Atlantic on Hongkongers in the UK, and the nostalgia for a colonial era many of them never knew.
The crowd gathered in a wood-paneled London hall struggled to contain their enthusiasm: Like music fans catching a glimpse of their favorite act peering out from backstage, people excitedly clapped and chattered when Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, entered to take his seat.
…It was a remarkable scene, the aging head of a former imperial power emphatically cheered by former subjects who had fled their ostensibly decolonized homeland.
Remember One Way – the almost-tragi-sit-com documentary on the Chow family moving to the UK? (With the gutsy mother, McDull-like dad, and the little girl Nam Nam who wanted more mathematics in her Year One primary class?) Here’s an update on the film and family from the directors (links to the original two-part series on YouTube page).
A less heart-warming video – Security Secretary Chris Tang sings (allegedly) Disney song A Whole New World. Good example of how an appalling off-pitch delivery becomes really apparent when the (in this case female) harmony kicks in.
A BBC report – denial of bail is silencing Hong Kong’s democrats…
Critics say this pre-trial detention undermines the idea of innocence until proven guilty – and is designed to break the will of those accused.
In HKFP, John Burns considers Hong Kong’s study sessions on Xi Jinping’s important speech, and the need for local officials to deliver results rather than learn slogans…
…these activities run the real risk of formalism, that is, of simply performing performance, ticking boxes, and meeting some informal key performance indicator for the number and size of study sessions … the Chinese Communist Party recognises formalism as a serious deviation from party-identified political correctness.
HKFP looks at the project to preserve ‘Prison Gothic’ – the Chinese font used on older Hong Kong road signs. And, as officials promote the CCP version, efforts to remember the multinational resistance to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong (while tactfully not contradicting the official line).
From ArtNews, how Singapore is gaining as an arts and culture hub at Hong Kong’s expense.
China is demanding that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet suppress a report on Xinjiang. To bolster its opposition to the report, it has organized an open letter from Chinese NGOs that are obviously United Front operations. Letter and signatories here. The 923 groups include the China Bee Products, Road Safety, and Weighing Instrument Associations, the Dragon Design Foundation, and the Xinjiang Desert Soil Art Museum. ‘We call on you and the OHCHR to stand on the right side of history, and not to release an assessment full of lies.’
Hong Kong – Global China’s Restive Frontier by Ching Kwan Lee, published by Cambridge University Press, is available for free as a pdf file here. It ‘argues that what happened to Hong Kong in the past two decades is part of China’s interventionist and repressive turn toward the world at large’. Just had a skim-through so far, but interesting.
try “heatiness”.
The Chinese embassy has not yet resolutely demanded that Ching Kwan Lee’s so called piece be removed from the internet yet?
I rather like the idea of the China Cultural Association of Poetry and Wine.
PK Tang is nothing if not consistent.
He sings just like he politics: a tone deaf talentless bungler with an appalling off-pitch delivery who’s clearly out of his element, leaving onlookers to recoil in horror at both him and the apparatus that put him in the spotlight in the first place.
I still can’t quite figure out if John Burns is having us all on. His post-retirement insistence on casting his advice in the CCP’s framework is most puzzling, as though employing such a rhetorical device has ever protected anyone from being arrested.
55. China Die & Mould Industry Association.
“…all ethnic groups in Xinjiang enjoy various forms of human rights…”
Kinda says it all right there.
> cheered by former subjects who had fled their ostensibly decolonized homeland
A minor inaccuracy, it is their “recolonized” homeland. Exit white skin colonizers, enter yellow skin ones, no prize for guessing which bunch of colonizers did a better job.