Lingua Sinica on how Hong Kong is emulating Mainland-style merging of NatSec police and media…
Episodes two and three [of NS Files: Decoded] touch on the publication and distribution of the allegedly seditious children’s book Sheep Village, and the prosecution of Hong Kong radio producer Tam Tak-Chi (譚得志), arrested in 2020 for a public protest during which he shouted the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times,” which has been banned in the city.
…As media in Hong Kong draw closer to powers they are meant to scrutinize independently, this show trial approach turns journalism into little more than a plot device.
The Wire China interviews Geremie Barmé…
In early ’75 the Central Committee launched yet another political movement, one that has been nearly completely forgotten, although for me it remains one of the most revealing moments of that tumultuous era. It was called ‘The Movement to Study the 33 Quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao Concerning Bourgeois Rights’. The concept of ‘bourgeois rights’ [资产阶级法权] was at the core of the Cultural Revolution, the core of the Great Leap Forward, and the core idea that really continues to obsess Xi Jinping and colleagues today. This politburo are all ex-Red Guard generation people. The present Chinese government is the last gasp of the Cultural Revolution era.
Basically, this movement maintained that the only way that the revolution could continue without sliding into revisionism was to continue to attack those ideas, behaviors and structures in society that bred concepts of ownership and individualism. Material benefits like wage differentials for workers, the unequal point system for farm labourers, the privilege system of the Party nomenclature and so on constantly generated bourgeois ideas and behaviours that by their very nature made a more egalitarian, pre-communist society impossible. It was argued that if the Party did not reduce, and ultimately eliminate, these ‘rights’ and rid society of both the material base as well as the ideological support for private property, then the revolution would inevitably be overturned and there would be a return to some form of capitalist consumerist paradigm. Guess what? They were right!