Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Not satisfied with making the public-service broadcaster scrap its unconstitutional Person of the Year referendum, the Liaison Office might set up its own RTHK. Beijing, it says here, plans to establish a state-owned Hong Kong-based ‘cultural’ conglomerate to do publishing, movies and entertainment. Story at Chinese-language Sing Tao says it will also cover news and have English content.

It will, needless to say, produce utter bilge no-one wants to watch. Unless, of course, they ban all alternative channels and/or pay people to tune in and/or force them to enjoy it at gunpoint. None of which we can rule out. The best we can say is that the output might be entertaining – though not in the way the producers think.

A long but brilliant (and meticulously balanced) letter from economist Dan Wang…

US elites have abandoned the idea that China would liberalize nicely. They should put another idea to bed: that this authoritarian system, riddled with weaknesses, is on the brink of collapse. The country’s strengths are real and improving while the government becomes more nasty towards its critics and the rest of the world. 

Some more culture…

A New Year singalong from exiles on the NatSec Regime’s wanted list.

A HK Police-supporting ‘blue ribbon’ as street art.

And the interior design of an uncannily real-looking Hong Kong-themed hotpot restaurant in Sydney.

What will happen in 2021? Will Hong Kong explode? The Financial Times’ New Year forecast waves the question aside with a confident ‘nah’. But local academics doing a survey of students believe the city is a powder-keg. If I were the Hong Kong government, I would take my time about vaccinating the rabble and letting them assemble again.

A safer prediction: in parts of the world where Covid is the number-one menace, 2021 will surely be better than 2020. In those places where the main threat to decent life is the Chinese Communist Party, the coming year will be worse than the last. Which brings us to…

Quartz on how the Hong Kong judiciary’s days as an independent safeguard are numbered. 

“I honestly never thought we would get to this stage,” said one member of the legal community …  “One month ago, I said to a colleague I didn’t even imagine that after 2047 it would be like this.”

A Reuters feature on Beijing turning up the heat on the Catholic Church in Hong Kong, which is responding with cowardice/pragmatism/belief in miracles, in the form of pre-emptive kowtowing.

And more gradual muzzling of the press. A new thing: online press conferences, in which officials can (presumably) filter out the questions they want to answer. Oh, and expect Apple Daily to shut down – or be rectified out of all recognition – too.

Also in the CCP’s sights will be what’s left of electoral politics, with a marginalization and rectification of dem-dominated district councils, and a dem-free Legislative Council poll to come. Under the NatSec Regime, these never-powerful bodies are purely ceremonial, but the CCP’s determination to cleanse public life of opponents will sap the system of what little legitimacy is left. The government will no doubt find itself fighting a popular campaign to boycott the LegCo election.

Instead, we can expect much more talk of people voting with their feet as the UK opens its doors to BNO passport holders. An SCMP op-ed looks at why Hongkongers moving to Britain may need to give up local residency rights. Will the CCP also start trying to identify, if not weed out, foreign-passport holders in the civil service and other institutions?

Foreign Policy sums it all up and declares the death of the post-1997 narrative that Hong Kong would become freer and ‘more itself’ after British rule.

On other matters…

A short documentary on Zhang Zhan, the lawyer whose reporting from Wuhan landed her in prison.

A Jerome Cohen op-ed in the SCMP on why Zhang’s case is special…

The Communist Party may soon decide to release her, however, not out of charity or regret, and certainly not because of her “good behaviour” but because, if she is at death’s door, they will not want her to die in custody, which always looks bad for the jailers.

Jerome Cohen reminds us of another area where the CCP will tighten control in Hong Kong in 2021: education. His brief memoir on the early days of the now-scrapped Universities Service Centre at Chinese U.

Today’s festive-season horrors: 19-year-old Tony Chung jailed for disrespecting the flag; a  NatSec Law detainee put in extra-special custody for scribbling a Hong Kong independence slogan on his cell wall; no-one is allowed into the HK 12 trial in Shenzhen. On a brighter note, a judge notes that Jimmy Lai’s supposed collusion with foreign forces look like merely comments and criticisms.

