The Hong Kong chapter of the Marco Rubio Fan Club is inundated with membership applications this morning as the US Senate passes the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a symbolic gesture (though anything that sends Beijing spokesmen berserk can’t be all bad, and it’s delicious to fantasize about our senior officials’ kids being barred from US colleges). But there’s a lot happening.
Events at Poly U apparently encouraged Senators to vote for the act. There’s also a Protect Hong Kong Act in the works, which would bar US sales of tear gas and other materiel to the city. And lawmakers are proposing several laws to clamp down on certain foreign (ie Chinese) corporate listings and investments in the US. As George Magnus points out, these could hurt China economically. And the more harshly Beijing treats Hong Kong, the greater US politicians’ impulse to pass these laws. (Update: one on data.)
As a reminder that harsh treatment is not inevitable, here’s a pithy thread on how whoever is in charge could quickly calm Hong Kong down. It involves half-meeting some of the protest movement’s demands – enough to appease moderate public opinion and leave hardliners isolated. So obvious (and potentially threatening to hopes of keeping Beijing at bay), yet impossible so long as Beijing cannot overcome its extreme phobia about appearing to bow to the popular will. Beijing’s greatest enemy in the fight against Hong Kong is itself.
Instead, Hong Kong gets a new, reputedly even-more-big-and-tough, Police Commissioner, Chris Tang. Being committed to full transparency and frankness, the guy’s first order is to remove the words ‘pride’ and ‘care’ from the force’s slogan-motto. It now reads ‘We serve with utter bone-headed intransigence and slavish obedience’.
It will never cease being flabbergasting that every single reaction to the US or any other freedom demand is met with more and more force and aggression. Has nobody yet in the politburo come to their senses? The more the CCP tries to crack down, the more the people are tired of it and will react, and the more other countries will react. The CCP is causing its own demise. That’s fine with me, but maybe someone should tell them? I mean, at least suggest a different tactic?
Apparently, the new Police Commissioner Chris Tang is the real deal. His appointment makes it clear that the five-year pussy-footing experiment that followed on from Occupy will now stop. With him being a conviction cop he needs to let his troops have one month’s freeish reign with proper guns and bullets. A review can then be carried out over the Christmas holidays to evaluate the efficacy of the approach. With the present riots, many people have many opinions. It’s very confusing. To this end, I like to see hard data informing how we might move forward over the medium and longer term. In particular, I am curious to see if there is an inverse relationship between on-target shots and rioter activity.
There are people who see the appointment of Chris Tang as meaning that there will be more police-Triad/thug collusion (a la Yuen Long on July 21st) in the future. It could just be prejudice against his being a member of the New Territories clansman but it also could just be pure coincidence on his first day as police chief, gangsters armed with axes and other weapons went strolling about Mongkok in broad daylight…
@donkeynuts: This is the party that, when the peasants were starving to death, debated whether the Great Leap Forward wasn’t working because they didn’t do it hard enough.
When Xi finally goes down it will probably be because someone younger and wilier stuck a knife in his back, and will proceed to rule just as oppressively. China might go through a protracted Roman Emperor of the Month decline phase before we start to see anything resembling democratic reform.
What the world needs now is a new boogeyman…a new Cold War…a sword of Damocles hanging over every head with the ever present threat that Team A and Team B could…and would, damn it, blow the whole show up.
I’m pretty sure in state-craft, that’s always been good for business!
The family festivals of Yulin, Guangxi are coming to a town near you, as China jostles and jousts for international influence.
It’ll kind of be like Ray Kroc and Colonel Sanders…except it’ll be 10 times as finger lickin’ good and you’ll be lovin’ it a whole lot more!
On the radio this morning was an interview with a plod in Central yesterday. He claimed to have been brought up in the UK. However, he repeatedly referred to Law and Orders, a collocation that no UK native speaker would confuse. It appears the CCP propaganda machine is trying to make the local thugs appear humane, an almost impossible task in the present climate.
President Xi has boosted the Chinese military.
He has fired up nationalist sentiment.
Apart from that, what has he done for China and the Chinese people?
His tenure has been bad for China and now it’s trending towards disaster.
