If you’ve ever wondered what life must have been like during the Cultural Revolution, stick around. The rectification of Hong Kong’s media, universities and police is underway, and it’s only a matter of time before they come for the courts.
Many people arrested following the Mongkok Fishball Riot are now being bailed. Various Beijing-linked bodies are denouncing judges for their impartial handling of such cases, accusing them of siding with pro-independence forces. A Chinese state-run ‘think-tank’ on Hong Kong has urged the intimidation of judges who ‘pass lenient sentences in cases which jeopardize national security’. A former deputy commissioner of Hong Kong’s anti-corruption agency wrote, and then retracted, a call for people to ‘hunt down’ a specific magistrate and seek ties between his family and pro-democracy groups. (More here.)
Ex-ICAC deputy commissioner Kwok Man-wai’s remarks have prompted a particular backlash from lawyers, which is a big story today. The Standard if you’re in a hurry, and the South China Morning Post for more detail…
Or Hong Kong Free Press, which also has a comment suggesting that Kwok’s remarks count as scandalizing the court. The writer of that comment, Tim Hamlett, writes in another HKFP piece that SCMP columnists Alex Lo and Michael Chugani could be committing another offense, contempt of court, as their diatribes against localist Ray Wong could prejudice Wong’s right to a fair trial.
And behold – Alex Lo’s My Take column in the SCMP comes this morning under the byline of Yonden Lhatoo, who is author of a second column just a few pages away in the op-ed….
Which looks like some hasty, last-minute, stopgap arrangement owing to unforeseen events – maybe a midnight knock at the door, or a breakdown induced by a crisis of conscience. It would be exciting at this point to say that the columns concerned have been taken off-line, but no, and no. The sad thing is that Lo and Chugani presumably do not believe their own Ta Kung Pao-style ranting, but are under orders from their rectified newspaper’s owner, live in fear of struggle-sessions with the work unit’s Red Guards, and have to eat.
Flicking elsewhere in the paper, I wonder if a couple of the big-size quotes that the SCMP likes to pull out are perhaps self-defeating? One puts you off reading the story because it is so inane (unless I am missing something – I don’t know Adele from Beyonce from Kanye), while the other goes waaaay too far in the other direction…
I declare the weekend open with Joke of the Week…
You really must stop reading the SCMPravda. I haven’t clicked on a story in weeks.
They have only had one investigative story in 28 years. That’s my experience of looking at it. Perhaps it’s longer.
Yonden Lhatoo…crazy name, crazy guy???
Chugani was already under the weather, complaining (yesterday?) that people on the MTR were picking on him — exceptionally, I must express considerable sympathy for him.
Of course, by providing links, you could possibly be aiding and abetting the aforesaid alleged offence… (without prejudice)
There’s rather a nasty side to the probable scandalising of the court, which is itself predictable — and was indeed predicted in these columns — but no less horrifying for all that.
Remember the horrified “discovery”, a while back, that some judges were, incredible though this may seem, actually foreign?
Many of the previous Chinese revolutions have had a vicious xenophobic streak (not sure about the Cultural “Revolution” as being unChinese was virtually unheard of then).
You can see, I hope, what I’m getting at…
Ref: Teddy and his private parts.
This happens to me every day. Whatever happened to shaking hands?
And staying with the genitalia theme, what’s with the picture on the same page as the “Teddy” article? I think the house of Celine needs to get a new fashion photographer as to my untutored eye this picture resembles nothing more than a woman attempting to urinate into a bag.
That’s the thing about propaganda and brainwashing. If many persons, Lo, Whatoo, Chugani et al, go around talking about bomb making terrorists then the less well informed in society will start to believe the lies. The only way to oppose this strategy is to have a free press and web media that is prepared to question and investigate as they do in PRC………oh, I’ll get my coat.
PD: …”being unChinese was virtually unheard of then”…
The two places that suffered the most extreme, wide-spread violence during the (anti-)Cultural Revolution were Inner Mongolia and Tibet, whose people the Han could barely tolerate calling Chinese rather than barbarian. Of course it’s different when Beijing wants their cooperation to get something under their land. Also, ambassadors and embassy staff from many nations in Beijing were targeted for beatings if they ventured onto the streets.
A literal translation of Cultural Revolution could be “expulsion（or murder） of culture”, and this statement was closer to Mao’s stated intent,## compared to the popular name. This was to be no trans-formative revolution, but rather the murder/sweeping away of all existing culture, including foreign elements –a day zero fresh start from the raw. BTW, You’ve got an ex (bomb-making?) culture murder for Mao running Legco.
