Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Great news for anyone who badly wants to vomit right now but for some reason just can’t: Regina Ip says…

Last weekend, Hong Kong’s billionaires stood on the street in the sweltering heat and visited low-income families to help publicize the new electoral system.

It was a beautiful sight to behold billionaires showing care for poorer people – even as a political posture. It drives home China’s requirement that all those who hold political office must be part of the people and accountable to the people.

While Reg goes to absurd I’m-not-a-freak lengths to prove herself fit to be next Chief Executive, the incumbent Carrie Lam runs off shrieking to slash her wrists over a typo in the backdrop at a press conference about Mainland something blah blah stuff. (It should be ‘zhong hua‘. Even I can see that. I almost feel sorry for those Beijing officials who complain that Hong Kong civil servants are ignorant of the motherland.)

National Carceral Week continues with Hong Kong’s authorities fighting the chocolate-and-hairpin prison rebellion by pressuring inmates’ support group Wallfare to disband.

The announcement came a week after Security Secretary Chris Tang said some groups were giving prisoners treats such as chocolate to recruit them to endanger national security.

The NGO helps channel letters and basic supplies to prisoners. One grateful beneficiary describes its fate as cruel. A previous HKFP piece on such work.

And the HK Journalists Association puts on a brave face as rectification draws near.

But wait! We’re just getting started. Hong Kong needs more NatSec offences…

National security offences are treated differently than other crimes. 

In Hong Kong, only handpicked national security judges can adjudicate trials, bail is usually denied to those who are arrested and juries are not a requirement, despite offences carrying up to life in jail.

We need more NatSec laws to counteract – among other dangers lurking in our midst – espionage. (What about Evergrande? Doesn’t Evergrande seem a bigger threat right now?)

A juxtaposition of SCMP headlines shows how, in just 11 short months, Hong Kong’s prison service has changed. What had been a confident and manly institution embracing rapid-fire guns and expanding shields has become a panic-stricken wreck, petrified of chocolate and hairpins. The city’s justice and penal system is still learning how to handle prisoners of conscience.

The Washington Post highlights the plight of American lawyer Samuel Bickett, convicted of assaulting a police officer who had refused to identify himself while beating a young man in an MTR station… 

“To commit this crime, you have to have actual knowledge that he’s a police officer,” Bickett said. “And there’s a video of this guy saying he is not a police officer.”

Among other subjects in the (possibly paywalled) WaPo piece: the likelihood that prisons will become less transparent and fair as they clampdown on their own ‘civil society’ of political prisoners (often seen by other inmates as heroes); the extent to which the police are now in practice above the law; and the hypersensitivity of the police and Justice Dept in response to press queries.

The NatSec regime faces a challenge in calibrating how harshly to deal with the American (not the first US lawyer it has arrested and bailed). If it thought Bickett would keep quiet and let things slide when he was let out of jail to appeal, it was wrong. The system has picked on someone who takes a stand (like Chow Hang-tung or the ladies at Lo Wu Correctional Institution)…

I feel such a responsibility to speak out. Many of my fellow Hongkongers will never get this sort of attention for their case. If the Police are doing this to me, despite all my privilege, then what they’re doing to the powerless and voiceless is much worse.

(Link to YouTube video of the incident. )

The NatSec scriptwriters now have to make a choice: back off and admit the cops were in the wrong that day in the MTR, or do the classic Crush Without Mercy psycho-Leninist thing on this guy and have it all over the US press.

Meanwhile, it’s time for the NatSec regime to come for the charities.

A minor amusement – or at least a curiosity – as Hong Kong’s NatSec regime prepares to prosecute HK Alliance and other activists for their past calls for an end to China’s one-party state. Several current judges, including one at the proceedings for Chow Hang-tung last Friday and three NatSec judges, signed a petition in May 1989 supporting the students in Tiananmen Square. A reminder that some of today’s leading pro-Beijing figures did as well.

A few other things… 

Some more details on the prison authorities’ horror upon finding that jailed activists might engage with and win support from fellow inmates. Could the Correctional Services management avoid ‘rebellion’ over chocolate and hairpins if they updated their obsessive and petty restrictions on what items prisoners may receive? 

Denise Ho’s concert goes ahead online from an undisclosed (and apparently sweaty) location.

Professor Michael Davis’ testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Among many gems…

It seems only in Hong Kong does trying to defeat the government in accordance with constitutional requirements amount to subversion.

And more on Beijing’s use of social media – the YouTube foreign legion.

Another ‘no clampdown on civil society’ day. NatSec police raid the Tiananmen Massacre Museum, because obviously they’re going to do that straight after rounding up members of museum organizers HK Alliance. Then they charge Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho and Chow Hang-tung with incitement to subversion (Chow almost welcomes the challenge). And a dozen pan-dems plead guilty to unauthorized assembly and incitement at last year’s 6-4 vigil.

