HK develops its creative and culture hub plans

Hong Kong’s NatSec Regime takes a break from putting dissidents in jails and mental hospitals to exercise its censorship muscles.

With the Broadcasting Authority bending over backwards to entertain ‘complaints’ about the station committing such heinous acts as suggesting Taiwan might be a country, RTHK is scrapping so many shows you have to wonder what they’ll fill the empty space with. The head of the board of advisors Lam Tai-fai is heaping praise on Patrick Li, the civil servant recently put in charge of the station.

Meanwhile, Henry Tang, the tycoon-scion figurehead for the West Kowloon Cultural Hub-Zone, confirms that Ai Weiwei’s finger-photo will not appear at the new M+ museum, and says the the NatSec Police art-criticism unit will decide whether works break the NatSec Law

(Trivia question: what is the connection between Lam Tai-fai and Henry Tang?)

For the first time since 1969, no Hong Kong broadcasters will carry the Oscars. Not because it is one of the most tedious and ignorable televised events imaginable, but because Mainland media are criticizing and boycotting it because a nominated documentary Do Not Split is about the 2019 uprising. (Interest in the film suddenly grows 10-fold.) As Jerome Cohen points out, this will send a NatSec Regime message to the masses that Ai’s photo won’t. 

This year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival’s opening feature – the world premiere of Where the Wind Blowsis cancelled by its owner, presumably to conform with the Mainland’s banning of the cops-and-triads picture.

So far, things are being banned because of the messages they contain. It won’t be long before they are banned for the messages – the patriotic sort – that they don’t have.

The World Press Photo Exhibition is finally going ahead at a space in Admiralty, after HK Baptist U chickened out of hosting the award-winning photos from around the world (including some from Hong Kong).

Not censorship exactly, but a move obviously aimed at curbing the press: details of corporate officers’ residential addresses and full ID numbers in the Companies Registry are to be, in practice, off-limits to the public, including the media. Officially, this is to ‘address concerns over misuse of information’. In reality, it will hinder due-diligence checks, and no doubt make ownership of all sorts of assets – and CCP elites’ families’ money-laundering – harder to investigate.

(The answer to today’s trivia question is here.)

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6 Responses to HK develops its creative and culture hub plans

  1. Casira says:

    After extradition treaties, maybe it’s time to go after double taxation treaties.

  2. Low Profile says:

    How long before David Webb gets in trouble for keeping the Hong Kong public informed of corporate shenanigans, I wonder?

  3. Chris Maden says:

    To be fair to Henry, he is the first official to say that HK is a diverse society – and mean that as a good thing. He’ll probably get sacked or rectified soon…

  4. where's my jet plane says:

    To be fair to Henry…
    He’ll probably get sacked or rectified soon…

    But it will be all his wife’s fault (as is the M+ fiasco)

  5. Mary Melville says:

    The Broadcasting Führer has kept a low profile as he plodded his way up the ranks at Home Affairs, a DAB stronghold. Looks like he was a sleeper agent like the new Bauhinia Party wallahs.
    This position may have introduced him to the CCP inner circles:
    2005 Election Committee Subsector By-elections List of Returning Officers and Assistant Returning Officers
    Subsector: Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference
    Mr. LI Pak-chuen, Patrick, JP Assistant Director of Home Affairs
    Hopefully there will be informative contributions to the new minted wiki page.
    A dandy with a dodgy haircut and liberal use of Grecian.

  6. Tamey Tame says:

    Re: quiz answer. Was I alone in initially reading that as ‘Peninsula Knickers’ and hoping it wasn’t a pair of Regina’s discarded Burberry efforts?

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