Andy Chan – speaking the unspeakable

That ugly popping noise coming down from Kennedy Road yesterday afternoon was the sound of blood vessels bursting at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs office. Andy Chan’s remarks (also here, pix here) at the Foreign Correspondents Club didn’t cover a lot of ground – he just zeroed in on the most hyper-sensitive heresy imaginable, repeatedly.

Essentially: “China is an empire and threat to the world, and Hong Kong is a colony that can only preserve its freedoms and culture as an independent nation”.

Contrast this with the principles long-espoused by the older traditional pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong: “We are all Chinese, and we would like the Communist Party to keep its promises to give Hong Kong democracy, please – otherwise we will whine about arcane constitutional points and hold a march, again”. On icky subjects like CCP elites’ corrupt families, or Tibet or Xinjiang, they were mostly mute. For decades, this was the voice of firebrand opposition, which Beijing has always treated with contempt.

Andy Chan’s position, including that of race-traitor, is so extreme, you can almost sympathize with Chinese officials’ fury at the FCC for giving it a platform. The pro-independence idea has previously been largely hidden away – the preserve of teenage fantasists. It would have stayed hidden away if Beijing hadn’t insisted the local authorities make a big deal about banning Chan’s barely-existent HK National Party. (We could debate whether this is a screw-up or calculated. We could also speculate that discontent would never have arisen if China had ruled Hong Kong halfway decently since the handover in 1997 – it’s not as if the British regime was a really hard act to follow. But that’s another story.)

The key thing is that Andy Chan’s shocking and outré stance is also hard-headed and logical. His analysis is sound. The Communist one-party monopoly-of-power dictatorship will not give Hong Kong representative government, because by definition it cannot; and it will destroy Hong Kong’s freedoms and distinct identity, because as a Leninist system that only knows control through force, it must.

This reasoning – ‘unacceptable’, ‘crossing a red line’ and ‘threatening national security’ – is based on what many will see as fact and truth. By exposing this so publicly, Chan humiliates not only Beijing but our lame moderate pan-dems who wouldn’t dare be so honest. There is a real chance that all this might make the pro-independence logic more mainstream.

There will be retribution. The FCC wins the ultimate accolades of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people and getting its website hacked. The Hong Kong government will look increasingly hapless as it pretends to be in charge and all remains well. The banning of groups and ideas will proceed, and censorship of seditious thoughts will inevitably follow, and so on. Beijing will prove Andy Chan right.

 

This entry was posted in Blog. Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to Andy Chan – speaking the unspeakable

  1. Chinese Netizen says:

    I hope Andy has an exit strategy to a decent country (now that the US is rejecting and jailing asylum seekers)

  2. Paul says:

    Er, I think you mean Andy Chan in your last line.

  3. Headache says:

    Ironic that the Beijing’s diktats regarding Hong Kong are nowadays emanating from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If only…

  4. derek rice says:

    Yeah, Andy gave it both barrels; even the grizzled hacks started to shuffle in their seats. Surprised police helped him into a taxi. Was expecting a cry of ‘black van for Andy Chan’.

    It was CY who kicked all this off in para 10 of policy address 2015. Had heard no mention of Independence until he bashed on about it, saying ‘we must be alert’.

    CY is akin to a man who introduces a gorilla to a cocktail party and, after a welcoming glass of champagne, promptly begins to wrestle with it.

  5. dimuendo says:

    It looks increasingly that CY deliberately introduced what had then been a none topic, so that it could be enhanced and subsequently demonised and crushed, not least to encourage the others. If so, there is a smart, “sophisticated”, very cynical, thinker somewhere as to HK affairs.

  6. Independence for Rutland now!

  7. Mjrelje says:

    How ironic that Matthew Cheung (Billy Bunter doppelganger) was stood in front of a ‘Hong Kong Asia’s World City’ banner whilst he banged on about limits to freedom of speech!

    As for the CCP, if it were personified, it would look exactly like it acts — Pennywise from IT. Fucking scary and totally mad.

Comments are closed.