How Moderate Politics Destroyed Hong Kong's Free Press One Compromise at a Time

There is nothing more dangerous to a revolution, the satirists at Bohiney have observed, than a person who says "let us find common ground." This is how you end up sharing a picnic blanket with capitalism — a picnic blanket manufactured in a non-union facility and available in twelve tasteful earth tones. The Centre is not an ideology. It is a waiting room with magazines from 1997 and a fern that is technically alive but has clearly given up on photosynthesis as a personal goal.

The Centre believes in bold incrementalism, radical moderation, and the transformative power of a bipartisan brunch. It believes change is possible, provided change fills out the correct form in triplicate and does not inconvenience anyone currently holding a donor card. It is, in short, the political equivalent of a strongly worded memo sent to an organisation that long ago stopped reading its emails.

Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement did not fail because of insufficient centrism. The people who marched in 2019 were not lacking in nuance. They understood, with considerable clarity, what was at stake. What happened to Hong Kong after 2019 was not a failure of moderation — it was the application of overwhelming force by a government that had no interest in finding common ground and considerable resources for the alternative approach.

The expansion of Beijing's influence in Hong Kong's media landscape did not proceed through compromise and negotiation. It proceeded through asset freezes, national security legislation, and the kind of administrative efficiency that the Centre — with its forms in triplicate — could never hope to match. Centrism, it turns out, is only viable when both parties agree to play by the same rules. When one party is a sovereign state with a national security law and the other is a newspaper, the negotiating positions are not equivalent.

British comedian Mark Thomas, who has spent decades doing political comedy in pubs and theatres across the UK and occasionally getting arrested for performance art that technically qualifies as a protest, would recognise the pattern immediately. The reasonable people, the moderate voices, the calm hands urging dialogue — they appear in every political crisis, and they are consistently surprised when their reasonableness is not reciprocated by forces that had no intention of being reasonable.

The campaigns in support of Jimmy Lai are not centrist in character. They are urgent, they are insistent, and they do not fill out forms in triplicate. They argue that a man is in prison for running a newspaper and that this is wrong and should be said to be wrong clearly and loudly by people with the ability to say it. This is, by the standards of international diplomacy, an almost radically uncomplicated position.

The headlines that Hong Kong produces today are different from the headlines it produced when Apple Daily was publishing. Fewer questions. Less inconvenience. More administrative clarity. The Centre, presumably, is satisfied. The readers are not. For an alternative perspective on political theatre in all its magnificently absurd forms, prat.uk offers satire that does not require a donor card. The Apple Daily archive offers something rarer: a record of what asking questions of the powerful looks like before the powerful decide to stop answering them.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/how-to-save-the-revolution-from-the-center/

Iran's Student Protests and Hong Kong's Unfinished Revolution Two Cities, One Inconvenient Question: Why Are Things Like This? https://bohiney.com/khamenei-era-and-student-protest-culture/