Big Lychee, Various Sectors

With jails full of politicians, protestors, speech therapists and activists, and professional and protest groups disbanding, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam denies that there is a crackdown on civil society. (Geremie Barme writes on the analogy between the Taliban entering Kabul in 2021 and the CCP taking over in Beijing in 1949. His description of post-1949 crackdowns might tell you something about what more Hong Kong can expect in future.)

Would you expect Carrie to say? Still, her claim highlights Hong Kong’s ongoing image and reputation problems.

HK Free Press offers a crosstalk-style pair of articles on the government’s multi-million dollar PR consultation and the supposedly forthcoming (post-Covid) image relaunch campaign – one pro and one con. At least that’s the theory. In fact, the establishment advocate, Regina Ip, thinks the official PR approach is crap as well – though not in the same way. 

She thinks the consultation’s survey of overseas perceptions should have included the Mainland, which is classic wannabe-CE virtue-signalling. She also says that the eventual messaging should not try to gloss over political ‘sensitivities’ (which she chooses not to detail). This too is designed to please CCP overseers who don’t see anything to apologize for. But it also makes some PR sense.

Why were two million people on the streets in the first place? Why did authorities not listen to public opinion and seek a political solution – as you would expect of an open dynamic cosmopolitan world city – but instead go for the Third World-dictatorship option of tear gas, mass-arrests and a subsequent NatSec dismantling of human rights, rule of law and civil society? If you really want to relaunch Hong Kong as a brand, a PR consultation needs to address these things.

Regina of course still thinks like a local bureaucrat. Beijing’s officials would have none of this ‘public relations’ flim-flam – they just screech their version of the truth at you and throw you in jail if you don’t believe it.

A truly credible positioning of Hong Kong’s brand would be: ‘the world’s best business location run by paranoid Leninists’.

Which brings us to some more recommended reading…

David Shambaugh on how Beijing’s ‘conflicted nationalism’ is a drag on China’s soft power…

Notwithstanding … efforts to project a positive image, Beijing has punctuated them with periodic angry outbursts, accusatory rhetoric, and an aggrieved national persona…

Michael Turton on how China’s propensity to be ‘provoked’ shifts the blame for its aggression onto others, often with the international media’s help, ‘in a move likely to anger Beijing’.

Brilliant analysis of China’s over-the-top anti-Australian trade policies…

…there are some signs that we are witnessing Chinese hubris and overreach rather than Australian contumacy or pigheadedness.

I sometimes wonder if we can go 24 hours without at least one absurd/creepy NatSec horror. It never seems to happen. Today, we have two.

It says here…

Three more members of a speech therapists’ union have been charged and remanded, over children’s books featuring talking sheep that prosecutors say are seditious.

I think it’s the books, rather than the actual cartoon sheep, that allegedly…

…bring hatred, contempt or disaffection against the government and the administration of justice, to incite people to commit violence and to ‘counsel disobedience’ of the law.

But maybe it’s the animated wooly ruminants. Either way, it’s so borderline self-parody that even the most devout CCP loyalist among the Justice Dept’s prosecutors must find it embarrassing. Maybe the idea is to test their willingness to debase themselves.

Second, we learn that…

Vitasoy is [reportedly] planning to collect personal information on its workers and their family members, including employment history and membership of various associations… 

This is presumably aimed at weeding out any staff at the soy milk maker who might stab a cop and then kill themselves, or express sympathy to the family of a colleague who does so.

Is such a tragedy involving a company employee likely to occur again? Will a background check on staff members’ and their families’ affiliations help to prevent such a thing? And how does Vitasoy enforce this? Let’s say the company’s deputy assistant accounting manager’s husband is a member of the speech therapists’ union – how do they force her to admit it? And what action will Vitasoy take if she does come clean about it?

The family-run company has supposedly hurt the feelings of Mainlanders by blaming them – ’not its own misdeeds’ – for a fall in profits. The management is petrified about being in the CCP’s Big Book of Enemies, and desperately needs to do a public kowtow. A corporate version of political screening might do the trick. Watch more companies follow suit.

And Hongkongers are once again talking about boycotting their most venerable brand of soy milk. (Am I the only person who remembers the mint-choc flavour Vitasoy? It was amazing. In its absence, I can probably live without the company’s products.)

We also have the raiding of a movie screening on rather selective Covid grounds. 

Coming next: the makers of the dystopia-come-true film Ten Years release a previously unseen sixth vignette about speech therapists being rounded up for subversive cartoon sheep, explaining that it was cut from the 2015 production as too ridiculous.

The UK Supreme Court decides that two of its top justices will, for the time being, remain as non-permanent judges on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. 

