Police have arrested Jimmy Lai and veteran pro-dem activists Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho and most-harmless-man-on-the-planet Yeung Sum. This looks inexplicably rash. How does the regime benefit if it brings flimsy charges against such high-profile, mainly moderate, figures? It just provokes mainstream public opinion and degrades the city’s justice system.
Presumably, this is connected with the appointment of Xia Baolong and Luo Huining to Beijing’s Hong Kong Affairs bureaucracy. The knuckle-draggers know no other way.
I declare the weekend open with an array of more-or-less worthwhile diversions (with a rather heavy viral load)…
Apple Daily‘s hour-long documentary on the Hong Kong protests, Battle Against Tyranny.
Not one but two rants from Philip Bowring on the HK administration’s dismal response to the virus: a government that waffles into incompetence, and looks terrible compared with Singapore.
Another must-read Geremie Barme translation in Chinafile: academic Xu Zhiyong daringly tells Xi Jinping to go.
HK Free Press on what WuFlu tells us about socialism with Chinese characteristics.
China Media Monitor reports a swiftly/prematurely published book in five languages about how the CCP and nation valiantly defeated the disease.
Dan Blumenthal in Real Clear World on the Xi Jinping flu…
It is a high-tech authoritarian state experimenting with complete social control. To succeed it requires lies, intimidation and obfuscation. These very ingredients have exacerbated a public-health crisis and laid bare a government that fears the truth.
Atlantic offers more on how the CCP’s obsessive surveillance and censorship opened the door to the virus outbreak and provides a cheery assessment of the disease: ‘the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable’.
HK Free Press on how China is tightening censorship around the world.
Harvard Biz Review asks how much money does the world owe China?
A little history of how, after doing without the revolting stuff for centuries, the Chinese managed to get into drinking cow milk.
A nostalgic look back at studying in China in the 1970s.
And the Slightly Distasteful Cartoon of the Week Award goes to: CCP pyramid ass kissing for a harmonious society…
Saw lots of blue shirt popo in CWB this morning, writing parking tickets and harassing peaceful citizens for their IDs.
When I read that people had been arrested in relation to offences occurring on 31 August 2019, I hoped for a nanosecond That they had arrested the riot police who assaulted MTR passengers that night.
Of course, those criminals are still at large.
These arrests really, really do not bode well for the future of the city…
To me, at least, this is the most depressing news I’ve come across in weeks, even moreso than the WuFlu and its attendant social / economic catastrophe.
Moreover, these arrests come mere days after a budget announcement which gave massive increases in police funding and and to police recruitment numbers, as well as a huge sum of money allocated to a propaganda campaign to “educate” the local population on “law and order”.
Hong Kong is fast on its way to becoming full-on authoritarian…
“How does the regime benefit if it brings flimsy charges against such high-profile, mainly moderate, figures?”
It just made the opposition more radical.
As ignoring public demands for responsive and accountable government, and cracking down on peaceful protests have proven to be such a winning formula so far, the newly-installed CCP minions thought more of the same would be a good idea.
Pure genius!
Those Bowring articles are a bit out of date, wouldn’t you say?
The other links are good, though.
donations to the Community Chest sound rather good, if said quickly but the anterior superior motive, conversely, is that the donor gets a tax break of a 1/4 of the donation, which means that, if someone has a guaranteed salary, that someone is better off!
@so – not to mention that their generous pension entitlement remains undiminished.