Hong Kong was overcome with vibrant positive energy yesterday – an infectious buzz of ecstatic enthusiasm and excitement sweeping the city as it launched the ‘Appreciate HK’ campaign. We haven’t seen such an outpouring of popular merriment and dancing in the streets since [insert last time there was widespread merriment etc].
The government announcement calls for ‘sectors in the community’ to organize ‘activities 
and projects suitable to be incorporated into the programme schedule’. By ‘sectors’, officials mainly mean themselves, plus their business cronies and perhaps the Communist Party’s grim-faced ogres and clueless hirelings. But they are also rather daringly including academia and NGOs, so perhaps pro-democracy lawyers from Hong Kong University and young activists from the City-State Independence Movement will be joining in. It depends what they mean by ‘suitable to be incorporated’. Maybe not everyone will be ‘incorporated’ with open arms.
While her boss continues on his mission to alienate and embitter anyone in the city who is (one or more of) young, intelligent, thoughtful, good-looking, literate or vaguely decent, Chief Secretary Carrie Lam welcomes us to this latest attempt to spread harmony and happiness throughout the land. It is, she notes with a touch of weariness, the third such effort, following the roaring successes of the much-loved ‘Hong Kong: Our Home’ campaign of 2013 and the ‘Bless Hong Kong’ thing last year. This one, she insists, has ‘a deeper meaning and generates greater social cohesion’ (sounds like an ad for soap powder), and it has no fewer than four meanings (which we tragically have insufficient space to list here).
Her message then lapses into cold propaganda-speak, like a China Daily quote of Xi Jinping’s exhortations to a party plenum…
Note the clumsy ‘Communist’ English here. This is Carrie’s subliminal/subversive way of distancing herself from the prose ordered from on high: an apologetic ‘not my idea’ from a heart-broken bureaucrat who no longer has the will to resist. (Leaving harsh-sounding Liaison Office phraseology intact is becoming an established silent gesture of defiance – keep an eye out for it.)
Biting her lip, Carrie summons up a few far more polished and rousing words in tribute to the old Hong Kong Spirit…
…before finally admitting her despair, head down, implicitly pleading with anyone who might be able to do something – anything – to rescue the city, even at this stage, where it looks too late and beyond hope…
Lest you think I am reading too much anguish into her words, you need only check out the innards of ‘Appreciate HK’, such as the soy sauce and instant noodles below-cost for the underprivileged (one item per eligible person per week) to confirm the wrist-slashingly wretched awfulness of the whole thing. Meanwhile, Carrie still has retirement details in the UK to sort out. Please don’t make her do a fourth campaign.
Last year’s “Bless Hong Kong” thingy somehow failed to catch my attention. I know it’s impossible but it just slipped by, unnoticed. Maybe it was those million people in the street at the start of Occupy that obscured the posters in the MTR and at the bus stops. Or the smoke of the teargas that blanketed Admiralty -Beijing-like- while we were hanging over the highway railings, vomiting our fish head curries, blinded by the PTU’s ZyclonC.
Carrie-oot is wilfully and triply violating the Basic Law.
Those with long memories will recall the first sample question to test civil service entrance, something like: who does property in HK belong to:
a) private individuals
b) HKG
c) the butchers of Tiananmen Square.
Therefore, the incorrect, foreign-inspired phrase “belongs to us” must forthwith be resolutely and tenaciously deleted from all documents.
In my naiver days, I used to think “various sectors” meant white and black devils, sexual minorities, immigrants, the handicapped and the like.
Wouldn’t the “Appreciate Hong Kong” campaign be better targeted at the CCP to convince them to stop screwing it up piece by piece?
@Joe Blow – I didn’t notice it either – did anyone?
Let’s not feel sorry for Carrie – let’s look at the choices she is making. In decision after decision she is rubber stamping Beijing over the Hong Kong people – and why? for cash.
She is Judas betraying Jesus for 40 pieces of silver – a traitor, nothing more, nothing less.
This “Appreciate Hong Kong” campaign is all about property-owners having ever-appreciating property-values: the web-site says so:
“it also means showing gratitude for Hong Kong, understanding Hong Kong and adding value to Hong Kong”
The “adding value” part means that the unfunded 3/4 of a trillion Civil Service pension liability gets reduced by charging Govt rent and rates to convert property-owners’ wealth into Civil Service pensions.
Since Hemmer mentions, I can faintly recall seeing “Bless HK” adverts on some buses.
Hong Kong is the humour capital of the world. If the government knew that, it would spoil everything. They would make it into a hub. Why don’t you send stuff to Private Eye? I got another tenner from them this week.
“to appreciate, show gratitude for, understand or add value to Hong Kong”…I can go along with most of this as I have done so (in my own wee way) for 30 yrs. BUT to whom am I/we being asked to ‘show gratitude’, here? @Probably, has got it right, and the whole targeting exercise is arseaboutface.
@ Tai O
‘understand’ is the key word here. Understand we are an unusual and particular society that still needs a bloody great fence at our land border; and that not once in our peacetime history has anyone attempted to escape North.
That’s who we are. And it’s understood.
As I am not a civil servant, I pay half of my gross income for rent, for a miserable little apartment, I pay tax to fund the grossly inflated salaries of the Civil Service (best paid in the world) and the Quisling Government that nobody voted for, and the building that houses my ‘parliament’ has a steel wall around it to keep people like me out. My cup of appreciation runs over !
Pie-chucker: escaping up north has been an increasing phenomenon in recent years due to mainland hired goons or local pro CCP trolls that need quick getaways after they’ve done their murders/choppings/vandalisms/etc at the behest of the motor oil headed crew in Zhongnanhai.
Naturally, there are revolving doors for these patriots.
@Tai O Bloke – “to whom am I/we being asked to ‘show gratitude’, here?” Presumably to our overlords in the North, from whom all blessings flow (according to them, anyway). Like CEPA, and the flood of tourists who are supposedly propping up our economy, and no doubt other blessings we would be better off without.
Pie-chucker,
While I certainly agree with the general thrust of your observations, I believe that there have been a few examples of people attempting to “escape north”, and, in some cases, succeeding in so doing. Beloved Hong Kong icon, and darling of “government” publicity campaigns, Jacky Chan comes immediately to mind. This all-round twat escaped north to his Peking fastness some time ago and has since spent much of his time pouring inarticulate scorn upon his fellow citizens down south.
As for Curry Lamb and her fellow goons on the upper slopes of the “civil service”, they all have their escape routes well mapped out, but I very much doubt that any of them will lead northwards. At least those irrelevant old turn-coats, Tu and Akers-Jones, have had the grace to stay put even as the commie-inspired enormities that they helped foster have started to bite.
Oh, and by the way, like many others, I entirely missed both the “Hong Kong: Our Home” and the “Bless Hong Kong” campaigns. I would never have heard of this “Appreciate Hong Kong” bollocks either had Hemmers not brought it up. You have much to answer for, me old china.
jkgj