Many find this an inexplicable and shameful endorsement of a system that no longer protects citizens’ rights but sides with a politicized prosecutions function – ‘the best piece of free PR that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam has had in years’.

A less critical view notes that, while the government will welcome this as a vote of confidence, the UK judges’ announcement was cautiously worded, and much of the legal profession in Hong Kong also wants overseas judges to stay on the CFA. (Conversely, the CCP-loyalist crowd dislike foreign judges and would welcome their departure.)

This thread argues that UKSC made the ‘right call’. Essentially: the Hong Kong judiciary is still technically independent, even if Beijing’s NatSec law and other edicts have reduced its power; and the CFA is still in theory able to use its powers to protect rule of law. In other words, it’s better that the UK judges stay on the CFA for now while there’s a possibility they can do some good. 

This implies that it’s a matter of timing: at some point in the future, the withdrawal of serving British judges (and probably several retired ones) from the CFA will have a greater impact than it would now. (The same goes for imposing Magnitsky-style sanctions on NatSec regime officials, which the UK is also yet to do.)

While the UK hesitates on pulling its judges, Hong Kong activists set up digital archives of the city’s pro-democracy past.

The last memo from Bleak House Books. HKFP story here.

And Variety on film-makers’ responses to the NatSec regime’s extension of film censorship.

Some worthwhile reading on Beijing’s media influencing and shifting approach to the private sector… 

How disinformation on Hong Kong spread in Malaysia.

A look at the Beijing-centric content (typically older) Sinophone Singaporeans get in their local Chinese-language media.

Kevin Carrico on Chinese state-media propagandists who pose as independent journalists.

Nothing very new, but a War on the Rocks explainer in case you haven’t been following Beijing’s clampdown on China’s tech tycoons…

Xi Jinping will likely be confirmed as leader for at least another term — if not for life. China’s billionaires, seen as occupying rival centers of power and influence in the country, are being put in their place.

…leading to ‘a sudden outburst of philanthropic activity’.

Willy Lo Lap-lam on Xi’s ‘Common Prosperity’ thing

In Scholar’s Stage, a review of a book on the USSR as a ‘failed empire’ includes a discussion (towards the end) on whether Xi Jinping’s enthusiasm for a return to earlier Marxist-Maoist values is a sort of Chinese boomer-nostalgia thing.

In its debut performance, the NatSec regime’s ‘Candidate Eligibility Review Committee’ bars Cheng Chung-tai of the localist/maverick group Civic Passion from running for the Election Committee. The vetting body doesn’t give any specific reasons for rejecting the would-be candidate, but they have a ‘negative list of behaviours’ and can bar someone for ‘things they have said and written in the past’. While they’re at it, the CERC also eject Cheng from the Legislative Council, where he was one of just two remaining/surviving non-establishment members.

Cheng says he ‘respects the decision’. It’s hard to see who’s trolling whom. 

The nativist’s account confirms that the CERC inquisition imposes a CCP-style religious test. It’s hard to see why the unjailed remnants of the Democratic Party might still be tempted to run – or try to run – for election, though I bet a few will. 

To repeat: Beijing officials and their local underlings might blather about ensuring that only patriots are admitted to ‘governance’ of Hong Kong. But this whole electoral ‘improvement’ thing is about completely excluding public opinion from any actual political decision-making – leaving the Legislative Council and other supposedly representative bodies no more than a ceremonial role. The exclusion of dissenters is purely symbolic, just as the ‘insider’ status loyalist/shoe-shiner candidates will enjoy (Gay Games mouth-frothing notwithstanding).

Yet officials still want people to vote in the coming pointless elections, and Carrie Lam is suggesting that it will be the political parties that are pointless if they don’t participate – even though her puppet administration has put most of their leading members in jail. A distinct lack of enthusiasm for elections, compared with the 71.2% turnout in the 2019 district polls, will be one of few ways for citizens to register their views.

The UK has received 64,900 BNO applications in the first five months of the settlement option.

Some other reading…

How many have you forgotten? A spreadsheet of 300 horrors that have taken place since… March 2021.

An investigative piece on for-profit operations at the public-subsidized South China Athletic Association.

George Magnus on Xi Jinping’s attack on private-sector companies.

More from Jamestown on Beijing’s exploitation of Western social and digital media. 

A good summary of what might come next in the Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou extradition case.

The latest civil society group on the chopping block: the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, founded in 1989 and running annual gatherings with police cooperation for decades. The NatSec police say they might be agents of foreign organizations and are demanding details of staffers and financial dealings with Mark Simon (of Next), the National Democratic Institute and others. 

Combine this with the Andy Li/crowdfunded ads ‘international conspiracy’ (there’s at least some overlap), and the NatSec enforcement establishment is purportedly busting a major Western plot to bring down the whole PRC via foreign-manipulated Hong Kong traitors and subversives. If anything of the sort had really happened, Beijing would at least have recalled an ambassador over it years ago.