New Year reading for the gentry…

Reuters has a big feature on what has made Carrie Lam the way she is. Not much really new. It would be interesting to know why all the other top officials – Matthew Cheung, Teresa Cheng, et al – are just as willing to follow the CCP’s orders.

Western and Asian envoys in Hong Kong say they have found Lam increasingly “reclusive.” Long-time observers say she has become almost unrecognizable since she came to power in 2017. Her language in media briefings and in conversation with Western diplomats is increasingly formal, similar to that of Beijing.

A former senior government official and colleague said Lam had become distant. She added, “I don’t think anybody in their wildest dreams expected her to turn out like this.”

Former classmate Lee said he believed Lam “didn’t anticipate that the Chinese Communist Party is so cruel or so totalitarian.”

Well, no-one ever accused her of being in touch.

This is a must-read. Lawyer and former San Francisco police commissioner Doug Chan in Eastwind reviews the SCMP’s Rebel City documentary about the 2019 uprising, finding it… 

…slickly-produced apologia for the thuggish policing and incompetent government that are greasing the skids for Hong Kong’s creeping authoritarianism.

The review is packed with gems about Yonden Lhatoo and Regina Ip, among others.

As you would expect from something called Radical History, dangerously subversive ideas on Hong Kong and Taiwan…

The argument that these two places rightfully “belong” to China is based on a version of the country that has not existed for five generations now and was only ever itself a tenuous reality in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries…

By rejecting or modifying the label “Chinese,” both territories have started exploring what it might mean to honor their histories as multicultural and multiethnic societies instead.

A link to some ‘utter, superb China-bollocks’ about how the ancient mystical Oriental mind works.

The ancient mystical Oriental mind does foreign policy: how China is learning to lose friends and alienate countries, the Swedish edition.

A presentation by David Webb on the costs and benefits of three broad approaches to countering the Covid pandemic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the middling neither-tough-nor-lax regimes used in the US/UK/EU produce the worst results in terms of the number of lives lost, disruption to people’s lives, and likely long-term economic damage.

New Bloom explains how most Taiwanese would like to rename the country’s flag carrier, currently known as [Republic of] China Airlines. But even changes to the livery are controversial. (Beijing threatens to veto the company’s air traffic rights if it adopts a ‘Taiwanese’ or non-motherland name. How about a romanized ‘Chunghwa Airlines’? Good enough for the phone company. Or even ‘Zhonghua etc’, if that’s what it takes to satisfy the CCP’s nomenclature and Pinyin fetishists. Most foreign audiences wouldn’t perceive a ‘China’ connection.)

Also on nomenclature, Transit Jam asks why the planners called the latest infrastructural marvel the bland and clunky Tuen Mun-Chek Lap Kok Tunnel instead of the zippier (and geographically more appropriate) Long Ku or ‘Dragon Drum’ Tunnel. (Simple answer: have you ever seen what happens when bureaucrats try to be creative? It’s not pretty.) How about White Elephant No 17?

And for light relief, the HK Film-makers Federation video on how they shoot action choreography – aka kung-fu-bodies-flying-through-air-stuff.

Former pro-dem lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting is arrested by the ICAC – where he once worked as an anti-graft investigator. His crime seems to be seeking the truth about the Yuen Long gangster attack and subsequent cover-up. The CCP is desperate.

From HK Free Press, an interview with Queen Cynthia, a dominatrix. When the police busted the Fetish Fashion store a few years ago, the proprietress hinted that many clients were high-flying professionals (allegedly including, though not limited to, members of the judiciary). Apparently, such people give orders all day long, and being tied up, put in cages, subjected to pain and being forced to kiss someone’s toes offers great relief. But who needs to pay Queen Cynthia thousands an hour when we have Empress Carrie and the NatSec Regime doing it for free?

A thread on the de facto absorption/dismantling of a renowned HK Chinese University-based research service institute apparently for being too exposed to charges of collusion with foreign forces. CUHK produced its excuses on Christmas Day. Apple Daily story here.

