The weirdness gets a little weirder

For your reading convenience, today’s Standard puts all the ‘Hong Kong Independence’ excitement on one page…

At top left, a localist election candidate dares the government to follow through with its threats and ‘take action’ against him for mentioning the dreaded ‘I’ word. At top right, the pro-Beijing Sing Pao accuses Chief Executive CY Leung and Beijing’s Liaison Office of deliberately stirring up the HK Independence scare; the paper demands that the Mainland’s disciplinary system investigate. At bottom left, ex-Chief Secretary Anson Chan also expresses a suspicion that CY has invented the HK Independence menace to win himself a second term. And at bottom right, like a Greek chorus, a forlorn, halftone quarter-page government ad desperately pushes the much-derided blurb about ‘choice’ to urge people to vote on Sunday.

While the Hong Kong government barred some localists from running in the election, it let some others onto the ballot. (You can imagine any reason you want: maybe it was a cunning attempt to nonetheless maximize the number of pan-dem rivals, or maybe it was confusion, or just stupidity.) Now officials are shocked to find that some of these young and insolent splittists are calling for independence on the hustings. A severe-sounding waffle-statement warns that some sort of penalties could follow – though no word of what, how or why.

Media observers worrying that the South China Morning Post is becoming indistinguishable from China Daily will be heartened to hear that the former files this story under the category ‘anti-separatism’, while the latter goes for plain ‘politics’…

To bar a candidate from the election at this stage would involve blotting them out from the already-printed ballot papers, or declaring them (and their votes) invalid when announcing the results. That would mean additional legal appeals, and presumably an even greater chance that the courts will order new elections. Either way, it’s more of an embarrassing mess for CY and the Liaison Office. If the courts back the separatists’ right to run, it raises the possibility of an ‘interpretation’ by Beijing to give the Basic Law hitherto non-existent meanings criminalizing ideas.

Which bring us to the anti-CY/Liaison Office Sing Pao article. It’s one thing for Dame Conscience to say this sort of thing at a Foreign Correspondents Club lunch, but different for a supposedly loyal media outlet – especially when it also points the finger at the Liaison Office. This organization micro-manages pro-Beijing media and, indeed, has essentially taken control of the local administration’s counter-revolutionary/national security-related work, which means pretty much everything the Hong Kong government is doing these days, apart from bus timetables and dog-catching.

The idea that CY and his master Zhang Xiaoming at the Liaison Office could be caught up in some sort of Beijing power-struggle sounds too tantalizing to be true. There was a bit of gossip about central government inspectors looking at officials posted to Hong Kong and/or CY’s UGL payment, but it was brief. There are all sorts of possible scenarios involving everything from Zhang Dejiang’s recent visit to Hong Kong, to Xi Jinping’s ongoing purge, to an anti-Xi backlash and coup – before long you have a Falun Gong newspaper’s report-thriller.

All we can do is watch the hangers-on, opportunists and shoe-shiners in Hong Kong who are more than averagely publicly and deeply committed to the highly unpopular CY. Do they look nervous? Are they suddenly keeping a low profile? Do they seem a bit distant? Are they avoiding eye contact? You know the signs.

The cops are preparing for an election day uprising – but that’s probably the usual ‘too-much-budget/too-much-manpower/paranoia/autism’ syndrome…