Asia’s perpetual-crisis hub

Chief Executive John Lee asks everyone to visit a new National Security exhibition at the HK Museum of History, promising an enhancement of their ‘sense of safeguarding national security and a boost to patriotism’…

“We must strengthen our crisis awareness… in the face of fast-changing international situations, constant geographical conflicts and collective suppression by foreign forces,” Lee said.

RTHK adds…

“Safeguarding national security is always a work in progress. There is no completion. Given the ever-changing international situation, it is necessary to maintain a sense of crisis,” he said.

David Webb comments…

“It is necessary to maintain a sense of crisis” – CE Lee. Maybe not if there isn’t actually a crisis? How can we promote trade and tourism while simultaneously pretending that there’s a crisis? 

A subsequent RTHK story reports ‘dozens’ of visitors…

A woman at the front of the queue said that as a Chinese person, she should know more about national security legislation.

She expressed concern about the limited sense of national identity among Hong Kong’s youth compared with their mainland counterparts, and stressed the need for more education.

The Standard says ‘hundreds’…

A 27-year-old woman from Foshan, Au, visited the gallery with her mother and found the section explaining different perspectives of national security to be particularly enriching.”I learned that food and outer space security can also contribute to national security,” she said.

However, an Italian tourist in his 40s, Homel, who came with his wife and two children, found the exhibition to be overly patriotic and not particularly interesting.

Hey – there’s always the inflatable Leaning Tower of Pisa just across the harbour.

HKFP mentions…

…installations dedicated to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ideas of governance, and a lunar soil sample collected during a China National Space Administration mission.

And the Standard finds

…a replica of the oil painting “The Founding Ceremony of the People’s Republic of China,” which is being displayed outside the mainland for the first time … and a six-meter-tall, 1:9 scale model of the Long March 5B carrier rocket.

But apparently nothing about any actual ‘crisis’.

(For a real national security story, the SCMP looks at corruption in the PLA.)

If you want to escape the NatSec panic and go somewhere relaxed, more Shenzhen border checkpoints are on the way. (Didn’t the Standard get the ‘call it the boundary’ memo?)