MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

There’s a new TV show on Amazon starring Nicole Kidman called Expats, created by Lulu Wang and based on a novel, which is – as the title implies – about wealthy expats. Specifically, American expats in Hong Kong, where I also happen to live as an expat – although in my case, I’m a poor expat rather than a wealthy one, so the first thing I should say is that anything you see in the show is like no life I have ever lived, here or anywhere else.

Many of the HK scenes were actually filmed here on location, and if you haven’t heard, it caused a big stir here because the scenes were shot in the thick of the COVID pandemic when HK had serious restrictions in place (masks at all times, only four people allowed to eat together in restaurants which must close after 6pm,  etc), the most stringent of which were immigration rules under which people entering HK had to be quarantined in a hotel for anywhere from one to three weeks, depending on what country they departed from.

Kidman and the film crew were all given exemptions to all of this, which did not sit well with those of us whose lives had been impacted by rules that made increasingly less sense as the pandemic continued. It didn’t help that for some outdoor scenes, where Kidman is walking around a street market in Mong Kok, the film crew reportedly decorated the street with lanterns, bird cages and other things – supposedly to make it look more “Chinese”.

Anyway, a lot of people were annoyed by this and promised to boycott the show when it came out. I am not boycotting the show, mainly because (1) I don’t subscribe to Amazon’s streaming service and (2) the premise of Expats doesn’t interest me, regardless of its setting. Put simply, I can’t legitimately claim to boycott a show I wouldn’t have watched in the first place.

(Update [added Jan 27, 2:44pm): Also, it seems Amazon isn’t making the show available in HK, for reasons that are currently unclear, but I think we can guess. Developing ...)

So I haven’t watched it – but I’ve read some of the reviews, which have been mixed. And this one from Linda Holmes at NPR is quite interesting, as she notes that a big problem with the show is that it seems totally disinterested with the fact that it is set in a city at a time of significant political upheaval and change.

The show doesn’t really engage with any of this apart from one episode that has a protest scene, but according to Holmes, it’s done in a very non-specific way that doesn’t say anything about why protests are happening. It’s a backdrop, and barely a plot device as far as the main characters are concerned. And it’s never revisited again.
 
There’s been speculation that this was an intentional choice in order to avoid displeasing the HK govt and Beijing. We don’t know. But I think all of this raises a good question in terms of writing:

Does a story HAVE to have something to say about its setting?

I don’t think so. The setting doesn’t have to BE the story. You don’t have to set a story in, say, Barcelona, and be obliged to explore the issue of Catalan independence. Ergo, I don’t think Expats is obliged to say anything meaningful about the pro-democracy movement or Beijing’s encroachment thereon, etc. And as some have noted, a show about rich self-obsessed expats being oblivious to the realities around them is at least realistic.

However, based on the reviews, it sounds like Wang squandered both the premise (rich oblivious expats with problems) and the setting (HK during a time of political turmoil). She made a rich-people-with-problems drama that could have been set anywhere and uses HK-specific issues at most as shallow plot devices.

Again, I don’t think Wang is obligated to tell a story where the developments in HK are more central to the story arc, or to make some kind of social commentary. But I do think it’s a lost opportunity. There’s so much you could do with a story about rich expats living in a city undergoing profound changes. But it sounds like the only reason the show is set in HK is because the original novel was (and from I’ve heard, the novel itself took a similar approach).

That might be fine for Wang and her (presumably) US audience, but for those of us who live here it’s yet another example of HK being used as a generic backdrop for Western cinema, mostly for aesthetic reasons (urban canyons, Blade Runner neon, etc).

And, you know, it’s nice y’all think our city looks cool (I agree!), but we’re more than a pretty face. So forgive us if we’re not impressed.

And yeah, breezing in here during COVID and decorating Fa Yuen Street to make it look more “Chinese” didn’t help.

In the city,

This is dF

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region turned 25 yesterday.

Chief executive Carrie Lam, who “decided” not to seek another term, is gone.

