So soft resistance is not a legal concept? Why this is a worrying thought
Soft resistance, said Paul Lam, has three main elements: making false or misleading statements, expressing them irrationally with emotional bias, and having the intention to create misunderstandings about the Chinese or Hong Kong governments and their policies.
This looks like an extension of the law on subversion, already unmoored from its Common Law attachment to the provocation of violence. If this were the case, it would still leave a variety of tricky questions. For example, would sincere belief in the truth of the statement complained of be a defence?
But Mr Lam scotched this notion by adding that 'methods of soft resistance may not always be illegal, but that did not mean they did not harm society.'
He also said that although the term was hard to define the government would not use it arbitrarily. 'You can say it is a political term,' he mused. 'Not all issues in society should be addressed by legal means. [Legal means] are also not always the most effective way of handling [matters].'
This brings us to a rather alarming question: What non-legal means is the government proposing to use?
A few reminders: We have repeatedly been assured that freedom of expression continues to be protected in Hong Kong. Both the Basic Law and the National Security Law reiterate the point, which is often also made by officials.
Anyone who complains about apparent infringements will be referred to the relevant part of the Bill of Rights Ordinance, which permits exceptions to protect – put briefly – reputations, public order (including national security) and public decency.
But there is one condition attached to these exceptions: They must be 'provided by law.' That means that if a person engages in soft resistance, deplorable though that may be, using methods which are not illegal, then he or she is exercising the right to self-expression and is entitled to Mr Lam's protection while doing so.
The answer to soft resistance that does not break the law is, of course, soft repression. This could take the form of counterarguments, pointing out untruths, denouncing irrational language and correcting misinterpretations of government policies.
This should not be too difficult. The government has a whole department devoted to putting its version of events before the public. RTHK is at its service, and most of our surviving media take pride in doing more than justice to the government line.
The answer to erroneous speech is, or should be, correct speech.
Yet somehow, I do not think this was on the mind of the numerous senior officials who thought a 28th Handover anniversary speech was a good opportunity to denounce the evils of soft resistance and promise to extirpate it.
Rosanna Law, the secretary for culture, art and tourism, for example, promised to step up scrutiny before allowing funding or the use of venues for shows.
Other issuers of permits of various kinds are apparently putting their shoulders to the wheel.
Of late, we learn that restaurants can lose their licences, social workers and teachers can be drummed out of their professions. Some people cannot run a bookshop without entertaining a stream of visitors from government departments, citing anonymous complaints about hygiene, fire safety, business regulations or whatever.
We may have a government which, as Mr Lam said, welcomes criticism, but it is not very good at looking like that.
The problem with this sort of thing is that after a while it makes people suspicious. Maybe the venue you wanted to hire really does have an air-conditioning problem. Who knows? The Lord moves in mysterious ways and routinely refuses to discuss individual cases.
Recently the Inland Revenue Department resumed sending me annual tax returns. In normal times I would put this down to a lucrative one-off freelance gig in 2023 after which the employer very properly filed the usual form reporting how much it paid me.
As it happened, though, this sudden renewal of interest in my finances coincided with several stories about news media and individual reporters being asked for large tax payments they did not owe. So an innocent bit of bureaucratic routine looks … fishy.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
HKFP
3 hours ago
- HKFP
Thousands of men shared non-consensual intimate photos on Telegram: Chinese media
Thousands of men allegedly shared intimate photos and videos of their girlfriends without consent on the Telegram messaging app, Chinese media reported, sparking widespread outcry against secret filming and calls to better protect women. Pornography in China is illegal, and conservative social attitudes towards women remain the norm, often reinforced by state media and popular culture. It comes after a Chinese university expelled a female student this month for 'damaging national dignity' over videos posted by a Ukrainian esports player on Telegram suggesting they had been intimate. The Chinese state-owned Southern Daily reported this week a woman had discovered that photos of her taken unknowingly had been shared in a Telegram forum with over 100,000 users, mostly Chinese men. Members of the forum also shared photos of their girlfriends, ex-girlfriends and wives, according to a commentary in the Guangming Daily, an outlet backed by China's ruling communist party. Revelations of the group have sparked widespread outcry online. 'We are not…'content' that can be randomly uploaded, viewed and fantasised about,' read one comment on Instagram-like Red Note. 'We can no longer remain silent. Because next could be me, or it could be you.' A related hashtag has been viewed more than 230 million times on social media platform Weibo since Thursday. The largest group, called 'Mask Park', has since been taken down, but smaller spinoffs remain active, according to women contacted by Southern Daily. Telegram encrypts its users' messages and is banned in China, but it is accessible using a virtual private network. AFP has contacted Telegram for comment. 'Nightmares for life' The incident has drawn comparisons to a case in South Korea dubbed 'Nth Room', in which a man blackmailed dozens of women into taking sexually explicit videos and sold them on Telegram. Chinese women have taken to social media to detail their own experiences being filmed and photographed by men in public. 'What criminals consider 'regular' for them may be nightmares that countless women can't escape for the rest of their lives,' one woman said, sharing an encounter on Douyin. Chinese police have cracked down on illegal filming, arresting hundreds of people in 2022 over clandestine surveillance activities. But women's rights are sensitive territory in China — over the last decade, authorities have suppressed almost every form of independent feminist activism. #MeToo activist Sophia Huang Xueqin was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of 'inciting subversion of state power' after she became a symbol of the country's stalled feminist movement. Chinese authorities have yet to publicly announce any action against the Telegram group. But the Guangming Daily commentary urged 'accountability' for the organisers of the Telegram group, and empathy for the people filmed. Improving law enforcement would 'enhance the overall sense of security, free women from the fear of being spied on and make privacy boundaries a truly untouchable red line', it said.
