Hong Kong trade officials recently organized a Belt and Road seminar in Milan, Italy. Our hard-working Miss Choi rhapsodized about China’s ‘visionary’ initiative, the ‘super-connector’, far-reaching opportunities, pillar industries, logistics and innovation. She also 
allayed Italy’s apparent concerns about Hong Kong’s links to tax evasion (Italians, as we all know, being the planet’s most scrupulous and eager taxpayers).
While this was happening, other Hong Kong bureaucrats were holding a Belt and Road seminar in Montreal. According to the civil servant hosting that show:
“With a gross economic volume of US$22,000 billion and a total population of 4.4 billion along the Belt and Road, the Initiative offers businesses unparalleled opportunities to tap into new markets …
“With our distinctive advantage of being a ‘super-connector’ operating under the ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement, Hong Kong can play a central role in delivering the enormous opportunities presented by the Belt and Road Initiative.”
(Fun fact: of the 80 countries that are ‘part of’ the Belt and Road thing, hardly any have agreed to get involved, signed up to anything, or even been informed that they have been roped into the incomprehensible ‘Initiative’. They were included without even being asked – a bit like the way the Mormons baptize your dead ancestors without telling you.)
Hong Kong’s efforts to push Belt and Road know no bounds. If It’s Thursday, This Must Be Romania.
Meanwhile, up in Seoul, Commerce Secretary Greg So and his entourage were signing a memorandum on Hong Kong-Korean cooperation in creative industries. Much raving about collaboration and mutual benefits and opportunities ensued – indeed, it was so exciting they totally forgot to mention Belt and Road.
No chance of that back here, where Chief Secretary Carrie Lam was attending the 21st Working Meeting of the Hong Kong/Guangdong Co-operation Joint Conference. (Is it really 21 already? How time flies when you’re having fun.) This one actually gets reported in the press, possibly because it took place at Tamar, convenient for reporters, or maybe because Carrie and Provincial Vice-Governor He signed an impressive 92 ‘cooperation items’. They covered…
…the Belt and Road Initiative, liberalisation of trade in services, innovation and technology, financial services, youth, education, professional services, environmental protection, etc.
By ‘etc’, we can assume that the government’s writer of press releases was running out of patience.
Needless to say, space does not permit us to list the 92 items in detail. They include the pestilential ‘cruise’ industry, which never seems to go away, plus the Five Year Plan and some stuff about the Qianhai Zone-Hub, and of course the ‘Ten Thousand, Thousand, Hundred and Ten’ Development Target, with which we are all so familiar. But to give an example of the specifics, one item involves ‘encouragement’ for Guangdong companies to remember Hong Kong and possibly toss some contracts our way when building Belt and Road projects, like the high-speed rail network Uzbekistan didn’t realize it wanted. It all sounds a bit whiny and pathetic, but perhaps that’s the idea – to make Provincial Vice-Governor He feel big and important compared with little old Hong Kong begging for spare scraps. (Clue: Carrie insists we are taking this baloney ‘very seriously’.)
This was just one day (give or take time zones) in the busy life of our dedicated and tireless administration. We will possibly get around to the air pollution, overcrowded hospitals, traffic gridlock, student suicides and other icky stuff In Due Course – but not before declaring the four-day weekend open.
All belt & no trousers: the HKSAR misgovernment at work.
Trouble is the belt is loose and their trousers are falling down, whilst the road is leading no where.
Regina Ip’s version of Belt and Road is more interesting. It’s a dildo strap-on going only one way.
Funny how Government freebies are never held in really shitty places which are reasonably relevant to the cause like Tashkent or Baghdad.
I’m still reeling from yesterday’s SCMP headline: BRUSSELS BOMB ATTACK ANOTHER BLOW TO DEMAND FOR EUROPEAN TRAVEL AMONG HONG KONG TOURISTS.
What a shitty narrow-minded newspaper.
@Walter: And now you’ve given me a mental image of CY waddling down the road with his trousers around his ankles. Curse you.
… at work, hum.
Wonder what it looks like when the taxes are spent on play? One imagines Lufsig biting the neck of statuesque mainland
prostitutestea ladies from the Great Hall of the People (Great as in how many people are buried under it’s foundations). All of this while his better half and Vagina elbow and slap each other over who rogers them with the strap on, Lau gets his jollies peeping on from a trash bin, and Eddie bathes himself in a tub filled with the remains of students dropped from a great height.World’s most useless, overpaid public servants.
Do nothing sycophantic f*ckwits.
Clockwatching, pasty, pathetic wretches.
Ball-less, pedantic pedants.
Bullspistles. All of them.
Could Mrs. Lam possibly stand any further from the creep? That says it all.
“Relevant officials of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government … attended the meeting.”
Since when were Hong Kong government officials relevant?
That said, Carrie takes a nice photo, though I’m not sure about the bare legs and flip-flops look.
“…the Belt and Road Initiative, liberalisation of trade in services, innovation and technology, financial services, youth, education, professional services, environmental protection, etc.”
If you’re a certain kind of person,
A Chinese Communist,
You think that, if you use a word, the thing itself
Will then exist.
Say, “the heroic peasants joyfully working
In the countryside”
And no-one was arrested, or starved,
Or died.
Say, “he is helping the police” and truly
He is helping the police.
Say, “peaceful partnership”
And there is peace.
Say, “it has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”
And the pain is real.
Say, “love of country”
And that is what they feel.
Say, “every nation on the new Silk Road
Will be united”
And every one of them
Is delighted.
I suppose there is a philosophic term
Which is used
To mean that words and things
Are confused.
But maybe if you search the depths
Of the mind
(A disturbing image) of a Chinese cadre
You will find
A sagacious goblin saying,
“Comrade, don’t be absurd.
It doesn’t exist,
It’s just a word.”
Gooddog
Not up to the standard of Know not but seconded.
I just received the latest issue of ‘Youth Hong Kong’, and saw that the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups is well and truly on message.
See here:
http://youthhongkong.hkfyg.org.hk/journal.php?jid=30&p=4
You could try: chosisme.
@Knownot – perhaps the philosophic term you want is cognitive dissonance.
http://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1251781-20160331.htm> the chief executive of the truck association, Simon Chung, the estimated budget of around HK$600,000 is about right as a van that has to comply with all the government regulations like fire resistance, air flow and other safety measures will not be cheap.
Someone’s hard work for setting up a kickback on display. No surprise, but Maria The Hutt Tam is elbowing in to be
consigliere / 438for the The Hong Kong Food Truck Association. As Taxi License Parasite Rentier Supreme, this kind of corruption opportunity makes for a nice tea time snack. Simon has no idea who he’s just let stand behind him with a knife.“A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”