A civil servant bars lawmaker Eddie Chu Hoi-dick from running in a village election. As Hong Kong gets increasingly numbed to it, the Mainlandization gets ever-weirder. (Story here, and highlights of mind-warping official correspondence here.)
This is a bold – you could almost say reckless – extension of the tactic of keeping pro-democracy candidates off the ballot for their political beliefs. Eddie Chu is less identifiable as being pro-independence than earlier recipients of this treatment, so the (supposedly impartial) bureaucrat had to take more desperate interrogatory and deductive steps to determine his guilt of thought-crimes.
The way the official piled on the convoluted questions (which no other candidates were asked) added the Orwellian to the Kafkaesque to the plain absurd. It demands a legal appeal, not as a way to stop the Mainlandization process – which goes with Communist Party rule – but to clarify beyond doubt that we no longer have rule of law in these matters.
To add to the absurdity, this is a low-level village election, while Eddie Chu is already a member of the Legislative Council. (For extra murkiness, rural interests detest his views on land-related issues, as in death-threats.) It will be illogical not to disqualify him from that body. But he won his Legislative Council seat with more votes than any other lawmaker, so it will also make an additional mockery of the democratic process – or it would if there were one.
The pan-democratic electorate has understood that things will only get worse through the electoral/judicial process-cum-farce (something that their representatives don’t understand or pretend they don’t understand).
It’s high time the pan-dem camp boycotts all elections and finds other subversive means of action or disappears in oblivion while their electorate migrates and is replaced by farmers who’ll vote for anyone who gives them a 50 HKD wellcome coupon.
The Emperor is far away.
So they used to say.
But look out, Eddie Chu –
He’s afraid of you.
A nation-shaking village poll –
For China as a whole
Will badly be affected
If he is elected.
Find a civil service twit
Who agrees to sit
In judgement in the land
And say he cannot stand.
The nation settles down once more
According to the Law
And the threat will cease.
Call the thought police.
Unlike the independence advocates, Chu is actually dangerous to the establishment: he goes after New Territories corruption and is probably more interested in that matter and the livelihood problems caused for the vast majority of people here by the Civil Service-Tycoon-Liaison Office oligarchy than any other LegCo member.
I’ve always thought that this is the better route of attack for the Pro-Dems than Universal Suffrage , because if a few people at the top act like Pigs for any length of time and nobody else benefits, sooner or later something has to give, and it’s reform or die. But most of the Pro-Dems aren’t interested in pursuing that line.
Chu should definitely challenge this. But the best course for someone like him is emigration. People who want to change things for the better for everyone aren’t welcome here, because that harms the CCP.
It’s just reverse McCarthyism. What’s wrong with Hong Kong getting a dose of that?
And anyone called Hoi Dick…well…
Oh, by the way, Orwell feared Churchill more than Stalin. He thought Britain was going to go into permanent war. Of course it did, like every other Western nation, and the proxy brown and yellow and black people were burnt to hell all over the globe.
As for Kafka, remember he was a great humorist, one of the funniest writers in history. People who haven’t read him think he is Kafkaesque but he is more Monty Python.
Pip, pip and keep it stirrin’!
The reason for banning him is simple: he is a good looking guy and has charisma. Look at his opponents and those civil servants. They are just jealous.
“Enoch Yuen” is almost an anagram for Eunuch, which about sums up the government’s approach to anyone who dissents.
So the Docta is down to dick jokes now – the last refuge of the terminally unfunny.