AllAfrica
5 hours ago
- AllAfrica
Learning from Mao's ‘nightmare' youth revolution in China
In the 1960s and 70s, the youth of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia rebelled by protesting against the Vietnam War, trying psychedelic drugs, embracing free love and discovering the Beatles. Meanwhile, what their contemporaries in China were getting up to was just as transformative. The key difference, as Linda Jaivin's book shows, is that the young Chinese rebels' actions had profoundly destructive consequences – and their senseless behavior was masterminded by their 'great leader,' Mao Zedong. Review: Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China – Linda Jaivin (Black Inc.) Bombard the Headquarters! is a compelling but disturbing account of what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. In just over 100 pages, alternating between broad brush strokes and a fine-grained touch, Jaivin's book takes the reader on a tumultuous journey through the political upheavals in China from 1966 to 1976. She is a consummate storyteller. This, when combined with an intimate knowledge of Chinese language and a solid grounding in existing scholarship on China, equips her well for the mammoth challenge of making sense of the most indelible national trauma of 20th-century China. The book starts with the years 1949–66, giving readers a taste of how Mao, motivated by political neurosis, set out to foment a new revolution. Having established the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, he became increasingly worried about the 'capitalist, feudalist and revisionist' elements he believed had infiltrated the PRC government and Chinese society. He wanted to ensure China did not stray from its socialist values. But he also wanted to remove his detractors from the Party ranks and reassert his authority. So he encouraged Chinese youth to take part in the struggle against the 'capitalists' and 'bourgeois.' This led to the emergence, in 1966, of a number of cultural and social features that later came to be uniquely associated with the Cultural Revolution. One was the Red Guard. Primarily high school and university students, these militant young people played a key role in carrying out Mao's mission to eliminate the perceived enemies of socialism and uphold proletarian ideology of class struggle, anti-intellectualism and the need for permanent revolution. The Red Guards attacked intellectuals, destroyed cultural artefacts and persecuted 'counter-revolutionaries' who held 'bourgeois' values such as individualism and cultural elitism. The Red Guards, workers and other rebel groups were prolific producers of dazibao , or 'big-character posters.' These posters were often written to denounce teachers, officials or anyone seen as opposing Mao Zedong's revolutionary ideals. Another social phenomenon was chuanlian : the widespread travel of Red Guards across China to exchange revolutionary ideas and spread Maoist propaganda. Endorsed by Mao himself, millions of young people used free train passes and government support to visit Red Guard groups in other major cities. Chuanlian led to widespread disorder, the disruption of transport systems and the escalation of violent confrontations between rival Red Guard factions. The years 1967–69 witnessed the most violent and chaotic phase of the Cultural Revolution. The movement spread from universities and the cultural realm to factories, rural areas and the public service sector in local governments. Jaivin takes readers to Shanghai, Wuhan, Inner Mongolia – and then back to the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing. We learn that public humiliation, beatings, torture and forced confessions were common. Many people were imprisoned without trial, or were even driven to suicide. Violent clashes also occurred between rival Red Guard factions and later between civilians and the military, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people. The following period, 1970–76, saw a number of transformative events, including the deaths of Premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976 and then Mao in September. In 1971, Lin Biao suddenly exited the Chinese leadership. A close ally of Mao during the early years, Lin later rose to become his designated successor. In 1971, however, Mao grew suspicious of Lin's ambition. Lin fell from power under mysterious circumstances, after allegedly plotting a coup. He died in a plane crash in Mongolia while reportedly fleeing China, and the Chinese government later denounced him as a traitor. Another turning point involved a curious encounter between some Chinese and American ping-pong players in 1971. This encounter led to the well-known ping-pong diplomacy that eventuated in the normalization of US–China relations, as marked by President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. In 1976, the Tangshan Earthquake, considered one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history, killed half of that city. Like a scriptwriter for an epic historical film with an innate sense of the dramatic, Jaivin conjures up these historical moments. The Cultural Revolution officially ended with the 1976 arrest of the 'Gang of Four.' This is a group of four political figures – one of them Jiang Qing, Mao's wife – who were closely aligned with Mao and played a key role in promoting his ultra-leftist radical politics. It has cast a long shadow. In the final pages of the book, Jaivin offers her summary of the Cultural Revolution this way: It was supposed to imbue the nation with such a strong ethos of egalitarianism and self-sacrifice that corruption, bureaucratism and 'bourgeois tendencies' would forever be banished from China. Instead, it has become a cautionary tale that cannot be told, a radioactive memory and a source of multi-generational trauma. And her assessment of Mao, the instigator of the Cultural Revolution, is equally concise: A