In keeping with this festive spirit…

Farewell to the Hong Kong I Loved by Bloomberg’s Matthew Brooker. Vice on Hong Kong’s post-2019 disfigured urban landscape…

the disfigured streets of the city serve as a symbol of both their crackdown on dissent and the popular resentment simmering beneath the surface, ready to erupt at a moment’s notice as it did in 2019.

A trailer for Japanese documentary Montage of Hong Kong about the 2019 uprising. And a draft sample chapter from a collection of essays on the subject, Hong Kong Between ‘One Country’ and ‘Two Systems, due out soon (this one’s from June 2019 – quite prescient). 

Beijing mulls a ban on pan-democrats from their powerless, essentially ornamental, presence as a minority of the powerless, essentially ornamental, Election Committee. The idea also seems to involve disqualifying them from the district councils they won in a landslide a year ago, and generally scrubbing the city’s ceremonial ‘political’ institutions clean of the opposition.

Let’s be clear that the Election Committee is a pure rubber-stamp: Beijing chooses the ‘winner’, and the rest is just play-acting. Ignore the SCMP, NYT etc gibberish about how Hong Kong’s Chief Executive is ‘elected by local elites’. In such a system, the pan-dems have no influence except arguably of the moral sort. It now seems that even the most symbolic manifestation of representative government – the presence of powerless opposition figures – is a threat to the party-state.

The pan-dems have always won the majority of votes in any free elections in Hong Kong, so this is basically the CCP’s way of sending a warm Christmas message to the city’s people: we really really hate you.

Small wonder residents are thinking of packing bags. A Reuters special on a family leaving Hong Kong…

They’ve been watching “English with Lucy,” a YouTube channel that teaches English, from pronunciation to accents – a good thing for a family going to Glasgow, a city with one of the most impenetrable accents in Britain.

Antony Dapirin’s latest Procrastination, with plenty of perspective on events of the last few months.

Some longer, deeper or just off-topic things for the holidays…

A nicely written mini-memoir – The Liverpool-Macau Border, by Gregory Lee. 

If you’re passing by the FCC before the end of the month, see an exhibition of the late Nick DeWolf’s photos of Hong Kong in 1972. (Background from Zolimacity Mag in 2018.)

From Bloomberg, why more Westerners are avoiding China.

Francesco Sisci looks at Xi Jinping’s nasty dilemmas.

Sixth Tone on why Chinese couples don’t want a second child. And ChinaFile on why there are so few women in the senior (or medium, or junior) ranks of China’s government.

Not relevant to anything here but interesting: why automatic soap-dispensers don’t work on dark hands – and other white-designed problems.

Recommended Yuletide Japanese TV binge-watching: Your Turn to Kill (Anata no Ban Desu), which you can probably track down somewhere. A whodunnit of some 20 episodes. It starts as a soppy romance, and moments of (not-tongue-in-cheek) soap-opera weepy schlock appear throughout the series, presumably to keep the lonely-housewife market-segment tuned in. But it gets increasingly bizarre, not to say in parts violent and – best of all – amazingly tasteless. Unmistakable David Lynch influence, and even perhaps has something of JG Ballard.

On a more literary level, when you’ve wrung dot dot news dry, browse through East of the Web – a library of public-domain short stories, with a lot of Ambrose Bierce. If you need a three-minute dose of funniness – here’s The Open Window by Saki.

So much for a slow week of hibernation.

A government-in-exile at last! (Strictly speaking, a democratic deliberative platform, but let’s not ruin a good angle.) A joke? A meaningless gesture? A brilliant piece of guerilla theatre? (Clue: the latter, at least.) The symbolism alone should send some Beijing officials absolutely ballistic. And there’s a nice long drawn-out consultation (to which you can provide feedback) to add to the pressure rising in CCP blood vessels. You don’t have to take it seriously – the Liaison Office will do that for you. Prepare for a barrage of mouth-frothing ‘so-called’s. This initiative could even prompt the NatSec Regime’s first official blocking of an overseas website.

