Float in Peace

The pre-written obits must have been gathering dust. Jiang Zemin was not a warm and cuddly liberal. Nor was he oozing charisma. It just seems that way because spoke and acted with a spontaneity unimaginable among today’s leadership, which tightly manages public image to the extent of suppressing all evidence of personality. It could be that Xi Jinping’s generation – raised during the Cultural Revolution – missed out on schooling enjoyed by older (and younger) cadres and thus lack Jiang’s panache-with-Chinese-characteristics. But we have no way of telling.

Even before Jiang’s death – and chatter about parallels with Hu Yaobang/Tiananmen – Beijing’s propaganda machine had been scrambling last week to counter nationwide protests against Zero-Covid. It must be foreign forces. Asia Times reports…

Chinese columnists have launched a propaganda campaign calling on the public to trust the ruling Chinese Communist Party and government while urging them not to be used by foreign powers to undermine stability. They also criticized some Covid testing firms for providing fake data to local governments in a bid to get profitable mass test contracts.

An interesting look at the conspiracy theory that the US has a $500 million budget to create unrest in China.

Maybe Hong Kong gets a slice of that? Security Secretary Chris Tang sees local gatherings commemorating the victims of the Urumqi fire as a fledgling ‘colour revolution’… 

The city must take “preventive measures” to avoid returning to the “chaotic state” of 2019, he said.

“Later they will occupy the streets, use violence, throw petrol bombs and ravage our university campuses again. And after that, there will be large-scale riots and plunge the society into chaos,” he said.

…phrases such as “power abuse,” “leaders, step down,” “dictatorship” and “revolution,” which had appeared at demonstrations over the past few days, could be seen as endangering national security and thus violating the law.

If you think that’s a bit wild, try pro-Beijing lawmakers demanding that the government rearrange Google’s algorithms…

…e-books on Hong Kong independence have been published on online platforms, and a song on Hong Kong independence which is claimed as the “national anthem of Hong Kong” has even appeared among the search results of Internet search engines. In this connection, will the Government inform this Council:

 …whether the Government has studied ways to regulate online platforms (e.g. the Google e-books platform) to prevent such platforms from selling books that violate the Hong Kong National Security Law…

[and] use technologies to review the search results of Internet search engines, as well as inform the relevant operators about any false information (including false information concerning national sovereignty) and request their removal of such false information…?

Which leads us to the latest censorship directives from the Mainland, courtesy of China Digital Times…

…all search engines should continue implementing a clean-up of search results related to bypassing the Firewall, and limit the spread of keywords such as “Firewall circumvention,” “accessing the Internet scientifically,” etc.

To prove that even patriots can make honest mistakes. Former Justice Secretary Elsie Leung finds herself backing the wrong side after defending the courts for rejecting government attempts to ban an overseas lawyer from defending Jimmy Lai.