On 6 June 2024, three football fans attending the Hong Kong’s World Cup qualifier against Iran were arrested for, according to the police who was assigned to observe the audience’s behaviours, ‘turning their backs and remaining seated when China’s national anthem was played’. On 30 July 2025, one of the three spectators was convicted under the National Anthem Ordinance for ‘undermin[ing] the dignity of the national anthem as a symbol and sign of the People’s Republic of China’. Whereas previous cases of conviction for breaching the Ordinance involved active behaviours more readily readable as intentional insults, such as booing and waving a colonial flag, in the current case, what was interpreted as disrespectful was the failure to comply with the etiquette stipulated in the Ordinance—‘to stand solemnly and deport themselves with dignity’.

The criminalisation of ritual impropriety with the National Anthem Ordinance enacted recently in 2020 is reminiscent of the Qing court’s practice of regarding shiyi 失儀, literally ‘losing etiquette’, as a punishable offence. Qing court documents from the First Historical Archives show that the Ministry of Rites would assign an official to observe whether the participants followed appropriate decorum during court ceremonies, much like the above case. This reflects the traditional governing strategy of lifa heyi 禮法合一or lixing heyi 禮刑合一, i.e., symbolising a hierarchical and centre-oriented social and cosmological order with the Confucian system of etiquettes and rites (yili 儀禮), and enforcing that order with the Legalist system of punishment (xing 刑). By analysing rituals as a site where power relations are produced and negotiated (Bell 2009) with reference to the Qing cases of ‘losing etiquette’, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of the ideological underpinning of Hong Kong’s National Anthem Law.