Fernando Cheung reportedly leaves for Canada. In other NatSec news, dragged-out persecutions of Jimmy Lai, activists Andy Li and Chan Tsz-wah and Stand News editor Patrick Lam continue (here, here and here), and Hong Kong falls to 148th place in global press freedom. (Lai’s really big trial starts later this year.) But we will be allowed to go to beaches again!
Some 7,000 cops will be on duty to make sure the John Lee ‘election’ goes smoothly. (The SCMP story mostly reports that Lee – presumably a CCP loyalist of some sort – has ‘revealed’ that he is a Catholic. As if this whole thing isn’t sufficiently discombobulating already.)
For a full picture of the elaborate charade that is the quasi-election, check out the website (warning: only for the extremely bored).
A short thread makes the point that China’s extensive (big-manpower, big-budgets) zero-Covid social-control apparatus, now established, will be difficult to dismantle. At best, it will join character-simplification, cloud-seeding and (until recently) one-child enforcement as a bureaucracy that won’t go away. At worst, it will turn into a nationwide panopticon.
Speaking of which, LeaveHomeSafe has facial detection capacity?
One of the java files, originally known as “FaceDetectorUtils.java” but renamed “a.java” in LeaveHomeSafe, may be used to detect the positions of a person’s mouth, nose tip, left and right cheeks, eyes, ears and earlobes. It is also able to detect a subject’s head tilt in degrees and calculate the probability that they are smiling or has each eye open.
They probably won’t be smiling.
Some mid-week links…
CNN on the Mainland officials’ fondness for spraying antiseptic all over the place…
Seemingly any outdoor area is at risk of being targeted by workers wielding leaf-blower-style disinfectant machines, as China’s rigorous “zero-Covid” policy drives an obsession with sanitizing everything.
Reuters on Russia’s lessons for China…
“Many Chinese experts are monitoring this war as if they are imagining how this would unfold if it happened between China and the West,” said Beijing-based security scholar Zhao Tong of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
…”The Chinese can’t have any illusions now that they will be welcomed as liberators in Taiwan and given supplies and assistance”…
More signs China is overtaking the US: story on how Houston is subsiding says Tianjin is the world’s fastest-sinking city at 5.2 cm a year.
Can Kung Fu Hustle 2 possibly be as good as the first one from 15 years ago? (No. Probably.)
There are some contractors of disinfectant leaf blowers, white stormtrooper suits, wire mesh fencing and door bolting supplies (for starters) that have gotten very rich off of WuFlu excesses in spending and I’m going to go out on a limb and say their uncle/dad/brother/sis are reasonably high level officials within the province/municipality government.
Also betting they own or have a lease deal with warehousers to store all the shit after this theater is finished for the equipment to rot and fall into disuse until the next pandemic.
7000 cops on duty for the ‘election’! That works out at around 5 per voter – they must be quite a rowdy rabble of electors. Maybe choose some more civilised people to vote next time?
Wonder if the beaches reopening in HK gets press in the mainland- One country two definitions of dynamic zero covid?
Why are (at least) 3 HK CEs catholics? Donald, Carrie and apparently the presumptive.
CH Tung was I think Buddhist.
CY Leung?
So John Lee comes out as Catholic, eh?
Surely to god, Hong Kong has suffered enough from the enormities foisted upon it by adherents of the Bishop of Rome.
High time for a second Reformation.
Cardinal Zen said Donald Tsang was a good Catholic “an hour a day”. Many of these people joined the Church to help their kids get into better schools. Their devotion to scripture is questionable, to say the least. For a shining example of a truly devout Catholic, see Jimmy Lai.
@dimuendo
Satanist
@justsayin: didn’t the wumaos complain when Hong Kong reopened its beaches two months ago?
Maybe they’ll have something new to complain about when the newest MTR extension opens later this month, while some Mainland cities’ metro systems have been shut down.
@Red Dragon.
It’s sad to read anti-Catholic invective in this day and age.
Have some respect and don’t be such a sectarian bufoon.
Or indeed a *buffoon. Bugger.
Well said, Roddy! Men in black dresses exploiting the gullible are as relevant now as they were in my day.