‘Biden warning will only do more harm, US businesses say’ | SCMP

Today’s front page

Remember what Robert Gates, Obama’s Defence Secretary, said about Joe Biden: that he had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”. [Link]

In office now as President — after 47 years in government — Biden is keeping his record intact. He pulls out of Afghanistan precipitately, leaving it to the murderous Taliban. Did he need to leave right now, so fast? No. He claimed that Afghanistan army could maintain territory and stability. Everyone in the know knows that’s a lie.

Now he calls for boycott of business here in Hong Kong. Like the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (HKHRDA) before it, this move — arguably well-intentioned — will increase harm on Hong Kong. As American businesses are telling him. The business reps express “shock”. They shouldn’t be shocked. If they’d been paying attention, rather than hating on Trump, they might have noted Gates’ observation. (Not that Trump was any better on HK, mind). The article. 

Click Label HKHRDA below for previous articles I’ve posted on harm done while trying to “help”us. That’s the road to hell… paved with good intentions. (Parenthetically, I’m not even sure they do have good intentions. More like trying to harm China and we’re collateral damage)

“Peaceful protest in Hong Kong brutally crushed by police”. Not

Stop gaslighting us. Protesters killed by police: zero

I’m watching Germany’s English language DW TV. We quite like it as it seems to be — at at least tries to be ~~ neutral and objective. But not the show I’ve just watched. They’ve just shown some clips of 2019 demos on our Hong Kong streets. 

They just said the words above. Both parts of the statement are wrong. They were not peaceful protests in 2019; and they were not brutally crushed.

I was here. I went to the demos person to see what what was happening. I watched hours of livestream. They were not “peaceful protests”. And the police did not, at any stage, at any time “ brutally crush” the rioters. Indeed as was noted by media at the time, it was remarkable that there was not a single death of a protester, or of a policeman, during the many months if unrest, which every time descended to chaos, burning and vandalism (all which I saw, with mine own eyes).

I don’t for one minute support what’s going on now. The arrests. Closing down the Apple Daily. Stflimg the opposition. Proof of my views: Click on Labels “Xi Jinping” or “National Security Law”.

But for goodness sake, in 2019 they were not “peaceful protesters” and they weren’t “brutally crushed”. 

But this is how narratives get created. The narrative will be that in 2019 they were fine and peaceful protesters, until the police waded in, “brutally”. For the record: That did not happen. 

Tokyo 2020 Games: Hong Kong sailor Stephanie Norton trains with reigning Olympic gold medallist during pit-stop in the Netherlands

We were on a junk trip a few weeks back up around Sai Kung in NE Hong Kong, with Stephanie Norton and her dad amongst the guests. They were hanging on hearing if they'd made the cut to the Olympics. She did make it, in the Laser Radial class. Go Stephanie!

How lovely to be 20 yo and going to an Olympics, even if it's a Covid-hit one. 

All strength and luck to the team.

More photos at the link and story

/Snip:

History-making Hong Kong sailor Stephanie Norton is preparing for her Olympic Games debut in the strongest way possible – by training alongside the reigning Olympic champion.
The 20-year-old Norton, who became the
first women’s dingy sailor to reach the Olympics via a competitive route since the 1996 Atlanta Games after qualifying in Oman in April, has spent the last two and a half months training in the Netherlands.

With the help of Hong Kong coach and Dutch native Ben Koppelaar, Norton has been soaking up knowledge from the likes of 2016 Rio Olympics laser radial gold medallist Marit Bouwmeester.
“We’ve been lucky enough to train with the Dutch team so we’ve basically had the same preparations as them. We were able to train with a couple of boats so that’s worked out really, really well because Steph was the only laser radial sailor in Hong Kong,” said Koppelaar, who was part of the Dutch Olympic men’s coaching team five years ago. [More]

Stephanie at training 

Weird extremes in Covid “strategies”

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk guranatees lockdowns

In Australia the premier of Queensland guarantees she will lockdown if needed. She guarantees it to put people’s minds at ease. Meanwhile, in the UK, Boris guarantees that he will ease the lockdown on July 19. He guarantees it to put people’s minds at ease. 

