Claudia Mo was warning people as far back as June 2016
The power outage caused by a Yuen Long power cable bridge catching fire and then collapsing on Monday was supposed to have been resolved by this evening. But reports have come in of parts of Yuen Long being hit by more power outages this evening, with some 13,000 households being without electricity for a time and CLP -- the company which supplies electricity to that part of Hong Kong -- warning that power supply in the area may remain unstable in the next few days.
Even bigger news (or, at least, news that has attracted more comment among the Hong Kong social media community) this evening though has been that, with just a little less than a week to go before the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong's Handover by the British to China (and the swearing in of the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong and his cabinet), incoming Chief Secretary Eric Chan and Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Secretary Erick Tsang have both tested positive for Covid and are now under isolation! And while Tsang's wife (and the Commissioner of Customs and Excise), Louise Ho, has tested negative, she's of course classified as a close contact and thus has to be quarantined!
Until today, Hong Kong’s most senior officials had seemingly miraculously managed to evade catching the Wuhan coronavirus (unlike those in countries such as the USA, Britain and Brazil). The closest any of them had come to doing so were those who had been involved in Hong Kong's version of Partygate (AKA Witmangate) and were sent to quarantine at Penny's Bay after being deemed close contacts; the most senior of whom had been then home affairs minister Caspar Tsui (who subsequently resigned for his part in the scandal).
But now whatever spell that had kept them safe appears to have been broken. And after Ricky Lau, permanent secretary of Development Bureau, also was reported as testing postive for Covid and having been sent to quarantine, one wonders who'll be next! (In its report of this news, the Hong Kong Free Press had the following lines: "It is unclear if Lee or incumbent leader Carrie Lam may be close
contacts of the infected officials. HKFP has reached out to their
offices for comment.")
Coming as they did after the sinking of the Jumbo floating restaurant and the power outages in the northern New Territories, many people can't help but collectively view them as signs of the deterioration of Hong Kong. Another sign of Hong Kong's problems: There's been another high profile announcement of a person having left Hong Kong -- this time involving journalist Timothy McLaughlin, whose "The Leader Who Killed Her City" piece on Carrie Lam (written back in June 2020) few people who read it are going to forget.
The news was announced by McLaughlin in his latest piece, Farewell to Hong Kong and Its Big Lie. The following are a few choice excerpts from it:
In Hong Kong today, falsehoods, gaslighting, and endless fabrications such as these are equaled only by the cowardice of the people partaking in this insulting ruse, an infectious cascade of lies used by Hong Kong’s leaders, and their overlords in Beijing, to reimagine the past and justify the retooling of the city. One would think that the “patriots” deemed worthy of running Hong Kong and their swelling ranks of collaborators would be proud of their role in the dismantling of the city’s freedoms, jailing of its opposition, and overhauling of its institutions. Instead, they hide their motives behind unbelievable excuses and make their moves under the cover of darkness, treating Hong Kongers with visceral contempt, like a pack of gullible idiots devoid of agency and free thought.The narrative of the 2019 prodemocracy movement—in which millions defended their liberties and pushed for more freedom—now recounted by Beijing and its loyalists in Hong Kong is one of paid protesters, foreign agitators, and unpatriotic internal opposition. Claims that once resided in the mind of unhinged propagandists and on the fringes of the internet are now accepted wholesale in many parts of polite society, a story line being cemented in the city’s courts, where scores of activists and former lawmakers are on trial for violating Hong Kong’s national-security law...It is a struggle to try to keep up with the lies, which arrive at a furious volume and pace: New school textbooks proclaim that Hong Kong was never a British colony, for example, and heavy editing was deployed earlier this year to make a set of postage stamps appear more patriotic. All of these fictions serve the city’s leaders and officials, and help perpetuate one of the biggest, most enduring falsehoods about Hong Kong: that it is a city where people simply don’t care about politics. One needs only to look at the events in the city for the past decade to know that this is untrue. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, few places did more in recent years to stand up for freedom and democracy in the face of an unending autocratic assault.
Ahead of the 25th anniversary of its Handover from one colonial power to another, foreign eyes are (temporarily) turning again to Hong Kong and articles appearing. Another good piece that came out today is The Financial Times' on Claudia Mo. Its headline is dramatic, and hopefully eyecatching: "She was loved for standing up to China. She may die in jail".
While focusing on Claudia Mo, the piece's writers attempts to bring readers up to speed about what's been happening in Hong Kong in recent years with lines like these: "In response to the sometimes violent 2019 protests, a newly empowered
police force arrested more than 10,200 people and prosecuted over 2,800
of them, spanning the breadth of Hong Kong society, from students and
waiters, to gym owners and physicists".
They also of course pointed out that in June 2020, "Beijing introduced the vaguely worded security law under which the 47
were eventually charged. It outlaws subversion, terrorism, secession and
“collusion with foreign forces”. It overhauled school and university
curriculums, and forced children as young as six to take national
security lessons. Residents fear they may cross red lines without even
realising it. In June, the new police commissioner, Raymond Siu, said
people could have broken the security law if they simply watched a
documentary on the protests."
And that: "More than 60 civil society organisations, including unions with
thousands of members, have closed — some after threats to the safety of
their leaders’ families. Multiple news outlets have shut down,
journalists have been prosecuted and political cartoonists have fled. A
snitch line was set up for citizens to report possible breaches of the
security law, with police saying they had received more than 260,000
tips."
The sections about Claudia Mo herself are also informative, and touching. A sample passage: "In August last year, a friend of Mo's named Shiu Ka-chun received a letter from her, which he shared excerpts
from on social media. Mo said she had been teaching English to other
prisoners and that her Christian faith was helping her. She thanked
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, for
visiting. “I may be stumbling but not falling,” she wrote."
The article concludes as follows:
Mo has been a prolific writer, authoring at least 10 books over the course of her life, including a couple on raising children — “essentially sharing my experiences throughout my, ahem, reasonably successful motherhood”, she joked on a personal website many years ago. Her publisher Jimmy Pang misses her presence at the city’s annual book fair where she was known as the “mic queen” for standing at his stall for hours introducing her books and speaking to passers-by.
“She would quote this line as she signed her new book for her fans, especially young people: ‘It’s not the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog,’” Pang told me. “[She meant] the fight between two dogs is not about their sizes, but more about the spirit that they hold in the fight. When you fight, relying on pure violence is futile. Focus on how to hold on.”
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