How long have we had these social distancing regulations for?
(I can't remember anymore.) And, more pertinently,
for how long more are we going to have them?
Today is the 50th day in a row that Hong Kong last recorded a local Wuhan coronavirus case. To be sure, Hong Kong's case numbers keep on going up (and currently totals 12,243) but the infections have been detected at the airport, at other entry points into the city or while the infected person was in a quarantine facility for some time now.
In most places, this news would be a cause of great cheer and celebration. However, in Hong Kong, it's been greeted with apathy at best and also no small amount of frustration. This is because there still appears to be no end in sight to Hong Kong's tough pandemic restrictions which an increasingly large number of the population look upon as motivated far more by politics (in particular, attempts to pander to Beijing) than health considerations or plain common sense.
Speaking of pandering to Beijing: Carrie Lam gave her latest Policy Address today and I think that the Democratic Party speaks for many Hong Kongers in concluding that "it appeared to be aimed solely at pleasing Beijing". As the Democratic Party chairman Lo Kin-hei noted, "It ignores a lot of Hong Kong
people’s worries, including the emigration problem… a lot of people are
moving out of Hong Kong. They didn’t talk about how they are going to
[fix] the problems in Hong Kong. There is a lot of mistrust in Hong
Kong. Hong Kong people don’t trust the government. She didn’t try to
address that."
Bloomberg's Matthew Brooker was more succinct and scathing, Tweeting that the policy address was "really hard to listen to" and that it was "Written by the Liaison Office, as expected. anti-China forces, patriots governing Hong Kong, safeguard national security, blah blah"! And who can blame him, really, when among its "gems" was the revelation of there being plans for such as a new "mega courtroom" for the supposedly "small number of people" who will be affected by the National Security Law and a new cross-border railway (this one linking Hung Shui Kiu with the special economic zone of Qianhai).
With many people unable to stand listening to Carrie Lam droning on for more than two hours, it's helpful to see the Hong Kong Free Press' tabulation of the number of times she uttered certain words during her Policy Address. Some highlights: human rights, freedom = 0; National Security = 28; Mainland = 38. And, in keeping with the planned -- and false -- narrative that Hong Kong's unrest mainly stems from housing issues, she mentioned housing 60 times (and, attendantly, land 72 times).
Here's the thing: As that man Matthew Brooker noted ahead of the Policy Address, "The
catalyst for the 2019 protests was the increasing presence of the
party's oppressive hand in Hong Kong -- against all the promises that it
had made in front of the world
That is not to defend Hong Kong's living conditions, which could of
course be better"; and "HK has always been full of tiny cramped flats - and yet people came, in their millions. Why? To escape the soul-crushing oppression of the Communist Party's endless ideological campaigns, and to live in relative freedom. Nothing has changed".
Something else to consider: in addition to seemingly ignoring that we are in the middle of a pandemic, Carrie Lam also seemed happy to ignore the problems of climate change -- this despite last month being the hottest September in Hong Kong on record and this past May also being the hottest in Hong Kong's recorded history.
This prompted Johnson Yeung, for one, to Tweet the following: "Watching the #HongKong policy address I realize how visionless the elites in towns are, we are in the middle of a climate emergencies and aging population, and gov's plan is to land grab, destroy out coastlines and reclaims thousands of hectares of lands, which will accommodate.. 1.1M (the 1000 hectares reclamation) +2.2M (the rural urbanization). We hv 7.6M ppl now, how on earth there will be millions of population growth in the next 25 yrs? How is the gov gonna achieve carbon neutral when the plan is to reclaim and destroy our green zones?"
Adding insult to injury, this all really doesn't just affect Hong Kong. As Yeung further outlined, "These grand artificial land plan[s] are a waste of public money, and fundamentally injustice to our neighborhood - sands used for reclamation are grabbed from China, Indonesia and Philippines. It has already devastated fishery and livelihood of the locals." Lantau Tomorrow? What a terrible future has been envisioned for Hong Kong -- and I don't just mean politically, actually!
4 comments:
I wouldn't say the lack of affordable housing wasn't a reason for the 2019 protests. Even Brooker agreed with Dan Bland in their Twitter exchange after Bland wrote, "The truth is the economic conditions are due in part to the lack of democracy and the Lam administration has no real intention to improve either economic fundamentals nor governance."
Of course, the housing problem didn't begin with Lam, as it extends all the way back to the colonial era. But the current government has had a generation to resolve this problem and it hasn't.
Hi Anonymous --
The lack of affordable housing is of course a problem and grievance. But, as more than one person has pointed out, people were pretty specific in their demands during the 2019 protests. As someone who was there at the march back in April 2019 as well as later ones, I can tell you that the primary demand at the start was for no China extradition. Then, later, there were those five demands. Remember them?
https://webs-of-significance.blogspot.com/2019/09/hong-kong-protester-demands-one-down.html
https://twitter.com/wanderer_jasnah/status/1445922830466498563
I do remember the five demands. Four of them focused on immediate problems, while the fifth one (for universal suffrage) was a long term goal that was rather overdue.
But I'm certain that if Hong Kongers' basic needs, such as affordable housing, had long been met two years ago, it would have given them less cause to take to the streets.
The extradition bill did not represent the powder keg of underlying discontent that had been building up, but rather the spark that set it off.
Hi again Anonymous --
I think if Hong Kongers had a good government (that genuinely appeared to care for the people and strive to improve their lives and situations), they would have less cause to take to the streets. Here's the thing though: the reason why Hong Kong's long been a city of protest is because there's no democracy/genuine universal suffrage. If people feel that they can make their voice heard by voting, they wouldn't feel a need to go out onto the streets to do so.
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