One promises lockdown, one promises easing. That’s the extremes of handling the pandemic. 

At the Australian “Zero Covid” end, you also have New Zealand and us here in Hong Kong. In fact, if anything, we’re even stricter here in Hong Kong, requiring three weeks of in-hotel isolation for all arrivals, the longest quarantine mandate in the world. The US, meanwhile, has pretty well opened up all its states, Democratic and Republican. We three — the Antipodes and Hong Kong — appear to be the only Zero Covid places in the planet. 

It was weird listening to Australian ABC Radio Canberra yesterday, with the “breaking news” that one case of Covid had been found in Goulburn, an hour’s drive north of Canberra. The news promised more details as they came to hand.…

The thing about these Zero Covid “strategies” is that they’re not really strategies at all. At least not for handling Covid longer term There’s no hint of an exit strategy. Other than continuing to keep the borders closed and locking down at every single new case. Australia has already said it will keep borders closed until late 2022. Here in Hong Kong we used to have 30 million visitors a year. Now that’s a trickle. Apart from “hoping” for a border opening with the mainland, our beloved motherland, there’s not hint of a clue of an idea of when and how we might open up to the rest of the world as “Asia’s World City”.What kind of “strategy” is that?

Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jackie Stewart, Winston Churchill: pre-war British yacht’s storied past comes back to life in Japan, cigar burn included

Cynara, gaff-rigged schooner, launched 1927
In Japanese waters. Click screenshot to go to article

I'm very interested in wooden boat building and restoration.
I built a small one myself in the backyard a few years back. These days I follow a couple of boat-building and restoration sites: Mark Reuten’s 2.4mR project and Leo’s rebuild of Tally Ho are favourites. Also Bob Emser building a Haven 12.5 which is the carvel version of the lapstrake Somes Sound 12.5 I built. I pay them monthly contributions because they produce excellent videos that take time and effort and cost them time and money. They give me pleasure and teach me. That’s worth supporting to the tune of a couple of glasses of wine per month… (Patreon is the go).
Here I'm book-marking a lovely story in today's SCMP about the 6-year restoration of a famous wooden boat that ended up in Japan: the gaff-rigged schooner that ended up as Cynara, nearly as scrap ina Japanese marina. Fantastic that their owners committed so much to the rebuild. 

I wish I'd known; I could've popped over to Japan and offered my humble hands. Sigh…

‘Half Chinese, half white Australian – the mixed-race families who thrived when many did not amid 19th century prejudices’ | SCMP

"The Mongolian Octopus" in Australia's The Bulletin, 1886

By the 1850s, the opium wars had devastated China and brought the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) to the verge of collapse, while far to the south a gold rush had led to a period of unprecedented economic growth. Setting out towards a faraway fortune, nearly 40,000 Chinese men left home for "Xin Jin Shan", or New Gold Mountain, also known as Australia. [More]

And also another mention of an early Aussie of Chinese descent, Quong Tart, who I've posted about here.
My first wife was part Chinese, her grandfather from Shanghai. But she didn't know until after we'd met. It had been a family secret. The reason for her and siblings' dark complexion and almond eyes had been put down to "Spanish blood". At least we've grown past that sort of nonsense. I assume.

[And now I'm married to a Beijing-born, and we have a son together, so I feel pretty engaged with the whole issue of how Asians are treated in Australia and western countries]

Talking of fascism....

Yoof, in Trafalgar Square, proud members of the Communist Party
of GB, Marxist-Leninist. They’re also "anti-fascist" they say.
But today's CCP is fascist. It's one or the other, lads

As I was talking the other day about fascism as an accurate description of today's China, here's Joel Kotkin on the same line: "... China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure."

It's in Kotkin's "How the Democrats fell for Mussolini":  

Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.

