To China’s communist government, everything that goes wrong has to be somebody else’s fault. Tibetan riots? Foreign splitists. The party’s Global Times is in no doubt of it regarding the country’s latest weirdness. “The West has put all the blame on Chinese authori
ties for the Chen Guangcheng issue,” it complains. True: the assumption overseas is that Beijing essentially authorized criminal Shandong officials to beat and detain blind self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng after he tried to seek justice. Who else, simple-minded foreigners ask, would it have been in a one-party state where there can only be one source of legitimate power?
The newspaper corrects them. “Chen’s case originated from the grass-roots disputes in Linyi, Shandong Province and evolved into a more complex situation under the interference of Western media,” it says, describing the activist as a helpless tool of Western attempts to damage China’s political system. What we thought were causes are in fact effects, and vice-versa. “Chen’s case … will not undermine social stability, nor will it hinder the normal development and progress of China’s human rights,” it continues. “China’s stability lies in its grassroots.”
The Chinese government is now demanding that the United States apologize, presumably for masterminding the trouble-maker’s sightlessness and Linyi’s forced abortions from scratch. No wonder Chen is confused about what country he is supposed to want to be in. Meanwhile, searches on the Twitter-like Weibo system for such phrases as ‘blind person’ are banned. And, lest we forget, we’re still waiting to hear more about Bo Xilai, Chongqing party chief and apparently torturer of businessmen and expropriator of their assets, whose wife allegedly murdered a British fixer and was last seen dressing up as a PLA general. And these are just the things we know about up there.
Closer to home, murky goings-on among our own elite are being ruthlessly exposed as a new regime prepares to pull the plutocrats from their pedestal of privilege and reduce them to shame and ruin. Or something like that. At least, it would have been hard (though not impossible) a year ago to imagine any of the three ‘twilight of the tycoons’ stories in today’s South China Morning Post.
Walter Kwok goes to the press declaring his right to a third of the Sun Hung Kai Properties empire, whatever his old mother says. (Is lawyer Gordon Oldham involved? Shades of casino mogul Stanley Ho, who did a TV interview last year to fight his side in a family dispute about shareholdings.) This comes after the arrest of his two brothers by the Independent Commission Against Corruption. When PR people get involved, messy family affairs can be not only unpleasant and distasteful, but downright compelling.
Over in Macau, a city built on sleaze, Hong Kong property developer Thomas Lau is named in court as having co-signed a cheque for HK$20 million to now-disgraced graft-taking official Ao Man-long. And the heinousness comes to a crescendo with the revelation that Bank of East Asia boss David Li has still not removed his illegal structure. Several hundred thousand other Hong Kong property owners haven’t either, yet the SCMP, the ultimate establishment organ, picks on just this one. The world turned upside down.
You quite rightly identify the Chinese Government as seeking scapegoats for revisionist reaction in the liberal bourgeoisie but it is also reasonably easy to identify the power behind the recent Scheisskerldaemmerung (Twilight Of The Axxholes) in Hong Kong.
It’s not incidental that the tycoons are having all these problems. The black ops department of the Liaison Office must have opened its filing cabinets, or purloined the ICAC’s, good and wide months before this, the same time I should think as they opened them to get the goods on Tang.
I’m sure there is lots more to come.
The real question must be what was the mechanism for making sure the ICAC and other filing cabinets were never opened on the tycoons the last fifteen years. They must have been brimming even in 1997. Tung and Donald must have known all about it all. Why did they order “Do not proceed – Not in public interest” time and time again?
An absolutely brilliant dissection of the doublespeak and innuendo we receive from China and, increasingly, HK. You ironically echo, and thus ridicule, the twisted logic we’re constantly subject to.
I wouldn’t even try to add to your masterful deconstruction, but simply attempt to understand how you do it. The starting point must be an observation of how a clear legal position – the status of embassies or trusts, unauthorised add-ons, massive bribes – signals, like Russian dolls or the no doubt politically incorrect expression Chinese whispers, that the fun is really starting. When you read words like “not”, “interference”, “foreign”, “harmony”, “BVI/CI/MC”, “I can’t remember”, then, as you gleefully observe, the censorship has gone into overdrive and tasty morsels will soon come flying out of the mixer.
