A day of setbacks for those seeking better for Hong Kong (and China) but also one where resistance is shown to still exist

Photo taken in a very different Hong Kong from now

back on June 4th, 2016

 

I read a beautifully written piece in The Guardian this morning about how Xi Jinping has purged China of hope -- but can't stamp out small acts of resistance.  Among other things, Yangyang Cheng wrote that: "Sorrow tears into my organs and gnaws at my bones. But what I fear more than pain is numbness: to give in to the powers that be, and give up on imagining otherwise."

 

And amidst it all, I took comfort from her concluding lines: "I hold no illusions about the long night ahead, but each refusal of injustice preserves an opening. Every act of rebellion, however spectacular or humble, is a reclamation of the self and a love letter to a stranger. Across the darkness, another searching gaze catches the flicker, and a sacred bond is cast: I see you. I feel you. We are still here."  

 

Which is just as well since this has been one of those days which has been full of pain and anger resulting from seeing Hong Kong effects at resistance encountering a number of setbacks.  First up: the announcement in The Big Lychee, Various Sectors' latest blog post that the USA-based Hong Kong Democracy Council's new report, “Business NOT As Usual: International Companies in the New Authoritarian Hong Kong”, which calls on global finance leaders to not attend the Hong Kong government's finance summit and documents 39 "corporate bad actors" in Hong Kong", is unavailable to many Hong Kong internet users; so they will just to make do with such as a Twitter thread by Samuel Bickett that summarizes its contents (starting here).    

 

Upon further investigation, the Hong Kong Democracy Council's Anna Kwok reported that it wasn't just the report that had been blocked but, in fact, the organization's entire website and, actually, for a while now.  This means that it has been given the same treatment as Hong Kong Watch back in February.  And who knows when many more websites will become unavailable to those in Hong Kong without a VPN (or on those internet service providers that haven't yet got the memo).       

Also today came news that the Hong Kong government is planning to drop the "political neutrality" rule for civil servants. As lawyer-political observer Antony Dapiran noted in a Tweet, "Secretary for the Civil Service Ingrid Yeung Ho Poi-yan plans to drop the requirement of political neutrality from the code of conduct for HK’s civil service [in order to make it so that] “Political neutrality cannot be used as an excuse to evade tasks decided upon by the government.”

 

And as another member of the Hong Kong Twitterati pointed out: "Ironically, if I'm not mistaken, the neutrality requirement was meant to prevent civil servants from openly supporting opposition political views. Now that's not enough. It never is with patriots. You MUST openly pick a side, and it's no secret which side yr expected to pick."

 

Adding to the irony quotient: this same day saw a national security law judge state that he wanted what went on in his court to not be political and, instead, neutral.  Though he sure had/has a strange definition of what constitutes "neutral" for sure.  

 

More specifically, while presiding over the national security law trial against the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (i.e., the group behind the candlelight vigils in Victoria Park on June 4th), Principal Magistrate Peter Law barred lawyer-defendant Chow Hang-tung from using the phrase “Tiananmen [Square] massacre", with prosecutor Ivan Cheung suggesting that Chow use the term “June 4th incident” instead.  In response to Law's suggestion that she use “proper terminology in [a] neutral form”, Chow was moved to state the following: “I do protest to the term Tiananmen incident, what is a massacre cannot be downgraded to an incident, this is not a neutral term”.  

 

And that's not all: "The prosecution also objected to Chow’s use of “the killing” when referring to June 4, 1989, saying that the police application for a notice requesting information from the Alliance did not mention any killing.  “Then how do I describe it? That some people died on that day?” Chow asked, after the magistrate agreed with Cheung and asked the barrister not to say “the killing.”"

 

Those people who are "glass half full" types might say: "Hey, at least they're not denying that people died in Beijing on June 4th, 1989.  So Hong Kong's not (completely) part of the People's Republic of Amnesia yet!"  But seeing these court antics one day after Jimmy Lai received a fifth conviction (for an act that usually is considered a civil rather than criminal matter) makes them all the more risible.  

 

Seeing the treatment meted out to the likes of Jimmy Lai and Chow Hang-tung, one is reminded of what Tim Hamlett wrote in a Hong Kong Free Press opinion piece last month: i.e., "we see a system where the government selects a target and then throws at it anything that might stick. So crowd-funding becomes money-laundering, a breach of lease conditions becomes fraud, clapping in court becomes sedition, and so on. Laws which have been dead letters for decades are exhumed and, if that fails, there is always the national security law, which can mean whatever you like."  

It really can feel overwhelming at times, and one can easily be moved to despair.  As Yangyang Cheng put it in her piece in The Guardian: "I cannot recall when I entered a state of perpetual mourning."  And yet, it also is she who reminds us in the same article: "No control is absolute. Power at its most menacing and totalising is also insecure and unsustainable."  And yes, I do take some comfort from thinking -- no, knowing -- that this is so.