How about ‘the pro-government camp learned to lose elections’?

Steven Vines declares ‘it is advisable to ignore all the nonsense being aired in justification of scrapping the District Council election system’. But I can’t resist…

Behold Regina Ip’s support for the ‘improved’ patriots-only DCs. After some irrelevant (and selective) history, she says…

Politicians from the opposition camp learned to win elections by sloganeering and campaigning on issues that would stir up dissatisfaction with the government.

But they couldn’t have done that if the government had listened to the population rather than imposing policies that provoked (incited?) dissatisfaction. Can anyone remember a time since the handover when the administration was not at loggerheads with broad public opinion over something? Pushing up housing prices through an artificial shortage of land. Cramming the city with Mainland immigrants and tourists for whom there was insufficient space. Spending hundreds of billions on pointless infrastructure projects when people needed better homes and hospitals. And of course denying more representative government, and pushing scary national security, national education and extradition measures.

We don’t know why Beijing chose the post-1997 leaders it did (or failed to kick them up the backside for their poor and unpopular policies). Regina invites us to believe that the opposition figures the public elected to powerless councils were the cause of the problem. 

Although it has virtually no opposition or protest movement, Macau gets its NatSec Law tightened up anyway…

…the Global Times newspaper published by China’s ruling Communist Party said Friday that the changes target espionage, “foreign interference” and Taiwan independence supporters. It also expands the definition of crimes such as abetting and supporting insurrection and the preparation or intent to commit such criminal acts…

Pro-Beijing and pro-dem camps in Hong Kong have both instinctively viewed the post-2019 NatSec/‘second handover’ as a direct response to the city’s internal situation. But if you look at how the Chinese government has tightened control in the Mainland in the last 10 years (Xinjiang, Tibet, universities, churches, media, tech companies, etc), it seems fair to say that much of what we are now seeing would probably have happened regardless of anti-government movements from 2003 to 2019. Hong Kong is just one box that needs to be ticked.

Pre-emptive patriotism gets weird. Companies congratulating Ming Pao on its 64th anniversary use a phrase like ‘65th year’ in their ads in the paper, rather than utter the dread number associated with 1989. 

These face-giving ads are coordinated by the congratulatee’s PR Dept, who approach the congratulators, who simply send some money – which is why the notices all have near-identical wording and layout. So it would have been the Ming Pao side that suggested the performative cringe.

If the Beatles reformed (OK, unlikely) and played in Hong Kong (even more improbable), they would have to re-title one of their more tedious ditties When I’m Getting on for 65. 

Other things…

Reuters pays a visit to the Hong Kong branch of US due diligence consultants Mintz, and finds it closed…

Moving people swiftly out of Hong Kong underscores how the crackdown in China has unnerved some companies in the global financial hub, many of which are still navigating a national security law Beijing imposed on the city in 2020.

The relocations over the last couple of months are meant to be a temporary measure to ensure staff safety, given the uncertainty of the Chinese police probe, the sources said, and involved around half a dozen employees including investigators and the head of the Hong Kong office.

One source with direct knowledge of the matter, and four other sources briefed by Mintz employees, said the firm had engaged in corporate due diligence work examining the possible use of forced labour in supply chains linked to China’s Xinjiang region up until this year.

And China’s ‘blink or you miss it’ Covid stats.