The mysterious missing paragraph

We start the week as we intend to continue it – befuddled and confused.

Here’s another valiant attempt to work out former lawmaker/official Christine Loh’s ‘New Narrative for Hong Kong’ theory. She stresses that she speaks as a bystander rather than participant, and maintains that Hong Kong must…

…understand the Chinese system, its rhetoric and use of the Chinese language. In so doing, Hong Kong can “use their system to protect our privileges”

The assumption is that, if you adopt the right tone and stance, you can reason with a Leninist dictatorship that single-mindedly pursues absolute power and obedience.

You would have thought that a seasoned policy wonk would see a link between crap governance (eg deliberately overpriced housing) and a stroppy and resentful populace – to which the Communists respond by trying to bolster their own security by imposing even crappier government on Hong Kong, and so the cycle goes on. But apparently, it’s the ‘narrative’ not the housing that’s the problem.

Meanwhile… I wouldn’t normally recommend that anyone read – or try to read – the South China Morning Post editor’s attempts at being a columnist. I guess they have to let her play because it’s her ball.

Today’s effort only jumped out because of a typo…

The gist seems to be that Hong Kong’s openness exposes the Chinese regime, and as part of the city’s paramount duty to protect the motherland, it should perhaps start treating foreign NGOs the way they are treated on the Mainland.

It’s not often she writes something noteworthy. But weirdly, that paragraph (second from the end) is missing from the online version of the column.

 

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12 Responses to The mysterious missing paragraph

  1. Casira says:

    It’s not a paragraph, it’s just a sentence. And a very beautiful one, in the characteristic 201X GlobalTimes style.

  2. Chris Maden says:

    Oddly, when I clicked the image of the printed column, it took me to a YouTube video of the Rolling Stones.

    As to Christine-I-sold-out Loh, who cares…

  3. Docta Derisio says:

    Christine Loh is just the fag end of deluded liberal accommodation, an Oriental update on Jews for Hitler.

    Off her head but you see that’s what the British have produced in the end in Hong Kong, liberal idiots dressed in cashmere and Burberry, speaking Roedean English and as blind as bats, never mixing with the hoi-palloi and comfortably off with a White toyboy/Daddy and a house in Chelsea at least.

    You have to shoot them, Christine love, not talk to them.

    Only socialism can save Hong Kong. The terror is capitalist.

    Just look at how much effort is being expended by the neo-capitalists now running China to rescue Ms Huawei.

    To judge by our local branch of Xinhua, the SCMP, you would think war had broken out. Or that Mars men had landed on the White House lawn.

    It’s the biggest journalistic brownnosing in history and hasn’t the SCMP done a lot of that?

    Pap, pap!

  4. Chinese Netizen says:

    “international NOGs”

    Must be getting close to Christmas with the scents of mulled wine and eggnog wafting in the air…

  5. Headache says:

    SCMP journos are often told to pad out the word count when something’s selected for the print edition. The print copy also goes through a different sub-editor, who apparently isn’t getting enough sleep.

    Of course, shenanigans are always possible too – eg, is the recent rash of articles about Muslim tourism (1 2 3) diversionary propaganda or just exceedingly tedious journalism?

  6. Chinese Netizen says:

    Muslim tourism vs. Muslim terrorism? Or is it the same?

    Anyway, HK is an international hub center innovation gathering point for Islamic banking by now, right?

  7. Boredcaster says:

    @Headache – it’s travel industry PR in overdrive and catering to the rise in travel operators, notably in Malaysia, who base their product on halal-worthy hotels etc

  8. pd says:

    Given that the context is foreign devils, a less charitable interpretation of nog might be an anagram of gin-gon.

    I used to delight when commie tools got their deserved come-uppance — until I realised that the West usually caved in when things got too hot. Sabrina’ll be out by Xmas I imagine.

    Incidentally, is anyone old enough to remember when a “Sabrina” was a synonym for an infinitely desirable and well-endowed girl? Bit of a misnomer in this case.

  9. reductio says:

    When I hear NOG I immediately think NOGGIN, as in the late, great Oliver Postgate. Anybody else remember that from their childhood ?

  10. Paul Serfaty says:

    Christine Loh’s book fails intellectually – and is even intellectually dishonest – in three main ways:
    1. It mixes up China and the CCP. One might feel a loyalty to a country, and call for loyalty to a motherland, but that is not what is needed in the case of China. In the case of China, the people are the country, the people are presented by the CCP. The CCP is (according to the latest constitutional changes) the Core Leadership. The Core leadership is now Xi Jingping, whose thought is now in the Chinese constitution. So at the least, what the CCP requires is loyalty to it.
    2. Loyalty means acceptance not just of the existence and integrity of China (fine) and the rule of the CCP (arguably OK if that means refusing a violent change of government), but also to the policies of the CCP. And that means the persecution of lawyers protecting their clients; the mass re-education of Uighur citizens; the abduction and forced confession of sellers of sleazy books to thought crimes; &c. Fine, if you have no morals whatsoever, but a line too far for most of “us”.
    3. Loh and Cullen talk constantly of “HK” and ‘we” and assert that for the general good of HK, “we” must be loyal to “China” which again is an unacceptable conflation. Business-people and politicians may need to make accommodation, but why should ordinary citizens, academics, lawyers, journalists, artists and truth seekers generally be asked to be loyal to policies they may despise, and park their moral values in the bin, as the authors of this very poorly argued book do? We understand that if you’re in business or diplomacy, you may have to jettison your values. That is no reason to call on the rest of us to do so.
    A very unacceptable volume.

  11. Din Gao says:

    @Boredcaster Your mention of “halal-worthy hotels” reminds me of boring evenings in remote Malaysian hotels invigorated by climbing on the furniture to re-orientate the little green arrows on the ceiling.

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