The authorities are preventing Hongkongers moving to the UK from cashing in their retirement savings early – a longstanding right for people leaving town permanently. The reasoning (that the Hong Kong government doesn’t recognize BNO passports, so therefore the departees can’t claim overseas residency) is obviously absurd. Is there some way (UK government action?) to pressure HSBC and other MPF providers with UK operations to release emigres’ savings now and reclaim the money when those clients turn 65?
There’s an interesting debate about whether the CCP wants malcontents to leave Hong Kong or (perhaps for reasons of face) would prefer them to stay. Beijing’s post-1997 immigration policies make clear that dilution or displacement of the local population is an underlying strategy, and the recent NatSec regime couldn’t be better designed to drive people out. But the UK’s granting of residency to BNO holders obviously touches a raw nerve: Chinese people are the emperor’s property.
Facebook, Twitter and Google could quit Hong Kong if the NatSec regime makes their employees liable under revised privacy laws aimed at curbing ‘doxxing’ of police and other officials (link to original WSJ scoop here).
Internet companies generally comply with such rules in other jurisdictions – but the laws are proportionate, and these are typically countries with rule of law and accountable governments. Police states, on the other hand, don’t allow Western social media sites in the first place. Which is Hong Kong?
And Hong Kong officials claimed a few months back that real-name registration of SIM cards was now suddenly necessary to fight ordinary commercial crime. But Beijing’s guy doesn’t bother with the lame fibs. It’s a NatSec regime thing. But you knew that.
John Burns in HKFP on how an ex-cop’s rise to Chief Secretary goes with a decline in trust, accountability and the role of professional civil servants. And Steve Vines on Hong Kong’s transition to a police (or whatever you want to call it) state where the government has ‘abandoned cooperation and persuasion in favour of crackdowns and heavy punishment’. Benedict Rogers of HK Watch gives Security Secretary Chris Tang a serious mauling after the latter blames ‘those who incite violence and hatred against the country’ for the stabbing/suicide in Causeway Bay on July 1.
Hong Kong’s security officials are clearly enraged at public reluctance to buy in to their hype about terrorism – and especially at online portrayals (however histrionic) of the attacker as a martyr.
The laying of flowers outside Sogo was not about ’romanticizing a despicable act’, nor really even about honouring a stranger who could hardly have been of sound mind when he stabbed himself in the heart. Simple explanation: it’s a (now rare) opportunity for people to express their view of the NatSec regime as a whole, and of a police force now seen as an instrument of oppression.
The cops’ bullying of kids and bystanders in Causeway Bay earlier that day served no purpose other than to embitter the public. The intimidation of flower-bearers at Sogo the day after, or screaming at kids the day after that, etc, only accomplished the same. People are not like soymilk companies. (Warning: watching these items could make you ‘radicalised by myriad fake information’. You’d have thought the police PR people might realize that the whiny panty-wetting about ‘mourning the cold-blooded attacker’ is itself inciting more people to bring flowers – but no.)
As the articles at the top point out, Beijing’s Hong Kong officials could in theory ask how they created this mess, and break the cycle of brutality-alienation by returning to a more representative, rule-by-consent style of government. But in a system that relies on constant paranoia and insecurity, all they understand is a strategy to break the will of the population and force them into submission.
Sadly, the front-line cops don’t seem to realize – or mind – that this puts them in a position where they bear the brunt of public hostility. Meanwhile, their ex-boss-turned-Chief Secretary thinks he can heal the social divide…
…through “non-political activities” such as sports events and campaigns that encourage a healthy lifestyle among teenagers.
Among this year’s July 1 festivities: Police stopping and searching cross-harbour buses, swamping Causeway Bay, detaining Grandma Wong, kicking kids doing soccer practice and domestic helpers having picnics out of Victoria Park, chasing the usual petrified 10-year-old, and (surprising it doesn’t happen more often) someone apparently going nuts. At least we in Hong Kong didn’t have to sit through Xi’s hour-long speech.
A July 1 message from former Governor Chris Patten. In classic Patten annoy-all-the-right-people style, he begins with some pointed comments about social inequity in China.
Amnesty International declares a human-rights emergency in Hong Kong.
