Everton Camargo (r.) is hoping for progress with Hong Kong after the 0-1 defeat against Iran led by goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand.
Foto: imago/Ding Ting
Timmy is in a pretty good mood these days. “Hong Kong is spilling oil!” enthuses the social worker. That means: Your homeland is causing a sensation. Namely the footballers at the Asian Cup, which the 42-year-old is watching on her TV screen at home: “The fact that we are there this time is a great success. But the fact that the team is doing well is sensational!” The 1:3 in the opening game of Group C against the United Arab Emirates was followed by a narrow 0:1 defeat against Iran. With a win this Tuesday against Palestine’s footballers, progress would still be possible. And if that doesn’t work? “We make noise anyway,” says Timmy.
The day after the opening defeat at the Asian Cup, which has been running in Qatar since January 12th, the “South China Morning Post” wrote: “It was a moment that you had to wait 56 years for, but no matter how it turned out, it was a moment Moment of pride.« Hong Kong had previously failed to qualify for the finals of the Asian Cup for more than half a century. Now they are a complete outsider: Hong Kong is ranked 150th in the world rankings, no other participating country is ranked lower.
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The footballers have been keeping Hong Kong on cloud nine for weeks. After surprisingly qualifying for the Asian Cup, the team from the once politically autonomous metropolis of 7.5 million also won against their rather unloved, very big brother: China. A 2-1 win on New Year’s Day marked their first triumph over the mainland in three decades. And it is one that is perhaps even more important than the Asian Cup.
“I don’t have to motivate the team against China,” said Jörn Andersen, who played as a Bundesliga professional in Nuremberg and Hamburg in the 1990s and has been training Hong Kong’s team since 2021, after the test match. Because no trade fair could be more important than that with China. The background is political: the extent to which Hong Kong’s selection still has any legitimacy today is increasingly controversial. After all, it is now forbidden to even claim that Hong Kong is a nation. Then why have a national team?
There has been a national football association since 1914, when Hong Kong was still a British colony. In 1997, however, the area returned to Chinese ownership. The Sino-British treaty that regulated the return promised Hong Kong extensive autonomy for at least 50 years. People should continue to enjoy freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and be able to choose their own government. But China’s government in Beijing soon began to interpret the principle of “one country, two systems” established with the handover in an idiosyncratic way.
The Communist Party ruling on the mainland repeatedly tried to bring autonomous Hong Kong under its control. Again and again there was loud resistance. From the middle of the last decade, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of people protested on the streets of Hong Kong. And when China finally passed the National Security Law in 2020, which also banned criticism of Beijing’s one-party system in Hong Kong and punished it with long prison sentences, riots broke out for weeks. Beijing had them crushed and the leaders were arrested.
What does this have to do with sports? A lot, says Timmy: “Winning makes you happy. And being happy is important sometimes!” she says about the sensational win against China: “We love Hong Kong!” She prefers not to read her last name in the media. Even this banal declaration of love for her homeland is politically charged, as it shows that patriotism and nationalism still exist in Hong Kong. “Sports fans used to boo during the Chinese anthem,” says a journalist from Hong Kong, who also kept his name anonymous: “Nowadays you get put behind bars for that.”
Since the passage of the security law, Hong Kong sport has been in a strange state of obscurity. The Football Association, as well as the National Olympic Committee, have the suffix China in their names, but continue to compete in competitions formally independently. But how independent are they?
When the Hong Kong fencer Edgar Cheung won Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021 and the Chinese anthem was played afterwards, the popular rallying cry echoed at a public viewing event in a Hong Kong mall: “We are Hong Kong!” Shortly afterwards, a man who apparently who was caught booing was arrested. Since then, the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” has been played repeatedly at sporting events – officially by mistake – instead of the Chinese anthem.
If something similar were to happen during the Asian Cup, controversy would be guaranteed. But another encounter between China and Hong Kong, this time in tournament mode, would probably be even more explosive. The test match at the beginning of January took place behind closed doors, probably to prevent riots. But in Qatar there is an international audience. And perhaps patriotic battle cries on the streets of Hong Kong – if anyone still dares.
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