After making dozens of arrests, Chinese authorities get an array of reporters, bankers and others to confess to rumour-spreading and illegal trading. Caijing journalist Wang Xiaolu admits responsibility for ‘inflicting huge losses on the country and investors’. So the story is that these individuals caused the recent stock market crash, and Xi Jinping and his administration are just innocent victims along with everyone else.
This is how to do blame-shifting: implicate a generous-sized group of unconnected people, extract not only confessions but remorse, and pile on the shameless lies until your propaganda-fed public have no sense of perspective. Whether it’ll work is another matter. But at least the leaders in their bubble will feel they’ve kept some face.
Contrast this with the dismal performance of Hong Kong’s government when the lead-in-water scare broke out a few weeks back. In their panic to offload responsibility, our valiant officials found a scapegoat in the form of one Lam Tak-sum, a plumber. They could at least have had the wits (let alone decency) to find someone who isn’t in a wheelchair – but oh, no… What a bunch of amateurs.
They have more to panic about. At any given moment, parts of China’s United Front in Hong Kong will be out of step – this is inevitable in an unnatural alliance of born Communist Party believers, co-opted tycoons, opportunist politicians, shoe-shiners and plain losers. But Chief Executive CY Leung seems to be testing the pro-government camp’s unity to its limits. Among pro-establishment lawmakers to go off-message in the last few days are Priscilla ‘Rat Queen’ Leung, who has criticized the administration over the lead crisis, and James Tien, who has accused the government of interfering in Hong Kong University’s internal affairs. Meanwhile, a semi-senior Beijing official has held private discussions with members of the opposition Democratic Party.
Now Legislative Council president Tsang Yok-sing expands on his previous comments apparently deviating from the official line. He questions the way ‘One Country, Two Systems’ is going. The target here is not just CY Leung but Beijing’s local Liaison Office, which over the last couple of years has assumed more control within the Hong Kong power structure in order to apply Mainland-style bullying, smearing, manipulation and other tactics to crush opposition forces. These crude attempts have been polarizing, leaving the opposition intact, while causing greater divisions within the loyalist camp.
Tsang was born into the Communist faith, while CY is a pre-1997 convert and zealot. There now seems to be a conflict along these lines, between the local traditional patriots and the CY-Liaison Office bloc. This suggests that the top policymakers in Beijing are not impressed with Hong Kong’s management since 2012, bungling the political reform package and ‘losing’ the post-colonial generation. No-one outside China’s ruling clique can be at all sure what is happening, but we do know that Hong Kong’s DAB/FTU milieu, of which Tsang is a/the leader, is the CCP’s local front, and by definition does not pick the wrong side.
And to add to the CY administration’s woes – we now learn that Hong Kong’s better-paid civil servants are getting a monthly, no-strings allowance equivalent to around 80% of median household income, because, er, well… no-one seems to know.
I haven’t enjoyed a political death watch so much since Vagina Yip was chased out of town after the Article 23 demo.
The irony is that the Old School CCP Fan Club is the only faction of the United Front that the CCP has never seen fit to put in charge.
They’ve cycled through all the remaining options. They tried the tycoon. They tried the civil servant. They tried the…opportunistic princeling-arsekissing hatchet troll. But would they ever put a traditional “patriot” or trade-unionist in charge of Hong Kong? Not in a million years, when there’s all this money to be laundered.
The old school patriots are loyal, so they can be taken advantage of. The thing about lapdogs is that you only have to occasionally throw them a small bone. They’re too dumb to turn against you.
I don’t read the Chinese newspapers or watch the local TV but I’d love to see Apple Daily interview some of the cage home dwellers for their opinion & how even 1/5th of the ‘no strings ‘ allowance would change their lives.
Hint. Mr. Lam may be in a wheelchair, but his wife isn’t. Check out her United Front background.
The old left is clearly pissed at CY after he kicked out TSANG Tak-sing and is starting to make its fury known in public because the Liaison Office is not listening. This places Beijing in an extremely difficult situation given its robust support to CY. Meanwhile, Carrie LAM, our Chief Secretary, has been remarkably quiet in the face of this turmoil. Far be it from me to suggest she is waiting in the wings …
Sorry but no, CY has been part of the CCP machine since the 80s and earlier.
My father told me of a brief comment/conversation in 1986 where the late Sir Jack Cater leaned in and whispered while nodding in the direction of CY “Bought and paid for by the Chinese”.
Meanwhile, did anyone else notice that this howlingly batshit editorial was scrubbed from SCMP.com within hours of its publication? The time stamp is 3:34am on Sunday, and it was gone by noon the same day.
Jasper’s pepretual harping on about 2047 is a transparent red herring.
Something will have to give sooner or later. If CY continues losing support at the same rate as potential successors shy away, by 2017 only the army will be — nominally — on his side.
Could it be that the factional infighting currently taking place in Beijing (things are definitely NOT right over there) is being played out locally as well ?
You’ve joined up the dots well however with a year and 10 months left I think they will let CY limp on. However not serving two terms is being akin to being fired.
Saw mustachioed John at the boxing on Saturday night and he was largely left to himself (except for a short time by that opportunist cock Allen Semen) and stayed for a number of bouts. If CY had shown up or even Head Prefect Carrie trouble would probably have followed. Which is why, with such a dearth of other candidates, I think they are positioning John to the helm. Pleasant, unoffending and not very good at his sums but allowing us all to catch a breath …
Such a good post today. You come here to this blog to decipher all the shoeshining crap in the mainstream media.
