Hong Kong’s annual Chief Executive’s Policy Address has long since degenerated into an insipid substance-free ritual, befitting the city’s largely ceremonial formal political system. Carrie Lam, for her part, has even less imagination about policy than her benighted predecessors. But – here’s the key thing – Beijing will not allow her to produce any serious initiatives anyway. So today’s speech (which she might deliver by TV link from her bathroom in Government House for fear of marauding mobs) can be safely ignored.
As a fully paid-up establishment mouthpiece, the SCMP has a stab at taking it seriously, asking whether Carrie will Get Real (no need to read unless you’re very bored). Of course, common sense says that after 19 weeks of a popular uprising bordering on micro-scale civil war, she must do something mega. Surely, she should at least do some diversionary ‘shock and awe’ on housing – say, by barring non-residents from buying homes. But forget it. The big exciting leak is… more charging stations for electric vehicles.
I guess people focus on ‘What Carrie Should Do’ because it’s comforting to think someone with a name and a face might be in charge – even if it’s someone who has…
…failed to own up to [her] epic incompetence in creating the biggest political disaster Hong Kong has ever faced, with aftershocks tearing apart the city’s social fabric and shaking our economic foundations.
Even SCMP op-ed writers are getting exasperated.
Similarly, we have constant chatter about Who Beijing Will Replace Her With. It could be a chimpanzee. It’s irrelevant.
The one thing the Policy Address will achieve is to just make everyone even angrier, if that’s possible. While we’re waiting for that, here’s an interesting – partly contrasting, partly parallel – pair of articles…
A former CCTV presenter outlines the CCP’s long-term plans for Hong Kong in the context of the 1,000-year mandate of heaven awaiting the Communist Dynasty. It sounds depressingly horrifying enough to be right, including the displacement of unpatriotic businesses with state-controlled ones.
And a Westerner experienced in Beijing’s treatment of Christians and other CCP nastiness salutes Hong Kong’s protest movement, and takes a heartfelt stand against some of their methods while desperately wanting them to win.
Unfortunately, China has certain “friends” in high places who want nothing less than a universe full of automaton, non-questioning communist worker drones. The same ones who’ve been destroying just about every Western nation on the planet in a huge fireball of degeneracy since World War 2.
You’ve just got to love what the Pan-Dems have just done in LEGCO. I think their plan is to bawl (and quite possibly brawl) their way to victory.
Out mob the mob. Out mob the mob. Out mob the mob.
It would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that my taxes pay for these loons.
In other news, obscenely highly paid sports personality with barely a high school diploma, LeBron James, decides to get his feet wet in the CCP vs Everyone maelstrom and – surprise – spouts the CCP party line like a good groveling lapdog. Pooh would be proud.
I note with dismay that she’s still proposing the Lantao Tomorrow nonsense in order to transfer Hong Kong’s reserves into the pockets of mainland constructions companies and the usual favourites. I’m comforted that she’s likely to be starting her pre-retirement leave prior to the (aptly named) Year of the Rat.
Your taxes also pay for the do nothing, wax expression, bobbleheads that are part of the “establishment” as well.
Carrie Lam is certainly no Murray MacLehose. (Measlyhose? SnackLehose?) I suppose we can also put to rest any notion of Beijing throwing the tycoons under the bus for the general welfare of the Hong Kong people; if they defenestrate any it will be to replace them with SOEs so that they can be given the license to rip us all off instead.
@Chinese Netizen
Yup, only way we’ll see him taking a knee is to bend down and tie his Nike LeBron 16 (Buy now, while stocks last!!!) shoes.
Was the reference to the thousand-year reich intended? It was apt.
I can see this uprising in Hong Kong and the fact that it seems interminable, without anyone stepping in to stop it, as only one thing: Xi is on the ropes, and there is an individual or a group of individuals craftily holding Hong Kong hostage to pull it away from the mainland. Their leverage is that, whether they do or not, the act of pulling it away either:
1. Causes Xi to overstep and really bring the international community’s ire to a head, isolating the country from its global friends
2. Causes Xi to do nothing, whereby he loses and Hong Kong is destroyed.
I can’t think of any logical reason why the CCP or Xi would let this get out of hand the way it has. I say we are about to see a Berlin Wall moment in the next 10 months.
Do you guys think Carrie had to ask Beijing’s permission if a blue cover was ok for the Policy Address?
@Chinese Netizen
LeBron is trying to start a new political movement in sport: “Yellow lives don’t matter”.
Whenever the band plays “March of the volunteers”, he gets down on both knees and opens his mouth…
Why the blue cover? Is this is the answer:
https://twitter.com/rachel_cheung1/status/1184378875649773568