Weekend starts early

Attempts to stamp out Glory to Hong Kong not going well. But it’s the effort that counts. Or performance, should we say.

From the Standard a few days ago – Ronny Tong marks the folding of the Civic Party by blaming it for unrest.

Tong said the Civic Party was “the biggest failure” in his 11-year political career, although he cofounded the party in 2006 and withdrew in 2015.

It’s not impossible that the Civic Party saw Ronny as their ‘biggest failure’, but anyway…

Tong recalled that when he was a lawmaker, he found that the pan-democracy parties at the time could not represent most of the citizens with centrist views, and he hoped that the establishment of the Civic Party could care for those voters, and to have a dialogue with Beijing in order to achieve democratic reform in the SAR.

…He said the camp has never tried to gain Beijing’s trust, and only wanted to create political pressure.

Tong added that people in the camp were suspicious and hostile toward the central government, and were not willing to communicate with Beijing.

Even if the broad pan-democrat camp – supported by the majority of Honkongers – was responsible for the ‘unrest’, the Civic Party was only an average-size and relatively moderate player in it. But responsibility, as we all know, goes with power. And the pan-dems and people of Hong Kong never had any real input into policy. If you get two million people protesting on the streets, it is by definition because the government has failed. And the idea that you can have a dialogue with Beijing is also fanciful. Even in discourse with international peers, the Chinese government will lay down its position and reject any idea that does not conform to it. 

Transit Jam to remain – because the government, in effect, won’t allow the editor to deregister it…

…they warned me, if they complete deregistration and then I write ANYTHING on the site which could be deemed as “news, intelligence, occurrences or any remarks, observations or comments in relation to such” then I would be in breach of Newspaper Ordinance and liable to a fine and up to one year jail.

Some (early) links for the weekend…

Wouldn’t normally bother with this, but it’s too pitiful to resist: Nury Vittachi, on a conspiracy-theorist site, denies the Tiananmen massacre happened. Click only if you want a mishmash of stuff about the National Endowment for Democracy (tankies’ version of the far-right’s ‘cosmopolitan financier George Soros’) plus mendacious hair-splitting over what didn’t happen in the actual confines of the Square. He lists 35 ‘facts’, such as…

8) On May 28th, 1989, Gene Sharp, America’s top undercover street protest strategist, flew into Beijing with his assistant Bruce Jenkins to offer help…

What’s behind this? Money? All-purpose toadying? Struggle for attention? Chip on shoulder? Can’t be genuine deranged ideology. 

Why are young white-collar Chinese trying Westerners’ unappetizing, cold and raw packed lunches?

Of course, not everyone is on board with the trend, and some people couldn’t bear the thought of foregoing flavor and variety. But others found a strange sense of comfort in the blandness of these meals, calling it a reflection of their work experience, and a reminder that the office isn’t a place for enjoying life.

From the Diplomat, a critique of Beijing’s ‘Global Civilization Initiative’…

…the GCI’s most insidious effect is that it is fundamentally a self-serving effort to disarm the “rules based international order.” By promoting the relativism of values and arguing against calling out bad behavior and seeking to stop it, the concept appeals to regimes that desire to do what they wish, from criminality and repression at home to the ruthless invasion of their neighbors under the spurious mantle of “legitimate security concerns.”

From Japanese TV – a show in which experts descend on a backstreet restaurant in Hong Kong and clean up the most disgusting looking kitchen you’ve seen in this city ever, or at least for several weeks. (All vividly understandable, even if your Japanese is rusty.)

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7 Responses to Weekend starts early

  1. Nury Vee says:

    My namesake has reverted to type and gone to seed all at the same time.

    Dancing all his life on the needle of being Brown but decidedly British, and profiting from an assumed faux-Asianness (it sells books and gets you a job sometimes), he has now COME HOME and become an apologist for everything anti-White and “pro-Asian”.

    The fact that the Asians generally hate each other, and that the Chinese in particular hate Brown people, escapes him for the moment.

    Nury Vee II is clearly in his dotage and is behaving like an angry Black man who has been shoe-shining all his life but who now curses every cracker in sight.

    “Damn cracker. Damn saltine cracker!” You can almost see him mumbling it.

    It’s very funny though. At last …Nury Vee II is actually funny!

    Hurrah!

  2. Chinese Netizen says:

    Love the last bit. Much like the American show “Bar Rescue” ( https://www.paramountnetwork.com/shows/bar-rescue ) in which a seasoned industry professional travels the country trying to get failing bars/dives back into the black.

  3. Chinese Netizen says:

    The girl writing about the West’s bland, unappealing work time lunches has obviously never had to see/be near/bear Chinese office drones with their most pathetic, barely-resembling-anything-edible “he fans” (box lunches) or canteen “meals” and it shows just by her choice of Western name (“Hayley” – ugh!).

    The Chinese “meals” are usually slurped in a fashion of direct vessel-to-mouth touching helped by chopsticks shoveling the contents into the gullet in the fastest manner possible (to avoid taste?), thereby allowing the eater to be able to have more time to enjoy the lunchtime at-desk nap before returning to the mind numbing activity called work.

  4. Low Profile says:

    It has long been known that most of the killings in 1989 occurred not in the Square itself, but in the surrounding streets. Arguing from that that there were no Tiananmen deaths is like saying the Woodstock festival didn’t happen because it wasn’t at Woodstock.

  5. Joe Blow says:

    I tried to read Li’l Nury’s list but my eyes glazed over when I reached entry No. 4 or 5. I doubt very much that Nury is splitting hairs: he is as bald as coot.

    Something else: The Endowment for Democracy provided financial support to the (then) newly founded DAB (early Nineties I think). Yes, the DAB that we all know and love so much received funding from the CIA. Chew on that.

    Back to you in the studio, Alex.

  6. Mary Melville says:

    Strange that no one has commented on RT’s statement that Honkies “can do almost anything which will not be harmful to the community at large” when effectively anything one does can be interpreted as a violation of ………………… the make it up as we go along vague red lines.

  7. justsayin says:

    The Transit Jam statement of what the government wants it to become reflects a micro version of what the CCP wants to do to HK as a whole.

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