As the tenth anniversary of the handover (sorry, "reunion with the beloved motherland") passes, we have seen a lot of looking back to the events of 1997. Here are a couple of extracts from my annual newsletter to family and friends in December of that year that I think deserve a wider audience:
Local politics become ever more farcical, with one of our Chief Executive’s senior advisers defending the reappointment of election losers to the “provisional” local councils as a step towards greater democracy, thus placing us in the elevated company of such shining models of democratic development as Burma, Nigeria and Algeria.
The so-called election (by 400 hand-picked China cronies) of Hong Kong’s representatives to China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, saw all but one of those “elected” coming from the ranks of the electors themselves. The most votes went to the head of the New China News Agency, China’s de facto top man in Hong Kong. This leaves China’s top representative in Hong Kong as Hong Kong’s top representative in China, but we are assured by the Chinese Communist Party that this is all right and we just don’t understand the system (who could?).
On Taiwan’s National Day a cluster of Taiwanese flags was taken down by the police, with the government first saying it was illegal to fly them, then realising they hadn’t actually got round to passing the planned anti-sedition law to outlaw them yet. They then changed their tune and announced that the real reason they were removed was because they’d been erected in a public place without permission. Ironically one of the plain clothes police removing them was wearing a Union Jack T-shirt!
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