Wherever it appears, whether in the early 20th century or today, fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. In 1922, for instance, large corporations and landowners helped finance Mussolini’s Black Shirts for their March on Rome. Confindustria, the leading organisation of Italian industrialists, was glad to see the end of class-based chaos and welcomed the state’s infrastructure surge.

Elsewhere, the German cartels and Japanese zaibatsu both kowtowed to and benefited from fascist state support and contracts. Even today, China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. Since 2000, a hundred billionaires sit in the country’s Communist legislation, a development that Mao would never have countenanced.

More here  

There's been a lot of talk in recent years -- from the likes of Eric & Bret Weinstein -- about how we are ruled not by a fair and decent democracy, but by an entitled oligarchy. And who can argue that there's not an elite, that see themselves as our righteous rulers? And to centralise, centralise. Or is that all horrid right-wing paranoia, hard-right talking points?

“Biden and US hawks must understand China before waving the democratic torch” | Jing Lee

Click above for the article

The geopolitical map of our time is unsettling. World politics is entering a new phase, and many politicians and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it should be: a clash of civilisations, the end of history, the decline of the nation-state, and the return of traditional rivalries between nations. [Read on …]

Jing again in the Op-Ed pages of our South China Morning Post. Links above or also Web Archive.

Many of the commenters support her thesis (we must understand China). My own simplistic response to the thesis is: Assume we do fully understand China and its history, what then? Do we treat it with more empathy and softness? Would that get any useful response from Beijing/Xi? Or just encourage assertiveness (aka aggressiveness or bullying)? Also: Don't forget China's (Xi's) "Document 9".

A US-based [Reader] comments (indent) and author [JL] response (flush left), below:

“Vitasoy trouble shows dark side of cancel culture in divided Hong Kong” | SCMP

A disturbing thought: on the Uyghur issue (indentured servitude or slave labour, take your pick) Chinese netizens may have even tougher attitude than Beijing! They deserve to be suppressed by the Han, seems to be a popular view.
Might doesn't make right. I'm guessing large numbers of Americans were in favour of actual slavery before their Civil War.
No physical copy of the SCMP today.
As I worry if and when our 103-year old paper, the best English language press in the region, might succumb to the National Security Law of Hong Kong. So happy to see that online at least all is fine. 

Like this article on the cancelling of Vitasoy.[Web archive]
And as I mourn yet another England loss in a final, on penalties. Oh dear. The 55-year wait goes on…
Below: "Cancel culture" with Chinese characteristics. That is, hyper nationalistic.…

Is the "lying flat" [躺平) movement in China a thing? Or a beat up?

Chillaxing Chinese style aka 躺平 Tang Ping. Pic @ Zhi Hu*

A number of occasional readers have sent links to stories on the latest Chinese phenomenon of "Lying flat". AS in the Guardian and the BBC. Here's a summary from VOA:

Some young adults in China are unhappy with the culture of long working hours, high housing prices and a very high cost of living. So, the young people are “lying flat” to express their anger. They have rejected traditional goals like getting married, having children, purchasing a home or car, and following the corporate money-making path. [Link]

I first wrote about it here, and labelled later posts under "Wu Wei", which is the ancient Chinese Taoist concept of "do nothing". 

My own thoughts and after speaking to long-term residents in China is that its probably more of a beat up than a "thing". Maybe getting more coverage in the west than China. Because it goes so much against the stereotypes. 

To the extent that it's around, as an idea and lifestyle in China, it's likely more amongst the single children of middle-class, well-off Chinese parents (remember whole generations of single children, result of the One Child policy). Others, the bulk of Chinese youth, may not like the relentless pace of life (they call it "involution", or 内卷 nei juan) but they've no choice but to get on with it.