Mao’s writings were where Pol Pot got his ideas, and one of the reasons, why China was more than extremely upset with Vietnam’s intervention with a client state. To stop the ethnocide in Cambodia was a far too soon critique of both Mao and China’s leadership.
## Mao’s real intent – to murder his opposition, and if it took the nation backwards and made it even more paranoid, so much the better. As Xi’s a Maoist real-politic man, everyone in HK get set to have a lot of fun.
Alex Lo, Yonden Lhatoo and Chugani are not white and make points of it in often offensive and inflammatory columns. Their writing is becoming no more than a parody of real journalism, ( it used to be second rate and uninspiring but that seems like a compliment now) and if it wasn’t for the free copy at work I wouldn’t bother reading the SCuMPost at all.
@ reductio and Teddy smelling (the) Hero’s private parts. I guess Hemmers was still referring to the convenor of the Hong Kong indigenous Group, Ray Wong. Anyone daring to do this , would have to be a hero.
Who knows where rock bottom will lie for the Post, but I’ll wager it ain’t there yet. As I type, senior employees are assimilating a presentation on Alibaba’s glorious back story in the upstairs conference room at the Leighton Mothership. The ambiguous guffawing seeping through the frosted glass walls, as I shufffle forlornly back to my desk, is somehow reminiscent of the closing scenes of Animal Farm.
Hemmer’s, might I make a suggestion to you?
Add one of those fail-safe thingy-dingy’s, so that if you don’t post something within, say 48 hours, it will automatically trigger a post here that you’ve been disappeared by mainland thugs . . . er, uh, re-education specialists, for all those offensive “hurt the feelings of” posts of yours.
Just a thought.
For the weekend
CY Leung urged demonstrators to take part in rational discussions through peaceful means … CY Leung called on lawmakers and citizens to make rational choices based on facts … Rita Fan said the people of Hong Kong will express their views in a calm, legal and rational manner … John Tsang said what really matters is to remain objective, rational and pragmatic …
Rational, irrational!
The words drive me nuts! I get so passional
That like a maddiman deprassional
I rave, in vocab newly fashional.
Rational!
And in a pash
I get a rash!
My blood contaminous,
My skin inflaminous.
Irrational!
And in a pash
I am rash!
I descreate our Flag
And rup it like a rag,
And even sinnier
Curse the Bauhinia.
Thank dog, my sufferment
Is decreasable.
And later, I’ll again be …
Peaceable.
I watched Chugani’s segment with Steve Vickers on the fishball riot.
I’ve never heard/watched Chugani before. I have never seen an interviewer touting positions less uninformed, preconceived and half-baked. A shrill shill for the HK establishment.
The one impression that stands out in both articles and troll posts about young activists and their sexual proclivities is the whiff of sour grapes. One gets the sense of a bunch of middle aged male wannabes who secretly wish they too were in on the sex, drugs ‘n’ cash action but their boat sailed long ago.
The bitchy references to OC and condoms are revealing. It should in fact be far more disturbing if people in their reproductive prime were spending a lot of time in close contact and not making out. After all the Family Planning is encouraging Hong Kong folk to ‘even form a basketball team’! Well practice makes perfect.
Viagra is not a listed substance. And it cannot be assumed that it was intended for personal use. It could be some dastardly plan like spiking the water coolers at Legco to stimulate debate on the IP legislation.
So here is a message from the ladies to the voyeurs, get a life guys.
Not surprising to see shoe shining from “tycoooooons” but tiring, contrived and credibility corroding when regularly published by local media and “journalists”.
Kwok Man-wai reportedly called Ray Wong “a dangerous terrorist”. You would think someone who used to be number 2 at the ICAC would have the word “alleged” in his vocabulary, or perhaps “innocent until proven guilty” will be the next Hong Kong value to be swept away. However, his call for a register of bad judicial decisions could work both ways – the “breast assault” farce comes immediately to mind.
You’re very forgiving of Chugani and Lo. More than once you’ve said they probably don’t really believe the rubbish they write. I wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt. And as for that yahoo Lhatoo, his columns are as irritatingly matey as they’re wrong-headed. Bleugh!!
@ Tiu Fu Fong: You must not have seen Yonden Lhatoo’s bit on ATV during Occupy (I think it was him anyway). Every whackjob foreign forces conspiracy theory crammed into 22 minutes, absurdly leading interviews of the “when was the last time you beat your wife?” variety. I’d never seen anything that made me want to punch the television as much as that.
@ Old Eejit: The Chugani-Lo Wargarrhhbl Monster probably think they’re fair and balanced because every 1 in 20 columns or so they have a go at the tycoons or the Heung Yee Kuk. They’re probably on a quota.