Turnout is not the priority

After barring most non- (or insufficiently) ‘patriotic’ candidates from running, the Hong Kong government looks for ways to boost voter turnout at the District Council elections. (Both ideas seem clunky. Polling stations at the border is an obvious idea, but voters living on the Mainland need to pre-register. And if you really worry that parents might leave town rather than vote, maybe don’t have a post-election school holiday?)

HK Watch launch a report on religious freedom in Hong Kong. And voila…

(Obviously a VPN or other method will work – the link is to the announcement only.)

Some history related reading…

A major Qing history project gets scrapped…

…the Qing History Project at Renmin University and CASS (this is the government sponsored attempt to formally write a comprehensive and authoritative history of the Qing) has now been put on ice because higher authorities deemed the draft it produced to be politically unacceptable—“failing to honor the perspective of the people,” which is an extraordinarily negative verdict. Specifically, the project “was overly influenced by the New Qing History.” This is quite the shocking claim, as most of the project leaders have spent their entire careers vehemently attacking the New Qing History. Nearly 2 billion RMB have been thrown into this project across two decades, and now it’s all gone to waste due to political incorrectness. 

‘New Qing History’ stresses the influence of Manchu and other ethnic groups (like Tibetans) in a way that offends the CCP’s focus on the absorption of fringe groups into Han culture. Thus Tibetans, Uighurs, etc are all ‘Chinese’, as are historic Manchu territories, and any other interpretation is an attempt to split China. 

Imagine if Indians declared that the Raj ruling over the majority of the British Empire’s population had adopted Indian culture so readily that they essentially became Indian, so India must today be the rightful owner of, say, Ireland. That’s the principle – if taken to an extreme. 

Compare with the Yuan, and a French exhibition on Genghis Khan…

The museum said that attempts at censorship first began as an injunction from CCP authorities to remove the words “Genghis Khan”, “empire” and “Mongol” from the entire show; the museum spokesperson says that those terms are now included in the exhibition.

Later, Chinese authorities allegedly demanded “control of the exhibition’s production”, which included providing a new exhibition synopsis written by the National Administration of Cultural Heritage in Beijing…

A press statement outlines the diplomatic efforts behind the current show, saying: “This exhibition was made with the support of the Mongolian government…

On a related note, a hyper-nationalistic academic aiming to downplay Western history is denying that Aristotle existed. There couldn’t have been enough vellum. And, presumably, the philosopher couldn’t have used papyrus because that’s basically paper, and only the Chinese are allowed to invent that. (Video of the guy, Jin Canrong, here, in Mandarin.)