The Financial Times notes that General Secretary/Chairman/President Xi Jinping’s hardline approach to Hong Kong is perversely almost guaranteed to further alienate the city’s people. This has much to do with the style of Beijing’s officials when they deign to address the local population – the imperious, belligerent, intolerant, ranting, Communist, Mainland, Mandarin-language, red-flag-waving hysterics and obscure slogans leave the local audience cold. Surprisingly.
Meanwhile, the day-to-day chipping away of freedom continues, and perhaps has a more numbing effect. Today brings two examples of instinctive self-censorship as pre-emptive kowtowing.
Mainland-linked broadcaster TVB lashes out after being criticized for cancelling an RTHK political satire show during Xi’s visit. Pro-Beijing figures have long detested public-funded RTHK for upholding editorial freedom after commercial stations have mostly embraced a more ‘patriotic’ bias. TVB’s aggressive stance suggests that it sees RTHK on the retreat from ‘public-service’ to ‘government broadcaster’.
And we learn that the Asia Society in Hong Kong recently banned activist Joshua Wong from speaking at a book launch (which he didn’t come to anyway, etc). The Society also wormed out of screening a documentary last year about the Umbrella Movement.
The Asia Society has impeccable old-style establishment roots (founded by John D Rockefeller III in New York in the 1950s) and still has a Davos-esque as well as arty-Orientalism feel (though I might be reading too much into it).
The Hong Kong branch is headed up by: property tycoon and raconteur Ronnie Chan; former HSBC CEO Anita Fung BBS (also a director of Ronnie’s Hang Lung); Danish taipan Hans Michael Jebsen BBS; property scion Lau Ming-wai (who in his capacity as government youth advisor tells the FT above that, to local kids, Chinese leaders sound like they are ‘from another planet’); Eric X Li, Mainland venture capital whizz and notorious TED Talk apologist for Leninist dictatorship; businessman Vernon Francis Moore BBS (formerly head finance guy for Mainland CITIC conglomerate); and another former HSBC boss, John Strickland.
(The concentration of Bronze Bauhinia Star holders is interesting: it is Hong Kong’s lowliest-almost-insulting medal for the Great and Good, which possibly reflects official distaste for these individuals’ cultural and international proclivities, by Hong Kong ‘elite’ philistine standards. Apart from Mainlander Li, the others are all Grand/Gold Bauhinia awardees.)
Now, following meetings between Hong Kong localists and Taiwanese contacts, we have a hint of action against local groups having links with Evil Hostile Foreign organizations. Despite the leading question from a pro-Communist lawmaker, the government’s response sounds cautious. Let sleeping cans of worms lie. Still, if the Communist Party insists that Hong Kong goes down that road, Mainland-style paranoia about overseas-based charities, dance troupes, stamp-collectors’ societies and other horrors is where we have to end up.
Stop press!!! Dangerously subversive event taking place at Asia Society later this month!!!
Asia Society…I nearly joined..thought it was full of Tuftons and FCC wallahs I could put down, satirize and insult.
Seems it is not a colonial relic.
More offensive though than all this politically correct culture protection is what the Hong Kong Polytechnic has. A Department of Chinese Culture. Racist or what? I wonder what people would say if they opened a Department of British Culture in a university in Britain. Even the Tories would wince. But the Poly gets our Asian Order of The Brown Nose anyway. Much more distinguished than the Bauhinia.
Pip, pip!
“All children [sic] participants will receive a gift from Miffy.”
A bronze bauhinia perhaps?
With regard to the subversive Miffy, I’m sure by the time she arrives in Hong Kong she will have had her red top “corrected” to add five gold stars, to avoid hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.
I don’t suppose the CCP is smart enough to see the irony of insisting that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China while demonising Taiwanese organisations as sinister foreign forces? No, I thought not.
Dear Hemmers, I was always under the impression that you were raised in good old Albion (although I do stand to be corrected on this). Therefore I would like to ask why the title of this otherwise, as always pertinant missive uses colonial spellings of English words. Whilst I can accept regional dialects and variations, globally, in non-native English environs, should we not use the original language rather than dialects?
Next week may we expect to see a discource about persons ‘chapping’ at doors and the ‘ejits’ being answered by those who talk ‘pish’, wearing their ‘baffys’ whilst holding their ‘bairns’ (or ‘wains’), before going to a ‘bri’.
word du jour: pertinent
@Probably. “Good old Albion”. “Whilst”. People who use that word should be shot. Get with the programme, dude.