So much going on – including another setback in the Hong Kong government’s tantalizing efforts to hire a PR agency, and a US hedge fund’s audacious/wacko/worth-a-punt plan to topple the Hong Kong Dollar. But first, a wrap-up of the weekend’s Mainlandizing.
The Security Secretary announces that Hong Kong will have some sort of home-grown secret police. Members of the new national-security unit will have to pass loyalty tests, and confidentiality will be necessary because their targets could be ‘very smart people, maybe specialists’.
If that’s not unfathomable enough for you, the Justice Secretary tells us that it would be impractical for the National Security law to be totally compatible with the Common Law system. Her full (hastily translated) blog post is here.
Reassurances that the Civil Law system offers the same protections as Common Law (presumption of innocence, etc) would be fine if we were talking about legislation emanating from France or Germany. But this is Mainland ‘Civil Law’, with Leninist characteristics: the law serves the government by restraining the people, not vice-versa.
The lack of a sunset clause is hardly surprising: the CCP doesn’t relinquish power after grabbing it.
But is she implying a parallel court system? We don’t know.
Genial old pro-CCP think-tank guy Lau Siu-kai says Beijing will not allow pro-democrats to win a majority of seats in September’s LegCo election. ‘You can only vote if you choose the candidates we want.’ What, you may ask, is the point of having an election? It’s not as if LegCo has much power anyway – but to Beijing it’s as scary as a bunch of schoolgirls singing the wrong song.
Some perspective…
Jerome Cohen expects Beijing to use National Security laws to target Hongkongers who ‘support’ (which could mean anything) organizations banned on the Mainland. In The Wire China, Victor Shih foresees trouble for Hong Kong as a financial hub as the CCP finds it can’t stop itself from freezing funds and pressuring courts on ‘national security’ grounds (you can see this coming). And the Diplomat looks at the impact on tech companies, privacy and cybersecurity.
At HKFP, Jean-François Dupré sees the National Security law as primarily a way to absorb Hong Kong’s constitution into that of China…
By bringing issues of national security into Hong Kong’s constitutional arena, the regime is using the NSL as a Trojan Horse to bring the Basic Law closer in line with the Chinese constitution—especially in its embodiment of authoritarianism.
From China Digital Times, a translation of comments by a former Central Party School academic – no longer in China (no kidding) – calling for Xi Jinping to step down and censorship and political arrests to be reduced, as a start. The CCP, she says…
…is no longer a political party, and hasn’t been one for a long time. It is just a tool in the hands of a mafia boss.
A quick summary with all the juicy bits in this thread. As Andreas Fulda said, the CCP will split.
Calvin Coolidge thought that “four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still.” If Beijing and the local puppets can manage that for a day or two, we will get on to the highly amusing PR agency fiasco and the supposed attack on the Hong Kong Dollar.
Re: The Secretary for Injustice’s blog
I saw her bullshitting on about how Beijing’s National Insecurity Law was definitely going to be totally fine and that foreign judges will be allowed and the law will be 100% compatible with common law and Hong Kong will be in charge and there’ll be juries and safeguards and nothing will change at all.
At the time I wondered how long it would be before she was walking those badly chosen platitudes back; as it becomes clear to her that it isn’t compatible with HK law in any way and will bypass the whole thing and destroy two systems and the Basic Law.
Not even a fortnight and we’re already half way into our total U-turn.
Can Comrade Lhatoo sink any lower? His latest column was perverse, if expectedly so, for suggesting the new laws were required to keep the government’s mythical silent majority safe from violent protest mobs. But then at the end he has to slip in a dig at “dial-a-quote darling of the Western media” Joshua Wong for having the audacity to have a “not exactly cheap” drink when out on a date. Naturally, the inference is that Wong really must be in the pay of the CIA to spend a couple of hundred bucks on drinks. Quite pathetic.
Lhatoo is a fake tibetan, a pooch in the hand of the party to show the world the so-called “liberation” of his country. He could change sides if one of his immediate family is sprayed blue as it happened to Chugani last year.
Lhatoo has become a Chinese citizen. Explains a lot.
Chairman Xi turns 67 today
A Blue Curacao for when Yonder Latrine is next seen in a bar! But really, how many Josh Wong doubles are there in HK? More likely JW was at home with his folks.
And, upmarket bars in TST! He’s kidding.. well, at least this JW had a lassie with him. When was the last time slimy Latrine scored? Remember that piece he wrote in his early days at the SCMP – the one about the one about the good time gals giving him the swerve as they chatted with westerners? Now he’s getting revenge
Don’t like Yonden Lahtoo’s views? Then why not slag him off like some 8-year-old primary school kids? “Yonden can’t get a girlfriend.” ‘Yonden’s a toe-rag.”
It’s no wonder that Carrie Lam and Beijing can’t be arsed soliciting the views of the locals. You’d just give them a ridiculous “What I want for Christmas is……..box of chocolates, Scaletrix set, big box of chocolates, Man United replica football kit, world’s biggest box of chocolates etc.”
The reality is that all the black-haired, fierce people need to do is go “BOO” and most of you lot will go running off to Chris Patten saying that that “Some horrible Chinese people have just scared us. Can you tell them off?”
@D3SH “Can Comrade Lhatoo sink any lower?”
Just wait…
Why the assumption that JW was picking up the tab for drinks in Tsimsy?
Hong Kong women are financially independent and have certainly demonstrated that they can more than hold their own.