Your tax dollars at work – it’s getting freaky

HAB-syria

Hong Kong Free Press finds that the city’s government is offering subsidies to non-profits organizing youth exchange visits to Syria – a war-ravaged country that also merits a Black Travel Warning.

This may seem like an extreme, if potentially effective, way for Hong Kong’s embattled administration to rid itself of the city’s rebellious and militant younger generation, who are setting up pro-independence and/or anti-Beijing political groups on a daily basis. (An aside: the latest ‘line to take’ from the Establishment Official Smears and Memes Department is that the tour of US universities by Demosisto’s Nathan Law and Joshua Wong is highly suspicious in a CIA-kind-of-way because – hey, how can kids afford airline tickets for such a long journey?)

But of course the subsidized trips to distant and dangerous places – Iraq is another – are part of something even more desperate and sinister: Chief Executive CY Leung’s deranged fetishization of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ slogan-initiative.

Insofar as anyone can make sense of it, ‘Belt and Road’ is part of Xi Jinping’s egotistical and grandiose ‘China Dream’, with an unfortunate whiff of thousand-year greater co-prosperity/Lebensraum spheres. The nuts and bolts is to export China’s industrial overcapacity by conning obscure and backward Central Asian and other corrupt regimes into signing up for Mainland-built infrastructure. The ‘vision’ is to gather up much of the Eurasia landmass and Indian Ocean littoral into tributary states, thus displacing US influence, hegemony and (a particular obsession) the dollar. It is all wrapped up in pseudo-historical baloney, harking back to the ancient Silk Road and Zheng He’s Ming Dynasty voyages, complete with clunky maps featuring Samarkand and Venice.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, there is no evidence that these other countries want or need China to oversee their infrastructure development, let alone absorb them into a Sinocentric New Economic Order. The list of 60-odd ‘Belt and Road’ countries has been drawn up unilaterally in Beijing (and apparently by academic/think-tank bodies, so at arm’s length from the PRC government). Few or none – Pakistan may be an exception – asked to be named a ‘Belt and Road’ member or participant. There are signs that in Beijing itself, the concept is being downplayed, perhaps in recognition that at best the whole thing comes across as a self-absorbed Han-supremacist fantasy.

CY Leung’s hyper-obsession with ‘Belt and Road’ is shoe-shining on both steroids and hallucinogens. The man is apparently oblivious to local public opinion, which – to the extent people care – finds his mania bewildering and alienating.

HKFP-GovHK-syria

His bureaucrats try to meet his demands for outlandish ‘Belt and Road’ schemes and projects while discreetly ensuring that no harm is done. And they succeed admirably. You can get a daily subsidy of HK$680 per person if you organize a Comradely Mutual Exchange Tour of sunny, historic Homs, but HK$1,360 if you drag the Patriotic Kids’ Club off to boring and drab Uzbekistan for some mutton pilov. In case you don’t get the hint, next week’s briefing session is in Cantonese only – a sign that this is a symbolic policy, designed to give Beijing the impression that Hong Kong is a community of fervent Communist Party/Glorious Motherland faithful. The functionaries at the Home Affairs Bureau silently plead with everyone to ignore it, we’re just going through the motions here, let it pass.

HKFP-Syria

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7 Responses to Your tax dollars at work – it’s getting freaky

  1. This could be my ticket to Kazakhstan.

    I like. You like.

    Possibly it will be the only safe place when the new U.S. lightweight atomic bombs are ready and the last Pacific War starts. Wouldn’t it be just awful if John Pilger were right?

  2. pd says:

    Thanks, Hemlock, for the irony and insight.

    I can’t resist commenting on the tarifs deemed appropriate for all the dreamed-of vassal states. The places worth $68o a day are brown-skinned; many of those worth a hair’s breadth less (oh the heavy symbolism!) are duskier; but the others, which benefitted from the civilisation brought by Attila’s evanescent empire, are worth precisely twice as much.

    I wish Joshua and Nathan the best of luck — if only because of their ostracism by the other wet-behind-the-ear groupuscules, with their bully-boy and girl methods and support, objectively speaking, for the Heung Yee Kuk/NT for the NTers even if they’re 4th generation foreigners/let’s just dump and concrete everything over Party.

  3. Chinese Netizen says:

    Easy to slough the youth off to war zones…when the shit hits the fan, it’s the local CCP embassy that’ll have to deal with it. Which leads me to another point…
    Isn’t it stated that HK a CITY with no powers of foreign policy and defence??? Why is 689 so rabidly pushing this like he’s a foreign minister of some sort?
    This is like the mayor of Portland, Oregon pushing for the TPP on an overboard propaganda campaign for something the vast majority of the population don’t know/care about.

  4. pd says:

    CN, Actually HK is NOT a city: it’s a Region, and one that’s Special as well, to distinguish it, I suppose, from the Autonomous ones like Tibet.

    HK has government representatives in London and places like that since, as a full member of the WTO etc., it manages its own trade matters, among others.

    A more useful comparison than Organ might be with Scotland — or Wales or Jersey if you insist — or a State in the US.

  5. LRE says:

    So if I’m reading this right, theoretically, the HKSAR government would subsidise the Hong Kong Independence Party sending kids off to train as terrorists in Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq. That’s quite subversive…

  6. Hank Morgan says:

    Great bare knuckles post.

  7. WTF says:

    Any idea if HK is out supporting the RCEP with our tax dollars? It would explain why the government gave up on Disney’s marching orders to get a new IP law in place. It’s all moot if one could achieve the same through treaty

    “[T]he Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) [is] a trade agreement that is being worked on by a bunch of Asian countries, and which is often described as an ‘anti-TPP’ or, at the very least, a competitor to the TPP. It’s being driven by China and India — two countries who were not in the TPP process” “Given how concerned we were with the TPP, we had hoped, at the very least, that RCEP would be better on things like intellectual property. Unfortunately, some early leaks suggested it was even worse.”

    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160420/11291334226/latest-version-anti-tpp-rcep-shows-that-intellectual-property-provisions-are-even-worse.shtml

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