With all the slights and insults this cruel and callous world is levelling at poor innocent victim China, there has to come a point when something snaps – the glorious motherland can take no more.
It could have been the Philippines, insultingly insisting it had a legal right to its territorial waters. It could have been South Korea, arrogantly allowing the US to install anti-missile systems as protection against the North’s nukes. It could have been the UK, insolently rethinking a part-Chinese nuclear power station project. It could have been Australia, whose boorish Olympic athletes bring up Chinese rivals’ records of doping. (Or France, ditto.) It could have been Austria, which irritatingly and stupidly has a name almost the 
same as Australia. It could have been Brazil, hoisting a Chinese flag with the little stars not pointing the right way (for the correct positioning, see example on right). It could have been Apple, Microsoft or Volkswagen, who have ripped off Mainland consumers and/or intellectual property. It could have been Japan or America for obvious reasons far far far too numerous to relate. It could have been [insert dozens of other instances in which hostile brutes have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, attempted to thwart the country’s rise, etc].
But it seems it is plucky little Hong Kong that has mightily miffed the motherland so much that the miff-ometer reaches breaking point. Ever-depressing all-purpose pro-Beijing spokesman Lau Siu-kai conveys China’s official mega-mouth-froth-rant over Hongkongers’ offensive and disgraceful laughter and hilarity in reaction to Chinese Olympians’ crappy performance…
Unless you break down in tears at our nation’s sporting failures, he says (pretty much), Beijing will scrap the ‘One Country Two Systems’ principle, make you all drive on the right-hand side of the road, abolish traditional written characters, and force you to drink adulterated Yakult, just like the 1.3 billion compatriots across the border – then you’ll be sorry.
In short, if you don’t start being happy about the one-party Communist regime, it will come and hurt you. Love the motherland, or the motherland will inflict pain on you. If this warning doesn’t convince you to respect and adore Beijing, whatever will?
The only soft power bit that could actually convince anyone outside of the mainland to like China is the one by Monty Python.
But alas, it’ll be derided as “foreign meddling into internal affairs and exposing of state secrets”.
Great post and very funny, but you missed the very unfunny part of Lau’s article:
Quote
[Lau] said the returning officers would not have disqualified the candidates without the support of Beijing and the SAR government.
“Frankly speaking how many Hongkongers would believe that it was purely the returning officers’ decisions?” he said.
“Certainly they are backed by the central government and the SAR government.”
Unquote.
In other words, the Central Government has thrown away even the pretence of two systems.
The scary thing is that they’re starting to feel powerful enough to treat the rest of the world they way they rule their poor population: eg South China Sea, the UK, etc. That may be laughable still but the world should start paying attention and start saying “no” before it gets out of hand. The gangster state CCP thinking they run the world is worrying.
China has more than one billion people.
I keep telling my colleagues with that many people to choose from, they should win every gold medal at the Olympics.
@Joel, that argument extends to India also which demonstrates the fallacy. It is all about government backing for sporting endevour to prove the alleged superiority of their rule that determines which nations have the best shot at Olympic medals.
Humourists laugh at other people.
Comedians laugh at themselves.
Joel
And yet, India’s medal count…
Not much good at team events though are they Joel?
“The beatings will continue until morale improves.” — Capt. Xi of the HMS Lychee.
Brazil could make some extra cash selling the not-quite-the-chinese-flags in Hong Kong for protestors to burn during rallies and protests without prosecution.
“It wasn’t a Chinese flag we set fire to, your Honour: the stars were clearly different.”
Thanks for pointing out Gary Cheung’s hilarious article — for an alleged political editor, the article displays a level of wilful naivety normally reserved for 1970’s porno movies: “Gee, mister, you mean the time machine only works if we take off all our clothes!?”
@Joel: And yet the country can’t field any decent men’s team sport. Says something…
That Lau Siu-Kai guy sounds like a right laugh at parties.
My temptation is to write him off as ‘just another nutter’ seeking attention and simultaneously conflating perceived damage to oh-so-sensitive mainland hearts and minds with a reason to ‘smash the system’.
My worry is that some people might actually listen to him – the naivety of HK’s crop of political commentators popping up in the press these days is astounding.
Lau Siu-kai is well-connected and his utterances are invariably at the behest of the Mainland. I first heard him speak at a conference in 1996. It was evident then that he had the inside track on what the Mainland is thinking. I’m not tempted to dismiss him as a ‘nutter’ although one could understand why you may think that.
