Who on earth is John Cena? Never heard of him. Apparently some sort of tough guy, now on his knees publicly groveling to the almighty Panda.
At the other end of the virtue-and-heroism scale: Lee Cheuk-yan’s plea of mitigation to the court ahead of his sentencing for taking part in an unauthorized assembly on October 1 2019. It reads almost like the older-generation pan-dems’ swansong. His heartfelt claim to be a true and constant patriot will presumably cut no ice with the judge.
Looking unmistakably slightly like a mummy staggering out of the crypt, Tofu-for-Brains appears on stage to announce that people wanting to leave Hong Kong ‘lack foresight’, and the city ‘has what it takes to become the place where everybody wants to be’, and ‘the best is yet to come’. For full effect, imagine the words coming from the captain of the Titanic. If you get the impression that, despite all the finger-wagging, he is not absolutely convinced himself, you’re right – the guy always was too guileless/nice/simple to bang the table with total resolve while spouting brazen lies like a CCP professional.
(By the way, fans of useful idiots will like the ‘righteous foreigners’ section at Tung’s HK Coalition group website: an Eric says Hongkongers must embrace Bay Area common identity, while one Oriol says hooray for the Five-Year Plan and Fintech hub! HK Coalition theme song? You’re welcome!)
On a more serious note, the HK and Macau Affairs Office is expanding its capacity to include a new propaganda department to ‘weed out incorrect viewpoints’, and some sort of national security function – which will presumably coordinate seamlessly with the existing NatSec Office. And RTHK is resolutely crushing internal resistance.
Some mid-week China-watching reading…
Willy Lam on how Xi Jinping plans to mark the CCP’s 100th anniversary.
CMP explains how Beijing sorts out unruly government social-media accounts.
In Lowy Interpreter, the Oz vs NZ laboratory experiment: is it worth being nice to China or not worth the bother?
J Michael Cole argues for defending Taiwan…
Many who argue for abandonment tend to have a very weak understanding of Taiwan, the history of the conflict in the Taiwan Strait, and the increasingly important role that this vibrant economy and successful democracy plays in the 21st century. Most of them write as if they’ve never set foot in Taiwan – and indeed, some never have.
A (long) Hollywood Reporter piece on the US movie industry’s relationship with China following the hoo-hah over Nomadland.
Critics … argue that China has cannily leveraged its market heft to co-opt Hollywood’s global pop culture machine into effectively carrying the water for one of the country’s most important lines of strategic global messaging: that China’s rise as a global superpower is a benign or stabilizing phenomenon.
In SupChina, All you want to know about China’s mega-’bad bank’ Huarong.
How the 1942 Battle of Midway informs China’s military thinking.
The CCP is keeping Hong Kong officials busy. The local administration will now require non-civil servant staff to sign a loyalty oath (meaning they can be fired for attending protests, voicing wrong thoughts, or being reported to the NatSec Police hotline). And it is suspending operations at its office in Taiwan, amid whiny accusations that Renegade Province has interfered in Hong Kong affairs blah blah by setting up ‘so-called’ things.
HK Post is issuing a special set of stamps to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the CCP. It will be interesting (ie stomach-churning) to see how much of Beijing’s overblown and even gory Red revolutionary centenary rhetoric seeps into Hong Kong official communication in the run-up to July 23. (The stamp blurb says ‘the 56 beams radiating from the logo signify the CPC’s endeavour of striving for advancement that shines all over the country’. They actually represent the PRC’s officially recognized ethnic groups.)
Maybe HK Post should have asked a kid. A school apparently asks its students to complete a questionnaire (update: deleted) asking them to rate every aspect of their own blind patriotism on a scale of 1 to 5. (Not the first time.) Details are murky, but it looks like the school wants to pre-emptively present authorities with a glowing report of how loyal its kids are to the motherland, to avoid suspicions to the contrary. There are good reasons for principals to do this.
Which brings us to middle-class flight to the (UK) suburbs. In his Escape the Commies series, Bob’s Your Uncle checks out UK residential areas being pushed in real-estate ads in Hong Kong media. In this episode, we visit a swampy place in East London called Thamesmead – which seems to be a sort of Tin Shui Wai, but with high crime, no mass transit and a sewage plant.
