Back in or around Occupy in 2014, the PLA released a video showing how gritty, hunky, tough Chinese soldiers could defend the glorious motherland’s sovereignty over Hong Kong – against (you were perhaps invited to imagine) marauding teenagers. One clip featured some sort of urban warfare training site with local-looking street features like HSBC, 7-Eleven logos, etc. (Memory is a bit dim.)
Ostensibly to celebrate its anniversary, the PLA proudly presents the 2019 update, which has attracted a lot more attention. The scenes of ships, missiles and tanks are obviously stock footage from elsewhere, but the riot-suppression/counter-insurgency action could have been shot on location right here in Hong Kong.
Eagle-eyed Google Earth geeks have zeroed in on the likely spots: the urban tactics training place might be at Shek Kong, while some of the bang-bang stuff possibly took place at the moonscape/firing range up by Castle Peak.
A bigger question is the purpose of the video. It is presumably intended to persuade someone of something – but who, and what?
The next big event in the anti-extradition uprising is supposed to be a general strike on Monday. In the wake of (say) a fatal shooting by the cops, it would be different, but right now there is something improbable about this idea. Take a Number 8 typhoon signal as a benchmark: unless key transport or public-sector functions like the MTR or schools and government offices shut down, it’s hard to make a visible impact on Hong Kong’s routine hustle and bustle.
Having said that, we have had two months of non-stop previously inconceivable weirdness (up to yesterday evening’s wet bankers’ parade). As well as the PLA’s oh-so subtle PR video, the prosecutors are doing all they can to keep things stirred up, and the government is almost asking for it by issuing statements essentially saying ‘we are utterly wetting ourselves’. And, of course, the police have the whole weekend to explore new heavy-handed and dimwitted ways of massively pissing everyone off.
Which period I declare open with some links about the big wide world out there.
- A seriously unflattering look at Pakistan’s relationship with China.
- An epic thread on the late Li Peng’s family business connections.
- And Australian media go to town on Crown Casino, starring the boy Packer, Macau, gangsters, money laundering, Xi Jinping’s cousin, a brothel, etc, etc. Maybe start with the Mainland and Macau end, then look at the Australian side of it; for those who like moving pix, the Oz 60 Minutes coverage, and let’s not forget that it’s not all about money and sex – but the lure of wombat hunts.
A weekend protest march (“Occupy the Peak”) that started at the SJ’s home in Severn Road and then visited top officials’ palatial residential mansions on the way down to Government House would paralyse all of the traffic in the area, focus directly on the individual officials responsible for the current mess, highlight the estrangement of the government from normal people, and might well produce some excellent media footage.
Possible March Route
19 Severn Road, Secretary for Justice
11 Barker Road, PLA Commander
15 Barker Road, Chief Secretary
28 Kennedy Road, Former Chief Executives’ Offices
Upper Albert Road, Government House
The police commissioner’s mansion may be up there somewhere as well.
Regardless of what Mike Forsythe writes, if the CCP muckety mucks want you to be corrupt then you’re corrupt. If they deem you clean, you’re clean. End of story. Until the next regime change.
I adore the Department of Redundancy Department’s government statement, pithily titled “Government Statement”.
“On recent moves by some people to issue anonymous open letters in the name of civil servants, and the plans by some people to organise a political assembly and a strike in the name of civil servants and call on civil servants to participate, a Government spokesman [anonymously] made the following solemn statement today (August 1) [in the name of civil servants]”
It’s like a prose version of an MC Escher drawing.
The urban tactics training place (as per the photo in today’s blog) looks like the live fire internal security training facility at Castle Peak ranges, which was built by the Brits and modelled on the Northern Ireland Advisory and Training Team facilities in Germany and the UK. Whilst it’s a live fire facility, it’s meant to be used with sub-calibre conversion kits in the rifles (converting them from full-bore to .22 long rifle) and the walls are (were?) covered in a ballistic material that can handle .22 impacts. But then again, the one in the video might just be a cheap Chinese copy.
@Chinese Netizen, all CCP officials and senior business people are corrupt by our definitions. It is just that whosoever is in power at the time decides which ones should have their collars felt for being so. (e.g. Bo Zilai)
I have posted this elsewhere, but for what it’s worth, here it is. The first one-and-a-half lines are a quotation, with one word changed, from a poem written in 1888 by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
The Once-Honoured City
Honoured it lived erewhile with honoured men
In opulent state. But then the teargas spread
To man and woman, child and citizen;
And local streets, now battlegrounds, resounded
With shots and shouts and thuds; and people said:
Is this the city that we lived in when
The days were easy, and we had, instead
Of battle, peace, success, and peace again?
In mask and helmet, riot-gear arrayed,
See them advancing to enforce the peace,
The tired, sullen, hostile, hard police.
But in the metro, neither peace nor aid:
Nor Christ nor Buddha, nor the native gods
Could shield you from the thugs with bamboo rods.
@Probably: Yes, that was my point. Cheers.
The HK street scenes in the video are at the CQBR (U) at Nim Wan, handed over by the British Army to the HKG in 1994 and used by the RHKP until passed to the PLA in 1997.
https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr97-98/english/fc/pwsc/papers/pw261179.htm
CY shows arrogant indignation when a CCP flag…a piece of cloth…is thrown into the harbour but offers nothing of value to the People, the erosion of their way of life and the coming of Draconian rule by law.
There is a really funny bit of subliminal messaging at 00:25 seconds in. This must be how you persuade 250 dorks to put on white shirts and beat up a kitchen hand.
@Stanley Lieber: Protest locations are very much defined by public transport options, hence the desperate efforts in recent days to hold barricade lines outside MTR stations as the last trains prepare to depart. It’s too easy to get kettled if you protest anywhere where the MTR isn’t.
In even more recent days, however, protests have started to run well past the MTR closing time because of the involvement of more and more local residents in eg Wong Tai Sin and Tseung Kwan O, who have just popped downstairs in their dressing robes and don’t need to take the train. So if you’re advocating action on the Peak…
@JLULKE
Point taken.
Maybe the Peak residents could send out their domestic helpers to march in their place.