Not that 99.9% of Hongkongers will notice, but AmCham chair Tara Joseph decides to quit. The RTHK item says…
…she is resigning as she cannot appeal to the city’s government to ease Covid-19 restrictions at the same time as having to undergo quarantine herself…
“It is not in my nature to advocate on something, and then embark on quarantine like a stooge.” … [She] would face three weeks of hotel quarantine if she returned to the city…
A stooge usually chooses to collaborate. I would have thought speaking out while detained against her will in a quarantine hotel would send a more powerful statement. Or she could just have said ‘this city is going down the tubes and I want to get out’, which would also have been impactful.
From Kong Tsung Gan, a comparative analysis of Hong Kong as a human-rights offender. Hard to have imagined this just three years ago. No more ‘Asia’s World City’ – maybe the government’s PR people can consider ‘Nowhere Near As Bad As North Korea’.
Panda-hugging ex-leaders are a dying breed, so one of many responses to former Oz PM Paul Keating’s recent comments.
“Or she could just have said ‘this city is going down the tubes and I want to get out’, which would also have been impactful.”
Nah…still gotta maintain some guanxi in case she needs to “explore” future money making opportunities. She’s learned well.
Ms. Joseph’s resignation is a principled one insofar as she is the paid representative of AmCham and is constrained from criticising the host government beyond the limits set by her board.
So she quit.
A less-principled person would have kept schtum and carried on.
Can you stop using ASPI as reference. It is a rightwing rabid anti-China “thinktank” sponsored by US bombmakers. This mob is one of those groups in Australia that is calling for war against China at the behest of its sponsors. It is treated as a joke among former Australian diplomats, Defence Department senior public servants and most others with any intellectual credibility on China and the rest of Asia. It’s like referencing Nury Vitachi’s China Daily columns. Otherwise, you do a damn fine job.