On August 23, Typhoon Hato, which was considered as the strongest one in 50 years, struck Macau. Our neighbour Hong Kong hoisted typhoon signal number 8 at 5:20am that day. Soon after that, the signal was rapidly raised up three more severity levels, reaching typhoon signal number 10 at 9:10am.
However, Macau’s weather department was slow to react, only hoisting typhoon signal number 8 after 7am in the morning and typhoon signal number 10 at 11:30am. Limited preparations as well as a lack of an effective warning meant citizens were psychologically and practically unprepared. When the typhoon struck, parts of Macau were devastated, leading to at least 10 people dead, and more than a hundred people wounded. In terms of economic losses, it is estimated up to more than one billion patacas.
However, the urban issues that were exposed by Typhoon Hato were far more serious and complicated than just poor weather predictions and insufficient warning systems. More troubing was the issue of the inefficiency of the government in the face of a public crisis, a lack of transparency and immediate announcement of information, as well as poor urban planning amd coordination among citizens for prevention and protection.
If Hato was an inevitable natural disaster, then the devastating “Macau Shutdown” that took place after, i.e. rubbish blocking the whole city, electricity and water cut for days, and the huge chaos and even paralysis of the whole city, were to a great extent caused by man-made mistakes of the city’s management.
At those moments, I couldn’t help but remember an apocalyptic fiction I read a few years back, Hong Kong Shutdown, which was written by the renowned Hong Kong writer Jozev. In 2008, he published a long fiction work Blood and Steel which had great success. Hong Kong Shutdown was written from 2010 to 2011 and was published weekly in the Hong Kong Economic Journal. During that time, when the fiction was published weekly, many readers would share it on the Internet, resulting in a great deal of discussion about what a Hong Kong doomsday would be like. And because of this, when the fiction was done being published in the newspaper, some publication houses in Hong Kong and Taiwan grouped the whole collection and published it in a single book.
The story of Hong Kong Shutdown is not set in a specific year; it is simply marked as year 201X. The main character, Ah Kit is playing zombie video games at home when suddenly there is power blackout across the whole of Hong Kong. The disaster is caused when an army plane crashes in the middle of the city in Causeway Bay, leaking out a highly infectious biochemical substance. Hong Kong is sealed up within a radius of 500 kilometers, all border gates with Mainland China are closed;
electricity, water and telecommunications are all cut. The whole of Hong Kong becomes paralyzed, and people start to panic and fight for resources and their survival. Horrors such as killing one another and even eating one another occur within 24 hours, turning Hong Kong from a highly civilized, rich and modern city into something unimaginable…
This type of 'Post-Apocalyptic' work is not uncommon in western literature and cinema, but it is indeed quite rare in Chinese fiction. The descriptions of how human psychology reacts to a disaster were so vivid that it caused my curiosity to read it a few years ago. Now, after I have seen how Macau was destroyed by Hato, my imagination was given a taste of real experience on the subject.
And of course, apart from the apocalyptic image of the city, what is interesting in Hong Kong Shutdown is the hidden metaphors in it. If one is familiar with the recent political storms and the ups and downs of the different currents of thinking in Hong Kong, it is not difficult to see that the book provides lots of associations and comparisons that are worth reflecting upon.
