‘Soft resistance’ talk could be ‘soft resistance’

Outgoing Hong Kong NatSec police head Andrew Kan appears to see discussion of the lack of a list of banned books as you-know-what…

“Saying there is no list of banned books or that the red lines are unclear – I think that is a form of soft resistance,” Kan said.

He also suggests that if they are unsure, booksellers shouldn’t sell books…

…“We’ve taken it one step further than bookstore owners and their staff – we actually read the books,” Kan said in the interview.

Before bookstores consider selling a book, they should read it or seek legal advice, Kan said. Otherwise, they should simply decide not to sell it.

“If we release a list of banned books now, and a new illegal title is released the next day, people will question why arrests were made if it wasn’t on the list,” Kan said in the interview. 

So discussing something that officials themselves confirm to be a fact – the absence of a list – is ‘soft resistance’? And booksellers should ban books themselves. Sounds odd. But remember there is no definition of what ‘soft resistance’ is, or is not. And there is no law that cites ‘soft resistance’ as a crime. So perhaps it makes perfect sense. 

Still, it makes you wonder how Hong Kong managed to survive for decades before the 2020s without banning books or spreading alarm about the horrors of ‘soft’ whatever-it-is.

They don’t worry about ‘soft resistance’ on the Mainland. They used to have ‘capitalist roaders’, and in modern times people who ‘pick quarrels and provoke trouble’. The (paywalled) Economist notes a slight willingness of Beijing to allow citizens to speak out against the government – at least the sort of local officials that make life harder for the central authorities…

“Treating differing voices as floods and terrifying beasts is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of governance,” would be an unsurprising homily from a liberal newspaper in a democracy. From the actual source, Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party’s main theoretical journal, in September, it is positively startling. Other party outlets have been sounding similarly enlightened. “Wherever energy is spent on targeting the commenter and blocking channels of speech, almost without exception the result is an even greater crisis of trust,” said China Youth Daily, run by the Communist Youth League, in July. Some officials “seek only silence in public discourse, not the resolution of problems, and habitually block and delete posts instead of solving issues”, China Comment, a magazine run by the country’s official news agency, Xinhua, also weighed in that month.

…Dare to post a message online that the death toll in last month’s flash flood on the Nepal-China border was higher in China than reported? Seven days in jail for that. A system that brooks no dissent is behaving true to form.

But China’s leaders do sometimes worry that censorship can go too far. Overly tight restrictions on everyday moaning, they suggest, can make it harder to get the feedback they need to improve government behaviour and thereby defuse public grievances before they explode on the streets. 

.

Many thanks to those who suggested junk-removal services. Much appreciated.