Former Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma says that defending the rule of law is not ‘political’. He tells Reuters that – thanks to that convenient judicial can’t-possibly-comment thing – he can’t discuss how people defending rule of law now get criticized by CCP-backed media or the Chief Executive for ‘being political’. Perhaps on this occasion he didn’t need to: he was speaking at the Law Society’s AGM, as the body voted for the ‘non-politicizing’ bloc in internal elections. (That’s the don’t-get-threats-against-their-families bloc. As someone put it, you can either castrate yourself or have someone else do it to you.)

A few months ago, the idea that Hong Kong schools would introduce Xi Jinping Thought classes was a grim, almost tasteless, joke. Now it’s a matter of time.

And a Beijing official declares that Hong Kong is now optimistic and patriotic. He also says that emigration from the city has nothing to do with the imposition of the NatSec regime. Huang Liuquan – hereby renamed Huang Christian Andersen.

Can films endanger the security of a nation? In the case of China, it seems they can. Hong Kong plugs the loophole with a censorship law that imposes heavy punishments on anyone showing past, present or future cinematic works that imperil the motherland. Films that were released in the past – and did not appear to threaten civilization at the time – have now become a particular problem…

Permits issued in the past do not have an expiry date, meaning that a movie can be screened again after its first screening…

What a scary thought! There are countless thousands of possibly dangerous films that the authorities recklessly approved over the decades for public viewing, though the government does not have a list yet. For example, have you noticed how The Sound of Music omits any mention at all of ‘Belt and Road opportunities’?

Hong Kong will now be able to impose a HK$1 million fine, or sentence offenders to up to three years in prison for the screening of movies that suddenly now imperil the country – perhaps, say, for airing any film from Taiwan that mentions ‘Taiwan’.

On the other hand, the Nicole Kidman smash hit Expats should be acceptable, thanks to the production’s tireless efforts to present authentic Han culture and its strong underlying message against collusion with foreign forces.

In today’s warm-and-cuddly NatSec regime ‘hearts and minds’ successes: an activist is arrested for unauthorized assembly at a 2019 protest against the Yuen Long attack; and Esther Toh of Hong Kong’s oh-so independent judiciary denies bail to Roy Tam, jailed since April for participating in a primary election.

Trouble on the way for the legal sector, especially if the Law Society doesn’t vote the way the CCP wants today.

More depressing points about the Mainland-style trial of Andy Li, co-option of the courts and retroactivity of the NatSec Law in our own comments section, if you haven’t read them.

Time to listen to some music.

Beijing-owned newspaper Wen Wei Po is working on living up to its motto ‘You read it here first’. Following warnings by Chief Executive Carrie Lam to the Law Society about being ‘politicized’, the paper attacked member Jonathan Ross – who subsequently received some sort of threats against his family, and now pulls out of the Society’s council elections. 

The paper is also following (or writing the screenplay for?) the Andy Li NatSec trial. Although Li is a defendant, the prosecution’s case seems to be focused on Jimmy Lai – crafting a version of events in which the crowdfunding of ads calling for sanctions becomes an international conspiracy masterminded by the publisher. Li, who was held in Shenzhen for months and has mysteriously acquired a pro-Beijing lawyer, is agreeing with this narrative in court. Description of the overblown plot here. A response from an overseas activist named by Wen Wei Po here.

Will Wen Wei Po be targeting psychologists and counsellors next? (I would have thought they’re further down the list, but who knows?)

Occasionally, Beijing runs up against reality in Hong Kong. The anti-sanctions law was due to be rushed through – then suddenly turns into something taking far longer to implement. The U-turn is not officially a U-turn. Chinese retaliation against US sanctions cannot be symmetrical: the US can kill Chinese banks by cutting them off from its financial system, while foreign institutions have no access to, or need for, equivalent RMB processes in the Mainland. And it’s nothing to do with Hong Kong’s interests: China’s CCP-guided economy needs access to the dollar system.

Something I have in common with the Hong Kong government: not realizing that Nicole Kidman is so famous that a citizen’s complaint about her car parking illegally on Queens Road Central is front-page news around the world.

We have to squeeze in another NatSec horror for Friday – a court hearing with a distinct smell of Mainland about it. Months in a Shenzhen jail, a defendant apologizing, weird charges about conspiring in an elaborate plot with Jimmy Lai and others in colluding with foreign forces (crowdfunding ads in overseas media), no bail, trial to take place next year. 

On lighter matters, there are two subscription-TV productions in the pipeline about Hong Kong expats and their luxurious brain-dead lifestyles of yachts and Peak dinner parties. The projects have provoked extreme gnashing of teeth, especially among Westerners who call the city home and proudly consider themselves long-term Hongkongers (relatively sober examples here, here and here).