Yet to be raided: Hong Kong’s M+ Museum, due to open in a couple of months. Aiming to keep themselves raid-free, the curators have pulled a work by Ai Weiwei from the online gallery to ‘await government review’. However, as Artnet News reports, some other artists’ potentially controversial pieces in the modern art collection remain on the website for now. This apparent discrepancy is easily explained: the pro-Beijing shoe-shiner-legislators and the government’s own bureaucrats have actually heard of Ai.

Some (OK, a lot) weekend reading…

Jerome Cohen on the Hong Kong crackdown on civil society.

Timothy McGlaughlin at Atlantic on the role Ta Kung Pao plays in creating the CCP’s narrative about Hong Kong and in triggering intimidation and persecution of pro-democrats ‘and others who land on Beijing’s ever-expanding list of enemies’. Stick around for the final sentence.

A week late (not good at anniversaries): a mega-thread on the 8.31 Prince Edward attack.

Yuck – the amount of vehicle tyres thrown into Hong Kong landfill every year.

A recent emigration and property exhibition in Wanchai last month attracted 28,000 registrants. Some findings.

How Hongkongers are settling down in the town of Reading, England.

A lengthy but readable paper on Hong Kong as a society stuck in a ‘late colonialism’ state. Perhaps tries too hard to wedge the city into some academic theoretical framework – but not a tanky thing.

A new Beijing-friendly lobby group in the UK is asked whether it has funding from HSBC, and responds by offering a ‘case manager’ to ‘refine the focus and framing’ of the question. Their team includes a Huawei UK board member and various investment, higher ed and other interests.

Cybersecurity company Fire Eye presents research on the expansion of Beijing-backed social-media campaigns into smaller platforms in multiple languages, and increasingly aimed at spurring protest action on issues like Covid and anti-Asian racism.

Brian Hioe at New Bloom on supposedly ‘progressive’ Western far-leftists’ obsession with being anti-American/capitalism and ‘imperialism’ leads them to support oppressive regimes like that of the CCP, rather than (say) Uighurs, Hongkongers or Taiwanese as you would expect.

(Not sure how seriously we should take these people, though recent examples from an outfit called Code Pink like this campaign against Taiwan arms sales and their webinar about the US supporting ‘color revolution’ in Hong Kong make you wonder whether they’re just really dumb tankies or funded by Beijing. Otherwise – file under the same category as Scientologists, blockchain nuts and the Ivermectin crowd.)  

A thread on China’s looming or actual insolvencies and defaults – much more than just Evergrande. It looks like there are some vast holes that need to be filled in. Presumably, Beijing has some magic way (aside from letting idiot Westerners holding Mainland property corporate debt get burned) to shift it into state-run bad banks and avert a financial crisis. It really does seem the CCP has managed to rewrite the laws of economics in such a way as to make infrastructure and real estate grow on trees.

As well as private education, online games and numerous other social evils, Beijing is clamping down on ‘sissy men’ from Chinese TV. (What about masculine women?)

A look at the ‘Xi for Kids’ textbook in Chinese elementary schools. (Thread includes a link to this illustrated comparison of Soviet and Nazi propaganda portrayals of Stalin and Hitler as father-figures of children.) 

It took a while for the Catholic church to accept Copernican heliocentrism, but they got there eventually. Is it finally dawning on them that the Chinese Communist Party is not going to arrive at a warm-and-cuddly ‘win-win’ agreement with the Vatican over running the faith in the Mainland?

The current version of the Vatican-China deal is set to run through 2022. But, with it increasingly clear that the pope expects neither good faith in diplomatic talks or concrete results on the ground, it’s paradoxically hard to see it not being extended, or ever judged a success. 

If so, that leaves just Blackrock still deluding themselves.

Nostalgic escapism from Zolima City Mag: a look back at a time when Hong Kong was happier and optimistic, and government campaigns could be fun – Lap Sap Chung.

Mightily miffed at the point-blank rejection of their demand to rummage through all the group’s files, the NatSec police rather predictably round up HK Alliance members, including Chow Hang-tung. 

The latter was due to represent Gwyneth Ho (in jail on suspicion of subversion-by-primary-election), whose request that reporting restrictions be lifted for her bail application was – predictably – turned down. By sticking to her principles on this, she of course has no chance of bail. (Ho’s statement is here. Holmes Chan explains it all here and here.) 

As the tone of related Security Bureau/police statements suggests, the NatSec regime is flustered and angry at the Alliance’s impertinence. The system will exact retribution for the perceived disrespect – notably dismissing the cops’ claim to have evidence that the group is a foreign agent. The authorities are also no doubt infuriated by these activists’ refusal to show fear, and will want to make an example of them. It won’t be pretty.

An analysis of the two overlapping cases here.