@Walter: what you say is true, but the fact is that there is no “Mainland ” as such. At best he represents some faction, and today’s premier faction may be tomorrow’s ‘degenerate anti-revolutionary splittist clique’. And if he doesn’t belong to some clique, he is just a dispensible busboy, just like Jasper.
Lau definitely is privy to the inside dope. Problem is, once he puts it down on paper, it comes across as childish, sycophantic drivel.
But then again, sycophantic drivel must be some formula the CCP actually likes to see in publications outside mainland party circles.
@Boris Badanov
The world is still at honeymoon with the newly acquired chinese power. As soon as they start to more and more interfere and meddle in other nations affairs they will experience what the americans got well before them: opposition and terrorism against their interests worldwide. This in turn will do wonders to remove the smugness in most of the CCP types naively thinking the world owes them something for the “centuries” of exploitation. There is a possibility that, having learned from american experience, this time the backlash will be more quicker and harder, and it will be interesting to see how the current crop of autocrats in power will react, without any significant internal opposition like the one their US counterparts have.
@Walter, Chinese Netizen, Free Republic…
Thanks for the insights.
Certainly gives us cause for concern, then, that such a figure feels free to signal the political machinations behind the poor derided returning officer’s actions. Seeing as that is illegal and all.
One wonders whether these guys either don’t understand the illegality, or just don’t care?
@bagesty
Don’t care. When you believe power results from the right to own violence in your society, and law is an realpolitik expression of said power … well you do the math.
As far as Hong Kong goes, the CCP is trying to set-up a ‘heads-i-win / tails-you-lose’ dynamic, very clumsily.
If things get violent, we (i.e. the CCP) get to do our thing, Tibet / Xinjiang-stylee … we know how to do violent repression, we are badass at it.
If things do not get violent (despite erosions of the semi-constitutional governance institutionalised in Hong Kong, e.g. the almost weekly transgressions by the CCP and its agents against our civil institutions) … we get a Hong Kong with a weak, damaged civil society (what they call ‘depleted centrifugal forces’) that depends on a strong central force (what they call ‘strong and consolidated centripetal forces’) for function and order – i.e. a society managed by the CCP mainland-stylee. We (the CCP) know how to deal with that kind of society, we are also bad-ass at that too.
It is all very clear and obvious if you study how the CCP went from being Comintern jokesters (c. pre-1932/3) to seizing power (c. 1937 – 1949) to holding and maintaining said power through violent repression and the finely-honed, subtle application of social manipulation and ideological engineering (c. 1953/4 until today). [NB: That last part about finely-honed and subtle was sarcasm.]
The reason the CCPs’ failure – in its current form – is inevitable (according to history as they like to say over yonder), is, ironically, contained in the communist manifesto. The CCP has become the bourgeoisie, whose economic and political interests oppose the majority of citizens in their society (the masses or the working classes in Marxist parlance) – as it happens, in China this is a rather substantial mass of humanity, who are, indeed, starting to arise. The CCP elite know this, and it scares them deeply. [NB: Hence the recent attempts to ‘clean up’ and get rid of some of the biggest murderers and the worst of the bad news dudes – Jiang Zemin, Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai, and associated clique of buddies].
The matrix of social consensus reality cannot sustain such deep contradictions and tensions in the long-term. The only way out is political reform, liberalisation, and some form of enlightenment to a social contract that does not depend on violence and intimidation. Some people at the top of the CCP know this, but they are in the minority and generally silenced by the bureaucratic CCP machine.
So, all in all, the best (and only hope) for Hong Kong is non-violent resistance and calls for peaceful transformation. This is the only way to keep the mainland public onside. The next time the Chinese public sees tanks in the street killing ethnic Han Chinese the CCP is history. The CCP elite know this as well.
Hence all of the recent attempts to incite violent resistance, which would lose Hong Kong any possible support from the mainland public, and give the Ministry of State Security the excuse to openly come into Hong Kong like a bear on acid…
From an optimistic perspective however, I place my faith in the capabilities of the CCP bureaucratic machine to hoist itself by its own petard and fuck up what would otherwise be a fairly sound multi-layered strategic approach. This tendency, which i term ‘shooting-ones-own-leg-off-itis’, appears to be spreading at an alarming rate, not just in Hong Kong but globally.
Almost seems like some peeps are digging a bit of global Chaos.
@Chris Maden – I am reminded of the famous American statement from the Vietnam War era that “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it”. In other words, China will happily destroy the One Country Two Systems principle in order to preserve the One Country half of it. You’re right, it isn’t funny.