The West meantime, hates China like we hate a swot. They're just too damned hard-working and so of course they must be cheating (often the are too, so that complicates matters). Of course there's Xinjiang Uygurs, domestic repression, international bullying, and all the rest of it, but there's also nascent schadenfreude, looking for, hoping for, the failure that we can glory in. The Chinese simply do too well, like the  students in the US, who have to be hobbled at universities, lest they dominate freshman years. So too in manufacturing and trade. They're simply too slick and now also moving up the value chain. If China is going to face domestic problems, like youngsters "lying flat" rather than working for the great machine, so that its economic growth is impacted, so much the better for us. Or so goes the thinking. Or so goes the hope. Like here, at TechStream. If it turns out to be true then it's schadenfreude all the way down. 

'Cept it's not likely to keep going. Then again, don't believe me. I've been too wrong on too many things....

*ADDED: "Zhi Hu" (知乎) is a Chinese Q&A website modelled after Quora ("modelled" as in "ripped off"), which I tend to use quite a bit. "Zhi Hu" is a mash-up of a bit of Confucius about knowledge and study:

好学近乎知， Hao Xue Jin Hu Zhi, To love learning is akin to knowledge. Confucius Analects

Headline watch — disconcerting trends in South China Morning Post

 

Front page South China Morning Post today
‘Patriotic education’ to become nice little xenophobic nationalists …
Oh… and another front page with “appalling old waxworks “

Who decides “fake news”?

Story

ADDED:

Democratic Party Chief latest opposition figure to quit 

Falun Gong targeted 

The beginning of forgetting: Tiananmen vigil group slashes staff in face of “obvious repression”

Pupils punished for singing problematic lyrics

Henry Kissinger marks 50 years since first China visit with call for talks to avoid ‘catastrophe’

 

It's good to have someone like Kissinger calling for peace. For measures to avoid a "catastrophe". I worry that all the talk of "war" -- which I see all over the internet, on both sides of the aisle -- becomes a self-fulfilling prediction. It's happened before, jaw-jaw becomes war-war.

This is marking Kissinger's secret visit to China 50 years ago. Which was happening at the same time my old mate and colleague, then Ambassador, Steve FitzGerald accompanied Gough Whitlam to China. And met Zhou Enlai, just as Kissinger did, much more secretly. I posted here.

Steve talks about the need for "back door channels", to get the some dialogue going on Australia-China relations, now so strained. I reckon Steve himself ought be a back door. He's himself Kissingerian in intellect, and certainly his match in knowledge of China. 

Or I offer myself. Once I was a "back door channel" to fix a problem on the shooting of the "Great Wall of Iron" documentary back in 1989. I sorted it by flying to Beijing and getting the estranged parties together over a Maotai or two.... You're welcome.

Kissinger: "I therefore hope that a serious dialogue starts soon again on the major issues between us,” he said. “Not every problem can have an immediate solution, but we should start from the premise that war between our two countries would be an unspeakable catastrophe.” [More]. [Web Archive]

ADDED: In the comments, I screenshoot a comment by one Jing L: 

Click to enlarge

Much of which I agree with, but it doesn't recognise that a lot of the bitterness towards China is not (or not only) due to its economic success, challenging America and the west. It's down to the way that China did it and continues to do it. By rampant pirating and protectionism. Every single one of America's tech companies, the driver of growth for decades now, is banned in China and then ripped off in a Chinese version. That ain't fair.

China buys Cambridge and fighting cancel culture | SpectatorTV

Click screenshot to go to video

Cindy Yu hosts. She's the fan favourite. Interesting discussions, and if one wants to skip past the domestic British stuff, then it starts at 11:19. Here's the list of what's on the menu:

00:00 - Welcome from Cindy Yu 01:27 - Political update: why is Boris concerned about unlocking? 11:19 - Covid ethics: are deaths a good measurement? 24:37 - How China bought Cambridge University 43:45 - Jess de Wahls: how eight complaints got her cancelled 58:33 - What are 'sensitivity readers'?