Kevin Carrico looks at the latest NatSec Regime developments…
…we can see that the “small handful of people” Carrie Lam told us would be affected by the National Security Law … expanding to literally hundreds of thousands who have attended the Tiananmen Massacre vigil in Victoria Park over the years.
Speaking of small handfuls, Frederic Choi was recently caught patronizing an unlicensed massage parlor.
Also in the ‘small handfuls’ department: Nury Vittachi’s latest project. An attempt to ‘tell the other side of the story’ through content too earnestly vapid to count as propaganda. Two items, on rents and 2047 (error-filled), seem curiously angled at puffing up property prices. Then there’s a warning for white guys that ‘while East Asian women may look younger for longer, by the time they have reached retirement age, their age advantage disappears’. Can’t help wondering who the site’s donors are. Worth a read in emergencies when you can’t get hold of Mogadon.
Back at a real news site – HKFP has an interesting contribution from a Civil Aid Services worker ‘telling the other side of the story’ about conditions at Penny’s Bay quarantine centre.
Latest from Art Basel HK: seditious exhibits on display, if you look carefully.
And a rare plug for a restaurant: Africa Coffee & Tea, on the 15th floor of a Wong Chuk Hang commercial block. Clearly a popular and not-very-quiet drinking place for local office workers, but the piri-piri chicken, lamb curry and other East African food is seriously good.
Two mildly amusing developments this week. First, the Big Tough NatSec Police was renamed the Bordello-Lurking Reputational Suicide Squad. The second was presaged by a chance conversation with a non-tech, non-libertarian and non-financially literate Discovery Bay resident. He proudly announced that he had ‘invested’ in a cryptocurrency I’d never heard of; it had a ‘market cap’ of X billion dollars (he showed me on a slick-looking trading app); and it’s blockchain and therefore just like the next Internet! As such innocents are drawn in, the ultra-leveraged, ‘group-hypnosis’ cryptocurrency bubble-scam took another lurch or three closer to the ditch.
The rest is not so funny…
You want trial by jury? Not if the CCP finds it inconvenient. The (CCP-cleared) judge making the ruling in the case of Tong Ying-kit argues that it is not a total right, and anyway the NatSec Law overrides it. The NatSec Law allows for trial without a jury for three reasons: to protect state secrets; in cases involving foreign forces; and – the catch-all, as here – to protect the personal safety of jurors (wink wink). And no bail either. The fact is that Tong Ying-kit is guilty of reckless driving; the rest – terrorism and inciting secession – is BS for which he will be convicted by a kangaroo court.
A history lesson: the guy who attempted to poison the entire bread-eating (ie Western) population of Hong Kong in 1853 got off – thanks to a jury.
CityAM describes the irreparable damage Beijing is doing to Hong Kong, through freezing Jimmy Lai’s assets and otherwise undermining rule of law.
Note that to Beijing, ‘irreparable damage’ means ‘permanent improvement’ – in the CCP’s ability to control the city. Harm to Hong Kong as an ‘international’ (ie Westerner-friendly) business hub is of no real consequence, so long as elites and their families can use the city to get their wealth out of the Glorious Motherland. If foreign financial and other players scramble for a slice of the action, that’s fine.
The most visible exodus in the next few years is likely to be of local people who want to get their kids out of all this.
Some links for the weekend…
Martin Jacques gets a kicking on Twitter for desperate tanky arguments about superior ancient Oriental wisdom. He even believes Beijing’s official 4,000-odd figure for Covid deaths.
From someone with an understanding of how Leninists work, silenced academic Xu Zhangrun’s letter to censors.
AFR editorial on why Xi Jinping, not Australia, is to blame for the worsening relations between China and Oz. More on the subject from ASPI.
Also from ASPI, a report on the drop in the birthrate among indigenous populations in Xinjiang – greater than in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. (AP story here.)
Human rights groups to push for a full boycott of China’s Winter Olympics.
Politico reports that the European Parliament is likely to pass a motion sure to anger China. (Does the body have any power to obstruct a trade and investment deal? Can’t imagine the German government would cede control to a transnational elected chamber.)
