A new shoe-shining quasi-organization has been discovered: the Greater Bay Area Homeland Youth Community Foundation. Launched last year – presumably as a gesture during the height of the protests – but hitherto unnoticed. If it comes to our attention right now, it’s probably because Xi Jinping wants Hong Kong’s kids in Dongguan.
Like all contrived, elites-driven, Beijing-friendly groups, it is backed by property tycoons and their kids and other business types, along with the usual obsessive-compulsive kowtowers like Irons, Bunny, Rock, plus Allen Zeman as the token non-Chinese. Appropriately for a group purportedly encouraging the young to move north, there are quite a few Mainland executives. Obviously, no actual young people – or anyone vaguely normal – are involved.
A sign of the times is the presence of locally based Beijing officials. Despite that, this is obviously home-grown. A CCP-run United Front group would feature China-rah-rah patriotic symbolism and wording, and it would be in Chinese only. Even the logo looks like a spinoff from the Our Hong Kong Foundation. Plus of course that silly committee-devised name – you could at least drop the words ‘homeland’ and ‘community’.
The PR floozies implementing the vision made videos of inspiring young people who don’t riot. Sounds stomach-churning, but I haven’t looked.
The tycoons signed up (ie made donations) as a gratuitous display of loyalty. The Beijing officials are lending their names to humour the sycophants. They have their own ways of dealing with a rebellious city’s dissatisfied youth.
Which is keeping them busy behind the scenes.
Apple Daily says: “The independence of Hong Kong’s judiciary could be the final barrier against the CCP gaining complete political control of the city”. It certainly looks that way. But of course the CCP does not and will not tolerate any such barriers.
On cue, another magistrate is reassigned to a lame job after being criticized by a CCP newspaper for not convicting protesters. Beijing officials’ fingerprints are all over this new trend – basically weeding out unreliable judges.
For other examples of how the Hong Kong government and associated agencies are now run by the CCP, try this statement from the Electoral Affairs Commission relaying Beijing’s horror at people organizing their own ‘elections’. And of course the government is introducing a political test in the form of an oath for civil servants.
On a bright note: the US is formally warning banks not to do business with the 10 sanctioned individuals who have taken part in undermining Hong Kong’s freedoms. (The details are in the FAQs mentioned here.) The Feds have removed former police chief Stephen Lo from the list. Maybe they have some reason to go easy on him?
A couple years ago I went to an “exchange” in guangzhou for the 20 years of the glorious return to motherland. The only exchange was actually getting multiple massages a day (for both men and women of our group of young hongkongers). For the mailanders that came to HK, I don’t think we talked to them once after the initial presentation (they had a minder as well, politics were explicitely taboo).
Let’s face the truth, there is nothing to exchange, youngsters North of the border live in their own parallel world.
Thanks for the link to the EAC “release”.
I made it to the end of the first paragraph before pulling out when I noticed my synapses shutting down. Anyone who can go further merits a BBS at the very least.
Key “takeaway”: the amount of verbiage expended on a topic by a “government” body is in inverse proportion to the importance of that topic.
This reminds me of the time I went to a City U lecture about — and this is a rough translation of the programme into English — “The Integration of Mainland Social Media Style Into Hong Kong Youth Culture”. About eight months before the protests began, the programme was about how Hong Kong leadership and media tycoons could take some example from their Mainland peers to encourage young Hong Kong people to stop stylising themselves after the evil capitalist ways of the West. The presentation was filled with power point slides that showed “alternatives” to enjoying culture, and they were presented in a more family friendly way, including staging soldiers at outdoor concerts to “show young people that the military is there to protect them and to encourage the values of being young.” The presenter was a professor of media at City U, and I can’t remember his name. He wore bright red eyeglasses that did not contain any lenses. I suppose he was the “hip” professor who understands social media, but who was very wary of Western corruption and the values of imperialist capitalist tycoons like Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter.
Also, I note in the Hong Kong Youth Foundation Federation Of Grand Poobahs that they have a course available to students to learn how to be KOLs, but their medium of expression is designated as “TikTok.” I suppose that effort is going to waste these days, as TikTok is banned in Hong Kong or they left and don’t offer it here anymore.
It’s no mistake that the biggest scumbag character in the (now streaming, formerly adult comic books) series “The Boys” is named “Homelander”.
Add to that the US Dept of Homeland Security and you get the gist of oppression, spying on citizens, unmarked uniformed “law enforcement”, well…you get the idea.
The ratio of male to female is 80:20. Goes to show that the ladies in the tycoon families are a lot more savvy and independent than their bros. They are not going to waste hours at long winded propaganda bore fests with a bunch of blokes who register at the bottom end of the desirable spectrum.
The Electoral Affairs Commission coyly – or provocatively – refers to “places outside Hong Kong”. Is it trying to gloss over the government’s preference for China-based HK voters? Or calling for fair and equitable treatment for all non-residents?