How can Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong return to pre-pandemic life? Vaccines, timetables, and targets| | SCMP

Richard Holden, prof at UNSW offers a view:

Basically once everyone has been offered a high-efficacy vaccine, if people refuse to take it, I think at that point, the government is going to have to say, 'We're telling you what's going to happen, we're going to open up, you've got your chance, and then people are going to have to live with the consequences of that'. [More]

"Zero Covid" strategy, is, like hope, not a strategy....

The “war on drugs “ — one hundred years of failure

Click above to go to the video

Here is another entry to the list of “things I did not know”. 

I didn’t know that the “war on drugs” began, not in 1971, but in 1914.

It became the capitalised “War on Drugs” by President Nixon’s proclamation only in 1971 and that’s what I always thought had been its beginning. But the prohibition — and its attendant vast harms — had begun nearly 60 years earlier, on the cusp of the First World War, and maybe we ought call it the First War on Drugs, as its effects matched, and likely exceeded, the industrial slaughter of that “war to end all wars” (hah).

Neuropharmacologist and previous government advisor on drugs policy, professor David Nutt, explains this to the Triggernometry lads, in the video above. His explanation of that begins at about 5’45”, but the whole talk is worth listening to.

I thought I’d double-check Nutt’s claim, that the 1914 prohibition was due to pressure from pharmaceutical companies, and he is correct. However, it’s  only part of the story. Yes, the pharmaceutical companies lobbied for opium to be banned, because they wanted to sell their patented opium derivatives, opioid tablets and morphine, as analgesics. 

But in addition their push to criminalise “natural opium” (and later other drugs) coincided with wider international pressure to ban opium— Britain had been pushing opium on China for centuries, and had fought two Opium Wars defending the trade (a trade which made Britain the largest drug dealer in history). By 1914 a groundswell in opposition the opium trade had risen. At the same time, the United States was dealing with the challenges of having “inherited” the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, and its opium-related problems.

All this and more is set out in the fascinating article “The Harrison Narcotic Act (1914)”. Read and enjoy. Please note the contemporary critics of the policy and its awful consequences, note their recommendations to abandon it in favour of a return to the earlier and successful medical interventions policy (instead of the newly-minted criminal ones). Then note the response of politicians, which was to ignore the advice and double down on a failed policy. 

Heavens above! We do exactly the same 100 years later! And the obdurate idiocy is bipartisan. 

How long must we go on with a policy that’s failed for so long? On such catastrophic scales? Another hundred years? Another hundred million wasted lives?

Three cheers and two thumbs up to Konstantin and Francis for highlighting the insanity of the War on Drugs, yet again. And for the good work of professor Nutt. 

China’s very own Cathedral of Light

Cathedral of Light, Berlin 1937

Cathedral of Light, Beijing 2021.Link

 

Now

Then

Now

Then

This only came to mind as I was talking to son John and he told me of Hitler’s massive gatherings at the Berlin Stadium, designed by Albert Speer and featuring 136 searchlights — the ones the Luftwaffe actually needed to pick out incoming ally airplanes — shining upward great columns of white light. A tremendous and awe-inspiring sight, no doubt. 

As are the steampunk solarpunk solar panels synchronised to pay homage to the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th birthday the other day. Which party, on reflection, is better called what it is, the Fascist Party, i fascisti. For it ticks all the boxes of the Cambridge definition of “fascist”.

And the only thing to celebrate about the CCP, and its 100 years of, mostly, mayhem, is when they’ve withdrawn from any area of public life things have gone better. When they’ve withdrawn from the economy, it’s boomed. That’s the reason for the miraculous 40 years of growth and lifting 600 million out of poverty. The private sector. Not the Communist Fascist Party.

Quiz: True or False? Teenagers among arrestees in “terrorist plot”

Today’s SCMP front page

Son John and I were wondering. Is this true? Were there really terrorists? Or was it a police frame up?

We thought: yes it’s certainly possible that some crazy young kids should think resorting to violence is the way forward. We also thought, yes it’s possible — disturbingly more so than a few years ago — that the police would frame them. 