Replacing her is John Lee, a former cop who (as Secretary of Security) led the hardcore crackdown on the 2019 protests. He was personally selected by the CCP as their preferred candidate, and he ran unopposed in what we laughably call an “election” (in which the Election Committee – 1,461 elites vetted by Lee himself and approved by Beijing – are the only voters allowed – Lee won 99.4% of the vote, and the 0.6% are probably under investigation by now).

So you have an idea of how the next 25 years are going to go. To clarify, Lee’s term is only five years (and he can run for re-election, though that’s a rare thing in HK), but it’s a fair bet that Lee’s successors will run with whatever ball they’re handed – because it is after all Beijing’s ball, and that’s the nature of the gig.

Do I have thoughts? I do, though there’s too much to say and at the same time nothing much to say.

1. It’s probably worth starting with sharing some links, like where HK is now in terms of the national security law, press freedom, civil society, and in general. On the whole, it’s not good. Unless you happen to share the views of GovHK and the CCP (or accept their highly idiosyncratic definitions of One Country Two Systems, free speech, press freedom, universal suffrage, judicial indepencdence, etc –  in which case, yr probably enjoying yourself.

2. Here’s another link explaining how we got here – and it’s worth reading as a cautionary tale for other countries who are experiencing creeping authoritarianism right now. Simply put, it’s not an overnight thing – it’s a long game, years in the making. And you'd be surprised how many people will accept it as long as it works in their favor. 

3. Here’s a link reviewing Carrie Lam’s legacy and her role in taking a wrecking ball to HK’s freedoms, and her Beijing-directed zero-COVID policies that have decimated the economy.

4. And here’s one about John Lee and what we can expect from him.

5. The HKSAR 25^th Anniversary itself was somehow a perfect metaphor for where we are right now – the convention centre walled off for blocks around, most media banned from attending it (though they could cover it using govt-supplied video), and a typhoon poised to shut down the rest of the city. No fireworks, no gala event, no party, just lots and lots of Chinese flags everywhere. China President Xi Jinping came down to swear in Lee and make a big speech about HK’s prosperous future now that it’s been brought to heel and the pro-democracy camp in jail or in exile. Good times.

6. And so, what now? Likely more of the same, only more so – an expansion of the national security law to cover even more vaguely defined offenses against the state, a “fake news” law that is very likely to be used to keep the media in line and crack down on social media, the June 4 candlelight vigil permanently banned, book bans, and of course the usual official gaslighting: Hong Kong has lost none of its freedoms, the protests were funded and run by foreign forces out to overthrow China, HK was never a British colony, etc. To say nothing of the continued and accelerated blurring of boundaries as Hong Kong gets co-opted into the Greater Bay Area project.

Which is a drag, of course.

7. To answer the inevitable question (and one which now regularly appears when meeting local people I haven’t talked to for awhile) – “Are you planning to leave HK?” – the answer is: no. Not right now. I’ve lived here 26 years now, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, so this is home. The one thing that would convince us to go back to the US is if my mom (who is 90, bless her) needs more looking after than my sister can provide on her own.

But apart from that, the political aspects don’t affect me too much right now. Perhaps they will later, especially with US-China relations deteriorating. I don’t feel in any real danger of being arrested, if only because GovHK isn’t interested in jailing literally everyone who says bad things about them – and that’s mainly because it’s logistically impossible. They know full well how much support the pro-Demo movement and the protesters had then (and have now). It scares them. So they’re hoping to make enough public examples of the high-profile ringleaders who have actual influence to encourage the rest of us to shut up.

My social media presence is modest and my follower numbers meagre. I think I’ll be fine. Perhaps that’s naïve. We’ll see.

Staying put,

This is dF

ITEM: Hong Kong has a new and improved election system that – we are assured – will result in more democracy than we’ve ever had before.

Here’s how RTHK put it on Twitter:

Which is about right.

To explain: the “reforms” were imposed on us by Beijing in response to the 2019 protests, the landslide victory of pro-Democracy candidates in the District Council elections at the end of that year, and the pro-Demo primary in 2020 that was part of their planned strategy to win a majority in LegCo for the first time in the LegCo elections in September that year.

