The Hong Kong Transport Department starts Wednesday with an announcement that it needs more time to clear roads still blocked after Typhoon Mangkhut on Sunday. It is an unintentional reminder (along with the Great Tai Po Post-Storm Traumatized Killer Bees Frenzy) that Chief Executive Carrie Lam screwed up by not requesting everyone to stay home Monday.
Her real error has been subsequently refusing to fess up and apologize – thus ensuring that this episode sticks in everyone’s memory for years to come as far bigger and worse than it really was. She continues to bleat that she could take no action because of ‘legal consequences and the effect on different industries’.
Some links on the subject: in case you missed it, an HKFP piece on what Carrie should have done; and today’s Standard editorial describing her excuses as ‘pure hogwash’.
This just in… Carrie announces a cross-bureau meeting to begin a multi-departmental/various-sectors review of mayhem-cum-chaos recovery arrangements. This is, for her, an abject, public, groveling, wrist-slashing admission of gross negligence and plea for forgiveness.
She can now get back to the issue of land supply, otherwise known as ‘leveraging the housing crisis into a HK$500 billion reclamation boondoggle for the construction lobby’. A quick guide to following the money from Paul Zimmerman, and some activists find land the government had mysteriously forgotten about.
On an entirely unrelated subject: a contender (you might think) for the Most Interesting Boring Book on Hong Kong Ever, the memoirs of a former Deputy Postmaster General – this sample chapter has amateurish spooks lurking in the Post Office basement.
The rest of the week will probably/mainly be in the form of a Hong Kong Free Press thing (link in due course), which could be titled (if space allowed) ‘Mainlandization of Hong Kong Will be Deeper, Redder and Quicker than Most of Us Expected – and There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do About It’.
To support this prediction, Beijing legal ideologist wacko Tian Feilong has written this charming paper called ‘We Must Crush Those Hong Kong Western-Influenced Rabble Like Ants’ (in Chinese, but should Google-translate well). Also aimed at Taiwan, it includes such themes as the Hong Kong elite’s shockingly deep-rooted internalization of British culture, ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘patriotic love of Hong Kong history’ as necessary prerequisites to decolonialization, and stuff about dialectics. Read it and, um, emigrate.
“Read it and, um, emigrate.” …
I didn’t wait for Tian Feilong to tell me. I scarpered to a Beautiful Island a few months ago. I thought I knew how messed up Hong Kong was becoming, but you don’t fully realise how bad it is until you’ve left. I now wish I’d upped sticks long ago.
The fact that the SCMP publishes the ravings of this Tian Feilong nutter is truly chilling
It’s a new addition to YOU KNOW YOU’RE IN THE THIRD WORLD WHEN….(Wally Wilde’s list… remember him??) alongside:
Having to drink drink bottled water,
The public utilities are all in private hands,
Posses of police at street corners demand identity documents and
US dollars are accepted for payment anywhere.
For example…
All Third World governments also deny there is a crisis of any kind. The United Nations or Save The Children have to announce such things to the world. Similarly in Hong Kong there isn’t a crisis after the storm although here in Stanley it is the third day without real buses. We have five thousand soldiers in barracks up the road doing nothing and 100,000 policemen taking damage reports, not lifting trees off roads. Carrie is afraid of declaring a crisis. In the Third World that means you have lost control and can be ousted. Poor love. It’s best to shut up and look confident. Let them take a helicopter!
That Deputy Postmaster General knew how to play the system, taking up a job at Lee&Fung while still paid by the Government during his 6 months (yes sure) overtime compensation and keeping the benefits, plus retiring at the age of 50 or something. Maybe just the typical HK civil servant.
That Tian Feilong bloke is a complete wing-nut. Makes Nigel Farage sound reasonable.