Stand With Hong Kong!

Hong Kong is not just a city – it is a state of mind.

It is hard to believe that just 74 years ago this modern beautiful of Hong Kong city was, for the most part, rubble and bok choy fields populated by the emaciated survivors of the Japanese Friendship (sic) Sphere. Just 4 years later it was over-run with refugees fleeing Mao’s China, many of whom arrived with nothing other than the clothes on their backs, taxing the already over-stretched modest social services of the day.

But the people persevered and Hong Kong became not only a bastion of capitalism but a beacon of excellence in a world increasingly mired in ongoing and falling averageness. Putting it bluntly, the people not only said, “Can do”, but then they went out and did it. Li Ka-shing is just one example – from a street vendor of plastic flowers to a manufacturer of those plastic flowers to one of the world’s foremost business magnates and richest people, he is but the ‘patron saint’ of an entire culture of people equally disposed and obsessively driven. Hong Kong pioneered the world’s largest outdoor all-weather escalator and the world’s first connected city totally above the traffic, as well as a society where the world’s population and religions get along in peace and harmony.

It also has a government and a police force that, until recently, had the unreserved support of over 70% of the population. Once the shock of the 1997 transition wore off, people came to the tacit viewpoint that, “the more it changes, the more it stays the same”. Essentially, that was the premise and the promise of the theory of, “One country, two systems”, posited by mainland China which, for a long time thereafter, was satisfied to keep hands off for the most part while copy/transpose whatever it could….witness not only the growth of Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, but the entire economy of China. But, with the Mainland’s success, their attitude and their thinking changed – and I’ll get back to that.

The people of Hong Kong are content to let the government do its thing as long as the people could do their thing ie. lead their lives and do their business unfettered by ‘unnatural’ governmental constraints. And so there evolved continuing laissez-faire capitalistic co-existence and mutual understanding. And the police force was still viewed by the population in a positive light subsequent to 1997 and indeed conducted itself in a manner befitting that acceptance.

But then, as I said before, the thinking changed – but not initially by the people. The Hong Kong Government’s leadership was coopted to try to jam a law into effect that would enable the government/police to arrest anyone accused of defaming the government, Hong Kong or Mainland, and/or any of its minions or for the revealing of state ‘secrets’, and send them to Mainland China under arrest without access to a lawyer or consular official and without even a hearing to determine if the charge itself was even remotely true. And, as we all know from just the experience of Zhang Wenzhong, a charge in Chinese court does not have to be remotely true in order to be found true (sic). And just so we are clear, the definition of “state secrets” in Chinese law has been deliberately kept vague all these years, thereby facilitating someone to be charged and incarcerated for nothing more than repeating a fact that everyone knows eg: stating that the deaths of pigs from African swine flu exceeds 50% nationwide when the official tally is at 20% is sufficient to earn you a one-way trip to jail for basically as long as they want to keep you there (eg: the 2 Canadians held in custody, Michael Spavor & Michael Kovrig) – and I am not going to comment on the barbaric conditions of their detention (incarceration).

But there is more to this story ……as China grew in wealth, as the people did overseas trips, as more foreign news came in that refuted the official stances past and present, the Government and the Chinese Communist Party became subject to not just increased scrutiny and resultant questioning, but to well-deserved ridicule. The people started making parodies – for instance, the word, VIP, which is in evidence everywhere, from airport terminals to meetings, started to stand for Very Important Pig, the “pig” referring to both the arrogance of many of these officials and, as well, their penchant for accepting bribes in the form of black money and other favours (sic). Example – “What does a government official always order for his custom-made suit?” …answer, “deep reinforced pockets”.

Long story short, the decision was finally made in Beijing, after it became apparent that the sycophantic bureaucrats in charge of the Hong Kong & Macau Authority had no ability to defuse the situation that they had created (and in fact, by their bungling, only inflamed further) to yank the bill and kill it. But by then the damage had been done…the police had resorted to questionable methods – enlisting triad (ie. criminal organisation) behaviour to intimidate and beat up protestors, strip-searching and otherwise humiliating arrested protestors, literally beating up docile protestors in custody and, finally, deliberately shooting to kill a protestor at point blank range when a shot to the arm or leg would have sufficed. So now the force, instead of being seen as a force of protection, is viewed as a group of thugs there to essentially intimidate the people who pay for them. Not as bad a situation as existed in pre-1949 China, but the portents are there and certainly not being ignored. Such occurrences are as totally unbelievable as they are unacceptable in the modern first-world society that is Hong Kong.

Are some of those same protestors agents for the Mainland and acting as agents provocateurs? I have no proof but it is certainly not out of character, any more than it was in the riots of 1967. What is true is that the protestors have uniformly decided on the principle of “burning together” (“lam caau”, in Cantonese) – that they are not going to be divided and that they are not going to settle. What may have been previously and reasonably resolved by an agreement to yank the proposed bill and subsequently investigate the actions of the police (calls for which have come from across the world, including the UN) has now progressed to way beyond that to a matter of determined face. The protesters want Carrie Lam gone and the Mainland Government doesn’t want to give in and acknowledge that the mess was created by its own arrogance and ineptitude.