A Canadian businessman decries the Hong Kong government’s adoption of Mainland-style rabid and delusional public statements…
The true meaning and objectives of some government communications, and even the intended audience, are becoming harder to divine. Combative overtones can be detected in communications that seek to deny and deflect rather than deal directly with the issues at hand.
Examples include officials’ choreographed mouth-frothing over Nancy Pelosi, the claim that ‘external forces’ were behind the 2019 protests, and the insistence that press freedom is still protected. As the author says, this saps the administration’s credibility and undermines public trust. He suggests that, under ‘One Country, Two Systems’, the local government has the freedom to change course – but of course the descent into CCP-speak comes with the ending of that ‘high degree of autonomy’. Someone has to insert the ‘wolf-warrior’ ranting into the press releases and speeches, and they are not from this side of the border. The only audience that matters is Beijing.
It’s not that government communications were once forensically rigorous and bursting with integrity. Go back 10 years, and you’ll find ‘lines to take’ brazenly declaring such bullshit as ‘the bridge to Zhuhai is essential infrastructure’, or ‘the housing problem is due to a shortage of land’. But that duplicity was rooted in bureaucrats’ condescending colonial-era belief that the population were infants. The new practice of PR-by-propaganda-slogans reflects Mainland-style ideology, where everyone must loyally recite the same fictions, however disconnected they are from any sort of objective truth.
Or science. While Singapore scraps mask mandates everywhere except public transport and health-care facilities, Hong Kong cancels a 10-km race and possibly the cross-harbour swim because of Covid.
I will place a bet on the HK7’s Rugby being cancelled too.
2022 – another year wasted.
Re: government communications.
“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This is what destroyed the Soviet Union.
Of the 6 political appointees announced yesterday three have hard core media backgrounds. Obviously telling the ‘story’ is the priority rather than any expertise in resolving the myriad issues that the bureaus should be engaged in addressing. Another is a DAB rice bowler, a party that has yet to formulate a single original solution to ………….. anything.
“Hong Kong cancels a 10-km race and possibly the cross-harbour swim because of Covid.”
This has got to be the pinnacle of stupid. But I know they’ll pull something even more stupid out of their asses soon enough. All hail New Emperor Shit Jumping!!
@Chinese Netizen, of course they had to cancel the cross-harbour swim. Hong Kong has not yet received the test kids for all the fish in the harbour from the, guess where, manufacturer!
The more outrageous, unreasonable, stomach churning, plain stupid, or whatever the more it fits the backward Marx-Leninists with Chinese Characteristics with Xi Jinping Thought agenda!
Step by step, inch by inch we are getting there, until we all accept and finally shut up; “They do what they want anyway, and there is nothing we can do about it!”
Just at a compulsory testing centre. The crowd goes round the block in several loops. Prenetics must be making lots of money. I wonder who owns them?
Even as they move to decriminalize gay sex, the Singapore government is also amending its constitution to ban gay marriage. That reverberates in areas such as home purchases and adoption. And they are still the masters of capitalist-style persecution of political dissidents. Eff that place.
@steve
Every person has the God-given right to object to Singapore’s proposed ban on gay marriage and express the view that such a community can go eff itself, just as every community has a right to decide for itself in its own way which social practices and institutions it wishes to shun or promote.