This paper investigates forms of political and sonic haunting experienced by Hongkongers after the passing of the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020. I use haunting to mean two things: a metaphysical, spiritual haunting, interacting with ghostly presence, and a metaphorical haunting that engages with the residues of political traumas (Gordon 2008; Good et al. 2022). Haunting manifests as ghostly presence, but also as absence, notably by limiting political speech through state-enforced censorship or silence. Drawing on five years of ethnographic and archival research, I propose a framework of “sonic hauntology” to describe how the state’s voice is amplified in the public sphere, by stifling of individual or dissenting voices, and in haunting the private minds of citizens, provoking self-censorship. In this way, specters haunt through both presence and absence, sound and silence; specters arise both from state control and from dissenting voices of resistance. ‘The People’s Voice’ especially haunts those who participated in the 2019 Pro-Democracy protests. I explore how political discourse functions in public using replacement words through euphemisms or “algospeak,” or metaphors from other geographic regions. Interviews with musicians, artists, and community organizers highlight how Hongkongers navigate a post-NSL public sphere where explicit freedom of speech or artistic expression are severely limited.

Public holidays and state-sponsored festivals are notable in the post-protest Hong Kong soundscape given the tight control the government has over the sonic dimensions of these events. One of the most significant and transformed public holidays is July 1, the anniversary of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese governance. During the twenty-three years between the handover and the passage of Hong Kong’s National Security Law (HKNSL), this holiday was accompanied by a street protest that drew in thousands of Hongkongers (Lee and Chan 2018). After the dissolution of the Civil Human Rights Front (the main organizers) in 2021, the government took on a larger role in the execution and character of this public holiday (Ho 2024). In this paper, I examine how legislation passed by the Hong Kong government following the HKNSL systematically dismantled the protest soundscape by restricting the movements of Hongkongers on July 1 by closing Victoria Park using COVID-19 restrictions, replacing colonial cultural symbols such as the Police Pipe Band’s British repertoire, and criminalizing “seditious” or “subversive” speech. The result is a soundscape that evokes patriotism instead of protest. I argue that this top-down approach from the Hong Kong government is Schaferian in nature, as it aims to reshape how Hongkongers construct their local identity by transforming the acoustic ecology of the holiday (Schafer 1977). While the Hong Kong government aims to project and construct stability through its strict control of sound, its tactics for silencing bely a continual reminder of the city’s protest sounding.

This paper examines the “Glory to Hong Kong” music box as a nonhuman mediator through which political memory and collective affect persist amid legal suppression. Composed during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Protests, “Glory to Hong Kong” became a choral practice of assembly and political subjectivation, extending Foucault’s account of embodied practices and power relations to collective musicking as a technology of political self-formation (Foucault 1982; 2008). After the Hong Kong Court of Appeal’s May 8, 2024 interim injunction restricting acts related to the song’s dissemination and performance, the music box produces a different politics of audibility: small-scale, domestic, and diasporic.

I theorize the music box as a Latourian mediator—an actant that translates the anthem across law, platform governance, home interiors, and transnational circulation, reshaping its scale and temporality (Latour 2005). I argue that the object’s “vibrant” capacities (Bennett 2010) reconfigure intentional musicking by redistributing agency across human-object relations through tactile, repetitive, quiet engagements that blur performance, listening, and everyday life—forms less legible as public assembly.

To explain how the music box binds listeners into a precarious collectivity, I take up the quasi-object (Serres 1982), while engaging object-oriented critiques of relationalism (Harman 2009). Drawing on an interview with the song’s composer and analytic reflections on the embodied practices of cranking and listening, and in dialogue with Andrea F. Bohlman’s account of cassette infrastructures as material circulations of solidarity and affect (Bohlman 2017; 2020), I explore how the music box operates as a micro-infrastructure of dissent.