If walls could talk, this one would have such tales to tell...
but as it is, even the graffiti etched on it has been censored
Twenty seven years ago today, the Chinese Communist regime abducted the 14th Panchen Lama. Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was just six years of age then. The Tibetan holy figure would be 33 years old now if he's still alive. But no one (outside of the Chinese Communist regime) knows if that's the case.
And 56 years ago this month, China's "Great Helmsman", Mao Zedong, "unleashed the gates of 10 years of hell on his country with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, designed to purge traditional culture and bourgeois elements from society leading to out-of-control violence and breakdown of authority" (this in the words of James M Zimmerman, an American lawyer based in Beijing who Tweets, presumably courtesy of a VPN). As many as two million people are estimated to have perished during it.
One wonders what China's Covid death toll will end up being. I doubt we will ever know, given the Chinese government's propensity to play with facts and statistics. But, lately, we have been seeing crazy scenes unfold in the country -- some of which looks like they're out of some surreal movie, others of which do get people thinking that people have gone mad enmasse there once again.
As Human Rights Watch's Yaqui Wang has Tweeted: "To those who are bewildered by the CCP's current insanity with zero-Covid, just a reminder that it's the same system that carried out the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Massacre & many other crazy and cruel things. Abusers don't change without accountability." Another recent Tweet of hers worth noting: "To those foreigners now lamenting their "beloved," "wonderful," "better-than-Paris/NY/London" Shanghai is turning into this hell, I'm sorry to say: China was wonderful is because you had been ignoring terrible abuses happened to others the whole time until now it's your turn."
And yes, Hong Kong still seems (somewhat) sane in comparison to Mainland China -- at least on the pandemic front. E.g., Carrie Lam declared today that Phase 2 of the relaxation of "social distancing" measures will go ahead as planned this Thursday; with restaurants allowed to operate until midnight (from 10pm currently), bars allowed to resume operations (albeit with a limited capacity) and people able to exercise sans masks indoors as well as outdoors. And this despite a bump in the total number of daily Covid cases (from 234 yesterday to 328 today) but, mercifully, also zero new reported deaths both yesterday and today.
However, it's worrying to see that the campaign to shut down Hong Kong's freedoms shows no signs of abating. A case in point: After targeting pro-democracy legislators and activists (including Cardinal Zen), Beijing mouthpiece Ta Kung Pao has turned its attention to pro-democracy taxi drivers.
In response to which, journalist Timothy McLaughlin was moved to Tweet the following: "Taxi trinkets a risk to Chinese national security.
Joking aside, this will no doubt send the signal Beijing wants and have people scrambling to remove this stuff even without an arrest or any word from Hong Kong officials/police."
Lawyer Kevin Yam's come up with a more measured -- even heartening? -- reaction though: i.e., "One way of looking at this is the lengths State Media will go to harass every occupation imaginable. Another way of looking at this is that it is a reflection of how all-encompassing, built from bottom-up the 2019 Hong Kong protests were in terms of breadth and depth of support."
Another disturbing possible development reported today: Hong Kong's official (i.e., government) privacy watchdog is considering invoking anti-doxxing laws to ban instant messaging app Telegram. Upon learning of this news, Charles Mok, the information sector's former legislative council representative who's now one more Hong Konger in exile, was moved to declare that "If they can ban [Telegram] they can ban any app" but also question whether they in fact are able to do so. More specifically, how would one go about banning an app like it? Would it actually be possible -- from a technical level? (And as he pointed out, Russia apparently tried to but found that it couldn't!)
On the other hand, what the Hong Kong government is sadly all too capable of doing is to get its case against Jimmy Lai transferred to the High Court, and thus increasing the possible penalty for him and his fellow defendants in the national security law trial to life imprisonment -- as it did today. In addition, it can do away with jury trials (which Jimmy Lai would undoubtedly stand a better chance of winning than a trial to be determined by government appointed national security law judges).
Further making things go in favor of the government: As Samuel Bickett points out, "per the national security law, the decision on whether to allow a jury trial is made not by a judge, but by one of the parties—the Secretary for Justice, representing the govt. It’s one of the clearest indicators that the NSL is intentionally designed to prevent fair trials." In addition, there's the matter of the government somehow having got an ex-Apple Daily executive (and co-defendant), Royston Chow, to become a witness for the prosecution in the ongoing fraud trial against Jimmy Lai.
As much as I wish otherwise, the fact of the matter is that things aren't looking good for Jimmy Lai -- and for Hong Kong in general. But, well, there are people who have been trying to push back against China for so many more years than those Hong Kongers who started doing so only in 2019 or a few years before, such as those Tibetans calling for the release of the Panchen Lama -- and even while their goals have yet to be achieved, they have not given up. And as history has taught us: in the long run, persistence and resistance often is not futile! Believe it!
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