Make of it what you will: David Webb compiles Immigration Dept data to show daily arrivals and departures in Hong Kong since quarantine measures were imposed in Feb-Mar 2020. In the last 12 months there has been a net outflow of 116,000. Possible reasons: expats (including domestic workers) rotating out but not being replaced; other expats leaving before their contracts end because of Covid; and of course this. What we can’t tell is how the numbers break down. But if 100 families of three are flying out on one-way tickets every night for a year, that would add up to 110,000.
Lots of CCP anniversary material around – here’s a selection…
Foreign Policy wonders who the celebrations are really about – the CCP or its chairman?
The ever-discursive Geremie Barme looks back at 100 years of the CCP – with lots of fascinating personal recollections.
From Kevin Carrico, 10 myths about the CCP, including a reminder that it was the Communists who kept the Chinese people in poverty for decades.
A Mekong Review three-part series on the CCP’s centenary by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, using book reviews as an angle – starts here (with links to other two).
Minxin Pei sees China’s future as more North Korean than Singaporean.If you want more ‘positive energy’ in the anniversary celebrations, Christine Loh in HKFP tries to do a brief history of the CCP without upsetting the comrades on the one hand, but not totally shredding her own intellectual integrity on the other. Not much of the nasty distressing stuff!
The post-1997 Hong Kong honours system of Gold Bauhinia Stars and other medals is a direct relabeled version of the colonial-era system (MBE, OBE, etc), and as such is a cheap but effective way to reward pro-establishment shoe-shiners.
In the first few years after the handover, the government could give the new-look medals to previous recipients of the colonial ones – and thus vain property tycoons augmented their British titles with post-1997 ones. Compilers of the list also handed out honours to the city’s outstanding (but not politically outspoken) science, medical and cultural figures, but this small pool of potential recipients soon ran dry. In recent years, more and more of the top medals have been going to retiring, and even serving, public servants.
Health-care workers deservedly get some (lesser) awards this year (though some medical experts were missed out). But inevitably the list is heavy with NatSec cheerleaders (Regina Ip, etc), and there’s a large portion of embarrassingly puffed-up selfless police heroism. But the NatSec angle doesn’t hide the ‘honours inflation’ that has taken place in a system that gives recognition only to a small circle of insiders and shoe-shiners – not to the thousands of politicians, activists, entrepreneurs, volunteers, artists, academics and others whose service to their fields and the community has failed to include kowtowing. For most Hong Kong people, the honours are irrelevant, if not alienating.
Bunny Chan yesterday.
Classic example: longstanding pro-government stalwart Bunny Chan has progressed from Bronze Bauhinia Star in 2004, to Silver in 2009, to Gold in 2014, and now gets the top – supposedly super-elite – Grand Bauhinia Medal, simply for hanging around, because the Medal Management Committee can’t find anyone else.
Among other dubious awards…
Being perceptive and analytical, Mr [CK] CHOW has made remarkable contribution to tendering wise counsel on policy-making and administration of the Government.
(In other words, he stays awake during Executive Council meetings.)
Former Director of Public Prosecutions Grenville Cross, who got a Silver Bauhinia Star years back, now gets a Gold one – presumably for writing humiliating op-eds praising the NatSec Law in China Daily.
Martin Lee Ka-shing, son of Henderson Land property baron Lee Shau-kee for, er, helping the poor access housing.
Senior civil servants called Cherry, Maisie and Betty.
Daryl Ng, another property scion (dad Robert runs Sino Land) for ‘profound achievements in heritage conservation’, oh yes.
A token gwailo, a token brown person, a few ‘clansmen’ association bosses, and too many guys with the pretentious ‘Ir’ title (even one or two bores who are both ‘Ir’ and ‘Dr’).
The citations for the cops’ Medal for Bravery push the ‘saving civilization’ narrative to the limits and probably insult many previous recipients…
…was challenged and assaulted ferociously by violent rioters with hard objects during the execution of duties. She bravely protected her colleagues with her body to save them from sustaining more deadly injuries.
…was challenged and assaulted ferociously by violent rioters with umbrella and fists during the execution of duties.
…responded to a call to attend to one of the most dangerous cases involving homemade explosives in Hong Kong’s history. At the scene, there were sensitive and unstable homemade explosives known as triacetone-triperoxide (TATP), which had been used in terrorist attacks around the world.