Every single person who ran in that primary is now in jail for violating China’s national security. (No, really.)

Meanwhile, as there was a pretty good chance the pro-Demo strategy actually might have actually worked, the HK govt postponed the LegCo election for a year (citing COVID-19 as the official reason, of course), and Beijing decided our election system and our democracy in general needed fixing.

Well, they fixed it all right.

The details are here if you want them, but in the name of TL;DR, here’s an analogy:

Imagine that Congress had a total of 70 seats, only half of which (35) are directly elected by the people. The other half are elected by business sectors and special interests.

Imagine also that the POTUS (let’s say Trump, for example) is elected not by regular voters but an Electoral Committee of 1,200 electors controlled by the GOP, which gets final approval on who serves on the committee. The same committee also gets to decide who gets to run for POTUS.

That was our system until today.

Here’s the new system:

• Congress will be expanded to 90 seats, but you can only vote for 20 of them
• Of the remainder, 30 will be elected by business reps and the other 40 will be elected by the same Electoral Committee that elects the POTUS
• That committee (which is now 1,500 people, 1,000 of which are hand-picked and appointed by the GOP, the rest elected by approved pro-GOP corporations and interest groups) also gets final say on who gets to run for all 90 Congressional seats
• A new committee will vet all candidates to ensure they are “patriots”. They will be assisted by the national security police to make sure the candidates are not national security threats.
• Any candidate disqualified by the committee is subject to arrest by the national security police for violating the national security law
• Encouraging people to cast protest votes in any way shape or form (to include t-shirt slogans) is punishable by three years in prison, even though protest votes are not illegal.

 So, yes. That’s our democracy now.

CAVEAT: It’s an imperfect analogy in the sense that the HK isn’t a two party system. Rather, we have a number of parties divided into two ideological camps – pro-Beijing and pro-Democracy. The CCP does not operate as a political party in HK, but from this point on, only candidates (regardless of political party) who pledge patriotic loyalty to China and the CCP can run for office – which basically means anyone approved by the CCP to run for office in HK is by default CCP-adjacent, if not literally a party member.

Naturally, Carrie Lam and whatever LegCo members are left (as most pro-Democrat politicians are either disqualified, in jail or in exile) are selling it as a delightful, major improvement that it actually makes Hong Kong more democratic, because it ensures that all voices are represented. (To explain: Beijing’s idea of “representation” is that all points of view are welcome to be represented in government, so long as only pro-Beijing voices have majority control forever – and as long as all views come with a pledge of loyalty to the CCP.)

They’re also selling this in the TV PSAs as a matter of national security with a direct link to the 2019 protests. Essentially, this involves a rewrite of history that combines two separate elements – protest violence + rowdy scenes in LegCo by pan-Democrats with a penchant for theatre – as if all of this was one big violent separatist movement funded by Western govts to create anarchy, take over the govt and overthrow Beijing.

“See? It’s either this or TOTAL VIOLENT CHAOS! Which would you rather have?”

Which of course is 100% false. But this is the same govt that arrested 53 pro-Demos for attempting to legally win a LegCo majority and tells teenagers holding up blank placards in malls that they’re violating national security. So.

BONUS TRACK: Regarding the RTHK tweet, here’s a link about how RTHK (our local public broadcaster) is being slowly but surely transformed from the best and most trusted news source in the city to a govt propaganda mill. Their social media person (at least on the English language side) is apparently keen on going down swinging.

Voted off the island,

This is dF

Hong Kong was scheduled to have its next LegCo election next month. It has now been postponed to next year.

The move has been condemned by Donald Trump – who as it happens wants to postpone the US election in November.

Let’s blog this, shall we?

1. The excuse for the HK election postponement is COVID-19. The loyalists either really believe this or are pretending to do so. The rest of us are reasonably convinced the actual reason is that Beijing wants it postponed because if we hold it on time, there’s a decent chance that the pan-Democrats might actually gain ground or – even worse – win a decent-sized majority. And we can’t have that.

