Sulu Sou (蘇嘉豪) was elected to one of the few directly elected seats of the Macau legislature. Record voter turnout demonstrated that young Macanese want change.

Neither attacks over Sou’s relationship to the Hong Kong independence movement nor the rhetoric of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) when it entered Macau to help clean up after Typhoon Hato — “the PLA loves the people, and the people have the PLA” — succeeded in blocking the election of Sou or other non-establishment candidates.

Just over a week ago, China’s State Internet Information Office issued a directive banning Internet agencies from publishing news about Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan until it has first been reported on an official government Web site. Even Phoenix TV was forced to cancel three talk shows.

Apparently, no news from Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan is good news — it must be processed before it can be published.

Pro-independence posters appeared on Hong Kong university campuses on the first day of the fall semester, and Xinhua news agency called for those responsible to be dealt with “according to the law.”

In the absence of any actual law for dealing with such posters, authorities had to rely on pro-China supporters to go to the Chinese University of Hong Kong and pull the posters down.

Police were called in to deal with the ensuing clashes, which were reminiscent of campus clashes during the Cultural Revolution.

At a rally by Beijing supporters criticizing Occupy Central campaign group leader Benny Tai (戴耀廷) one attendee yelled: “Anyone calling for Hong Kong independence ought to be killed.”

Pro-Beijing Hong Kong lawmaker and Law Society of Hong Kong former president Junius Ho (何君堯) then added: “Without mercy.”

Ho later told reporters that such people should be “killed without mercy, as one would destroy an enemy.”

Asked if his remarks constituted criminal intimidation, Ho said: “It depends what you are to kill: There’s nothing criminal about slaughtering pigs and dogs.”

Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen (袁國強), who pushed for pro-universal suffrage demonstrators to go to jail, chose to give the rally attendees calling for people to be killed the benefit of the doubt, saying one had to look at the intention behind the words and their context.

Are Ho and Yuen, trusted cohorts of former Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英), being accorded special mercy? Is this is the kind of “rule of law” you can expect in a Chinese colony.

Large numbers of people detained during the “Umbrella movement” are facing persecution by Hong Kong’s judiciary in the coming months. Beijing is readying its arsenal, but Western governments are blind to this.

According to Xinhua, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) spoke on the phone on Monday, after which Trump said he was satisfied with the close relationship he had with Xi and that he was looking forward to a state visit to China and that he believed such a visit would benefit Sino-US relations.

Taiwanese should not take what they have for granted and become preoccupied with internal tensions over a government still struggling to find its feet:

We should not give the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) room to maneuver.

Our main enemy is the CCP and the KMT conspiring with it to control Taiwan. We cannot allow the KMT to regroup: Remorse for one’s actions from behind bars, hoping somebody will come and free you, does nobody any good.
 

Paul Lin is a media commentator.

Translated by Paul Cooper


Source: Taipei Times - Editorials 2017/0922

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