complex, contradictory and often cantankerous figure, larger than life and all too human in his flaws, Mao was capable of the grandest revolutionary visions but also the pettiest manipulations. He was both an inspirational leader and a remorseless tyrant. One benchmark for the success of a short book on a 'devilishly complex' topic is whether readers are left wanting to know more. Measured against this benchmark, Jaivin has certainly succeeded. For this reader, the book provokes many questions. What was the psychology behind the mass hysteria of the Red Guards, and what led them to commit acts of violence that call to mind what Hannah Arendt dubbed 'the banality of evil'? What lessons can we learn about the dangers of personality cults and the worship of authoritarian dictators – which, in the case of Mao and numerous others throughout history, has enabled a single strong man (most often it is a man) to consolidate authority, suppress opposition and legitimise his dominance for many years? Another benchmark for the success of a book dealing with collective traumas with lasting impacts is whether readers can still enjoy reading the book, without being overwhelmed by its seriousness. Jaivin by no means makes light of the massive scale of violence, death and human suffering inflicted by the Cultural Revolution. But she approaches her topic as an epic tale featuring Mao as the central figure, with a big cast of characters including party leaders, the Gang of Four, the Red Guards and rebels and prominent victims. The human drama of the power struggles and power plays involving these characters is gripping and disturbing in equal measure. Jaivin has a gift for keeping her readers engaged. The book will appeal to a number of different readerships. For those in the Chinese diaspora who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand, it is a chance to relive the nightmare, but in the comfort of knowing it is now firmly in the past – as long we remain alert to the risk of history repeating itself. For non-Chinese readers, Jaivin's narrative flair and sense of drama give new life to what is almost certainly the sorriest period in recent Chinese history. Wanning Sun is a professor of media and cultural studies, University of Technology Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
AllAfrica
5 hours ago
- AllAfrica
Sanchez's Huawei stance puts Spain in Trump's line of fire
The United States could soon impose severe consequences on Spain's Sanchez administration for advancing the claim that the use of Huawei technology in its storage system for Spanish judicial wiretaps does not pose a national security threat. The Trump administration and the US Congress have made it clear that they believe that it is in the US national interest to aggressively counter the use of Chinese hardware and software in and around the national security-sensitive infrastructure of the United States and its allies. That includes NATO and major non-NATO allies. The Trump administration, therefore, cannot give the Sanchez government a pass on its controversial decision to downplay the national security threats posed by Huawei technology in the Spanish defense, security and intelligence sector. That would not only give rise to inconsistency between policy and practice, but also lead to confusion and uncertainty. It would create the impression that the Trump administration is willing to accept strategic misalignment with US national security and foreign policy interests by US allies and partners. It is not. The Trump administration, therefore, needs to quickly decide how best to respond to the Sanchez administration. In Washington, one proposal that has been discussed is to impose targeted sanctions that restrict travel and freeze the assets of Spanish individuals and entities that are involved in corruption, organized crime, human rights violations and anticompetitive practices. They might include Spanish organizations far outside the defense industrial base. Examples include La Liga, the Galician Mafia and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. Another option that has been discussed is to rein in bilateral defense, security and intelligence cooperation. That could include imposing restrictions on defense trade, relocating US military forces from Spanish military bases, suspending Spain from US intelligence sharing platforms, and/or ordering a full review of the bilateral relationship between Spain and the United States – similar to what is being discussed for South Africa. All of those options would impose heavy consequences for Spanish national security and foreign policy interests. Whatever policy pathway the Trump administration ultimately pursues, there is likely to be support within the US Congress for imposing harsh consequences on the Government of Spain. The Republican Party remains relatively united in demanding strong alignment on Chinese affairs from US allies and partners. That does not exist in the case of Spain right now, and many Republican elites are unwilling to continue to settle for the status quo. This is not the Biden era. To be clear, this is a predicament of Sanchez's own making. Since inauguration, Sanchez has been playing a high-stakes game of political poker with the Trump administration. Unfortunately, he has been using the bilateral strategic partnership as collateral in this game. At some point, both sides are going to have to show their hands. That could be disastrous for the future of US-Spain relations. Before that happens, the Sanchez administration would be wise to solicit non-partisan advice from the Spanish Ministry of Defense and National Intelligence Center. If domestic politics were taken off the table, one would have to imagine that those institutions would advise Sanchez against siding with the People's Republic of China over the United States on the matter. Michael Walsh is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