2. We were expecting this, of course. Both the HK govt and Beijing went out of their way to state that the pan-Demo primary was probably maybe a violation of our shiny new National Security law. This was followed by election officers asking the pan-Demo candidates who topped that primary to ask them whether they would support the NSL and every other HK govt policy wholeheartedly and without question (and the answer had better be yes, and it had better be a convincing yes).

Result: 12 of them were disqualified. Which was also expected – not least because Beijing was directly involved in the decision.

The only reason to think they might not postpone the election was if Beijing opted to just keep disqualifying pan-Demos until there were none left. Why cancel an election when you can just rig it? But I suppose they thought that was too blatant – that, and the pan-Demos planned to make them work for it by having a rather long list of back-up candidates.

Anyway, Stephen Vines sums it up well here, but basically Beijing has made it clear that it will only suffer the pan-Demos’ existence as long as they have no real power and they learn to shut up and like it. And given the momentum the pan-Demos have thanks to the Lam admin being generally hopeless at handling major crises like political unrest and COVID-19, Beijing apparently decided they would much rather call off the election using a plausible excuse like COVID-19 than take a chance that DQing candidates they don’t like might be too obvious.

3. Speaking of which, the COVID-19 excuse is also nonsense. Carrie Lam pointed out that several countries have also postponed elections because of COVID-19. Which is true, but plenty of others have successfully held elections – and their COVID stats are far worse than HK’s. The pan-Demo primary was a masterclass in holding an election safely, and that was organized and managed by a tiny polling organization with minimal resources. The HK govt has far greater resources and is perfectly capable of taking measures to ensure the Sept election is carried out as safely as possible. It just doesn’t want to.

4. Which raises the obvious question: will the election really take place in one year? And the obvious answer is: who knows? I think Beijing needs HK to have an election at some point, otherwise they can’t exactly claim with a straight face that HK is a democracy under One Country Two Systems. However, I’m reasonably sure that Beijing will not give the green light until they’re convinced the pro-BJ camp can’t possibly lose.

5. The other obvious question is how the current LegCo can legally keep serving for a year after everyone’s term expires? No one knows yet. But I fully expect the solution to be bad news for the pan-Demos still in LegCo (four of whom were among those disqualified from running again).

5. As for Trump wanting to delay the November election because of non-existent mail fraud, the catch is that you can never tell when he’s serious and when he’s just spouting paranoid nonsense to feed the base.

The one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that it’s not just because he’s worried about mail-in votes. He’s worried about having his ass handed to him, which would not only bruise his ego, but make him more likely to face prosecution and jail for his many high crimes and misdemeanors.

I don’t know how worried he is about the latter. But I do think at the very least he’s continuing his efforts to lay down the groundwork to de-legitimize the results should he lose.

6. Also, I take little solace in the technical fact that legally and Constitutionally, Trump can’t unilaterally delay the election. Which is true, but Trump somehow strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn't really care about breaking laws or violating the Constitution.

That said, in order for him to literally prevent the election from going ahead in all 50 states, he’d need some way to enforce that. I don't think the MAGA Boogaloo Cult with their AR-15s and whatnot have the manpower or firepower to stop every single election in each state. He’d need the support of the National Guard and Armed Forces commanders – which might look and feel too much like a coup for their taste.

I’m not saying he won’t try. I’m just saying his odds of succeeding are not good. At least right now. But as I say, I think he mainly wants his MAGA cult to throw a locked-and-loaded hissyfit if he loses and take their anger out on whatever liberals and minorities happen to be at hand while he tweets for the rest of his life from a secure location about the Democratic Liberal Coup of 2020.

7. Anyway it takes some nerve for him to send his press secretary out to condemn the HK election postponement when he’s planning on doing the exact same thing at home, and with an even flimsier excuse. On the other hand, it’s very on-brand.

Cancel culture,

This is dF

Hong Kong had its first – and possibly last – primary election over the weekend.

