Interesting Times

From the London Times: ‘The speed and drama of the transformation that has overcome one of the freest and liveliest cities in Asia is difficult to exaggerate’. A (paywalled) follow-up to the recent Regina Ip interview…

Given everything else that is going on in Hong Kong, you would have thought the authorities had more to worry about than Chan Mei Tung’s potato. It was a summer evening in June when Chan, a performance artist, produced the vegetable on one of the city’s busy streets.

Before an assembly of curious onlookers, she held it aloft and whittled it down with a knife into what roughly resembled a candle. Then she raised a lighter and mimed the action of kindling a flame. Within moments, more than a dozen police were arresting her and leading her away — because on that day in Hong Kong two years ago, a potato was much more than just a potato.

…Visual representations of the date itself … cross the red line — on this year’s anniversary, one artist, Sanmu Chen, was detained for several hours for tracing the numbers in the air with his fingers.

A white Porsche with the licence plate US 8964 was impounded and towed away by police last year…

After being arrested and questioned for 26 hours for her potato whittling in 2022, Chan’s “performance” this year consisted of standing on the street near the park and drinking Blue Girl beer, whose logo is an idealised Liberty-like figure. She got away with it, but one man was chased away by police for conspicuously consuming a can of Kronenbourg 1664, whose numbers include the famous date.

…Despite its suppression of open dissent, the government is enraged, and apparently alarmed, by such symbolic gestures. It denounces them as “soft resistance”, an undefined term which seems to mean nothing more than perfectly legal acts that annoy the authorities.

“It is imaginable that if we … disregard the behaviours of ‘soft resistance,’ it will create gaps in safeguarding national security or lead to a return of turbulent times,” Hong Kong’s security minister, Chris Tang, has said. “We must remain vigilant.” Such vigilance was exhibited last month by Hong Kong’s education bureau, which criticised two schools after finding that although their students were singing the Chinese national anthem, they were not singing it loudly enough.

To some people, such touchiness is encouraging, a sign of the government’s vulnerability and a recognition that, even if it has suppressed physical and verbal dissent, it recognises its failure to win hearts and minds — an official fear of potatoes does not suggest a secure and confident government.

Quotes from Emily Lau…

“It has really caused a huge collapse of civil society … The news organisations have collapsed, people have been arrested, trade unions have folded up and people are no longer allowed to demonstrate. It’s very, very distressing and people are very scared. But don’t get the impression that they’re all lying flat, that they’re all dead.

…“Although you have managed to suppress the expression of unhappiness, you still have a society where people are unhappy … And if you are in charge, I think you’d be quite scared.”

Re-engineering the human soul is long, hard work, and it must be frustrating for those attempting it to see ‘soft resistance’ everywhere they look. But people can’t not see what they are witnessing. It’s impossible not to see courts that jail folk for wearing T-shirts. It’s impossible not to see the pliant mediocrity of dozens of appointed patriots who replaced smart and spirited democratically elected legislators. And how can you instantly eradicate the sentiment of a movement whose followers are willing to suffer Blue Girl and Kronenberg for their cause?

Some reading from the weekend…

HKFP op-ed asks what do the HK Consumer Council and the Wall Street Journal have in common? The pre-emptive kowtow, of course…

Following a meeting, the council, usually a robust defender of its conclusions, collapsed in a heap, apologising, reclassifying Nongfu’s masterpiece as five stars, and stressing that all the samples it tested were perfectly safe to drink, as indeed it had stated in its original report.

…[Selina] Cheng’s union activities were not likely to clash with her professional work covering the car and energy industries in China. And the newspaper will soon be free from worries about hostility in Hong Kong because it has moved most of its staff to Singapore.

The Guardian on China’s Olympic swimmers…

Saturday was the first day of major competition since this all came to light. And of course the fallout is already toxic. This past week Qin posted a feisty social media message claiming the increased drug testing of Chinese swimmers was a tactic designed to throw his country’s athletes off their stride.

…China has often suggested this is all a result of Sinophobia, racism, US propaganda. There is even a theory China now welcomes, at an obscure political level, the suspicions around its athletes, which is presented as evidence of hostility, a unifying sense of national victimhood.

China Digital Times on another incident of anti-Japanese violence in China – aimed at a Chinese person…

Videos of the incident, which went viral on social media, showed the man punching a young female cosplayer while yelling, “You’re wearing goddamn devil clothes. Look at what you’re wearing. Did you grow up eating shit? All of you are wearing Japanese clothing.” 

China Media Project looks back at the success of Xi Jinping’s ‘media convergence’…

Ten years on from the start of Xi Jinping’s media convergence campaign, the leadership seems confident it has wrestled back control of a media ecosystem that from the late 1990s through the 2000s had grown restive and unruly from the standpoint of public opinion controls. This has been aided by strict media controls under Xi Jinping, as well as the swift collapse of the traditional media models (such as advertising-driven metro tabloid newspapers) that to some extent empowered more freewheeling journalism more than a decade ago. Even if there have been cases of waste, particularly at the county level, there is also a clear sense that convergence has optimized the state’s use of media resources. 

…[International Communication Centers] below the national level are now actively involved in producing external propaganda, much of it powered by the newest tool in the media convergence arsenal, generative AI, directed at foreign audiences through social media platforms such as Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Central state media and regional ICCs are working closely with state-backed technology firms to harness generative AI and streamline foreign-directed content production.

Topical quiz: which two current news items – one Hong Kong, one international – are linked by a 1960s Irish government minister’s comment that a certain book was ‘filth and should not be allowed inside any decent home’?