Small victories and one bombshell on the first Monday of the new year

Some people are really impatient for the future to arrive

(and have put up the Chinese New Year decorations)

...even while others seem stuck in the past (and haven't put 

the Christmas decorations back in storage yet; though, to be fair,

it's still only the 11th day of Christmas after all!)

 

After ringing in the New Year with a long weekend (that saw colder weather conditions than is usual -- complete with the issuing of frost warnings by the Hong Kong Observatory! -- in this part of the world), the bulk of Hong Kong went back to work today.  On the Wuhan coronavirus front, Hong Kong's 50th day of the fourth wave saw 53 new cases and one additional death today.  As the medical experts made clear though, it's too soon to relax the current social distancing measures and people are pretty much resigned to their remaining in place through to the end of the first month of 2021, if not longer.

 

At the same time, there are many things that people still are not resigned to -- and have shown that they will fight against, sometimes with winning results even.  At the end of 2020, we had the case of the underground reservoir in Bishop's Hill whose planned demolition has been halted after public outcry.  And the beginning of 2021 now sees the government similarly swiftly reversing a decision, announced yesterday, to move the daily coronavirus briefings online -- to enable, some journalists feared, the filtering out of questions from the press that the authorities did not want to answer; again, after an outcry.       

 

Ideally, of course, we would have bigger victories than these to celebrate.  But at a time when even an annual online poll for Hong Kong's "Person of the Year" conducted by Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) has ended up being scrapped (probably in response to criticisms by pro-Beijing mouthpieces unhappy that the likes of Nabela Qoser and Apple Daily were among the voting options along with the likes of Carrie Lam and Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan), people aren't going to look at even the smallest gift horse in the mouth!   

Once again though, one only has to look at events on the other side of the Hong Kong-Mainland China border to see how much worse things can be, and get.  Today alone saw news reports of two Mainland Chinese lawyers who helped the families of the 12 Hong Kongers arrested by the Guangdong coastguard back in August having been had their licenses revoked by the Chinese authorities and -- this represents quite the bombshell -- the disappearance from public of Alibaba founder Jack Ma (post his earning the displeasure of the Chinese Communist Party).

With regards to the latter: chances are that he'll get back into view at some point (though there's no guarantee of that: remember Xiao Jianhua, the billionaire businessman abducted from Hong Kong's Four Seasons Hotel and spirited across the Hong Kong-Mainland China border back in February, 2017?).  But regardless of whether Jack Ma turns up behind bars (a la Anbang's Wu Xiaohui) or not, you can bet that he'll be, a la actress Fan Bingbing or Wanda's Wang Jianlin, a more subdued version of the personality we thought we knew.

For those who think that doing business in and with China is like elsewhere (and, unbelievably, there still are patsies who believe that, including the head of the European Union  -- or maybe she's less patsy than willing collaborator, or, at the very least, willing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and more for monetary gains), here's the latest proof that it is not.  

 

Similarly, for those who thought everything was okay in Hong Kong until the China extradition bill protests (that saw far more violence on the part of the police than the protestors despite fingers often getting pointed at the latter, and came about because so many people in Hong Kong there's no real justice in Mainland China): cast back your memories to -- or learn about -- Xiao Jianhua's abduction, that of the Hong Kong booksellers in late 2015, the way that Hong Kong Chief Executives get selected, what caused the Umbrella Movement to happen, and so much more.   

 

And as things have gotten worse in Hong Kong (because, make no mistake: China's security law for Hong Kong has not brought back real stability and resolution to the territory's many problems), small wonder that university researchers have likened Hong Kong to a "powder keg waiting to go off".  And this all the more so with a leader at the helm who seems more likely to pour oil on fire than to put out the flames as well as perceived as more of a problem than the solution even by members of the pro-Beijing camp!