To explain briefly:

HK doesn't normally have primaries in the same manner as the US. But the pan-Democratic parties (which are legion) have never held a collective majority in in the Legislative Council (LegCo) – in part because the parties keep splitting into smaller factions, which ends up splitting the vote to the point where pro-Beijing parties tend to win.

So the pan-Demo organization People For Democracy organized a primary election to help the various parties work out which pan-Demo candidates have the best chance of winning and then back those candidates in the General Election in September. The Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI) – an offshoot of HK University which conducts public opinion polls – is collecting the data and tallying votes.

Another reason for doing this is that most pan-Demos are pretty sure that the upcoming LegCo election is their last chance to win a majority, not least because the govt has been looking for every excuse they can (often linked to last year’s protests) to disqualify pan-Demo candidates to ensure they don't win a majority.

Indeed, even though the primary is not against election rules, various HK govt officials (including, of course, Carrie Lam) have naturally said that all of this could potentially violate the new National Security Law. Their reasons? (1) it's cheating for the pan-Demos to figure out in advance which of their candidates have the best chance of winning and (2) it's a violation of the national security law for opposition parties who oppose govt policies to win a majority because opposing the govt is sedition. On the other hand, if the opposition parties agree to support everything the govt proposes, then that's perfectly legal. See?

[Additional note: these are the kind of arguments you get from people who have no idea how something works but think they do.]

It’s also notable that the night before the election, police raided PORI and seized some of their computers – supposedly for something unrelated to the election. Luckily, they didn’t take the computers with the election data on them.

Anyway, I voted. I don't think I'll go to jail for it, if only because 610,000 people voted. So I don’t think they have the capacity to arrest that many people at once. More than likely they’ll arrest the organizers if they decide to arrest anyone.

So, a brief Q&A:

1. Is 610,000 a good number?

Yes, in the sense that the PFD was expecting 170,000. Every one of those are verified voters.

2. Will it actually help the pan-Demos win a majority?

No idea, but it’s unlikely, if only because I fully expect the HK govt to arrest and/or disqualify the candidates who won the primary (all of whom, as it happens, are the younger and more blatantly anti-Beijing candidates rather than the moderate Establishment pan-Demos).

Also, it depends on whether the various pan-Demo factions really can unite behind a candidate that may not tick all their ideological boxes. (For the Americans, it’s kind of like convincing Sanders supporters to vote for Joe Biden.)

3. Could the govt just cancel the elections?

They could, though legally it’s tricky, and they’re trying to pass themselves off to the international community (especially investors) as a reasonable regime that totally believes in freedom and democracy despite beating up, tear-gassing and arresting people for advocating just that. So I think they’ll settle for rigging it in their favour.

4. Isn't the fact that they didn't send the police out to stop the primary a good sign?

Not really. As I said, the HK govt is desperately selling the narrative that the NSL all about freedom and democracy and the NSL was only necessary because a tiny group of violent separatist terrorists (trained and funded by mysterious foreign agencies) were trying to overthrow China by firebombing the streets of Hong Kong and sticking Post-it Notes all over the place. Beating the crap out of decidedly non-violent people who support (currently) legal political parties who are clearly not doing anything technically illegal creates the kind of optics that make that narrative a tough sell.

Yes, so does banning slogans, prohibiting schoolchildren from singing that song, yanking books off library shelves and arresting kids for silently waving blank placards. But then I never said their arguments make sense, and HK/BJ either don’t know or care that they don’t – their defense of the NSL, police brutality and censorship is essentially one big gaslighting exercise, and they seem convinced that if they repeat it enough times (despite all evidence to the contrary) the rest of the world will have no choice but to believe them. I mean, these are the same people who said that the press will have 100% press freedom under the NSL as long as they don’t write anything that violates the NSL.

Anyway, as I say, they’ll settle for arresting the organizers (likely starting with Benny Tai, who they absolutely hate) and disqualifying candidates.

Developing …

You choose, you lose,

This is dF