![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Americans have July 4 to celebrate the day they declared their independence from England. Here in Hong Kong we have July 1 – a.k.a. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day – to celebrate our dependence being transferred from England to the People’s Republic of China.
Which many people see as a step backwards, of course. On the other hand, guess who gets more respect as an economic power.
Irony!
Anyway. It was 15 years ago Sunday that China took over the pink slip on HK. Which means a three-day weekend for me. And a lot of speechifying and reflection on the televisions.
Also, protests.
For those of you who don’t know, I relocated to Hong Kong about 15 months before the handover in 1997. Consequently, people often ask me how much things have changed since then.
Well, any city will be somewhat different today than it was 15 years ago. But the fact that massive anti-govt protests like the one above have become a tradition on the Handover anniversary is probably a basic indicator of how things are going.
Not that everyone wants China to give us back to the UK or anything. And to be fair, the July 1 protests only really became a tradition after 2003, when Tung Chee-hwa’s crew had managed to alarm enough people with his plans for a new law that dealt with treason, sedition, and other things that the PRC generally uses as a thin excuse to jail anyone who makes snotty comments about them (hence the alarm).
Still, it’s been more or less downhill since then in terms of confidence in the local govt, and Sunday’s protest was the biggest since the 2003 march against Tung – not least because it was the same day we got a new chief executive: CY Leung, who not only won a small-circle election mainly because he was better at spinning scandals than rival Henry Tang, but (as we just found out a week before his inauguration) also turns out to be guilty of violating the same laws that cost Tang the election in the first place.
So between that, the realization that Leung’s predecessor Donald Tsang turned out to be corrupt, the fact that HK’s govt is selected by wealthy pro-Beijing businessmen at a time when HK now has the largest wealth-poverty gap in Asia – to say nothing of things like increasing restrictions on journalists (sometimes imposed by their own editors) – the people of HK can be forgiven for being a little disenchanted with the status quo.
Of course, not everyone feels that way, and even the ones that do don't think the answer is the hysterics and cheap theatrics that the League of Social Democrats and Post 80s activists tend to deploy in lieu of actual arguments. The point is that 15 years on, HK has watched its government transform from a colonial quasi-democracy to a Beijing-approved plutocracy prone to corruption and self-inflicted buffoonery.
Still, it’s not like “real” democracies can point any fingers. So I guess that’s something.
Same as it ever was,
This is dF
Which many people see as a step backwards, of course. On the other hand, guess who gets more respect as an economic power.
Irony!
Anyway. It was 15 years ago Sunday that China took over the pink slip on HK. Which means a three-day weekend for me. And a lot of speechifying and reflection on the televisions.
Also, protests.
For those of you who don’t know, I relocated to Hong Kong about 15 months before the handover in 1997. Consequently, people often ask me how much things have changed since then.
Well, any city will be somewhat different today than it was 15 years ago. But the fact that massive anti-govt protests like the one above have become a tradition on the Handover anniversary is probably a basic indicator of how things are going.
Not that everyone wants China to give us back to the UK or anything. And to be fair, the July 1 protests only really became a tradition after 2003, when Tung Chee-hwa’s crew had managed to alarm enough people with his plans for a new law that dealt with treason, sedition, and other things that the PRC generally uses as a thin excuse to jail anyone who makes snotty comments about them (hence the alarm).
Still, it’s been more or less downhill since then in terms of confidence in the local govt, and Sunday’s protest was the biggest since the 2003 march against Tung – not least because it was the same day we got a new chief executive: CY Leung, who not only won a small-circle election mainly because he was better at spinning scandals than rival Henry Tang, but (as we just found out a week before his inauguration) also turns out to be guilty of violating the same laws that cost Tang the election in the first place.
So between that, the realization that Leung’s predecessor Donald Tsang turned out to be corrupt, the fact that HK’s govt is selected by wealthy pro-Beijing businessmen at a time when HK now has the largest wealth-poverty gap in Asia – to say nothing of things like increasing restrictions on journalists (sometimes imposed by their own editors) – the people of HK can be forgiven for being a little disenchanted with the status quo.
Of course, not everyone feels that way, and even the ones that do don't think the answer is the hysterics and cheap theatrics that the League of Social Democrats and Post 80s activists tend to deploy in lieu of actual arguments. The point is that 15 years on, HK has watched its government transform from a colonial quasi-democracy to a Beijing-approved plutocracy prone to corruption and self-inflicted buffoonery.
Still, it’s not like “real” democracies can point any fingers. So I guess that’s something.
Same as it ever was,
This is dF
