Among this year’s July 1 festivities: Police stopping and searching cross-harbour buses, swamping Causeway Bay, detaining Grandma Wong, kicking kids doing soccer practice and domestic helpers having picnics out of Victoria Park, chasing the usual petrified 10-year-old, and (surprising it doesn’t happen more often) someone apparently going nuts. At least we in Hong Kong didn’t have to sit through Xi’s hour-long speech.
A July 1 message from former Governor Chris Patten. In classic Patten annoy-all-the-right-people style, he begins with some pointed comments about social inequity in China.
Alternative CCP 100th anniversary commemorative stamps for Hong Kong.
Amnesty International declares a human-rights emergency in Hong Kong.
Make of it what you will: David Webb compiles Immigration Dept data to show daily arrivals and departures in Hong Kong since quarantine measures were imposed in Feb-Mar 2020. In the last 12 months there has been a net outflow of 116,000. Possible reasons: expats (including domestic workers) rotating out but not being replaced; other expats leaving before their contracts end because of Covid; and of course this. What we can’t tell is how the numbers break down. But if 100 families of three are flying out on one-way tickets every night for a year, that would add up to 110,000.
Lots of CCP anniversary material around – here’s a selection…
Foreign Policy wonders who the celebrations are really about – the CCP or its chairman?
The ever-discursive Geremie Barme looks back at 100 years of the CCP – with lots of fascinating personal recollections.
From Kevin Carrico, 10 myths about the CCP, including a reminder that it was the Communists who kept the Chinese people in poverty for decades.
A Mekong Review three-part series on the CCP’s centenary by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, using book reviews as an angle – starts here (with links to other two).
Minxin Pei sees China’s future as more North Korean than Singaporean.If you want more ‘positive energy’ in the anniversary celebrations, Christine Loh in HKFP tries to do a brief history of the CCP without upsetting the comrades on the one hand, but not totally shredding her own intellectual integrity on the other. Not much of the nasty distressing stuff!
There is a snowball’s chance in hell that Mr. Stabby from last night will be written off as a lone nutter. Any affiliation he ever had in his life, no matter how tenuous, will be used to crack down on civil society and the media. For all our sakes, we’d better hope he was a hikkikomori with nothing in his browser history except porn. And even that might not be enough.
@Toph
On the bright side, there’s a fairly good chance the Police will be issued with stab vests, which should lead to a slew resignations every summer.
“There is a snowball’s chance in hell that Mr. Stabby from last night will be written off as a lone nutter. Any affiliation he ever had in his life, no matter how tenuous, will be used to crack down on civil society and the media. For all our sakes, we’d better hope he was a hikkikomori with nothing in his browser history except porn. And even that might not be enough.”
Let those CCP cunts do it then. I’m numb to it all. A friend of mine in China showed me their anti censorship setup: https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core
Spin this baby up on a cloud server or vps and you have a far superior method of getting past the Great Firewall than your bog standard commercial VPN which CCP has extensive blacklists of.
Nury Vittachi reveals the untold story of Apple Daily:
https://www.fridayeveryday.com/opinion-peter-fredenburg/10100/The-untold-story-of-Apple-Daily
10 RMB to anyone that read that entire Hittachi article.
Go to your local NatSec neighborhood committee office to register and collect.
@Stanley Lieber – some of Nury’s criticisms of Apple Daily may be valid, but his claim that the paper is unpopular among advertisers overlooks the pressure put on companies doing business in China not to advertise in the paper, or in other media perceived as unfriendly to the CCP.
As I am a simpleton what do I know but surely none of you brave armchair rubber desk johnnies face the possibility of getting stabbed in the back as you fester in front of whatever screen echos your pusillanimity? What’s the worst can happen to you – a paper cut perchance. In which case I recommend you dial your local hippie wokester for help – see how far that gets you and do let us know. Bonne chancé.
@Simplicissimus
No right-thinking person condones wanton violence against a policeman or any other person.
