Team News Riveting
Scores of Hongkongers vented their anger at the top Chinese leader and Hong Kong officials for their repression of the city’s freedoms during a traditional “villain hitting” ritual.
According to reports, a large crowd lined up under the Canal Road flyover in Causeway Bay waiting to perform the ritual. Under the practice, customers write the names of their adversaries or badly behaving people on paper effigies and hire elderly women to beat them with slippers.
The ritual takes place around March 5, which marks the awakening of insects in the traditional Chinese solar calendar. People believe the ritual can dispel ill fortune by curbing the inauspicious impact of “villains.”
For some in the queue, the mainland and Hong Kong governments’ repression of freedoms and rights in the city was the reason to hire villain hitting services.
A man paid a woman to thrash paper effigies marked with the nicknames for top Chinese leader, Hong Kong administrative and police officials and Beijing loyalists. The authorities’ persecution of 47 pro-democracy politicians who took part in unofficial primaries for a legislative election last year had prompted him to perform his first ever villain hitting ritual, he said.
Police officers at the scene came over and inspected Chan when he showed one of his paper offerings, on which he had written his support for Hong Kong protesters, to an Apple Daily photographer.
The 47 have been charged with “conspiring to subvert state power” for their involvement in the primaries, with most of them denied bail.
Many paid for a ritual to wish for their good fortune this year and for an early end to the COVID-19 pandemic.
