These Interesting Times
Peter Forsythe in Hong Kong
Tuesday, 28 June 2022
Falklands War 40 years ago
Monday, 27 June 2022
“‘Incredible milestone’: Nasa launches rocket from Australian space centre“
Nasa has successfully launched a rocket from the Northern Territory – the first commercial space launch in Australia’s history.
Troublesome winds caused the countdown to be aborted several times before the first of three scheduled rockets launched at about half past midnight (ACST) on Monday from the Arnhem Space Centre on the Dhupuma Plateau, near Nhulunbuy. [More]
“The beginning of the end of the American Union as we know it” | Really?
Sunday, 26 June 2022
Saturday, 25 June 2022
Claudia Mo Redux. Pushing for independence gets you in trouble
Here is my letter to the editors re Claudia, which was published at the time.
I don’t think she should be in jail. Leave it at that. Her views, celebrated by the Financial Times, her own, personal and rather dodgy views, have harmed all of Hong Kong. I say “dodgy” meaning her saying she’s against “mainlandisation”. If they were not also Han Chinese, that would be classic racism. As it is, it’s surely bigoted. Me, a foreigner, living here in Hong Kong as long as Ms Mo, thought that more Mandarin being spoken in Hong Kong was good. Because I speak Mandarin. Mo doesn’t like it. So she makes up stories about Chinese -- “mainlanders”! -- taking over Hong Kong, when all it was, was more mainlanders coming to Hong Kong, so we heard more Mandarin. To repeat: I think that Mo’s views, and those of her acolytes, are quite simply bigoted. Belted on to a demand for “democracy” to whitewash her horrid views.
References:
1. Financial Times story, to get it without paywall, Google "She was loved for standing up to China. She may die in jail” and try the link. Otherwise, the paywall version.
2. My earlier post about Claudia Mo: “Protect the freedoms we already have, Claudia!”. February 2020
3. My letter, “Bigotry in the protest movement”. November 2019
ADDED: I don’t know Claudia, but I do know her husband, Philip Bowring. He was the editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, back in the 1970s, when I was here as the Aussie Embassy point man for economic issues. Philip was on our list of folks to call on when in Hong Kong on official reporting duties. I like his writing, though lately he tends a bit far left for my tastes (the sort of leftism that got us the Beijing Backlash). Now, of course, I empathise with him. How does it feel, what’s to be done, when your wife is in the clutches of a horrid Beijing?
Friday, 24 June 2022
Jumbo Icon becomes double metaphor
The second metaphor is the sinking. Like, you know, the Titanic, like the end of times for Hong Kong.
Amazing that the HK government and (I assume) the insurance company approved the tow-away, at this time of year. Things are beeezy, and you can see on this huge basically barge-thing has very low freeboard. Wouldn’t take much — clearly didn’t take much — to flood the ground floor.
It sank at the Paracel Islands (西沙 Xi Sha). We’ve sailed right by them — a low-lying group of islets, claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan and China — racing down to Vietnam. The Jumbo sank just to the SE of North Reef island. Which means they were cutting through the archipelago. Both times we’ve left North Reef to port, heading south, bypassing the islands. Anyhoo… the water there is not 1,000 m deep as the tug captain said. At deepest it’s 200 m. Salvageable? Not worth it, I’d say. Let it become part of the reef. A great new diving site!
Of course there’s conspiracy theories. But one I don’t buy is the insurance angle. It just doesn’t fit that the insurance company approves the trip and then straightaway Jumbo sinks. Something stinks.
I had a meal on Jumbo just once, in the 80s. Didn’t think much of it. Too kitschy and bright lights. Still, it’s a shame it’s gone.
ADDED: The Chinese name is 珍宝, Zhen Bao which is a transliteration of the English, made to sound like “Jumbo” and also meaning “Precious Treasure”, which is kinda nice. Now it’s a pirate treasure.
Thursday, 23 June 2022
Wednesday, 22 June 2022
China’s Covid-19 health code system is ripe for abuse and must not outlast the pandemic
Except it probably will…
Ludicrous. HK Rugby Sevens castrated
Ludicrous. Every weekend I'm watching Aussie Rules football at stadiums in Australia taking up to 100k crowds. No masking, no quarantine, no vax visa. Deaths and hospitalisations remain steady. What on earth are our HK apparatchiks thinking?? [Here]
“Appalling old Wax Works”
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New Chief Exec John Lee and his waxworks |
Depressing isn’t it? That’s our “leadership”. Apparatchiks All…
Tuesday, 21 June 2022
“Behind every closed shop is a story of disappointment and despair”
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Check out the dressed goose! |
Here is the Post again taking against China's zero Covid policy. Which is sacrosanct within China. I’m encouraged every time they publish against the grain.