Overall, though, if we had to bet, we’d bet in its being true. They really did catch some kids in the act of would-be terrorism. After all, we saw them do crazy stuff in 2019. I saw them with mine own eyes.

Random fact: we’ve been playing chess. It’s 10-0 to John. Despite which I remain hopeful of winning some day…

“China-Australia relations: what Canberra can learn from Gough Whitlam and its own diplomatic history” | SCMP

Gough Whitlam, then leader of the Australian opposition Labor
Party leaves Hong Kong for China, July 1971

Ex Journalist and now academic Tony Walker quotes Steve FitzGerald in his piece about Australia-China 1971 and Australia-China now. Article here [Web Archive].

I knew Tony when he was a young foreign correspondent in Beijing in 1976-77, for the Sydney Morning Herald. I found him keen, intelligent, serious, diligent. A very good analyst. I was a young diplomat, and had some sources just because of that position that a journalist could not have. I learned to trust him when we talked and I gave him whatever hot-take I could. Remember: these were pretty heady times: the Gang of Four about to be arrested; Deng Xiaoping to return to power; China to begin its "Four Modernisations"; begin opening up the economy. The official end of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

Steve FitzGerald I know rather better than Tony. First met him when I arrived in Beijing in 1976, towards the end of his Ambassadorship, Australia's first to the People's Republic of China. And later, in 1982, back in Australia, I joined his China consulting company and became a partner until 1989, when the Tiananmen killings killed our business. (actually a near-death experience; the company recovered and soon prospered again, while I found myself back in China).

So, two older men, who know China well, thinking about how we, Australia, might begin to repair relations with Beijing.

The answer, says Steve, is "back doors". I agree with that, and have said so. And various other times in "Australia-China".

But I do wonder. Aren't there back doors already? If not, why not? And isn't Steve, or even Tony, one of the back doors? And if not— Steve could be our Kissinger — then who? Pollies? Academics? Business folks? And is Beijing, the increasingly belligerent, even interested in "back doors"?

ADDED: Steve FitzGerald talks to ABC radio Sunday Extra about that China trip 50 years ago

“Facebook, Google and other tech giants could stop offering services in Hong Kong if anti-doxxing law goes ahead in proposed form, internet coalition warns” | SCMP

Click screenshot to go to the article

This is not good. [Web Archive]
It approaches my "red line". On what it would take to have me move from here: no access to crucial internet info. I don't use Facebook, but billions do.
Google gives me blogger, including this blog and millions of others. It accessing that would be a significant deterioration in my freedoms. And that of my seven million co-residents.
Of course doxxing is hateful. Can they (whoever "they" is) work this out? A workable anti-doxximg law that satisfies our Big Tech Overlords?  [Link]

ADDED: Commenters are saying (i) it’s an empty threat, and anyway…(ii) get a VPN

The end of Common Law in Hong Kong…

Today’s front page in South China Morning Post 

It’s great when you have your legal system decided by Beijing 

"Why the West is best" | Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has seen it all. Born in Somalia, married-off, underage, to an abusive husband, forced into FGM, escaped to the Netherlands, where she got death threats from Islamists for writing the documentary "Submission", which got the director himself, Theo van Gough, killed. She fled to the United States when the Dutch government made clear it would not protect her.

A free-thinker, a politician, a feminist, a public intellectual. A brave woman.

Here she offers spot-on observations and analysis, on why, for all its faults, the liberal West is better than other "isms". 

After looking (briefly!) at socialism, islamism, authoritarianism and tribalism, she asks "You don’t like any of those -isms?" and goes on:

Well, maybe Western civilization is not so bad after all. It’s not perfect, but it is clearly the system that provides maximal peace, prosperity and freedom. The classical liberal system based on Enlightenment values has done more good for the world than any other system or civilization. Western civilization’s medical and scientific leaps eradicated smallpox, came close to doing so to polio and measles, and brought a host of other infectious diseases under control — most recently COVID-19. Is it a coincidence that the most efficacious vaccines were devised in the US, Germany and Britain, rather than China or Russia? [Read more] [Archive]

New Evidence Indicates Critical Race Theory Escaped From A Lab In A College Humanities Department

Click screenshot above to go the article. It's satire!

