Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam are in custody pending sentencing next week after pleading guilty – on their lawyers’ advice – to lame incitement and illegal-assembly charges. Presumably, this could attract a lighter sentence from the judge. But, if they get anything more than a token spell in prison, it also maximizes the bad publicity here and abroad for the CCP and its puppets. No-one incites like the CCP: what it most wants will also further alienate the population and create heroes.
Thoughts from Jeffrey Ngo in exile on the likely fate of the three.
Like so many people, I leap out of bed every morning itching to read the SCMP’s editorial. Today’s prays that Chief Executive Carrie Lam will deliver ‘hope’ in tomorrow’s postponed policy address. Having no doubt been redrafted by Beijing officials, the speech is likely to be short on inspiration, though it will be interesting (itself a first for a policy address) to see whether the knuckle-draggers pay any attention to obvious livelihood issues, or if their obsession with crushing dissent gets the better of them. Will they make Carrie spout stuff about Xi Jinping Thought?
The sentencing of Joshua et al puts the judiciary on the spot. The UK’s latest six-monthly report on Hong Kong covers up to June 30, so it misses a lot. But it does raise the possibility of pulling British judges off the Court of Final Appeal panel.
And yes – here it comes: the panty-wetting strong refutation of irresponsible remarks.
“we could not help but mocked at the double standards adopted by the UK Government”????
The ISD is in dire need of competent English language editors to sort out their logic and grammar. I wonder if the Chinese tirades are as badly written?
@where’s my mask
From what I’ve read, recent government announcements use similarly janky logic and metaphor in Chinese just as they do in English.
Unsurprisingly, it also seems that HK’s Chinese language announcements are fast converging toward the Mao-era Mainland Chinese style now prevalent across the border.
I have a suspicion that the ISD’s performatively bland civil servants are declining to edit the grammar of the pronouncements handed down to them by the Mainland flunkies. Call it malicious compliance.
And Carrie Lam’s “livelihood” policies will begin and end with going full speed ahead on another ridiculous megaproject. Massive fake island, bridge to nowhere, tunnel to the centre of the earth, paving the moon. What else could our overlords profit off of?
‘The so-called “response” taken by the UK Government represents a breach of international obligations where it concerns extradition agreements to combat crimes and bilateral agreement with the PRC on the treatment of British National (Overseas).’ So it’s not an actual response from the British Gov’t, just a so-called “response”? They are using this term [so-called] rather a lot lately – which is surely redundant here when used with the quotation marks.
I know I go on and on about this stuff but I do quite a bit of writing for a living. We could play press release bingo:
Inalienable
Comprehensive
Seriously
Unswervingly
Firmly
Resolutely
External Forces
Interference
Sovereignty
and of course the inestimable, Organ
I note it seems to reference in the 1st line of the 2nd paragraph “Mr. Deng Xiaoping”. Does anyone here know if persons are referred to in China as Mr. perhaps this is something they do for Western sensibilities.
Overly-long and detailed rebuttals, using pseudo-sophisticated vocabulary (especially ‘so-called – well spotted @ Hermes) are usually a sign that the author(s) know they are on the wrong side of the argument. A short paragraph, or a pithy ‘fuck off’, carries far more weight.