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| Note the positioning. Bad news on the left. Beach babes on right |
… here in Hong Kong. On Monday it was the new election law foisted on us by Beijing.
Now it’s the headline above. Veteran democracy activists who are household names and have been around for ages, now arrested. I’m scared for erosion of other freedoms — the press, assembly, Internet. Not travel though and not the free market; these seem pretty safe, for now.
We should dream now of the status quo ante. How things were just before the demos and riots of 2019. Before our Chief executive Carrie Lam tried to push through an ill considered extradition bill. Now that’s hopeless. To have even the limited democracy we had then. All gone and going
To such a Good Friday, then…
ADDED: Requiring candidates to our Legislative Council (LegCo) including the Chief Executive (like an executive Mayor) to be “patriotic”, is, I’ll grant the activists, a step back. What can I do about it. Bemoan? Decry? Very well I decry. But I’m not about to go out on the streets about it, nor even would have when that sort of thing was, sorta, allowed. So what I’ll do is rationalise. Like this:
We had a hundred years, exactly, of England deciding the C-E, then known as Governor. In all that one hundred years all male, by the way. Then we’ve had 23 years with four C-Es appointed in a kind of sort of elected system, in which we had some say but not a lot. There’s not much to separate them in competence from the majority of British governors, save one, perhaps, Murray MacLehose, fondly remembered here for declaring nearly half our acreage as Country Parks, memorialised in the most famous as the McLehose Trail, 100km from Sai Kung to Tsuen Wan, and the trail run in the annual charity race, and which I’ve done. Unlike British days, one quarter of post handover C-Es are woman. That is to say, one, Carrie Lam, who has hardly distinguished herself, save for incompetence.
Still, all p a bit of a wash, Pre and Post handover.
Now there’s a tightening of requirements, to include “patriotism”. TBF, now that we’ve got to the stage of rolling back the modest gains made to universal suffrage, does it really matter if the next C-E is outright appointed? Without any fig leaf of “consultation” or “public input”? Not really.
I’m recalling that I’ve lived in a couple of major cities in China (“mainland” as we like to call it here in HK): Beijing and Shanghai. I was in Shanghai shortly after the Tiananmen demos and crackdown (aka “massacre”) and for a time after. The Mayor of Shanghai was Zhu Rongji. [interrupted, back later…]