Front page today is about the extraordinary measures our Hong Kong government is taking to prepare thousands of local apparatchiks to meet their Beijing bosses during the 25th anniversary of handover to China on July 1.
Monday, 20 June 2022
The UK's Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK's Freedom Lectures Are a Farce
End the Covid-19 hysteria, reopen Hong Kong and give us back our lives
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Jing went to Art Basel, HK. I used to. Not this year. Because of this sort of nonsense: guards telling us what to do... |
What I’ve been saying for ages: that the government and the media is keeping the hysteria alive. It’s them.
Here’s Mike Rowse:
It is now clear that the first action incoming chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu needs to take on July 1, as soon as he has been sworn in, is to open up Hong Kong to the outside world and to its own people.
There is not a moment to lose. Jumbo Floating Restaurant being towed out of Aberdeen Harbour has been seen all over the world and interpreted by many – friend and foe alike – as symptomatic of our demise. It has also seriously damaged morale at home.
But this is just a symptom of what is wrong. The cause is the sense of panic, veering on hysteria, which has gripped the community over Covid-19. The government and media share responsibility for creating and sustaining this feeling of doom, but only the government can lead us out of it.
Take the issue of numbers: every government statement and news bulletin for months has led with the headline figure of cases detected in the preceding 24 hours. Yet, we all know that what counts is the number of new hospitalisations and of those, the number requiring intensive care. [More]
Sunday, 19 June 2022
Monitoring the pandemic | crushing F & B
Saturday, 18 June 2022
Communist humour
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Good question: why do we fear 1,000 cases a day
Friday, 17 June 2022
Hollywood Realizing Chinese Market Not Worth Creative and Moral Costs | National Review
…Hollywood is coming to the sad realization that pursuing Chinese money is not worth the creative and moral cost. Disney effusively thanked several different arms of the Chinese police state in Xinjiang Province — gracias, Gestapo! — in the credits of 2020’s Mulan, a movie built to appeal to China, and the Communist Party banned it anyway. China demanded that Sony censor Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood for its unflattering portrayal of Bruce Lee — and Lee was not even a Chinese national. (He was born in San Francisco and raised in British Hong Kong.) Tarantino refused, and Sony properly told China to stuff it. The same movie could easily have been banned for a different nonsensical reason: It starred Brad Pitt, whose movies were banned from China for years because he had starred in Seven Years in Tibet.
“Out for a cheeky pint” Covid check list
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More from Harry |
The Post also continues putting stories marked “Coronavirus crisis” stories on its front page, because… well… just because. And then, periodically, wonder why people remain “fearful”. “Don’t be fearful” they say from time to time, while every day front-paging a “coronavirus crisis”. Go figure.
Singapore’s main paper, The Straits Times has nothing about Covid anywhere on its pages, let alone on its front page. They’re getting along with normal life.
Meantime, one of our household members is heading off to Portugal on Sunday. We'll see how that goes. Heading off to Europe, or wherever used to be such an everyday thing.
Thursday, 16 June 2022
Monitoring the pandemic | 1,000 cases a day. So?
Pandemic adviser, David Hui, says we ought focus on hospitalisation and deaths rather than raw case numbers. He’s right. It’s been so for well over a year. But his government and this newspaper take no notice.
Wednesday, 15 June 2022
Monitoring the pandemic | “Refusing to give an inch”
“On the menu: Flip Flop Curry” said one of the commenters yesterday, noting that only the day before Lam had been talking about easing pandemic restrictions to start regaining some of our International City vibe. “Politics trumps economy” said I at the site. “Politics trumps intelligence” responded another.
Note the underlined bit above: “pandemic adviser” professor David Hui says showing RAT test before entering bars or pubs is more of a “gesture”. You can’t tell when a RAT test was taken, so what’s the point? I have a pile of negative results sitting on the coffee table. Care to borrow one? A lot else has been “hygiene theatre”, even the masking — which on a macro level shows no benefits. And those plastic dividers in restaurants. Meantime we’re watching a Netflix special this year in Spain and England, and you’d not know they’d had (some ways still have) a pandemic.