…responded to a call to attend to the case involving two largest homemade bombs in Hong Kong’s history. The two large bombs, weighed around 8 kilogrammes and 2 kilogrammes respectively and designed to be set off by mobile phones, were more powerful than that of the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. The explosion would cause maximum devastation and injuries.
Some Hong Kong history. Enjoy the rest of the Handover Day/CCP 100th anniversary festivities!
HK Police uncover a Special Occasion gunpowder plot. (No ‘bang’ here – but you probably guessed that. Maybe a few dozen beer bottles.) This comes after the sleuths tracked down dangerous stickers, and as they prepare to put 10,000 cops on the streets tomorrow to help us celebrate this extra special Handover Day.
Remember Apple Daily? Or maybe it never existed. For proof it was once a big deal – the second part of Lee Yee’s series on the paper is here.
As we all know, there’s a major anniversary taking place right now – congratulations to Hong Kong Free Press for making it to year seven.
Defending the accused “is an impossible task,” one lawyer told AFP.
“This is presumption of guilt.”
For a mega-read on the subject, Georgetown Law has just released a briefing – Hong Kong National Security Law and the Right to a Fair Trial.
Will the NatSec Regime manage to co-opt a splinter de-facto pro-Beijing Democratic Party to play the role of fake opposition? I’m betting a few of these nonentities will turn quisling. If so, it will simply remind all right-thinking people that there will be nothing to vote for in the forthcoming LegCo ‘election’.
Reuters on how China’s state-owned companies are boycotting HSBC.
Vehemently denying you are insecure is a sure sign of insecurity – discuss. Anyway, the Diplomat notes the festivities surrounding the CCP’s 100th birthday party, and detects a bit of uncertainty…
…the campaign seems infused with insecurity.
…the reality of party history is much more unsavory than leaders are willing to acknowledge.
In April this year, a man is believed to have been publicly executed by firing squad in front of approximately 500 people for illegally selling CDs and USBs containing South Korean video and music content…
The article goes on to say…
South Korea has installed loudspeakers that can be used to can blast propaganda into North Korea. In 2016, as a response to nuclear tests from the North, K-pop was blasted loud and clear in a show of defiance. K-pop hits such as Big Bang’s Bang Bang Bang were chosen as a way to irritate the regime…
Today’s top tip: If you want to get someone arrested, put a sticker on their door.
RTHK is cancelling more shows, while a former editorial writer at Apple Daily is arrested at the airport before boarding his flight – ‘collusion with foreign forces’ stuff. It seems the NatSec Regime has a list of journalists to be prevented from leaving the city. It would be strange if they didn’t.
Which brings us to a short piece with lots of pix on a former photographer at the paper who has already moved his family out…
The adjustment to life in Leeds, a city in northern England, has perhaps been easiest for his 5-year-old daughter. Before leaving, Hui told her that their new home was a place where people of different skin colors and races lived, just like in the Disney movie “Frozen.”
She has been enjoying the spacious parks, huge warehouse-like toy stores and a larger bedroom than in densely packed Hong Kong. “After all she’s still young, and she doesn’t know what’s going on,” he said.
If you feel like being depressed today, see the photos of scenes at the London flights check-in at the airport.
(Some suspect that the recent supposedly Covid-related ban on inbound passenger flights from the UK is in fact a ruse to reduce capacity on the route and stop Hongkongers from fleeing. In a place with a government that breaks your door down because you have a flag on the washing rack, why shouldn’t they?)
The government announces senior appointments and removals. Matthew Cheung is released from his misery (where will he retire?). Unusually for a Security Secretary, John Lee moves up to Chief Secretary. Police Commissioner (for 19 months) Tang Ping-keung becomes Security Secretary. Deputy Commissioner Siu Chak-yee is the new police chief. (The release omits the last two’s ‘Chris’ and ‘Raymond’.)
“It is important that there is a senior officer to give an objective view, consider it from other angles, taking into consideration other interests and concerns, so as to ensure all the concerns and matters are addressed, and I consider that as my main function,”
This is a partial, as well as rambling, job description for the Chief Executive’s deputy. Lee has presumably been put into the number-two position not merely to coordinate but to ensure that every government department becomes a NatSec-compliant department. We can imagine he and Chris Tang being co-opted by the CCP long ago; years of grooming as trusted locals now come to fruition after Beijing assumes direct rule under the NatSec Regime.
