Macau was supposed to show how China would handle an “obedient” special admin region, compared with “rebellious” Hong Kong. Macau’s reward? Worse repression than HK.
Those that claim “if only HK didn’t oppose China things would’ve been different” can therefore shut the f*** up.
I rarely see people talk about this. Although Wang FUK Court is not exactly public housing, it is a complex arranged by government and sold below market price to lower income families. Residents there are not wealthy. It’s not only a trauma but a tough road for them to rebuild their lives.
Chung Ching-kwong is precisely the kind of person that Hongkongers would vote into political office if Hong Kong had genuine universal suffrage. Instead, she is in exile, and her informative posts like👇might well result in her getting a bounty put on her head by the authorities.
Narratives of this (now) ongoing incident is running hot on Chinese language Facebook. It reflects a number of things:
1. The Hong Kong public does NOT trust its Government and its lackeys with supplies that are intended for victims. It reflects the fact that the years of distrust which culminated in the 2019 protests has not gone away despite 5 years of national security crackdown, media censorship and constant pro-Government propaganda.
2. The Hong Kong Government and its lackeys are not acting in good faith. If this was merely a case of them believing that they have the resources and logistics to do things on a larger scale and more efficiently, they could have chosen to work with the citizen-led cohorts of volunteers, rather than reporting the volunteers to the police for unlawful assembly. At best this is an act of revenge for Government lackeys having been shown up in the last day or so for being only interested in photo opportunities for performative purposes rather than actually helping victims. At worst this is yet another sign of the Government and its lackeys treating civic-minded ordinary Hong Kong people as enemies.
3. These moves to monopolise the narrative and the audio visuals (let’s face it these lackeys aren’t really into helping people) is yet another reminder for ordinary Hong Kong people that their city is now subject to Mainland Chinese official malpractice in the aftermath of disasters (ie all political and PR show all about self-benefit no real assistance to victims). In other words, even in times of disaster and grief, it is now made known to Hong Kong people in no uncertain terms than they are now subject to a bad faith colonial master.
My civil procedure professor in law school was a former IRS attorney. She lived in China for a couple of years working in the US embassy. While there, she became friends with several Chinese lawyers and judges.
One thing she noticed was that the judges were typically younger than the lawyers— the opposite of how it was in America.
She asked a (Chinese national) lawyer friend of hers why that was. He responded “it doesn’t take much experience to say ‘guilty’”
And that is, perhaps, the most bone-chilling sentence I have ever heard
I watched this happen on the morning of 4 June 1989 in Chang’an Avenue, near Tiananmen Square, the morning after the night’s massacre. Don’t believe the propaganda lie that no massacre took place: I saw 40 people killed in front of me before giving up counting in despair.
"Our desire not to be inferior to others in terms of performance, combined with the idea that we can freely choose to go the extra mile, can lead to self-exploitation. We force ourselves to go beyond what is good for us, until we burn out."
- https://t.co/ck3ImRttfY @goodreads
Word of the Day is one I keep posting at the end of the year, hoping its time will come.
‘Respair’, from the 16th century, is fresh hope, and a recovery from despair.
Here’s to a few drops of respair in 2025.
🧵
The first judicial review (JR) challenging a new prison rule established under the #Article23 national security law concluded this afternoon after 2 days of debate.
It was revealed in court that the powerful , immune-to-JR national security committee played a role.