May Day in Hong Kong, and here it happened again!
Several media outlets reported that “hundreds of protesters did gather in small groups at a shopping mall in the town of Sha Tin, chanting slogans and holding protest flags”. A few other groups of rioters were spotted at various other locations in the city.
They were holding banners, and singing and chanting slogans that were described by Western journalists as “pro-democracy” and “anti-Beijing”.
As Hong Kong is still fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, the police, naturally, sent the rioters packing.
There are two points to be made.
First, the rioters are thoroughly confused, logically and ideologically. I have already mentioned this fact in several of my earlier articles, but now it has become even more obvious.
What a day they had chosen to celebrate, and to commemorate!
Well, actually, a very fine day for me and for people like myself. But for them? For people who hate everything communist and who glorify everything Western, all that comes out of North America and Europe?
May 1, or May Day, is a communist or at least socialist holiday. This is when the workers of the world come together and show their unity and solidarity in fighting the extreme forms of capitalism. This is how it has been for more than a century.
Just to revisit the definition by Philip Foner (and this description is carried by various encyclopedias’ ad sites):
In 1889, May Day was chosen as the date for International Workers’ Day by the Socialists and Communists of the Second International to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago.
And the “Haymarket affair” itself? At least 50 workers, but most likely many more, were murdered by the police in Chicago, in 1886, at Haymarket Square. The workers protested, demanding an eight-hour working day. An anarchist threw a grenade. Then, the police, which were defending the interests of big business conglomerates, opened fire. Hundreds of workers were wounded. Many died. This event shook the world.
Now, is this what the Hong Kong rioters went to commemorate at Sha Tin, on May 1? I doubt it. The Hong Kong rioters, instead, marched into New Town Plaza, one of the city’s upmarket shopping plazas, and began to demand the dismantling of the system in the biggest and most successful socialist country on earth.
That is quite bizarre, but the insanity of the extremists in Hong Kong, as well as their intellectual muddles, are not novel whatsoever.
It is also obvious that their handlers in Washington, London and elsewhere are convinced that the Hong Kong inhabitants are too busy to pay attention to the details. But details are important, and we are here to remind them that they are.
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The second point to be made is the COVID-19 social distancing!
They wanted it, the rioters. They wanted lockdowns, the closing down of the city to the outside world (read: closing the borders with the Chinese mainland). They wanted all that the United Kingdom was doing.
Last month, the Hong Kong opposition kept attacking, relentlessly, the pandemic response by both Beijing and the Hong Kong SAR administration.
Nothing was good enough for them. The UK was doing, according to them, a much better job than their own city, than the People’s Republic of China, which very quickly and so efficiently defeated the virus in its entire territory! Apparently for no other reason than because, by definition, the US, UK and other European countries always do a much better job than China.
Now, it is obvious that many Western countries, the UK and the United States in particular, have totally failed. In different ways, but failed. Tens of thousands of people are dead, irreversibly and unnecessarily. While China has come out from the battle more united and more confident than ever.
Weeks ago, critics in Hong Kong, including some doctors, were saying that if their city had imposed UK-style social distancing earlier, the losses would have been much smaller.
So, following their “logic”, one could ask: What were you, the people, doing in a Sha Tin mall, gathering and yelling, breaking all the rules of social distancing that you yourself were demanding?
Don’t you know what would have been done to you in London or Paris, if you were to dare break the lockdown rules, by forcing yourself, in hundreds, into Harrods or Gallerie Lafayette, while yelling that you truly want to overthrow Britain’s Boris Johnson or France’s Emmanuel Macron? No, seriously, don’t you know? Have you ever tasted the boots of the British or French riot police?
Let me repeat once more: The rioters in Hong Kong have been demanding strict measures in the fight against COVID-19. The Hong Kong administration and police delivered precisely that. Now, they have been breaking the rules, confronting those measures. Apparently, nothing, absolutely nothing, will satisfy them, as long as it comes “from Beijing” or from the Hong Kong government.
Now, the police are “bad” again.
It appears that the rioters are carrying an excessively heavy bag of thoroughly contradictory demands. It is not easy to follow their “rationality”, when it comes to May Day, social distancing, or the direction in which they want their city to travel.
• First published by China Daily Hong Kong