Hehe. From the Babylon Bee.

Via comment at an article by the Babylon Bee "punching back" at MSM and Social Media efforts to shut down their satire. 

/Snip below, from BB CEO Seth Dillon, arguing against the Facebook requirement that satire should not "punch down":

...we’re not “punching down.” We’re punching back.

Conservatives have been on the ropes in the culture war for a long time. We’re in a defensive posture, fighting back against the top-down tyranny of the Left’s progressive agenda. The jokes we make that they find so objectionable are aimed at popular progressive positions (e.g., the view that biological males who identify as women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports) promoted by politicians, celebrities, Big Tech, and all the largest corporations. If attacking those ideas isn’t punching up — given where they’re coming from and how they’re being advanced — then I don’t know what is. [More here]

Australia’s COVID Catch-22 – Quillette

Wow …

Excoriating take-down of Australia's Covid policy. What's the exit strategy? What's with the low vaccination rate?

So far as I can tell from listening to Australian talk-back radio and ABC, pretty much all the population is behind this "zero covid" strategy. But that doesn't allow a way out. Australia may get to zero, but there's no sign the rest of the world will, any time soon. So... what...?... keep the borders closed indefinitely?  

Late Arvo at the Plaza, Discovery Bay, 1 July 2021, "Reunification Day"

 

Tai Pak Beach, Discovery Bay, Hong Kong
looking north-west, yesterday evening

All the restaurants were full

Pano. We had dinner here yesterday, "Reunification Day"

Pano. Heaps of folks, many "tourists" from Hong Kong island

Why does the internet love Chinese-speaking foreigners?

I remember in the 1970s in China Steve FitzGerald, the first Australian Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, telling me how much the Chinese loved Chinese-speaking foreigners, encouraged them to use and speak and sing, in Chinese,  looking at us much "like performing bears", he said. Depending on the banquet, and how much drink had been drunk, Steve was more than happy to be that no performing bear. Not just a gifted speaker, but a talented tenor as well, he would belt out Chinese Opera ditties to the delight of his guests. They'd would fall about, doubled over in mirth and admiration. 

My own turn as a performing bear came in 1995 in the city of Dalian. I'd organised a trade and investment Forum of Australian business people to visit this port city, hosted on the Chinese side by the then Mayor of Dalian, Bo Xilai (who came to a sticky end in his contest with the new President Xi Jinping in 2012). and on our side by me. I was giving the return banquet, in a rather beautiful mansion on the outskirts of the city, for some 300-odd Aussies and Chinese counterparts. I gave a speech, which I decided to do in Chinese. I'd worked in a joke, midway through, a pun, which only works in Chinese, but not sure if it would work or not. On the night, it killed, as they say. Chinese in the audience cracked up in laughter and then applause. Job done. Felt great. 

And led directly to my marriage to J, as I'd met her there and introduced her to Bo, who she'd been trying to meet for a few days, and helped push along a deal she was working on. But that's another story....

A few years later, Bo Xilai visited Hong as then rising star, Commerce Minister, and invited me to a lunch with business luminaries in Hong Kong. Bo's speech mentioned me by name, as the foreigner who'd given a speech in Chinese and what's more had punned in Chinese! He also mentioned that on of the "joint ventures" to come out of that Forum back in '95 had been my marriage to one of the participants! All amazing, now I look back on it, but true. Again... another story.

But still, it's what comes quickly to mind when I read a recent article on the doings of Chinese-literate foreigners working on the Internet in China [here]. And I can't help but think, oh my goodness, if we'd had the Internet, I coulda had class, I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody....

