Beijing mulls a ban on pan-democrats from their powerless, essentially ornamental, presence as a minority of the powerless, essentially ornamental, Election Committee. The idea also seems to involve disqualifying them from the district councils they won in a landslide a year ago, and generally scrubbing the city’s ceremonial ‘political’ institutions clean of the opposition.
Let’s be clear that the Election Committee is a pure rubber-stamp: Beijing chooses the ‘winner’, and the rest is just play-acting. Ignore the SCMP, NYT etc gibberish about how Hong Kong’s Chief Executive is ‘elected by local elites’. In such a system, the pan-dems have no influence except arguably of the moral sort. It now seems that even the most symbolic manifestation of representative government – the presence of powerless opposition figures – is a threat to the party-state.
The pan-dems have always won the majority of votes in any free elections in Hong Kong, so this is basically the CCP’s way of sending a warm Christmas message to the city’s people: we really really hate you.
Small wonder residents are thinking of packing bags. A Reuters special on a family leaving Hong Kong…
They’ve been watching “English with Lucy,” a YouTube channel that teaches English, from pronunciation to accents – a good thing for a family going to Glasgow, a city with one of the most impenetrable accents in Britain.
Antony Dapirin’s latest Procrastination, with plenty of perspective on events of the last few months.
Some longer, deeper or just off-topic things for the holidays…
A nicely written mini-memoir – The Liverpool-Macau Border, by Gregory Lee.
If you’re passing by the FCC before the end of the month, see an exhibition of the late Nick DeWolf’s photos of Hong Kong in 1972. (Background from Zolimacity Mag in 2018.)
From Bloomberg, why more Westerners are avoiding China.
Francesco Sisci looks at Xi Jinping’s nasty dilemmas.
Sixth Tone on why Chinese couples don’t want a second child. And ChinaFile on why there are so few women in the senior (or medium, or junior) ranks of China’s government.
Not relevant to anything here but interesting: why automatic soap-dispensers don’t work on dark hands – and other white-designed problems.
Recommended Yuletide Japanese TV binge-watching: Your Turn to Kill (Anata no Ban Desu), which you can probably track down somewhere. A whodunnit of some 20 episodes. It starts as a soppy romance, and moments of (not-tongue-in-cheek) soap-opera weepy schlock appear throughout the series, presumably to keep the lonely-housewife market-segment tuned in. But it gets increasingly bizarre, not to say in parts violent and – best of all – amazingly tasteless. Unmistakable David Lynch influence, and even perhaps has something of JG Ballard.
On a more literary level, when you’ve wrung dot dot news dry, browse through East of the Web – a library of public-domain short stories, with a lot of Ambrose Bierce. If you need a three-minute dose of funniness – here’s The Open Window by Saki.
PSA: For ad-support websites (such as the Hong Kong Free Press) that you frequent, give them a Christmas present by turning off your ad-blockers and clicking on their ads.
And, because advertiser websites can sometimes track your time-on-page, the links you click, your cursor movements, etc while visiting their pages, it’s not a bad idea to make it look like you might buy something, too!
Not to be missed, Matthew Brooker’s elegy for the Hong Kong we knew:
https://t.co/ikFsViNmTu?amp=1
“PSA: For ad-support websites (such as the Hong Kong Free Press) that you frequent, give them a Christmas present by turning off your ad-blockers and clicking on their ads.”
Fully agree!
PSA: For SCMP make sure to turn your ad blocker ON and use private tabs to get around their “free article” limit. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES send these Uighur discriminating hacks any money directly or indirectly!
So when can we expect press censorship and religious persecution?
SCMP “free article” limit
That’s curious, I visit the SCMP, ad-blocker firmly on, via a VPN and I get a choice of editions with no limit.
“So when can we expect press censorship and religious persecution?”
2021. We even have a Party Prick in charge of taking over HK that specialised in taking down crosses in China.
An occasional lover of mine works in a court where the the rioters are being “processed”. Apparently, the cells are rammed with kids balling their eyes out in regret. Just an ickle fraction are there for real reasons and can construct some sort of argument as to why they were hurling petrol bombs. The rest got sucked in to it.
Many of you lot lionize these losers, but in reality most were there to be seen, with quite a few up for an easy post-game shag.
Fact is, the Revolution our Times was just an ephemeral youth movement in the same way that clackers were to me in the 1970s and hula hoops were to my mother 20-odd years earlier.
From the Reuters article: “neither are fluent in English” she’s a nurse, he works in the aviation industry…. yeah, right.
The author of that article should start writing romantic fiction, the emotion is overwhelming – rigorous journalism this is not.
They make a big point about being Christians, so why don’t they trust their very numerous fellows in senior positions in the HK Govt? After all, if there is a problem with the truth we can rely on the Christians (or Catholics, in the old HK designation with which I was often presented when I first arrived: “are you a Christian or a Catholic?” ), can’t we?
From the “Handwashing” Twitter thread, many interesting and, no doubt, accurate points made. Pity that the initial video lets it down – the hands are not presented at the same angle, so it’s not possible to judge the accuracy of the claim which started the thread. This is brought up a couple of times on the thread and just ignored by the ‘me too’ respondants and not replied to by the original author.
Good points are not enhanced by sloppy reporting.
Arsehole #4
Your “occasional lover” really shouldn’t be blabbing about things like this.
It’s entirely unethical and (if indeed he exists) he should be ashamed of himself.
As for you, you’re a nasty, cruel bastard and require no egging on.
I think #4 means bawling, not balling – in the Siuxties, the latter was slang for engaging in sexual intercourse.
People today who talk about ephemeral youth movements and the like tend to forget that the 1911 revolution and the rise of the CCP started off as youth movements – as did many other successful revolutions around the world. The CCP however, does not forget.
Reactor … what ally are they ‘balling their eyes out in regret’ when the vast majority are being found not guilty due to police malfeasance? Also please don’t pretend you have friends, still less lovers.
“balling their eyes out…”
Says a lot right there about someone that can’t get that right.
Merry Christmas to Hemlock and everyone.
It’s the early hours of Christmas Day in Hong Kong, 2020. Children’s stockings are full and weirdly the harbour is still busy, does it EVER stop. I’ll take one more measure of port to wonder why.
Thinking back to the 1980s Christmases in Hong Kong, when the norm was everyone headed back to Blighty for Christmas. And there were a few of us who stayed, because we knew. Hong Kong was where to be. The days, the days. The glory days.
Never coming back but never forgotten.
“I’ll take one more measure of port to wonder why.”
Always a wise and classy decision. Merry Christmas everyone!
Here in the Vatican the question du jour is how much longer The Big Lychee can cling on. The masses are fleeing if they can while the PRC and the outside world collude to continue the charade of Rule Of Law in order to maintain the flow of cash out of China. Hong Hong died in 1982, kicking the corpse at this late stage is only preventing everyone from moving on. It is not coming back, even when the PRC inevitably implodes (or, much worse, explodes taking the region with it).
R.I.P., Fragrant Harbour. You were fun while you lasted.