The whites understandably want to distance themselves from the Discovery Bay stereotype who can’t count to ten in Cantonese and barely noticed the protests and CCP backlash since 2014 except as an incomprehensible nuisance. The overseas-born Chinese seem, if anything, even more vitriolic about the new movies, perhaps because one was written by one of their own – plus, being conscious of their ancestry, some might feel a responsibility to complain that the productions exclude the less glamorous lives of the other 99.9% of the population. 

With the greatest respect to these groups: if you were a genuinely authentic Hongkonger, you wouldn’t care less about how some US streaming TV series portrays the place. 

Your time is precious. Don’t let this crap annoy you.

Still, since we’re here… One of these productions is actually called Expats and stars Nicole Kidman, and the other is called something else and probably stars someone else. (Had to Google her. She’s this one. I’ve never seen any of her films except the excellent Paddington, but I don’t recall her part – maybe she was in the bear costume.) Everyone is irate that Kidman was exempted from quarantine on arrival for shooting (though rest assured she will not approach you). Quartz comes to the rescue with everything on the subject. Exciting Times!

The deeper anger on Twitter and elsewhere is aimed at the perceived callousness of the movies’ focus on a wealthy and privileged elite at a time when the city is being ground down around us by Beijing. But Hollywood sells fantasy. The backdrop could have been somewhere else (see Dubai below).

So: is it a coincidence that there are two shows in the works showing Hong Kong as a vibrant, dynamic, cosmopolitan blah-blah hub, or has someone encouraged the productions as an image-boost? Maybe PR agency Consulum worked harder for their US$5.7 million than we think. I’ve no idea. The boring explanation would be that the protest movement vaguely raised US public awareness that Hong Kong exists, and the entertainment moguls are jumping on the bandwagon. Nowhere else has a skyline like this, right? For what it’s worth, Amazon – which would love to sell video on demand in China – is behind both series.

If only Graham Greene had done a ‘Hong Kong expat’ novel for Amazon to work with. Or at least Tom Sharpe – I can recommend The Ghost of Neil Diamond by David Milnes. 

Other weekend reading…

Professional Commons find nearly 2,000 hectares of land suitable for housing.

Which member of Canto-boyband Mirror starred in a haemorrhoid-treatment ad? (Clue: it wasn’t one of the ones that look seven years old.) All you wanted to know about them here.

A concise thread rebutting George Soros’ amateur-psychology analysis of Xi Jinping being anti-Deng.

On out-of-area-matters…

All you need to know about Dubai (plus a bit about Romania).

And that wonderfully vicious review of the rooftop Polo Lounge at London’s Dorchester – ‘chicken breast with the texture of value-range cotton wool’. 

Today’s Can’t Make This Up Award winner: HKU students are arrested for ‘advocating terrorism’ by mourning the guy who stabbed a cop and then killed himself. Was that tragedy terrorism, or the act of a mentally disturbed person? Is mourning advocating? Can any judge convict someone for this with a straight face? (If I were the defendants, I would consider claiming devout personal Christian convictions. Or at least quote John Donne.) Is the students’ real crime not respecting the police force’s apparently inflated sense of victimhood? Could the police leadership at least find better uses of taxpayers’ money? 

Runner-up in the Can’t Make This Up Award: former Chief Executive CY Leung bemoans the ‘radicalization’ of youth to which his own policies surely contributed. Oblivious to Beijing’s recent exclusion of opponents, democrats and non-CCP-worshipers from elections, his think tank suggests…

…platforms must be broadened for young people to participate in politics and public affairs.

And in today’s purge of civil society, the 612 Humanitarian Fund – which helps prisoners and arrestees – is to cease operations. Will the NatSec regime scramble to freeze assets/arrest organizers before the group winds up?

At least the latest departure from the West Kowloon Cultural Hub-Zone is probably nothing to do with political rectification. Some other sort of embarrassing bureaucratic screw-up, maybe, but not that. Maybe.

This just in: the judges have ruled that a late entrant to the Can’t Make This Up Award qualifies for joint winner. The government’s US$6.4 million (later haggled down to 5.7 million) public relations consultation with the Consulum agency yields a bunch of slogans grabbed from a handy thesaurus, featuring ‘innovation’, ‘cosmopolitan lifestyle’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘diverse’, adding up to ‘the best place in Asia to live, work and invest in’.

Stuffing their US$5.7 million into their pockets, the PR folk rush to the airport to join the hundreds of families seeking one-way tickets out. 

(One booming investment opportunity right now in Hong Kong: relocation services for emigres taking pets with them. Really.)