Out local government just handed over 124,000 sq ft of prime waterfront land to the Housing Authority to build medium-rise apartments for 12,000 of our poorest residents.
Just kidding! I wish. Instead…
Out local government just handed over 124,000 sq ft of prime waterfront land for the Beijing-backed Office of National Security. You’d not be the only one to find that name Orwellian.
By my reckoning that office will fit about 400 bureaucrats. Their sole aim will be to find threats to “national security”. It doesn’t matter if you’re Left, Right or indifferent — the incentive for government officials is always the same: to find work. Mission creep is inevitable. How long before in Hong Kong the bureaucrats, the "officials", become apparatchiks servants not just of a government, but a communist government, and we have corridors like the one above, the one in KGBs “House of Horrors”?
I do worry about this Office. Nothing good can come out of it. Peace and stability? Maybe. But at what cost?
A few years ago there was an uproar from the pan-Dem camp when the local government agreed to Beijing stationing some ticket collectors and customs agents at the Kowloon side of the Fast Train station. (To me, at the time, it sounded fine, as it made things simpler, quicker and more efficient). Now, a fully-fledged office of Oppression National Security in the heart of Central, and barely a peep. I’m sure they wish now that the “problems” they had were only a few ticket collectors at Kowloon Station. The unintended— but clearly foreseeable — outcome of trashing the city and calling for independence during our 2019 “troubles”.