However, the policeman has only himself to blame if he continued to wear the uniform despite knowing that the police are loathed by half the population or more for switching from protecting the citizenry to attacking and suppressing them.
He could have refused his orders. He could have spoken up. He could have resigned. He could have found another line of work.
He did none of those things. For failing to stand up for the good people of Hong Kong, he and all policemen like him are a disgrace to themselves and their families.
The constable made his decision and now he must live with his decision, just as we all must do, just as Jimmy Lai and all the imprisoned protesters must do.
As for dialling for help from the local thugs who call themselves police, in the past I wouldn’t have hesitated to do so, but now I wouldn’t dream of it.
We’re all on our own now and at least some of us know it.
Nury Vittachi reveals
Looking at the url for that article it sugests that Peter Fredenburg was the actual author, not Nury, despite the byline.
Fredenburg is an even greater obnoxious Beijing toady than Nury or Grovelling Cross GBS. The tone of the article smells of Fredenburg who is probably lucky that the Un-American Activities Committee no longer exists because he would be a prime candidate for their attention.
Looking at the Friday magazine website it seems that a lot of the stuff by-lined to Nury is, in fact, the work of this very unattractive individual.
@Stanley Lieber
Thanks for the Nury link from “Fridayeverday.com”. I was just about to read it when I glimpsed one of the Headlines at the right of the article:
“HONG KONG LEADS IN COVID RECOVERY -Life in city almost normal, global survey shows”.
Aahhh. I think I’ll skip, thanks Nury
It’s increasingly becoming a waste of time calling the police or liaising with them on any “normal” matter, from email fraud to common or garden assault. They are useless now. Non responsive, don’t want to help when they do respond, permanently unavailable at the numbers they give you, and think nothing of leaving you waiting for months on end whilst whining about their lack of resources (which wasn’t a problem on Thursday).
It’s now basically a third world standard force without the corruption that goes with it, although we will see that come back soon I am sure. All they are good for is picking on people for the Liaison Office.
As Robert Harris says in Fatherland, a Police State is a country run by criminals.
Nury has been in my media orbit since the late Eighties. Can any of you people explain to me l’il Nury’s miraculous conversion on the road to Beijing? When did it happen? I shall not ask why because everybody is for sale, even if they have nothing to offer.
I don’t mean to break up the pow wow here, but has anyone seen that softcore porn video that SCMP did recently about the city’s first black signal that shows a school girl with massive rack running in slow motion in such a way that her breasts are moving side to side in the most hypnotising and assuredly marginally illegal way? I think they’ve since taken down the video.
Video editors a little randy over at the post?
https://youtu.be/UpzCM1aitHw
@Mark Bradley: I think you’re being a bit optimistic if you think the Great Firewall will be the extent of the crackdown. The cops have just threatened to arrest people who lay flowers outside of Sogo for terrorism. The volunteer wumaos have gone on the warpath against Vitasoy for acknowledging the death of their employee. They’re just getting started. How do you VPN that?
Vitasoy effectively scored an own goal. In its efforts to appease the wumao it jettisoned its moral obligation to extend a helping hand to the bereaved parents of an employee. One can only imagine the trauma for this elderly couple who were not only advised that their son, and probably the family bread winner, died in tragic circumstances and their home is turned into a crime scene.
A responsible employer should offer condolences and assistance to these innocent victims of circumstance. This could not be construed as condoning in any way the employee’s actions.
You can’t imagine how much it pleases the guy upstairs & me to know that, no matter how far they’re pushed, the flock still believes in the state’s monopoly on violence and that merely contemplating inflicting some on their oppressors is wrongthink of the most despicable sort. Keep your heads down and the production flowing, true believers!
Let me see if I understand CCP thinking correctly. “We must crack down on our own people severely, and convince them that we are not cracking down on them severely, because if we did not crack down and dissuade then they would be very mad at the CCP and we would need to crack down on them severely.”
Is that right?