Probably a good time to consult HKFP’s guide to writing to people in Hong Kong prisons.

Is the NatSec regime big and tough, or pitiful and petty? Security Secretary PK Tang freaks out over prisoners ‘building up forces’ and making inmates hate China, thus threatening national security, by (cue scary organ crescendo) sharing chocolate and hair clips supplied by an NGO. Or something. More here.

While authorities see a dastardly plot, it looks like some inmates and supporters – drawn from Hong Kong’s smart and resourceful political and social activists – are organizing small-scale mutual aid networks while they are behind bars. Maybe it would have been better if the government had left them at liberty, where they could focus their energy on district council work and helping local residents, while our top officials could maintain a dignified air of calm self-confidence.

But Leninists must always be paranoid. Chris Yeung looks at the cops’ claims that the impressively unfazed HK Alliance is working for evil foreign forces. And – just as you thought it couldn’t get weirder than chocolate and hair clips – cycling campaigner Martin Turner is arrested in a suspected plot to plant a bomb at the Legislative Council. Or at least check the bike-parking facilities. 

After getting stroppy over the HK Alliance’s refusal to hand over information on donors etc, the NatSec regime finds two more things to get hypersensitive and whiny about.

First, Digital Media board members resign and call for liquidation of the company. Their statement mentions that the authorities have used the National Security Law to freeze assets and arrest executives and writers – all with ‘no trials or convictions’. The directors express the hope that an orderly liquidation will enable staff and other stakeholders to be paid, and take the opportunity to thank Hong Kong people for supporting a free press while it was still allowed… 

We are confident that the Company’s founder, majority shareholder and former chairman, Jimmy Lai, would join us in these expressions of gratitude if he were able to communicate from his prison cell.

The insinuation that stakeholders are victims of the NatSec Law clearly stings. The government responds with an angrily righteous statement saying…

…there is no such thing as Next Digital Limited being forced into liquidation due to a lack of funds arising from enforcement actions. By putting the blame of its operational decision on law enforcement actions, Next Digital Limited is trying to shift its responsibility, with law enforcement authorities which act in accordance with the law as scapegoat, and maliciously smearing the Hong Kong National Security Law.

Second, a pro-Beijing figure warns that the Democratic Party might be breaking the NatSec Law if it prevents members from running in the forthcoming elections. The NatSec regime is barring most pan-dems from elections through jailing, vetting or other means. Now it is worried that with none taking part, the charade might lack legitimacy. Make your mind up – do you want to silence opposition or not? 

While we’re on the subject: an open letter from jailed speech therapist Lorie Lai; and from HKFP, an excellent summary of the dismantling of Hong Kong’s democracy movement.

On more trivial matters, Variety on Nicole Kidman leaving the set of blockbuster TV production Expats because her 40-foot Winnebago with jacuzzi couldn’t find a parking space anywhere around Fa Yuen Street.

The ‘elite’ Correctional Services ‘Black Panthers’ riot team, plus dogs, enter Lo Wu Correctional Institute to suppress some sort of insurrection (why else deploy the riot squad and dogs?) by female prisoners armed with snacks, lipstick and hair clips. It seems by organizing and sharing these items, they were threatening to create ‘chaos’ in the facility. (At least one is being held without bail under suspicion of threatening national security by taking part in a primary election – so from a NatSec regime viewpoint, snacks and lipstick are quite possibly a mortal danger to the established order.)

The Black Panthers (who the hell picked that name?) will probably get medals for bravery after their daring raid on the snacks- and lipstick-wielding women at Lo Wu. Perhaps more deserving of a Platinum Bauhinia Award for Heroism would be Hong Kong Alliance’s Chow Hang-tung, who’s telling the NatSec police to shove their demand for data on members, donors, affiliates etc. ‘We will not help you spread fear’.

It is humiliating for the all-powerful Security Bureau and NatSec Police to be called out so bluntly. They issue frantic press releases (here and here) warning of stiff penalties for such defiance, and they will no doubt follow through with dawn raids, arrests and asset seizures.

The word ‘elite’ also crops up in this SCMP report on the 2021 Election Committee Subsector elections to be held in two weeks time – an analyst describes the process as ‘elite politics’. Gullible reporters insist that the EC is now super-powerful as it will elect the Chief Executive and select many legislators. This is absurd, as the Politburo in Beijing does not delegate personnel decisions like the choice of Hong Kong CE (even a puppet one) to anyone, and certainly not to a few hundred shoe-shiners incorporating a bunch of property tycoons’ witless kids.

The SCMP finds great meaning in the fact that these candidates mostly offer no policy ideas. The reality is simply that the candidates – in addition to (some might say) having limited intellects – mostly have no opponents, hardly any actual voters, and only a ceremonial role to play. The elite, and the politics, are a thousand miles away to the north.