The chatter is that Carrie will remain as captive puppet figurehead for another term (including implementation of BL Article 23 unfinished business).
For the bigger context, don’t miss this Quartz article on the first anniversary of the NatSec Law, describing the transformation in governance represented by rising security budgets, arrests, sentencing, censorship and other controls…
A new security structure now sits atop existing institutions, in many cases directly altering the institutions’ original functions and imposing a new priority upon them: upholding national security, as defined by Beijing.
…once you have a bureaucracy, the bureaucracy has to do things to justify its own existence,” said Ho-fung Hung, professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University. The national security complex, he added, will target an endless list of enemies…
We could add that, in the punitive top-down PRC system, lower bureaucratic levels would rather overreact than try to be subtle. The recent banning of a Taiwanese documentary film suggests local officials so petrified when faced with NatSec enforcement duties that they use a sledgehammer on everything to be safe.
The NatSec ‘Law’ is not merely a law or a new focus on law and order. It is essentially the Mainlandization of Hong Kong’s government. The Mainland-staffed NatSec Office is above the law. It has extensions and annexes in the police, prosecutions, judiciary and now Chief Executive’s office, and is in effect a parallel government – Party commissars behind the scenes ensuring discipline and obedience throughout the subservient and more visible civil/state administrative structure (plus of course rubber-stamp legislature).
For masochists wanting exhaustive detail, Human Rights Watch releases a Hong Kong report: Beijing Dismantles a Free Society. And HKFP compiles a near-endless list of steps in the decline of press freedom in the city. (It can now add Stand News’ measures, like suspending opinion pieces, to protect writers and staff. I think they are also concerned about readers’ contributions – as perhaps we should all be.)
In the nearest thing Hong Kong will get to a democratic vote in the foreseeable future, people lined up in the streets yesterday to buy up a million copies of the last edition of Apple Daily.
Ten seconds into a BBC interview, Chris Patten sums it up in his first sentence.
Former editor and senior contributor Lee Yee offers his thoughts via Geremie Barme. Nathan Law does the same in the Spectator.
Atlantic provides a good look back at the often-boisterous tabloid’s impact on Hong Kong, including ‘shaking up the cozy elite world of the developers, politicians and the media’. (If I recall correctly, competitors were so angry at the new Apple Daily’s low cover price that gangsters threw piles of the paper into the sea.)
The government’s Science and Technology Park moves to evictApple Daily’s printing plant from the industrial zone. Why didn’t the CCP think of this earlier – or would it have been too quick?
A diligent pro-Beijing nonentity finds that the Librarian’s Choice display at Shek Tong Tsui public library had 13 (!) Jimmy Lai titles. Sixty armed NatSec Police surround the shelves while dozens of others raid the homes of Leisure and Cultural Services staff. They have now launched a manhunt for several quiet, single, bespectacled women with cats. (OK, so what was DAB lawmaker Horace doing in a library in the first place?)
When they’ve finished with that, they also have the Book Fair to swoop on.
Other horrors…
After nearly a year in jail, Tong Ying-kit goes to trial on NatSec charges in a NatSec court. He is pleading not guilty to incite secession (carrying a flag) and terrorism (riding a motorbike). Stand Newsreport on the trial.
And a little-reported case of an American lawyer who tried to break up a fight and ended up being accused of assaulting a police officer – now convicted.
A quick update from the airport’s London-flight check-in.
Some weekend reading for the armchair China-watchers…
Foreign Affairs tries to explain Xi Jinping’s hasty, hubristic, apparently reckless rush to make himself emperor for life and China the centre of the universe…
Xi believes he can mold China’s future as did the emperors of the country’s storied past. He mistakes this hubris for confidence—and no one dares tell him otherwise.
An almost-as-good-as-reading-the-article thread – with vids – on the NY Times’ piece about China’s elaborate online disinformation and propaganda campaign to counter Uighur genocide allegations.
On a related note, the Conversation on Beijing’s tireless attempts to rewrite history at home and abroad.
CMP on how China is trying to improve its ‘international discourse power’, especially reaching young media consumers.