Other bits and pieces…

Nathan Law on the Court of Final Appeal’s ruling on the face-mask ban. (Not hugely surprising if you’re paying attention to what’s going on.)

CNN on Hongkongers in exile.

An interesting Mekong Review interview with Joshua Wong.

A review of Ai Weiwei’s Cockroach – will we get to see it in Hong Kong? The trailer.

Former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten proposes pro-dem media boss Jimmy Lai as his man of the year.

In the interests of balance… A few years ago, Hong Kong’s Beijing-owned newspapers Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao set up dot dot news to push their propaganda on-line, and in English. It was kicked off Facebook at one stage for fake news. Worth a browse for the weirdness. Anyway, here’s CCP-worshipper Grenville Cross sparing no effort, or wordcount, to insist that Jimmy Lai is a US asset attempting to ‘destabilize Hong Kong’ or something. (Why would the US want to destabilize a city with so much American investment in it? Couldn’t it find a better way than to enlist a high-profile media owner?)

Jerome Cohen’s response to Cross’s latest nuttiness.

From Quartz, not really new, but worth re-emphasizing: the UK didn’t introduce democracy to Hong Kong because Beijing warned in no uncertain terms against it. (The Brits had already given independence to some 50 colonies – it was no skin off their nose.)

Minxin Pei on China and climate-change – or how Xi’s CCP will try to leverage climate-change for its own purposes.

China’s ‘dual circulation’ strategy explained by the Berggruen Institute (basically more emphasis on mercantilism).

…so probably not much going on here until the New Year (barring unforeseen etc).

Main horror of the weekend, according to Apple Daily, is a Hong Kong government plan to amend immigration law and entitle itself to bar people – without any other legal process – from leaving the city. This is presumably to plug a loophole where the authorities want to persecute someone but haven’t confiscated their travel documents, let alone jailed them. Can’t have people just wandering off whenever they feel like it.

An SCMP op-ed takes the new Bauhinia Party’s sort-of counter-establishment platform at face value, saying ‘they should be given a chance’. Which is obviously what you’re supposed to think. For a more skeptical view, try Ching Cheong (former prisoner of the CCP) at RFA.

Some interesting statistics: 722 (12%) of all local Covid-19 cases in Hong Kong came out of the recent ‘dancing/singing’ socialite cluster. That’s over 9% of all cases included imported ones. They account for nearly 40% of the current fourth wave. To a great extent, they are the fourth wave. Pie charts here.

Some other things…

Jeffrey Wasserstrom in Nikkei Asia likens Hong Kong today to post 6-4 Beijing.

The Diplomat on Apple Daily as a symbol of what is happening to Hong Kong, including some good background on the paper’s ups and downs over the years.

HKFP op-ed on the persecution of Hong Kong’s moderate pan-dems. Worth remembering that in many cases the older traditional pro-dem figures were openly proud to be Chinese, pro-1997 handover, and – in essence – willing to be co-opted into the system had Beijing been flexible enough to tolerate a dash of pluralism.

The US extends its Mainland travel warnings (against detention for political views, etc) to Hong Kong. Not unreasonable, so expect a high-powered mouth-frothing press statement any minute (they’ve been busy churning out this one).

A summary of an NYT story on how Beijing has micromanaged information from the beginning of the pandemic…

Videos that showed hospitals overrun, corpses in the streets, angry residents in lockdown were purged. Media was ordered not to call the virus fatal. Terms like lockdown were downplayed. The heroism of party officials was emphasized.

Hmmm of the Week Prize goes to the ‘Brits to Stamp Out CCP Menace’ stories. The Guardian presents the background on the UK’s move away from lovey-dovey win-win cooperation…

Overall, it represents as swift and complete a reversal in foreign policy as the UK’s shift from treating Russia as an ally in 1945 to cold war foe in 1946.

And the Spectator on how the UK will get tougher with Beijing, oh yes. 

As well as Hong Kong and the Uighurs and obnoxious diplomats’ Tweets and Covid and much else, this change in the UK has been influenced by the CCP’s obsessive thing about Australia – explained in detail here by news.com.au. And ASPI Strategist looks into how Beijing has hijacked Australia’s Chinese-language media.

