A weekend when events in Hong Kong made the international news on both Saturday and Sunday

A candle that was burning in Victoria Park on June 4th, 2016
 

Yesterday and today, news about Hong Kong featured on the main page of The Guardian.  To put it mildly, this helps serve up proof that Hong Kongers are living in interesting times.  Another sign of the times: earlier today, some 300 officers from the People's Liberation Army (PLA)'s Hong Kong Garrison ventured out of their barracks to gather at the Central waterfront for a Lunar New Year flag-raising ceremony.  This is not something I can recall ever happening before.  And yet, it doesn't seem to have been considered headline news by anyone and, actually, hasn't attracted all that much comment!  (It's also telling that the few comments I've seen thus far about it include ones noting that the soldiers had not been wearing any masks!)

Here's what been considered big news internationally though (and been covered by The Guardian and the BBC, among others): The University of Hong Kong following up its removal of the Pillar of Shame days before Christmas 2021 with its literally covering up another Tiananmen Square masscre memorial on its campus days before the Lunar New Year of the Tiger comes along.  And you can see how much brazen they are now about turning Hong Kong into part of the People's Republic of Amnesia by way of this latest act taking place in broad daylight rather than in the dead of night, as was the case with the removal of the Pillar of Shame.     

The Swire bridge at HKU has had a slogan written in traditional Chinese characters on its surface since 1989 which can be translated into English as follows: “The souls of martyrs shall forever linger despite the brutal massacre.  The spark of democracy shall forever glow for the demise of evils”.  As Samuel Bickett pointed out on Twitter: "Students painted a banner on Swire Bridge during the very first 1989 demos right after the massacre & paint bled through. It’s been kept up ever since. It’s a site of genuine historical significance. For an academic institution to destroy it is absolutely nuts. Gives ISIS vibes."

 

Thus it is, as 伯昏無人 @Baakfanmouyan noted, also on Twitter: "The Swire Bridge slogans originally weren't a memorial but a preserved record of Hong Kongers' real-time reaction to 6489. Under Zhang Xiang and his party apparatchik cronies, HKU is destroying a painstakingly curated record of our history."  Truly for shame.

 

While we're on the subject of shame: It does no credit to Hong Kong's Legislative Council that honorable folks like Dennis Kwok (the recipient of the 5th Commonwealth Law Conference Rule of Law Award 2021) and "king of votes" Eddie Chu Hoi-dick are no longer gracing it and, instead, its members now include the likes of the Edward Leung who didn't know that Sai Wan Ho had an MTR station and Junius Ho.  And while we haven't heard much from Edward Leung (both the DAB's man and the far better known Edward Leung Ting-kei) in recent days, Junius Ho has been in the news again with some more remarks that have raised eyebrows.

 

More specifically, Junius Ho proclaimed yesterday that health experts who suggested that Hong Kong should abandon "Zero Covid" strategy and move to adopt the "living with Covid" strategy should be viewed as violating the national security law!  This prompted one wag on Twitter to proclaim that: "There are smart people, there are dumb people and then there is Junius Ho" while journalist Timothy McLaughlin took the opportunity to share the following quote by Hannah Arendt: "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”  

 

While the Hong Kong government has moved to issue a clarificatory statement (in both English and Chinese) today that having an opinion favoring "living with Covid" is not a breach of the national security law, this act in and of itself is actually not all that assuring.  For, if you think about it, it looks to indicate that enough people were spooked by Junius Ho's comments for the government to feel a need to step in to clarify and try to calm things down.  And, really, if Hong Kong truly still had freedom of speech (as supposedly guaranteed under Article 27 of the Basic Law), such an action by the government would and should not be needed at all.