Temporal Rifts in Hong Kong: The Slow Arts of Protest

opening paragraph:Time-lapse video amplifies the speed of traffic, people, and their movement around the cityscape of Hong Kong. In a video, "The Best Is Yet to Come," dedicated to promoting Hong Kong as "Asia's World City," for example, writers used the magnification of speed to emulate the dynamics of capital's never-ending flow.1 Time-lapse brands Hong Kong and creates a visual metaphor for the elusiveness of "connectivity" that depicts Hong Kong culture as one of rapidity and instant gratification. Recently, speed has been foremost on the mind of Hong Kongers caught in the political quagmire surrounding what has been lambasted as "white elephant" projects devoted to more speedy connections to mainland China. Time-lapse forms the idealized mirror image of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, which, without station stops cuts traveling time to Guangzhou from two hours down to forty-eight minutes. The fantasy of uninhibited speed occludes the controversy of the co-location agreement that ceded Hong Kong territory to the mainland allowing for the practice of Chinese law on Hong Kong soil in direct counter-indication of Hong Kong's mini-constitution. "One train, two systems" directly challenges "One country, two [End Page 619] systems." Plagued by financial woes and construction setbacks, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau mega bridge connects Hong Kong to the Pearl River Delta and puts each city within an hour's commute of each other. Faster and more efficient connections between locations in southern China cemented a new geographical and economic proposition envisioned by officials as the Greater Bay Area. In the context of Hong Kong, faster connections also compress space by supposedly bringing "two systems" closer in a more harmonious temporal and political network.