Poor us. Caught on Beijing’s cleft stick. Carrie Lam is religious. She fears god. More temporally, she fears Beijing.
Tuesday, 14 June 2022
Monitoring the pandemic | Zero Covid policy and eco growth don’t mix
Zhou Xin “…virus balancing act just impossible”. You couldn’t say this in the mainland media, where zero-Covid policy is unquestionable dogma. Related: “Covid rules in China bewildering”. And: Hong Kong reports 800 new cases yesterday; China 138. China, with 187 times the population of HK… Huh?
Meantime, we learn that China will add to its GDP, all its expenditures on Covid testing. Over next few months Beijing budgets 180 Billion RMB (US$ 30 Bn) in Covid testing. That’s equivalent to around 1% of GDP, which they are adding to GDP. It’s like digging a hole, filling it in again and adding the costs to your annual income. Testing does nothing to add to wealth.
And “Carrie Lam won’t budge an inch in response to business chambers calling for easing”. After saying a few days ago we had to try to get back our international competitiveness. All comments are mocking her. Eg:
Dish of the Day - Flip Flop Curry - yesterday she stated Hong Kong must reopen to maintain its Global Status Perviously keeps moving the goal posts. Must reach 70% - 80% and 90% Vaccination Rates Full of broken promises
Monday, 13 June 2022
"Lam urges next leadership to toughen up for ‘political struggles’ “ | SCMP
Here, snip below, is Carrie Lam, our Chief-exec, speaking fluent Commie-talk.
“[The government and the people] need to go in the same direction. If our thinking was too different, it’s meaningless to hold our hands and walk together,” she said.
“But now that one country, two systems is back on the right track with national security protected and the electoral system improved, this should be the best time, since the handover, for us to move forward.”
We, in the West, have decided that the adversarial system is the one that in the end gets better results, even as it’s messier along the way. People get to thrash out their differences. Enough of this “one party” idea. Hopping along with Carrie, happily holding hands, skipping along the yellow brick road, only to find, at the end, a fraudulent wizard.
By the way, this same issue is something I often wonder about in the US. There’s only one Cable station on the conservative side, Fox News, and there are many on the Left -- CNN, ABC, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, etc. Yet many on the Left want to shut down Fox, the one and only viewpoint that differs.
We need differing viewpoints.
Not “harmonisation”, not “unity”. These are today’s Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, aka, "Wizard of Oz” aka "Oz, the Great and Terrible”, Wizard the fraud.
“China is the biggest threat to the West” | Triggernometrry
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Click above to go to the video |
Worth an hour of your time. For a major world issue. China in the East and China in the West.
- “Statistically China is engaging in the greatest re-militarisation of any country in absolute and relative terms in peacetime history”.
- Importance of Communist Party membership. Now 100+ millions. They include many of the middle class, so the middle class has been suborned.
- Authoritarian governments like China can rapidly increase economic growth in a poor country. That becomes more difficult as the country becomes richer. (PF: with this analysis, is John subject to some of the same self-delusion that led the west to open up their markets to China in the 90s and 00s, in the hope that doing so would lead them to become more open and liberal? IOW, that authoritarian China might manage to move past the “middle class trap”, in a way that other countries have not? I hope not, but maybe).
- Taiwan: Tied to Xi Jinping making it his legacy. That’s dangerous. Though the Russia experience in Ukraine may have given us a few more years of breathing space.
- SEA countries don’t want China to dominate. Don’t like its values.
- China is Leninist. As I’ve often said: an authoritarian-bureaucratic-state. Closer to Mussolini’s Italy than any other country today. Concerned mainly with maintaining power, not so much with making revolution.
- Uygurs: Why is China imprisoning them? Because Beijing can’t stand differing viewpoints. (PF: agree, but also the issue that China fears they might join the East Turkmenistan Liberation movement.
- Why China is punishing Australia. The “Fourteen Grievances”. From 43'00
- The West and other open economies need to understand importance of enlightenment structures. Enough of constant self-abasement. (Comes with a first-generation immigrant perspective. Similar to Konstantin Kisin)
Dr John Lee is a political scientist, specialising in Chinese political economy, at the Hudson Institute. Dr Lee has authored several books about international security including 'Will China Fail?' and 'The Free and Open Indo-Pacific Beyond 2020' as well as writing for some of the world’s most popular publications including The New York Times, The Australian, and Wall Street Journal.