In the next day or two, some special recommended festive season links.

An SCMP interview with the new Bauhinia Party’s guy confirms initial impressions that it’s a CCP initiative to co-opt broader middle-class and young elements. It looks like an attempt to sideline, rather than just scare, the pro-Beijing groups that currently fail to attract much following from those ‘sectors’. 

The predominance of Mainlanders in the group seems like a turnoff, but the Liaison Office might be calculating (rightly or wrongly) that the old traditional local business establishment is so unpopular among the populace that it will be a plus. The fact that you’ve never heard of these people is the point. Ronnie Chan, Allan Zeman and the plutocrat kiddies are yesterday; the future lies with the Mainland and the Bay Area. 

Although the group presents itself as a ‘political party’, the idea would not be to focus on Legco, elections and the local quasi-politics charade (though they might participate in these to raise their profile). The long-term strategy will be to form a broader and more loyal business/professionals base, under United Front control, to pull the middle class away from the pro-dem movement. 

That means it will have to appear ‘fresh’ and to some extent critical of the status quo. The disdain for Carrie Lam might seem edgy, but is essential for any hope of credibility (and no doubt reflects Beijing officials’ own views). Subtle stuff, for Leninists.

It will be interesting to see how it goes about building up its image – eg by attracting some new and appealing figures to join it. The mission will be to appear sexier than the Tung Chee-hwa/tycoons mob – not the hardest job in the world.

Karma seems to be subject to statistical probability. For every nasty person who suffers an unpleasant fate, several more escape it – and meanwhile the good (or some of them) die young. So we’ll assume the venomous Leticia Lee passed away, Covid-positive, owing to scientifically explainable causes, and it is merely a coincidence that, according to the SCMP…

Her last public comment came on Saturday, when she took to Facebook to mock pro-independence activist Baggio Leung Chung-hang for seeking asylum in the United States…

She never had a chance to jump on the Extradite Jimmy Lai bandwagon being trundled out by Mainland academic Gu Minkang via Ta Kung Pao… 

It was … questionable as to whether the Hong Kong judiciary was able to safeguard national security and adjudge cases strictly according to the law, said Gu… He cited cases in which the High Court had ruled against the Hong Kong government … Gu claimed that as residents were having doubts about some of their judges, “it would of course be reasonable and legal to hand Lai’s case in accordance with the law to the mainland judiciary to handle.”…

Gu further branded Lai as one of the “chief commanders of the anti-China gang that incites unrest in Hong Kong” and “the No. 1 traitor who colludes with foreign forces,” pointing to his meetings with the United States vice president, secretary of state, congressmen and other senior officials in the Washington government. If the judges passed down a light sentence for such serious offenses, the national security law would be left with no credibility, he wrote.

Nothing would encourage foreign forces to lose further faith in – and extend sanctions on – Hong Kong like sending Jimmy Lai to the land of forced confessions. And there are few single actions the CCP can take that would so seriously further inflame local opinion. You almost wish it would happen. It’s hard to imagine that the CCP would let their spite get the better of their common sense. Except maybe it’s not.

If they do send him over the border, expect some truly overwrought panty-wetting in the Hong Kong government’s press releases on the subject (above and beyond the Justice Secretary’s ‘perpetual truths’). Here’s a thread on the growing adoption of creepy CCP rhetoric in these official statements, and the full article measuring just how much the use of phrases like ‘so-called’ and ‘external forces’ have increased in the last year or so. It is regrettable that the survey did not cover the word ‘regrettable’, now routinely used to mask overt freaking-out when measured and legitimate criticism hits a raw nerve. The geeks who did this text analysis (somehow surveying 165,000 official releases) deserve a Gold Bauhinia Medal.

The government’s spin-doctors take a break from ‘so-called’ press releases and proudly present this faintly nightmarish scene…

Yes, that’s Carrie presiding. It’s almost as if someone relished maximizing the anti-pandemic social-distancing precautions in order to make the ritual even more visually disturbing.