tim's experiment

The Chinese New Year is my favourite Hong Kong festival. There is fun, a week off, pleasant social occasions, agreeable rituals and none of that nonsense about buying people presents you hope they will like. Of late, though, I find myself wondering if it will still be this much fun in a year or two’s time. There are freedoms without which self-fulfilment and true happiness are impossible. They continue to wilt.

It was reported without comment, and even in some places with approval, that the attempt to sell toilet rolls with C.Y. Leung’s face on them had been prevented because the disrespectful bumf had been confiscated on the Mainland. Now as an exercise in freedom of speech having CY’s face on your bogroll probably counts as some sort of pinnacle of bad taste. But an exercise in free speech it is. No self respecting court in a free country would fail to recognise this as an infringement on the citizen’s right to express his opinion, favourable or otherwise, on his local leader. Yet here it passed without comment, even from the usual  “trouble-makers”. We have become inured to attempts by the national authorities to curb the rights guaranteed to us by the Basic Law, the Bill of Rights, and (giggle) the Constitution of the PRC. Apparently it is no longer worth complaining.

Then there was a story this week saying that the police had “taken down” some messages on the Internet. Once again the worrying thing about this was the points which were not explored. Since when did the police monitor the internet, and what for? Do they really have the power to “take down” items, and if so from what legislation? Is there a right to be notified, a right to appeal? Many years ago the right to censor stage performances was moved from the police to the Commissioner for Television and Entertainment Licensing. Censoring films has always been a matter for a separate body and broadcasters are answerable to an authority of their own. So what is going on here?

I wonder if this was what it was like in Germany in the 30s, or in Italy in the 20s. In more primitive societies you know when the tanks appear on the lawn of the Presidential Palace that you are going back to the middle ages. But in more sophisticated ones that does not work. What happens is that a regime appears which sells the idea that it will concentrate on livelihood matters, from which bourgeois notions of rights and freedoms are an unwelcome distraction. Some citizens overlook the resulting deficiencies in the matter of human rights in the hope that the concentration on “livelihood matters” will enrich them. Some overlook these deficiencies because they are dumb, because they are doing well out of the system, because they are sycophants or because they are easily scared. Anyone who complains is branded a miscreant and trouble-maker, and told to shut up even by his friends. Until one day we all look round and discover that rights and freedoms we took for granted have been spirited away. And the livelihood problems still have not been solved.

The media freedom frog is, it seems clear, now pretty well cooked. Will other freedoms now have their turn in the pot?