If you’re intrigued by the formation of a Communist Party cell in the Chinese space station, here’s a Jamestown article on the whole setting-up of branches overseas, on other planets, etc. I’m thinking of setting up a CCP cell in my bathroom.
For fans of that ‘Last G7’ painting, What’s on Weibo looks at the strange world of Chinese ultra-patriotic online artwork. (Not just a Chinese phenomenon, of course. Fans of this sort of thing should check out Jon McNaughton and Ben Garrison.)
Reasons for the killing of Apple Daily (it says here): to scare all HongKongers; to silence all independent media; and to make everyone forget history. We could also add plain personal vindictiveness – a desire for revenge dating back to Giordano’s pro-student T-shirts in 1989.
By pulling the Next media group down, the CCP also makes Hong Kong a different place – as, say, demolishing the old Star Ferry pier for reclamation did in the past, and imposing simplified characters will in the future. Tian Feilong switches on the charm on this theme in Globular Times.
Apple Daily‘s demise attracts a lot of international media attention – along the lines that Beijing is breaking its promises to preserve Hong Kong’s freedoms and is endangering the city’s role as a business hub.
This overlooks two things. First, the Leninist leaders in Beijing would consider it absurd that they must be subservient to independent players – the media, courts, the law, principles of human or civil rights – in order for Hong Kong to maintain an ‘economic status’ defined by foreigners. CCP control is the only consideration. Second, it underestimates the motivation and determination of businesses to ignore degraded institutions so long as they are still making profits.
‘Both a celebration and a funeral’ – the scene outside Apple Daily HQ last night. Photos here and here.
The persecution of Apple Daily does not stop here. NatSec Police arrested its lead opinion writer on suspicion of ‘conspiracy to collude with foreign forces’, presumably through his opinions.
A small sign that establishment figures are finding all this a bit too creepy – Bank of East Asia patriarch David Li sends his sympathies…
…while I work out what to do with four souvenir subversive bottles of Watson’s water. I’m assuming the bottles will keep their future rare collectors’ item/heritage value if the contents have been used (distilled water is good for pickling).
On Apple Daily… HKFPtalks to the paper’s staff in their last day or two on the job. Bloomberg recalls a time when the authorities tried to help keep media owners out of jail…
…the government decided against charging newspaper owner Sally Aw in a case of circulation fraud to boost sales figures, even though she was named as a co-conspirator by the anti-corruption agency … partly because “the prosecution of the chairman of a well-established and important media group at that time could have led to the failure of the group, which would have sent a very bad message to the international community.”
(If I remember correctly, the government also cited Sing Tao‘s role as an employer as a reason.)
At a press conference, Chief Executive Carrie Lam gets whiny about foreign disapproval of the destruction of a free press, and about overseas media ‘beautification’ of acts that endanger national security (more in HKFP and the Guardian).
As a reminder that the NatSec Regime’s incessant paranoid freak-outs have people on edge, a minor routine change to HSBC’s online-banking terms and conditions triggers panicky rumours among Hongkongers convinced that the bank is moving to curb capital flight by cutting off access to their accounts while overseas. Now once-unthinkable injustices have become weekly norms, it doesn’t sound unbelievable.
In case you missed it: a Globular Times ‘journalist’ tweets a pic of a Hong Kong ‘bus’ tastefully ‘decorated’ in CCP 100th anniversary slogans and logos, ‘providing residents with a rare opportunity to know more about the Party’ – and you won’t believe what happened next.
Exciting news from the Civil Service Most Mind-Boggling Bureaucracy Competition. Everyone had assumed that the much-coveted award had been won – with ease – by the Treasury’s magnificently unfathomable Buy Stuff at Big Stores Voucher Scheme. But, in a last-minute burst of inter-departmental rivalry, the plucky public servants at the Food and Health Bureau pipped them at the post with an utter giant hairball of ‘not exact science’ Covid rules for gatherings, restaurants, quarantine, etc that are so complex that several of the bureaucrats drafting it disappeared somewhere among the sub-paragraphs and have still not been found.
Some excerpts from For the Love of Hong Kong by Hana Meihan Davis, with an intro by Geremie Barme.
And Lennon Wall – an interactive archive of Hong Kong protest movement images removed from Mainland social media.