On the subject of local pro-Beijing politicians, a former one has been arrested for stealing apartments (it can be done) for sale to the government’s redevelopment agency… 

…Sio was … the vice-president of the Young DAB – a youth branch of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong. He ran in the 2015 District Council election but lost, after which he withdrew from the party.

During the social unrest in 2019, Sio founded a 100-member voluntary lawyer group to provide legal assistance to pro-establishment citizens injured by protesters.

An upstanding citizen! Unlike all those Hong Kong youngsters who, a Beijing education official says, are obsessed with Western ideas like freedom and democracy, and not stealing apartments.

Elsewhere in No Clampdown news – a look back, with pics, at RTHK’s City Forum – launched in 1980 to encourage free expression of views, scrapped suddenly in 2021 to shut the public up.

A busy week for Hong Kong’s NatSec regime ends with a focus on education. Most schools sign up for NatSec workshops, to train teachers on forthcoming NatSec classes. Teachers will also at some stage have to take an oath (presumably similar to the civil servants’ one). 

And Baptist U introduces a compulsory NatSec element to its graduation requirements. It doesn’t exactly sound onerous: a two-hour lecture, a similar amount of reading, and a ‘quiz’. (Remember what Henry IV of France said.) It’s the symbolism that counts. Of course, there’s always room for curriculum development. No word yet on when university academics will be subjected to oath-taking, Vitasoy-employee and other screening and rectification treatment.

In areas where CCP-overseers are not giving the orders, local officials are less efficient. You wouldn’t have thought they could screw up the handing out of free money – but they manage to do it. (Any idiot could have told the bureaucrats: offer free rice at the same time.)

Some weekend reading…

William Pesek in Nikkei Asia wonders if Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam realizes just what a difficult position Hong Kong is in, with the ‘Dickensian’ inequality that fueled the protests even worse than before, and a government in Beijing apparently on a drive to downgrade capitalism…

Asia’s “world city” now trails Brazil and Mozambique when it comes to inequality … Beneath the billionaire tycoons, chauffeur-driven bankers and gleaming skylines, many of the city’s 7.5 million people are falling further behind — and perhaps more keen than in 2019 to take to the streets.

…now the billionaires, too, might be bracing for what is to come. Xi’s Maoist turn is putting trillions of dollars of market capitalization at risk…

…Once COVID-19 passes, Hong Kong Inc. will likely be more unbalanced than it was before the pandemic hit. An economy that satisfies no one but Xi in Beijing is not one with a vibrant future.

Moron Western fund managers are still sticking with the ‘invest in China’ dream years after it ended as an investment concept. (Reminds me of the time a Fidelity superstar called Anthony Bolton (?) turned up in Hong Kong to perform his stock-picking miracles with a China fund just as the Mainland market peaked. The smart thing – he says modestly – was to move into Vietnam and India five years ago.)

From Niao Collective, a thread of categorized protest-art threads.

For history fans, a niche but fascinating subject – how Hong Kong (Chinese) moveable type spread into the Dutch East Indies.

And for map/WWII freaks, an impressive cartographic database on military preparations before the Battle of Hong Kong in 1941 (intro here). A vivid illustration of how the Brits didn’t expect invasion from the north. 

Are you one of the thousands who made donations to the 612 Humanities Fund, which helped with protesters’ legal costs? The Hong Kong police want to see the group’s records, and those of the pan-dem umbrella Alliance for True Democracy, suspecting threats to national security, collusion with foreign forces, etc. The wording of the police statement is almost a parody of sinister-intimidating-creepy-bureaucratese. 

If the NatSec cops do get hold of their details, will donors get a 6.00 am knock on the door? Will they be put under surveillance? Will the authorities inform their employers? Will employers – Vitasoy, say – feel the need to fire them? They will be in good company: among Fund trustees are former lawmakers Margaret Ng and (now jailed) Cyd Ho, Cardinal Joseph Zen and singer Denise Ho.

Which of course brings us to the HK Arts Centre’s cancellation of the forthcoming sold-out Denise Ho concerts, citing a public order/safety clause – saying it is ‘duty bound to observe closely the recent development in society and the laws concerned’. More here and here.

Seven pan-dem activists get 11-16-month prison sentences for ‘inciting’ and ‘organising’ an unauthorised assembly on October 20, 2019 (I think that was the one where the police water cannon managed to spray the mosque on Nathan Road)…

Six of them are already in jail for three previous cases of the same charges.

The Confederation of Trade Unions – which has dozens of affiliated labour groups – is next on the chopping block, according to Ta Kung Pao (which previously targeted Denise Ho).

The sound of bags being packed continues…

“Just two months ago, I believed that those who were leaving the city didn’t truly love the city,” a 26-year-old female primary schoolteacher told Nikkei, “but now emigration is slowly becoming an option at the back of my head.”

Still to come…