Sunday, 12 June 2022
Lab leak theory of pandemic origin is still on the table | WHO
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They’ve tested nearly 100,000 animals at the wet markets. Result = zero covid. Animals: “Not guilty, M’lud!” |
One quote from the Post report:
The group of 27 scientists from around the world said the closest genetically related virus was a family of coronaviruses identified in horseshoe bats in China in 2013, which is 96.1 per cent close, and in Laos in 2020 with 96.8 per cent genetic overlap, but they were not close enough.
Now, we all know, don’t we, that we share 98+% of our DNA with monkeys, yet look at the difference. 96% similar doesn’t cut it. As the leader of the SAGO group notes herself! The “they were not close enough” is from the team leader, Marietjie Venter. And it rather destroys the Post’s own headline.
Thus the SAGO report does not exonerate Wuhan Institute of Virology, still less Chinese officials.
References:
“Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO)”
Saturday, 11 June 2022
Jonathan Haidt | The problem with social media
Friday, 10 June 2022
Kimmel v Biden
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Click for video |
1918 Seattle: “No mask No entry” and 49 more wonderful historic photos
Monitoring the pandemic | HK between a rock and hard place
Kind of shocking that Chief-exec Carrie Lam admits we’re “caught” between zero-Covid and living with the virus. Indicates erosion of One Country Two Systems.
Thursday, 9 June 2022
So much hating on the US
As I expected, most comments support Chandran Nair’s article, which is pretty much all about hating on the United States. My comment at the site:
So much hating on the US. Which gave us: winniing WW2, Marshall Plan, constitutions of Germany and Japan that allowed them to recover; stopping Stalin-inspired, China-supported North Korea invasion; then the GATT, WTO, WB, IMF, all of which China (and other AsianNations) joined; freedom of navigation for SCS and Straits of Malacca. Free for anyone. But go ahead and hate on the US. Go ahead and enable China's rule of the region! Be careful what you wish for.
(Final note, and a *huge* tell: What is the country that most people sitll want to emigrate to? China? Japan? Hint: no it's not them....)
You don’t have to like everything that America does or hate everything that China does. I know both of their societies. I’ve lived in both. If it’s a choice between a world dominated by the United States or a world dominated by China, I choose the United States. For all its faults, for all its failures, for all its frustrated freedoms and all its unmet ideals, I still like those freedoms and ideals, still prefer the United States' striving towards them.
Not so with China.
China not only doesn’t strive for freedom and democracy. It actively mocks them. China is now going all ad hominem on the US, criticising it for “systemic racism”-- the US' criticism of itself! As if China is not the most racist country in the world! So I’ll go all ad hominem on the commenters and say that those that buy into Nair’s take on this -- that America “needs to be reined in” -- are ignorant lickspittles. So there!
ADDED: An Occasional Reader draws attention to “Blinded by self-belief” from Harvard professor Dani Rodrick:
To those who wonder why we should care about the decline of America’s relative power, US foreign policy elites respond with a rhetorical question: would you rather live in a world dominated by the US or by China?
In truth, other countries would rather live in a world without domination, where smaller states retain a fair degree of autonomy, have good relations with all others, are not forced to choose sides, and do not become collateral damage when major powers fight it out.
To which: sure. No argument. It’s just that that’s not the way of the world works and hasn’t done in recorded history… thinking Greece, Sparta, the Moors. Even China, back in the Song, the Ming. Australian, now living here at a crossroads between East and West, I’d sure like it if it were not so binary; wouldn’t we all? Just that “One divides into two”.
Pedant's Corner: I’m not sure it’s a “rhetorical” question in the quote above. It does need an answer. In this part of the world there are plenty, some I know personally, who would answer “China”.
Wednesday, 8 June 2022
“Beijing shows China century can wait” | Shi Jintao
But still, if you want to have soft power, and Beijing has said it does, you can’t forever be playing the victim, or speeching at the podium with barely suppressed passive aggressiveness, as do China’s “wolf warriors” and senior leaders. You can’t be super sensitive to the rest of the world criticising you, as China is — think Xinjiang, think investigation into the source of Covid (for which they punished Australia).
Shi also makes a point I’ve been making about the June 4 commemorations… or rather lack of them. Making hing Kong ever more like any other city in China. But also making a “Streisand effect”. Now ever more people know.
All except that, ironically, that Shi would be unable to publish in China an opinion piece like this very one.So we’ve still got some brave people, a brave newspaper, and some leeway. All is not (yet) lost.