Andreas Fulda presents a flow chart of how the CCP’s propaganda system works.
A Quartz interview with British politician Tom Tugendhat, who takes a special interest in China.
If you find old sepia family photos interesting – SCMP Vancouver correspondent Ian Young’s great-aunt Elsie’s wedding picture from 1923, complete with symbols of ‘both Chinese nationalist and Anglo-Australian patriotism’.
Totally off-topic, but possibly interesting…
Prospect on the whole concept of government debt.
A badly needed laugh from Bob Newhart.
An ever-so thorough internal inquiry exonerates National Security Police hero Frederic Choi after his caught-in-illicit-’massage’-place-raid embarrassment. While his fellow cops state that he did nothing illegal or immoral, six women at the scene were arrested. So it’s one rule for bystanders in a bordello, another for those at protests. Allegedly one ‘Vietspa’ in Wanchai. OK, I looked up ‘nuru’ – sounds a bit… distracting. (Update: more sordid details in Chinese Apple Daily.)
Remember – the CCP are in charge, so they will decide what happens and what you see happen. Either they did the framing/leaking (for whatever reason), or someone else who did is going to be in major trouble if they identify him.
Elsewhere in Hong Kong…
David Webb on what Jimmy Lai’s lawyers could argue (in theory) in order to unfreeze his assets.
After a long period of indecision, the Catholic Church names a new Bishop of Hong Kong – Stephen Chow. (No, not that Stephen Chow.) He claims not to know whether the Vatican and CCP agreed on his appointment, and delivers this insipid, hand-wringing gem:
The question is how to walk with young people, to keep them company with empathy, so we could walk closer together again.
And…
In response to a question about whether Catholics are facing suppression in the mainland, Chow said the removal of crosses by the authorities there “is not something we are happy to see”.
“Removing crosses I think is not nice, but we need to understand the reason behind it. I don’t like to use the word ‘suppression’,” he said.
However, he is a Jesuit and probably a lot smarter than he wants us to think. A Catholic publication goes into the politics here. In the background lurk the Vatican’s unseemly Panda-hugging impulses.
The court revokes bail for – and jails – six activists after they plead guilty to the usual ‘unauthorized assembly’ BS from 2019. Among them are Albert Ho, Yeung Sum and Sin Chung-kai – almost stereotypical peaceful, moderate and reasonable Democratic Party members. Which brings us to…
A lengthy essay on whether non-radical pan-dems should continue trying to work within the system and participate in the Legislative Council. The determinedly hyper-moderate author thinks they should, though this assumes not only that they are not in jail, but that the CCP would allow such semi- (or any) shoe-shiners input into policy-making – which is a joke. The NatSec Regime means a system with no open ‘politics’, just rituals crafted to reinforce obedience.
The Art Newspaper reports on the slimmed-down Art Basel HK taking place over the next few days. Organizers think that the NatSec Regime will not impose censorship like it does at M+ in years ahead as theirs is a private-sector event. Presumably meaning it’s about money, not art. Even so. good luck with that.
Hong Kong’s security minister John Lee tries to make the freezing of Jimmy Lai’s assets sound normal – nothing to do with press freedom, and purely aimed at preventing heinous crimes and threats to national security. (Apple Daily looks at the legal side of asset-freezing here.)
It doesn’t help that Lee is an ex-police officer. Anyone who watched HK Police press conferences back in 2019 will recall how cop-spokespersons always found it utterly bewildering that some among their audience might not believe their often-idiotic lies and drivel (‘reasonable force’, ‘yellow object’, etc).
Commissioner Chris Tang takes a relatively more sophisticated approach. Rather than assume that everyone will automatically accept what he says as the truth, he implicitly threatens to arrest reporters who don’t.
The police are not the only branch of government in decline these days. Could slime mould do a better job than Hong Kong’s transport planners? Stupid question, I guess.
The authorities freeze the personal assets of Jimmy Lai – who has not been found guilty of anything. – with no recognizable due process or anything. At some point, local officials will surely get tired of insisting that Hong Kong remains an appealing international business hub, and admit that the old rhetoric no longer applies. (See Paul Chan juggling the ‘leading international business centre’ blather along with the ‘Western countries containing China’ stuff here.)
