![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogToday marks the 26th anniversary of my arrival in Hong Kong.
How it started / how it's going
But seriously.
I don't have time to do a proper post, but suffice to say that between the slide into an authoritarian state and our Zero COVID strategy – and all of that in the last three years – HK is a much different place than it was when I got here.
The COVID situation here is especially stressful – NBC News explains why here but essentially we went from 12,000 cases and 213 deaths in the first week of February 2022 (which took us two years to accumulate) to 1,047,690 cases and 5,896 deaths as of today.
All that in just six weeks. And mainly because HK had no strategy apart from "don't let the COVID in", which is the strategy Beijing told us to adopt because that's what they're doing. Maybe the govt thought having a fallback plan would be an insult to Beijing's wisdom?
Anyway, here we are.
The good news: The fifth COVID wave is subsiding. The bad news: the national security crackdown is poised to get much worse. For all of Carrie Lam's efforts in the past couple of years, we're still relatively more free compared to China. And you can bet your bottom dollar Xi Jinping wants to fix that, as does our current security chief, who hates us and will jail as many of us as it takes to shut us up and love Xi Jinping as much as he does.
On the bright side, I'm still married and we'll be celebrating 25 years next week. So there's that.
Developing ...
Tales from the dark side,
This is dF
How it started / how it's going
But seriously.
I don't have time to do a proper post, but suffice to say that between the slide into an authoritarian state and our Zero COVID strategy – and all of that in the last three years – HK is a much different place than it was when I got here.
The COVID situation here is especially stressful – NBC News explains why here but essentially we went from 12,000 cases and 213 deaths in the first week of February 2022 (which took us two years to accumulate) to 1,047,690 cases and 5,896 deaths as of today.
All that in just six weeks. And mainly because HK had no strategy apart from "don't let the COVID in", which is the strategy Beijing told us to adopt because that's what they're doing. Maybe the govt thought having a fallback plan would be an insult to Beijing's wisdom?
Anyway, here we are.
The good news: The fifth COVID wave is subsiding. The bad news: the national security crackdown is poised to get much worse. For all of Carrie Lam's efforts in the past couple of years, we're still relatively more free compared to China. And you can bet your bottom dollar Xi Jinping wants to fix that, as does our current security chief, who hates us and will jail as many of us as it takes to shut us up and love Xi Jinping as much as he does.
On the bright side, I'm still married and we'll be celebrating 25 years next week. So there's that.
Developing ...
Tales from the dark side,
This is dF