I note that there's an element of insecurity in the Chinese reactions to these "Chinese-speaking foreigners". That they are buoyed by a foreigner learning Chinese, as a sign of respect. I've long thought: China can't take its place in the world as an equal partner until it gets over this inferiority complex. A complex that goes way back to the Opium Wars, for China the "hundred years of humiliation". They are still feeling that humiliation, and so enjoy seeing a kind of crypto-humiliation by foreigners, paying obeisance.

ADDED: "No more a victim: China must leave its past behind and embrace its strength". Zhou Bo writing from Tsing Hua University

One hundred years of Communism

 

This is page 3 in today's SCMP. More "appalling waxworks"

24 years ago today, the "appalling old waxworks", China's leadership, welcomed Hong Kong into the bosom of the Motherland. We were here. John was about to enter the world in six weeks. The night before had poured down. The Queen's ship, Britannia, in its last voyage, steamed out of the harbour, Prince Charles, last Governor Chris Patten, et.al. on board, Charles scribbling that famous observation in a letter home.

The Communist party is patting itself on the back, aided by the acolytes and fellow travellers and grifters everywhere. They say it's down to the Communist Party that China has crushed poverty and made it the second largest economy in the world. 

I was in Beijing in 1976, when China was still on the lock-hold of the Communist party in it's original and classic mode. It was only when it pulled out of the economy that it took off. That was down to Deng Xiaoping, but also to someone who is almost forgotten: Zhao Ziyang. I can remember clearly when he introduced what he called the "Responsibility system" in agriculture, which amounted to letting the peasants decide themselves what, where and when to plant and where, when and what to raise. That led to immediate gains, with the lessons learnt spread to the rest of the economy over the coming years. But that was a "lesson" that only a communist party needed to "learn". For the existing market economies, there was then, and is now, no mystery. Leave economic decisions up the market and you get magic. 

Today China is successful to the exact extent to which it has allowed private business to operate and prosper. Where it has not -- in the 30% of the economy run as State Owned Enterprises -- inefficiency, corruption and lassitude reign. The private sector props them up via taxes to Beijing.

So, the celebrations -- understandable and inevitable as they are - are just so much faffery and fairy floss, looking fine but evanescent. 

More “appalling old waxworks “

 

Twice in three days front page photos of leadership line ups. Shades of Prince Charles comment on the 1997 handover ceremonies. “Appalling old waxworks”.

And more charming headlines today:

Just to protect us from Covid, mind you…
(July 1 is “Handover Day” holiday. Usually street
gatherings/protests

Is it too obvious to say: “No. They should reflect the LAW”?

Stories of people leaving Hong Kong for good

They called it a conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab. | MIT Technology Review

Virologist Alina Cham

For sake of balance I'm posting this story about the possibility that the Covid origin might have been a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

And the opposite, from an Aussie virologist, Danielle Anderson, who spent time at the WIV, who believes that it was “highly unlikely” the virus originated from a lab leak.

Both hypotheses — (i) natural origin and (ii) leak from WIV — are so far unfalsifoed. 

Police have list of suspects who may try to flee

Front page today’s South China Morning Post 

Shades of June 4, 1989.When Beijing’s pursuit of students who’d been involved in the Tian’anmen sit-in seemed bitter, and twisted, and vengeful. Does this “list” show confidence or malice? 

ADDED: 4,000 Hongkongers are seeking refuge  abroad. And self-censorship kicks in. And foreign China watchers are wary of visiting China, not cause Covid but cause jail. Which reveals Tom Plate’s sly moral equivalence as disingenuous.

We had 6 inches of rain in 24 hours! Flooding in our basement… While California burns. West Coast sweltering in record heats.

ADDED: And now I read that our (HK) government is planning an “anti-fake news” law. Great. Just great.

Our very own appalling old waxworks

 

I remember when Prince Charles called the Chinese leadership “appalling old waxworks”. Now w have our very own. Not a good look for Liberty lovers among us. Lining up the apparatchiks for a photo op is something they do in North Korea, in China… and now in our beloved but battered Hong Kong.