And the government will deregister trade unions that somehow fail to comply with the NatSec Law (ie, are pro-dem). It will be interesting to see if any moderate/agnostic unions that exist are invited to kowtow in order to continue operating. Ultimately a Leninist regime must control everything, and unions are no exception. NGOs, charities, youth groups and churches – anything that is organized – will follow.
Some worthwhile reading…
In HKFP, Yuen Chan quotes Ching Cheong on how the CCP ambushes enemies and floats trial balloons using Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao…
“In the past, people wouldn’t give them a second thought. They have very few readers and what they say is totally out of step with Hong Kong values,” says Ching. “But now the CCP’s influence is everywhere and inescapable. It has comprehensive governance and … you have to listen to what its mouthpiece in Hong Kong is saying.”
There is already an established pattern in which WWP/TKP call for action against something or someone (eg the Bar Association) and officials dutifully start giving off negative vibes at the target.
From Transit Jam, a tale of a HK government multi-year, multi-million, multi-fruitlessness pedestrian signage project.
Al Jazeera on the Western ‘anti-imperialist’ lefties (aka tankies) who back Beijing on genocide in Xinjiang…
…we now have a group of Western “anti-imperialists” siding with China simply because they feel whatever the US says is suspect, and therefore what China claims is not.
An academic explains why the Mainland’s housing bubble threatens the financial system and undermines household purchasing power, entrepreneurism and willingness to have children.
This is happening in many societies – not least Hong Kong. But it seems uniquely dangerous in China, where the middle class have few non-property investment options and have only ever seen home prices go up. Michael Pettis reckons so much debt is backed by overvalued real-estate collateral, and so much middle-class wealth tied up in it, that Beijing can’t/won’t dare bring prices down. But with younger people and migrants priced out of the market (affordability ratios in Shenzhen are reportedly around 40, compared with 20 in Hong Kong), the status quo risks social discontent. Brings to mind Tung Chee-hwa around 20 years ago saying ‘we want prices to come down but not too much’.
And Best First Two Sentences of the Week Award goes to this Tim Hamlett piece, which starts…
There is something a little desperate about Hong Kong’s senior officials insisting that we still have an independent judiciary. It seems that other civic amenities have been written off.
Paul Tse – one of the sadder pro-Beijing lawmakers – opines that visiting unlicensed massage parlours is not as bad as jaywalking. One exploits trafficked women, but the other might leave messy blood stains all over someone’s nice Mercedes.
Not exactly in the same league as NatSec-Gestapo-Massage-Gate, but assistants of pro-Beijing ‘politician’ Starry Lee are convicted of bribing a voter (with a HK$100 goody bag) to vote DAB. The big surprise here is that United Front grunts doing their usual thing were prosecuted, even put in custody, in the first place – as if they were common pan-dem activists.
Like DJ Giggs, who is hit with more charges on top of sedition and secession-related ones. Reading not very far between the lines, it looks pretty clear that his only crime ultimately is having and expressing the wrong opinions.
Which is why we see more and more items like this one, from The Hill – a frothy but serious warning to anyone doing business in Hong Kong. And an AmCham survey suggesting that at least some US business people in the city are nervous about the NatSec Regime. (While we’re at it, civil service resignations have also risen.) China’s official spokesperson Hua Chunying could act cool and shrug off the AmCham poll, but instead hits back, almost as if the survey strikes a raw nerve.
More from Ms Hua, tying herself in knots defending Beijing’s propaganda efforts.
Speaking of which, a summary of the IFJ report on how Beijing has used Wuhan-originated Covid-19 to boost its international image (needless to say, it hasn’t succeeded uniformly – but places like Serbia seem to lap it up).
A little selection of weekend reading…
Which stats do you believe – the ones they falsified earlier or the ones they rigged recently? Andrew Batson looks at how China’s latest census figures conflict with population reports in the Northeast rustbelt.
And from ZolimaCityMag, how Hong Kong influenced Eileen Chang.
For fans (or non-fans) of excessive plastic wrapping, here’s a lone. solitary can of soda water that came as a Free!!! Bonus Gift as part of an order from HKTV…
The worst thing is it’s hyper-tough – won’t even pop when you stand on it.
