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On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 08:07:23 -0400, John wrote:

On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 13:50:11 -0400, wrote:

A free press suppressed. A vote postponed. Dissent criminalized.
China’s insidious reengineering of the region marches on, but not
without a fight.

Excerpted from WIRED magazine, a leading tech journal:

https://www.wired.com/story/hong-kong-is-troubling-case-study-in-death-of-democracy/?bxid=5cc9e2952ddf9c1a7adfa79b&cndid=54884204&esrc =BottomStories&mbid=mbid%3DCRMWIR012019%0A%0A&sour ce=EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_BACKCHANNEL_ZZ&utm_brand=w ired&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_mailing=WIR_Daily_092020_Backchannel&utm_m edium=email&utm_source=nl&utm_term=WIR_TopClickers _EXCLUDE_Backchannel

The voters began arriving just before noon on July 11. Soon a line of
some two dozen people had formed, snaking past a nail salon and a
beauty parlor lit with purple neon lights. The temperature outside was
reaching into the 90s. The heat, coupled with Hong Kong’s summer
humidity and the face masks to ward off Covid-19, made the narrow
shopping arcade a welcome respite from the sun. Those waiting to cast
their ballots tapped on their phones, reading about the candidates and
chatting with each other, using their final minutes to settle on their
picks. An elderly volunteer walked up and down the line answering
questions.

The voting, which took place across the city, was largely a smooth,
efficient process. The lines were orderly, and updates on the vote
count—first tens, then hundreds of thousands of ballots cast—were
announced on social media as day turned into evening. But the hints
that this democratic experiment was not entirely official were hard to
miss. No government employees tallied votes or checked IDs. Once they
shuffled past the nail salon, voters in the Kennedy Town neighborhood
popped in and out of My Secret, a cramped lingerie shop, casting their
ballots surrounded by flesh-tone bras with oversized padded cups.

Over that day and the next, 610,000 people voted in the election, more
than double earlier estimations of the turnout. (Hong Kong has some
4.6 million registered voters.) At its most basic, the vote was a
primary to decide which pro-democracy candidates would stand in the
territory’s formal elections in September. It was not part of the
government-recognized election process and was organized instead by
civil society groups. But in the context of China’s aggressive
campaign to remake Hong Kong, even turning up to vote involved risk,
and the strong showing became yet another sign that Hong Kongers
refuse to give up their rights quietly.

Eleven days earlier, Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, had
signed a broad, catch-all national security law on instructions from
Beijing. The law set out to, finally, bring mass pro-democracy
protests to an end—something her own government has repeatedly tried
and failed to do—and ensure they were unlikely to return by
criminalizing dissent in the process. Lam, whose stubborn, politically
misguided efforts to ram through a bill that would allow extraditions
to mainland China last year sparked the city’s worst modern political
crisis, made perhaps her only significant contribution to the
legislation with the few late night pen strokes of her signature.
Crafted almost entirely by officials on the mainland, the law was
imposed on a population that had no say in its contents.

The following day, Lam tried to reassure residents that the liberties
they enjoyed would not be infringed upon, but those words, like many
she has spoken since the crisis began last June, were empty. On the
streets, the law had started taking effect, with its enforcers, the
Hong Kong police, at the ready. During a protest against the
legislation on July 1, a 15-year-old girl with a flag reading “I stand
for Hong Kong independence” was taken by officers, and others were
caught and arrested for carrying packs of bumper stickers. After a man
flying a “Liberate Hong Kong” flag on the back of his motorcycle
collided with police, he became the first person formally charged
under the law. He faces counts of secession and terrorism, which carry
life sentences, and has been denied bail twice.

With police deploying more preemptive methods to control protests and
the pandemic discouraging crowds, street demonstrations atrophied.
What it means to resist authoritarianism in the city has morphed, and
the unofficial vote organized by the civil society groups emerged as a
form of protest as powerful as taking to the streets.

Days before the unofficial primary, Lam’s government warned that the
balloting could violate the national security law. Then, on the eve of
the vote, the polling organization assisting with the effort was
raided by police, who said the move was related to a hack of the
group’s computers, an explanation widely viewed as a bald pretext. The
government and police reaction to the vote may have galvanized
interest in an exercise that initially had received only lukewarm
interest. “Yellow shops”—the color denoting their support of the
pro-democracy movement—became ad hoc polling stations, and for a brief
moment the camaraderie of last year’s protests reemerged...

Are you fearful that the Communist Party may do the same in this country?
--

===

Fearful no, concerned yes. And there is just as much danger on the
extreme right as the extreme left. Totalitarian regimes come in all
stripes. Look no further than Germany in the 1930s for a classic
example. I used to think that it couldn't happen here but now I'm not
so sure.

--
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