Third time lucky?

Posted on December 2, 2015 by biglychee

Hong Kong was overcome with vibrant positive energy yesterday – an infectious buzz of ecstatic enthusiasm and excitement sweeping the city as it launched the‘Appreciate HK’ campaign. We haven’t seen such an outpouring of popular merriment and dancing in the streets since [insert last time there was widespread merriment etc].

The government announcement calls for ‘sectors in the community’ to organize ‘activities and projects suitable to be incorporated into the programme schedule’. By ‘sectors’, officials mainly mean themselves, plus their business cronies and perhaps the Communist Party’s grim-faced ogres and clueless hirelings. But they are also rather daringly including academia and NGOs, so perhaps pro-democracy lawyers from Hong Kong University and young activists from the City-State Independence Movement will be joining in. It depends what they mean by ‘suitable to be incorporated’. Maybe not everyone will be ‘incorporated’ with open arms.

While her boss continues on his mission to alienate and embitter anyone in the city who is (one or more of) young, intelligent, thoughtful, good-looking, literate or vaguely decent, Chief Secretary Carrie Lamwelcomes us to this latest attempt to spread harmony and happiness throughout the land. It is, she notes with a touch of weariness, the third such effort, following the roaring successes of the much-loved ‘Hong Kong: Our Home’ campaign of 2013 and the ‘Bless Hong Kong’ thing last year. This one, she insists, has ‘a deeper meaning and generates greater social cohesion’ (sounds like an ad for soap powder), and it has no fewer than four meanings (which we tragically have insufficient space to list here).

Her message then lapses into cold propaganda-speak, like a China Daily quote of Xi Jinping’s exhortations to a party plenum…

Note the clumsy ‘Communist’ English here. This is Carrie’s subliminal/subversive way of distancing herself from the prose ordered from on high: an apologetic ‘not my idea’ from a heart-broken bureaucrat who no longer has the will to resist. (Leaving harsh-sounding Liaison Office phraseology intact is becoming an established silent gesture of defiance – keep an eye out for it.)

Biting her lip, Carrie summons up a few far more polished and rousing words in tribute to the old Hong Kong Spirit…

…before finally admitting her despair, head down, implicitly pleading with anyone who might be able to do something – anything – to rescue the city, even at this stage, where it looks too late and beyond hope…

Lest you think I am reading too much anguish into her words, you need only check out the innards of ‘Appreciate HK’, such as the soy sauce and instant noodles below-cost for the underprivileged (one item per eligible person per week) to confirm the wrist-slashingly wretched awfulness of the whole thing. Meanwhile, Carrie still has retirement details in the UK to sort out. Please don’t make her do a fourth campaign.

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