The government announces its plan to ‘improve governance at district level’. HKFP report. Essentially, District Councils will follow the pattern of the new-look legislature, with most members being in practice appointed by the authorities – so the bodies will represent the government rather than the public.
As with LegCo, access to the small number of seats to be directly elected will be elaborately controlled via candidate-screening mechanisms. As with LegCo, the system has enough overkill built into it to ensure that few, if any, non-establishment figures at all will get seats. (Also, the councils’ powers will be reduced, civil servants will chair the councils, and the bodies will come under government committees. As with LegCo, generous remuneration for members remains.) It will be interesting to see how many voters turn out later this year.
This raises a basic question of how the government intends to monitor public opinion in an era of all-patriots councils, no protests, opponents in jail, a docile civil society and a largely compliant media. Perhaps the principle now is that the authorities decide public opinion and then pass it down (‘engineering the human soul’, etc).
Global Times says…
The restructured District Council will assist the government and enable the government plan regional services more effectively, and unite the people while providing consultation and referral services to residents in the area.
Note the contrast between today’s official description of the 2019 protests versus those of the time. (For more revisionism – eg about pre-1997 District Councils – see the CE’s responses to questions.)
Maybe you can’t get onto a District Council – but joining the police has become easier…
Being tall, bilingual and with good eyesight are no longer a must for Asia’s finest as the police force eases requirements beginning Friday in an attempt to fill a staggering 5,000 vacancies.
Lemme see: who is not so tall, not bilingual, has so-so eyesight, is patriotic and could use a real paying job?
“After considering the social environment, police believe that such height and weight requirements have limited correlation to police work, Kwok said yesterday.”
When all you need are pepper spray, a collapsable baton and a gun to take down a 78 year old “rioter” then so-called police work should be a breeze for underweight, myopic HK youth looking for an iron rice bowl. Also helps when you have your mobile speed dial set to your “brothers” in Yuen Long with white shirts to back you up.
Good to see the popo directly benefiting from the “talents” program as well:
“Police personnel wing superintendent Walter Chan Kit-fung said mainland students ‘have the heart to serve the community’ and recalled a mother who wanted to apply for the job on behalf of her 13-year-old son, but was asked to try again when he is older.”
“Police personnel wing superintendent Walter Chan Kit-fung said the force received more than 100 applications from recruitment campaigns in universities in Guangdong and Fujian last November.
“More recruitment activities were held last month in Beijing and Wuhan, with a hybrid mode of online and physical events in three phases…
“Chan said mainland students have “the heart to serve the community.””
What a comforting thought.
“underweight, myopic HK youth looking for an iron rice bowl”
Question the “HK” element and, in view of the rising numbers of obese youth both side of the border, uniforms will need to incorporate elastic waist bands.
I don’t know why they are bothering recruiting more police people – it seems so 2nd Millennium. I’d plasterer the city with cameras and have them linked to high-quality facial- and gait-recognition software. I’d then issue a social-credit marking scheme showing what to expect if you’ve been naughty or irritating.
It won’t be very long before school teachers are also recruited from the mainland en masse. Locals have been leaving the job in droves. Youth unemployment north of the border is in the ballpark of 20%. The mainland simply churns out more graduates than a low-wage industrial based economy can absorb. Which makes our government’s efforts to convince HK youths that opportunities abound in the Greater Bay Area even more ironic. When PhDs in physics are being hired in low level municipal jobs, any number of people would be willing to come down here and indoctrinate kids in the classroom or frisk them on the streets, for preference.
Just call it the HK People’s Congress and you have it. The joke that, in the West, people dismiss the government, in Communist countries, the government dismisses the people is the guiding principle of HK’s patriotic elections now we’re no longer being led astray we know this is good for us.
I’m not sure why you’re all surprised, Jackie got the memo in 2009 already:
https://globalvoices.org/2009/04/20/jackie-chan-chinese-need-control/
@Boris Badanov
You need to get over your fixation that Western-style democracy is the only way to run a country/jurisdiction. Over the longish term (several decades) the system fails miserably. If you are correct, you should be able respond by rattling off a humongous list of things you think make them better societies than the one we have here. Actually, I love your idea of a ‘HK People’s Congress’. In fact your suggestion is so good you might end up with a Gold Bauhinia Star medal. Wouldn’t that be funny?
It might help “Asia’s Finest” (/s)learnt how to use manpower efficiently. Almost always you see them operating in gangs of 5 and at any incident scene the photographs invariably show a mass of blue shirts and an abundance of white shirts standing around looking not busy.
“Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others that have been tried.”
Winston Churchill
@Ho Ma Fan
Is that the best you can come up with? Churchill died in 1965, almost 60 years ago. Then “democracy” was vital and positive. In the UK then, women had only had equality in voting rights for 37 years (since 1928). In the US, it was the year of Churchill’s death. Scroll forward to the 2020s and you’ll see the mess that the vote-driven ‘progressive’ societies have become. The proof of the pudding will be the boomerang HKers who shortly will be returning to these shores with their tails between their legs, and minus sizeable amounts of their wealth that is now the property of the UK government.
I find it hard to accept the HKPF doesn’t have enough labour when we don’t see ‘Bobbies on the Beat’ anymore, when none will turn up at a minor RTA (or similar) unless it is 8 of them clod hopping like swamp donkeys out of a semi armoured van.
And only then will they really hassle Hong Kong Youth if dressed in black