Number-two NatSec Police chief Frederic Choi is sent on leave pending an investigation for misconduct. It seems he was caught in a raid on an ‘unlicensed massage’ place. Now, several weeks later, it is leaked to the press. Tongues are of course wagging, and the public are enjoying the sight of puffed-up Police Commissioner Chris Tang on the defensive.
But what exactly has happened? Did a Senior Assistant Commissioner – surely an intelligent/happily married/well-paid/connected/informed man – actually resort to some illicit sleaze-pit for a ‘massage’? Or was his presence some sort of entrapment or even a fabricated frame-up?
The answer to the first question could well be ‘yes’ because it is not totally unknown for cops to be a bit dim or uncouth, especially if they are in a unit that is told it is above the law. So – was the vice raid on the premises while he was there a pure coincidence? That is too much to believe. The raid and/or the press leak must be the work of someone who wanted to smear him.
That could mean someone with a major grudge against him – possibly (if this were a TV show) a criminal he once brought to justice, though for the purposes of far more exciting Internet drama let’s stick to rogue elements or rivals among officials or cops.
However, there’s a problem with this theory. Framing, snitching on or just doxxing (loosely defined) a high-ranking Beijing-approved US-sanctioned award-winning NatSec functionary would be a risky step. Indeed, an embarrassing and sensitive high-profile leak like this is tantamount to undermining the state. Would any mere mortals – like fellow cops/officials – dare cross the CCP by indulging in such office-backstabbing shenanigans?
So we go back to another explanation, namely that the whole thing is a more basic stitch-up. And we all know who in Hong Kong has extensive expertise in arranging for people to be caught in tawdry circumstances.
The CCP picked and authorized Choi in the first place, and could order a sideways promotion or any (and I mean any) way of disappearing him if they wished. But if he displeased the central authorities in some way, and the vindictive CCP paranoids saw a need to make an example of him, isn’t an illegal vice den scandal exactly what you would expect? Right down to the ‘if the locals look even more stupid, who cares?’ attitude.
Or, of course, there could be a dozen other explanations.
Not just authoritarian so much as disturbing, Police Commissioner Chris Tang rants again about ‘fake news’…
“Whether a piece is considered fake news has to do with moral judgement and credibility issues, and has nothing to do with me. But if these fake news incite hatred and divide society, then people have a chance of committing crimes, including offences related to national security. Then I have to act,” Tang said…
“As long as you broke the law, we will find evidence to prove that you committed a crime. You can only wait at home for us to arrest you. But you don’t have to worry at all if you didn’t break the law,” he said.
Sounds like the Commissioner will use his moral judgement and credibility to decide whether a story ‘incites hatred and divides society’. The baiting of individual law or education professionals by Ta Kung Pao presumably won’t, but any Apple Daily report exposing incompetence or brutality by the disciplined services will – as would some recent Hong Kong coverage in The Guardian, Atlantic and other international media.
Every day – every week, at least – we get that little bit closer to packing our bags.
Also coming soon: a new, very tough, law against doxxing. The naming of cops in online forums is another of the Police Commissioner’s big hang-ups. But this drastic leveraging of the Privacy Commissioner’s function – along with the partial obscuring of business and vehicle registration records – suggests that the pressure comes from higher up, and is aimed at ensuring the confidentiality of CCP elites and their families.
Despite all this, Ranting So-Called Freak-Out of the Week Award goes not to the HK Police chief but to Globular Times, for its extreme reaction to a little-known democracy conference in Copenhagen at which Taiwan President Tsai Ing Wen appeared.
A mid-week round-up of recent items on other fake news…
From the Hoover Institution, a guide to the CCP’s overseas propaganda…
Leveraging Western elites’ weakness and gullibility, plus the vulnerability of open societies, the CCP’s massive overseas propaganda campaigns can be delineated into four general categories: disinformation, elite capture, coerced self-censorship, and brainwashing.
One example: an analytical study of Beijing’s Twitter activities in the UK, with graphics showing things like the fake accounts that follow the PRC ambassador. (Summary in this AP report.)
And an Axios report on the expansion of Beijing’s influence work in the US, based on foreign-agent filings.