With continued crack-down on internet searches in China, surely it has now reached the point that Chinese search engines can make use of a drop-down menu with a couple of dozen approved search topics, rather than typing into the search box directly? This way, control would be a cinch!
Given that progress under the communist party on human rights has been zero or negative, The Global Times is dead right that Chen’s case will not “hinder” further deterioration.
There’s not much point in putting SCMP links in posts; they’re all paywalled, and there’s nothing in the SCMP that would make me want to pay for it these days.
The SubStandard works just as well for wrapping fish or lining the bottom of cat litter boxes.
“The progress of human rights needs the support of comprehensive social development. The West has brought this idea to China, which is not against human rights. Conflicts are often the exaggeration of some specific problems.
The sustaining support of human rights can only come from within China. The West has no ability to provide much detailed help in this regard. They are frustrated more by their own human rights issues now.
The West has put all the blame on Chinese authorities for the Chen Guangcheng issue. Now he is reportedly in US embassy, which has proven to be a dramatic twist. Let us see how the US government can satisfy both Western media and Chen himself”
Or whatever………… ( copied from one of Hemmer’s links above)
@ RTA ( formerly BL) from RTP : seems we are on the same platform for once ( at last? ) Can I buy you a beer, please?
I once pushed a high-profile / ground-based complaint ( similar in scale to the piling scam case ) first to the Ombudsman and then, when things got worse, to the ICAC . “No case to answer” was the reply in both cases. My deep throat / snitch who saw the whole charade from the inside chuckled sickly and said “of course the ICAC dare not take on the big boys, neither in Govt nor in the private sector”
But it seems now the gloves are off and no-one is sacrosanct, starting with 2 of the Kwok bothers : one of whom is supposed to be a born-again Christian . If born again Christians are proved to have done such nasty things, one can only wonder at what super-nasty things others whose name allaus ( sorry / typo allows) them to appear in today’s BL and have yet to be brought to trial.
Now, RTA aka BL, I relish those dracula fangs for once
I don’t mind that some PD’s get rich at the expense of the rest of us all : hey that’s just stock market gambles on a huge scale. I don’t play the stock market.
But if PDs did it with internal collusion , then hang, draw and quarter them (and then eat their gizzards )
Real Tax Payer, sorry being Christian is no guarantee or measure of high morality. That is a claim they (Xians) make and have had others accept for thousands of years. Have you read their bible, it is inconsistent rambling, violent, abusive, masochistic, insecticidal, slave owning and gay bashing tripe, certainly not a good guide on morality. Sorry “insecticidal” should read infanticidal, though I suppose the Bible is also that as you can use it to crush cockroaches. Maybe I have to take what I said back then.
I wonder if Mainland authorities will censor HK’s forthcoming Digital Audio Broadcasting channels. Such a move would be defensible based on the logo alone…
http://www.digitalradio.gov.hk/en/basics/index.html
Chalk up another big fat win for the HK civil service.
Postscript, to reference Hemmers’ last paragraph, does this represent real competition for “the ultimate establishment organ”?
@ Dawei : although for many years I considered myself as a “born again” Christian I now have severe doubts , very severe indeed.
This is not the right Forum to debate Christianity : true/ false
But basically I agree with what you wrote, and I just hope (dare I say PRAY?) that those now in power in HK = CY et al have high moral values and will do what is “the right thing to do”
If you have read the BLC for the past few months you will see that RTP is a big fan of CY (although that is too simplistic – I was just ANTI – HENRY and all the evil he stood for / anything/ anyone was better than the enery )
Let’s not do God here …
The establishment has a very small organ.
Dying of curiosity…what is BLC???
BLC = Big LyChee
BLC = Big Ly Chee
Real Tax Payer, I think Walter is probably right, there are plenty of forums to debate such Godly or un Godly things, if you are having doubts then I recommend Pharangula, a blog by a US academic and well known freethinking skeptic who pulls no punches in dissecting the illogical positions that those of faith market.
BTW Walter, is “Lets not do God here..” sounds like something an Anglican minister would say.
Happy Friday
Oh No! RTP will shortly declare me the best friend he never had, and want to meet me for a beer in Wanchai, next