Wuhan coronavirus goings-on are the talk of the town but don't lose sight of other salient Hong Kong happenings too!

  

From one perspective, it can look like our dreams

and resolve are melting away...

 

...but that's not what the creator of the above 

wax sculpture sought to represent! 

 

Last Tuesday (November 17th), Hong Kong recorded a mere four new Wuhan coronavirus cases, of which only one was a local transmission.  Today, the territory recorded 80 new cases, the majority of which are local transmissions; with 54 of them being linked to the "dancing venues" cluster that now stands at 187.       

Inevitably, the government has ordered bars, nightclubs and saunas to close for a period once more.  The announced closure of the watering holes has cause an uproar -- among bar owners and patrons alike -- because, among other things, none of  of Hong Kong's recent coronavirus cases have been linked to these establishments.  

 

Still, the main talk of the town in recent days appears to have been the "dancing venues" cluster; with the revelation that quite a few socialites are involved and a running list already including one billionaire, three wives of billionaires and a top executive at Goldman Sachs!  And to spice things up further, there's a story making the rounds that this "dancing venues" cluster's -- and perhaps even the entire fourth wave's -- "Patient Zero" is a woman who went and visited her son who had newly returned from Britain while he was officially quarantining in a hotel!  (Amazingly, it hadn't actually been illegal for people in quarantine to receive guests until recently; rather, it seems to have just been assumed that people would act in a responsible and trustworthy fashion!) 

 

Amidst all this coronavirus-related commotion, it can seem that even pretty major political developments are not getting the attention they deserve.  Granted that the international press has covered Joshua Wong, Ivan Lam and Agnes Chow being taken into custody yesterday.   But I haven't seen that much coverage of, say, a third Hong Konger having been charged today under the national security law... for having chanted slogans calling for Hong Kong's independence.  

Ma Chun-man certainly is less of a household name than Joshua Wong.  Not a full-time political activist, he's a food delivery driver who lost his job last month.  But that's the big news though: that is, that the national security law and ongoing political clampdown does not seem to be targeting just an extremely small number of people.  Instead, the net being cast is super wide and encompassing.  Consequently, as Goose Lee Tweeted: "Delivery drivers, lifeguards, teachers, estate agents - normal people who would like never have been in trouble in their lives - are now being sent to prison in Hong Kong for having expressed their basic human rights. This is happening every day."  

 

Also, remember the international experts who resigned enmasse last December from the supposedly Independent Police Complaints Council (IPCC)'s investigation into allegations of police brutality during the 2019 protests upon discovering its lack of independence?  One of them, Professor Clifford Stott, had stated that he would be writing his own report on the matter and last Tuesday, Oxford University Press published a report on the role the Hong Kong police played in the radicalization of Hong Kong's protest movement co-authored by the professor of group psychology and the dynamics of crowd behaviour. 

 

The Hong Kong Free Press reported on this last week -- and gave their article a more accurate headline than the South China Morning Post did with its equivalent coverage -- and has followed up today with an interview piece with Professor Stott.  The following are some choice quotes from the latter:-

“I think the conclusion one should draw is actually that the public order commanders were very bad at their job,” he said. “When one looks at the evidence across the whole sequence of events, you can see some really, really poor decision-making”...

“The idea that the protests were marked by violence and petrol bombs is only true of the latter phases. It’s not true of the beginning. There was no violence, there were no petrol bombs on June 9, there was no violence and confrontation on the 16th,” he said, referencing the mass demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people which saw the beginning of the movement’s “five demands”.

Three of those five demands directly related to police behaviour on June 12.

I wonder how many people think back to June 12th, 2019, and believe that things would have been so very different here in Hong Kong if the police had not acted the way they did that day -- including some members within the force itself.  Considering how many people felt compelled to join the protests after that fateful day (as had happened after the police fired tear gas into the crowd on September 28th, 2014), I'm inclined to think it's an awful lot.