More of the same incessant police-state stuff…

Today’s CCP horrors come in no particular order.

Police arrest lawmakers Chu Hoi-dick, Ted Hui and Ray Chan under the LegCo Ordinance for ‘showing contempt and disturbing order’ during the National Anthem (Compulsory Adoration) Bill debate. How many times have these guys been arrested now? What are multiple arrests on increasingly flimsy grounds supposed to achieve? Maybe it’s to remind us that the CCP does not exactly have a sense of proportion.

Ta Kung Po accuses pro-dem mask-maker Yellow Factory of breaking the NatSec Law, so the business closes down. CCP media claim that even slogans that are puns of ‘forbidden’ ones contravene the NatSec Law. At some stage, these rabid propaganda outlets will start attacking businesses not for being actively unpatriotic, but just for failing to spout the correct lines without being prompted.

Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po also have a go at an academic for making supposedly pro-independence remarks during an on-line forum. Rather than tell them to shove it, she respectfully denies the allegation. Like the HK Police these days, both these papers are run by Beijing’s locally based officials – and have presumably been ordered to step up the witch-hunts.

As has Mainland law professor Tian Feilong, who accuses the group that organizes (or at least used to organize) Hong Kong’s annual 6-4 vigil of breaching the NatSec Law. The Hong Kong government promptly tries to stop them from getting a booth at the New Year flower market.

If you ever wondered what it was like to live during the Cultural Revolution’s public denunciations and struggle-sessions, stick around for 2021 in Hong Kong.

From China Digital Times, more on the CCP’s plans for Hong Kong’s judicial system. An SCMP editorial urges the relevant organs to respect Hong Kong’s rule of law when ‘reforming’ the legal process, and even asks that they allow the judiciary to take the lead in proposing changes – for example it could consider introducing TV cameras into courts. Hard to imagine Leninists taking advice from the judges they intend to neuter, but I’m sure the CCP might take the paper up on the televised trials idea.

(On related matters, HKFP on the micro-Mainlandization of the judiciary at the Magistrates Courts level – this is before the ‘reforms’ come.)

Do the CCP have something on Grenville Cross? Here’s an Orange News interview in which the former prosecutions boss goes to some lengths to excuse Beijing’s obsession with ejecting pan-dem lawmakers for thought-crimes. Sounds like he was reading from official Beijing talking points…

“There are numerous examples of how these four showed their hostility towards their home city and their home country, all of which are inconsistent with the fundamental loyalties they should, as legislators, have displayed to both places … By working with a foreign power to remove HK’s trade privileges, by supporting moves to impose sanctions on HK and mainland officials, and by trying to weaken the police force, these four legislators may have committed the offence of misconduct in public office (MIPO), and the ICAC will now need to investigate.”

The Independent Commission Against Corruption has so far managed to avoid dirtying its hands through HK Police-style laboriously vindictive persecution of people for their opinions – but obviously it’s just a matter of time. 

If it’s any consolation, Hongkongers are not alone in facing this demented despotic menace. Or as a newspaper down-under could put it in a headline, ‘Petulant Panda Positively Permanently Pissed’. The Sydney Morning Herald reports Beijing’s weird ‘leaked’ document on Why Australia Has Made Us Mightily Miffed. In the minds of the CCP strategists, issuing this ‘list of grievances’ will make Oz mend its ways and start kowtowing like a good tributary state. Makes you wonder what else Beijing’s policymakers think.