people will come forward. That’s because we are entering a period of dictatorship [in Hong Kong].”
You may agree or disagree with them, or just don’t care. But it’s the genius of Squid Game that people and groups in opposing camps can find something to identify and compare with in the same artistic drama. That accounts for the show’s universal appeal.
