7-21 and other tropes

Although some assailants have been convicted for participating, the Hong Kong authorities portray the 7-21 Yuen Long MTR station mob attack in 2019 as a ‘gang fight’. So, starting yesterday, they are prosecuting some of those on the receiving end of the assaults as well.

Which leads us to Whitewashing Hong Kong – a Doublethink Lab analysis of thousands of official and unofficial pro-Beijing posts on Twitter, examining the development of ‘propaganda tropes’…

Eight key tropes connect to the CCP’s narratives distorting the situation in Hong Kong: Vandals and Traitors, Western Hegemony, Law and Order, Perfected Hong Kong Democracy, Red Hong Kong, Powerful Ancestral Motherland, Magnificent Development, and Social Progress.

Look around you: they are everywhere. (Pity about the cover art.)

Some other reading for the weekend…

Just as the Financial Secretary looks for ways to boost the Hong Kong stock market, Beijing clamps down on Mainlanders investing overseas. Standard editorial lamentation.

Rather Be Ashes Than Dust, another documentary film about Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, opens in Busan…

“I use my point of view as a journalist to talk about the whole movement,” [director Alan] Lau told UPI in an interview in Busan. “What I felt and what I saw at that time is like a diary — my psychological diary.”

In a reflective narration that plays over the film’s scenes of chaos and violence, Lau describes the mental and physical toll that covering the movement took on him, from recurring nightmares to anxiety attacks to persistent skin rashes.

When he finally fled to Britain in 2021 amid sweeping arrests of journalists, activists and legislators, the 45-year-old said he was paralyzed with survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Is it political or structural? A Council on Foreign Relations article looks at China’s internal and external imbalances.

Ars Technica reports that cheap Chinese-made Android TV streaming boxes come with malware…

Human Security tracked multiple types of fraud linked to the compromised devices. This includes advertising fraud; residential proxy services, where the group behind the scheme sell access to your home network; the creation of fake Gmail and WhatsApp accounts using the connections; and remote code installation. Those behind the scheme were selling access to residential networks commercially, the company’s report says, claiming to have access to more than 10 million home IP addresses and 7 million mobile IP addresses.

I don’t have a ‘streaming box’. Does a (Netvigator-supplied) Huawei modem count? 

Streaming box or not, fans of Japanese TV might be able to track down my latest craze – Momo Ume. Ten-minute snippets of two office ladies delivering rapid back-and-forth witticisms about life in the workplace, with sometimes-wacky fantasy interludes. A familiar comedy format across cultures. Often quite funny. ‘Momo’ means ‘peach’, and ‘ume’ is ‘plum’, meaning (maybe) the younger sassy one is sweet, the older straight-lady character a bit more sour. (There’s a dubbed animated version on YouTube – but not a patch on the live-action one.)

And a nice YouTube video on the ‘chop suey’ font, of Western Chinese restaurant fame.