Once small clarification, shurely?
Hemmers: “This suggests that the top policymakers in Beijing are not impressed with Hong Kong’s management since 2012, bungling the political reform package and ‘losing’ the post-colonial generation. …”
Shurely Hong Kong’s management has been downhill not since 20102 but since 1997??
HK1980 and others might find the following article instructive:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/90738/partners-in-crime
“One of [Deng Xiaoping’s] best-known sayings was ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.’ He apparently reasoned that the triads were too significant a power in Hong Kong to be ignored, and that their traditional ties to Taiwan made them unpredictable, but that, fortunately, they could be bought. So he bought them: the Sun Yee On, the largest Hong Kong triad society, no longer requires initiates to pledge allegiance to Taiwan; now it is to the People’s Republic of China that they swear.”
Albert YEUNG has his people sweeping the internet for any reference to him being a triad and then seeking to get it removed. If Hemmers disappears we have a suspect.
@”This suggests that the top policymakers in Beijing are not impressed with Hong Kong’s management since 2012″
No make that “since 2005″……………… you’re forgetting Bowtie and Horay Henry, who more than any other two people in the whole of Hong Kong’s history, alienated our youth and working class.
@Qian Jian
That reminds me – Sir Bowtie. Perhaps now something will happen.
@Qian Jin – evidence? At least Bowtie didn’t order teargas to be fired at protesting students. That was the tipping point for many young people.
Outside Influence:
If it wasn’t for the occasional English mistakes that are in my league, I’d be very confident “Qian Jin” is one of the many “personalities” of the NTSCMP. Others probably include Bella Trotsky. Who ever it is, they must find an outlet somewhere or these little Eves will overwhelm the “dominant” one. Bottling them up just leads to more excessive neurosis popping up where they would be more embarrassing. Let the poor fellow have his release.
@ HK1980
How many among this readership remember or ever belonged to the Marco Polo Club, the early Xinhua News Agency version, rather than the Cathay Pacific copycat version? It must have been several years after June 4th making it November 1992 or 1993. That particular monthly meeting somewhat surprisingly was going to be addressed by a Westerner on the sensitive topic of political prisoners in China. The speaker and I were old friends but he never before had attended a Marco Polo gathering. During the dinner he came over to my table and in hushed tones asked for my advice on how he should pitch his remarks. I reminded him in no uncertain terms that this was a united front organization with clearly defined limits. He then thanked me and returned to the head table. Sitting next to me and overhearing bits and pieces of this conversation was a very much younger C.Y. Leung. He then leaned over and asked me in all sincerity, “What is a United Front group? What does united front mean?” In trying to explain and give examples before the desert and coffee arrived, I felt like a college professor teaching Chinese Politics 101. C.Y. Leung at that time knew next to nothing about the Chinese Communist Party. There is absolutely no way he could have been a Party member. He possessed none of the elementary knowledge essential for Party membership. In those days he appeared at Xinhua functions from time to time so I suppose one could say he was a ‘wantabe’ (or, less charitably, an opportunist) who saw China as the future and wanted Chinese officials to take notice of his commitment. C.Y. Leung may well be a Party member today, as I am sure C.H. Tung is, thanks to Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents’ policy, but he certainly was not back in the mid-1990s, let alone 1986.
@Cassowary
Thank you for your description of political lapdogs. One could be forgiven for seeing somewhat similar relationships developing between certain commenters to this website and Hemlock.
Older than Oldtimer’santidote is evidence for what would seem common sense, the only thing CY Leung is fanatical about is his own best interest.
His dithering and reluctance to come out in public is precisely because he has no other principles, has zero capability for empathy,which makes taking questions tricky. All he can do is try to read the face and language of his “victims” including his masters in the CCP and try to game them. This is impossible to do with a crowd or even a large meeting of top civil servants/political appointees, hence the poor internal communications (and even more damming rictus in public communications). If his masters in the CCP are not doing their own proper checks and alignments before they meet him, then he must come out of those meetings even more confused and lost about how to proceed.
First remember the following is relative (use Obama ordering double tapping drone attacks on wedding parties/schools and not loosing sleep for comparison) I don’t think I’ve ever met a CCP member of any real quality /power who would qualify as barely socially functional psychopathy/sociopath. This isn’t to say they don’t do nasty things aka Arendt’s Banality of Evil – normal humans can be nasty enough. The borderline function psychopaths in the CCP usually never get the real levers of power; no else one trusts them in a system built on a web of personal relationships, favors and trust. It wasn’t the corruption that did in Bo, that’s all too human. Bo Xi Lai lost trust, and then confirmed he was untrustworthy and dangerous. The party would regard someone like CY Leung (or Maria Tam, Elsie Lueng, Rita Fan, etc) as a toxin, a useful tool but not to be taken internally if at all possible. Tung is CCP material.
Either way, we’re stuck with a system in stasis that promotes venal corruption. Lapdogs can only be counted on to self-direct their own interests; where these don’t align with their masters, then they have to be micro-managed — something Beijing is surprising bad because of the smoke & mirrors and lack of clarity required to make a system run by patronage and relationships function.
@OTO/ Nimby: you may well be right. A borderline sociopath, unable to empathize. Easy to manipulate by an ersatz father (figure). No wonder his daughter is a loon.