No one is allowed to criticise him and no one knows how to get rid of him.
Deng Xiaoping bequeathed them collective leadership.
These dummies took less than 20 years to screw it up.
“the overall labour force in Hong Kong is expected to start declining in 2022 and the labour market will only become relatively critical after 2030” – Secretary for the Civil Service, Mr Joshua Law, in the Legislative Council today (November 20)
So far, more than 3,500 members of the HKPF, along with another 21,500 or so civil servants, have applied to extend their retirement age by 2 years – https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201911/20/P2019112000299.htm
The additional cost to that declining tax-paying labour force is running into billions on top of the half a trillion in unfunded civil service pensions liabilities.
I already beat Chris Tang to it: https://ourprivatebeach.blogspot.com/2019/09/hong-kong-police-adopt-new-motto.html. And interesting to see that he is already telling lies in his first press conference on the job: “police only draw their guns when they are under attack”. Look at the video of the shooting a week or two ago, and the protesters were clearly retreating (running away) when the foolhardy traffic cop raced in and grabbed one of them. Neither that protester nor the one who tried to intervene and got shot was carrying a weapon, and their obvious intention was to get the first one away, not to attack the cop.
Has Troll #4 considered the possibility that mass shooting of protesters may be seen by some of them as a moral green light to start killing cops? How will that make things better? Experimenting on humans is the province of dictators. When I see suggestions like that, I am tempted to fulfil Godwin’s Law.
Just a polite note to remind everyone that Reactor #4 is an utter troglodyte. Seriously, got anything better than warm soup you dork?
@Steve Mc Garret
Still could be legit — a FILTH in the filth has to have failed to get into both the Army and the Met for some reason, and that’s a very low bar indeed.
@Private Beach
from everything I read Troll # 4 doesn’t “consider” as I believe that requires thinking. He has no knowledge of eg the Irish troubles, because it does not compute for him. Still, as the new Triad leader cum police commissioner Tang is arming front line cops with sub machine guns, we might see quite a lot of dead police and innocent citizens on the streets quite soon.
Steve Mc Garret – that cop’s accent is exactly the same as the accents you hear in Sai Kung from villagers who went to the UK when young and returned to HK when young adults. Hang around Sha Kok Mei village for a couple of hours or travel on the 101 or 1A minibuses, and you’ll surely hear similar.
@ Steve Mc Garret : Is that the plod that mentioned ‘the motherland’? Too funny.
@ Stanley Lieber: Yes, Emperor Xi has been a disaster for China, and the miscalculations continue, not the least being his handing the upcoming presidential election in Taiwan to Tsai Ing-wen. Shall we include the extrajudicial torture of Hong Kongers that were taken across the border to errr, (cough), ‘the motherland’? All of which has led to unanimous action by the U.S. Legislative Branch (unanimous? In the bitterly divided partisan chambers of the U.S. Senate and Congress??).
Assassination attempts will continue and Emperor For Life Pooh, if he survives, will stay the course by undermining the rule of international law.
Quite a challenge.
I say shoot off more tear gas and beat a few innocent bystanders. That’ll do the trick!
HKPF: Putting the “Belt” in Belt and Road
From our observation of the organic growth of the protest movement on the ground we’ve concluded that every arrest creates approximately 4-6 new protesters. These numbers were merely conjecture until October 1st, but after police did their utmost together with the MTR to prevent protesters from reaching the scheduled rally in Victoria Park and CWB and protests erupted across 12 districts almost simultaneously, and many of them around MTR stations, we’re confident these estimates are roughly correct. Since then, we’ve found the numbers are holding true as each successive wave of arrests seems to actually grow the number of frontliners. But don’t take my word for it. With an estimated 2,000 persons arrested over the last few days we estimate the number of frontliners to explode. If Sh1tbird #4’s suggestion were to be followed and the police were dumb enough to accelerate the onset of Hong Kong’s North Irelandization we expect the force multiplier to increase to a ratio of 10:1. There was, and has been, no better recruiters for the Hong Kong protest movement than the Hong Kong police.
“Serving Hong Kong with Honour, Duty and Loyalty”?
Sounds somewhat similar to the Waffen SS motto: “My honour is called loyalty”.