Is the United Front starting to wind down its choreographed Great Youngspiration Oath-Mutilation Freak-Out? A glimmer of hope comes in today’s South China Morning Post hand-wringing why-oh-why let’s-move-on piece – the dreaded ‘Cheena’ mouth-froth outrage meme is missing! Perhaps Beijing’s local propaganda masterminds are worried that the orchestrated witch-hunt could go too far, as all sorts of trouble-makers flood the courts with applications to disqualify half of Hong Kong’s public office-holders. Or maybe the SCMP editors just cut it out to save their sanity.
There are two possible logical explanations for the Baggio Leung-Yau Wai-ching mass-feeding frenzy. One is that, after two years’ hyping of the ‘pro-Independence’ menace, the Liaison Office/CY Leung machine saw and took the opportunity to implement Operation Contrived Anti-Radical Clampdown – the use of legal process as political tool being either an accidental or intended outcome. The other is that the mighty and confident Xi Jinping regime is a paranoid and insecure elephant petrified by the Hong Kong geek-mice.
Yet – the Liaison Office, local officials and media have successfully convinced perhaps the majority of Hong Kong’s news-following population that two young lawmakers’ childishness has alone brought legal and constitutional calamity upon the city (with one-country-two-systems nonetheless/miraculously/naturally surviving intact). Having squeezed this much from it, and with the CY Leung re-appointment/defenestration looming, the United Front message-management operation must be tempted to ease off while it’s ahead.
If so, lawmaker Regina Ip hasn’t received the memo – or is ignoring it.
As the Chief Executive quasi-election draws nearer, the more frantic and desperate the lady gets. Her SCMP column yesterday pushes every button, including the beaten-to-death ‘Cheena’ insult to Chinese people, the casting of young geeks as threat to national-sovereignty, and a contorted revisionist history in which the evil British embedded Western democratic poison in Hong Kong as a bulwark against Beijing (it just looked like Chris Patten embedding egg tarts as a bulwark against weight-loss).
It is understandable that a hyper-ambitious no-hoper imagining a last chance stoops to such unseemly depths. But this really is trying too hard. Even in 2016, there is a limit to how much grotesque fantasy can become real. (Surely?)
A rule of thumb about the South China Morning Post’s op-ed page: the longer the bio-blurb beneath the column, the more ridiculous the blather*. And if you need to include the author’s CCTV show’s producer’s name…
*This assumption based on a 10-second scan of the linked boot-lick.
“Even in 2016, there is a limit to how much grotesque fantasy can become real.” Well, with Trump in the White House, probably not. We live in a post-reality world (or perhaps one in which “reality” signifies something different from what it used to – see “reality television”).
This ‘Cheena’ stuff is funny.
Always used it as a term of endearment, with NO reciprocation – For decades my wife would respond with “cabron.”
Last year during a movie filming in her old Chinese grocery store, I casually mentioned it to the Hispanic crew – they explained.
I guess she really hated being called ‘Cheena’ by the Mexicans.
@Hank – if you Google “Cheena”, it can refer to a village in Pakistan, a punk rock group from New York, a dog from Costa Rica, and believe it or not, a restaurant in Beijing – why aren’t the sensitive feelings of all Chinese people hurt by that one?
Mr. Kuhn is described as a “public intellectual, political/economics commentator, and an international corporate strategist”.
Oddly, the only title of actual substance to which he may lay claim, that of “TV chat show host”, is left off the list.
By contrast, French national treasure Bernard-Henri Levy (“BHL” to his thousands of close friends), is known simply as an intellectual.
Unfortunately, the foregoing neither proves nor disproves Hemlock’s theory of the relationship between blurb volume and vacuity of ideas, as both gentlemen are full of shit.
Not being Chinese, I have to say I am feeling left out that my feelings have not been hurt, along with those of a quarter of the world’s population. I’m sure there’s some psychological term for this, but then isn’t there always?
Looking at the title of Vagina’s SCMP column, the penny has finally dropped. Beijing IS the borg of Star Trek fame. Resistance is futile. Couldn’t have put it better myself! If only they looked more like Seven-of-Nine and less like Maria TAM …
One more thing … I think there’s a “t” missing at the end of Mr Khun’s name …
“Cheena” was actually first used by Dr. Sun Yat Sen, way before the Japanese used it. It was used in the context that they weren’t a part of the Qing Dynasty. Learnt this from the Hong Kong Heritage program on RTHK – 19/11/16.
https://youtu.be/8rhBdWojLe0?t=334
Time to move on from the whole thing, both sides of the boarder, if one is middle class. But one is only buying 20-30 years before the Clathrate gun resets everything in favor of bacteria and cockroaches. That’s why Beijing is going to win, the roaches always do.