We’re publishing a second dispatch from our anonymous Hong Kong correspondent, this time focusing on two recent reports in the local media. Together, they present a picture of a city that is gradually being crushed under the boot of Communist dictatorship.
Your readers may be interested in a further update on Hong Kong? At a time when most other countries are either removing or at least reducing Covid regulations and requirements, why is Hong Kong moving in the opposite direction?
I attach one notice and two articles from today’s South China Morning Post newspaper:
The above notice is the diagramatic instruction, English version, to all 7.5 million Hong Kong residents about how ‘Dynamic Covid’ is to be implemented from today.
The two articles include the following:
(President) Xi instructed Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and her team to mobilise all available forces and resources and take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of residents and the stability of society, according to reports splashed on the front pages of the Beijing-backed newspapers Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao.
He demanded the Hong Kong Government take primary responsibility for the fight against the virus while ordering the central Government departments and Guangdong province to promptly address Hong Kong’s requests. His forthright tone has clearly demonstrated Beijing’s worries and its dismay about Hong Kong’s response.
Making public his instruction is significant on several levels. The first aspect is to impress on the Hong Kong Government the need to take more decisive actions to contain the outbreak; the second one is to stiffen the spines of local officials in dismissing the thinking behind, and lobbying for, the policy of living with Covid – favoured by many residents including civil servants at a time when the rest of the world has opened up; the third one is to remind officials of the need to bury their differences and get 100% behind China’s dynamic Zero-Covid policy.
And like truckers the world over, our truckers have their problems too:
After enduring strict COVID-19 measures that kept him from seeing his wife and friends for more than two years, cross-border Hong Kong truck driver Liu Kun-ming has made the painful decision to shut down his transport company.
“I want to get out as soon as possible,” said the 53-year-old who has been transporting goods from mainland China to Hong Kong for more than two decades. “It’s hopeless and there’s nothing much I can do.”
He said he could no longer stomach the “inhumane” measures imposed by mainland officials on cross-border drivers, with the recent outbreak of the Omicron variant making conditions worse for many truckers. Despite Liu and his mainland wife having a home in Shenzhen, he has been confined since the pandemic began in early 2020 to a designated hotel for drivers provided by mainland authorities and subject to strict rules while at work.
These measures could mean drivers being confined inside their trucks for six to seven hours, said a 60-year-old Hong Kong driver surnamed Cheung.
“We cannot open the vehicle door or have proper meals, so we can only eat bread and biscuits,” said Cheung, who has been a driver for more than 30 years. “If you leave your vehicle without permission, your licence can be revoked.”
If a driver needed to use the toilet, he must drive over to officials present and ask permission, he added.
It appears from other articles that people are avoiding taking a Covid test. Apparently, this is because if they test positive they have to be isolated immediately. As you can imagine, we are all quite shocked at this very selfish reaction and expect the Government to do something about it!
Today it has been announced that China has sent a work team to construct, in two weeks, a makeshift 10,000 bed isolation facility with the potential for building a further three. They will be used to house asymptomatic Covid-positive residents. Apparently, this is preferable, and more controllable than using hotels. At the same time, plans are being advanced for the compulsory mass testing of 7.5 million residents, with three tests each over the period of the next month.
Safe and happy days in Asia’s World City!
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“Those with merit rule.”
Anyone who thought that, wasn’t paying attention to those who actually ruled… or the mediocrats ruling today.
Socialism is the quintessential ideology of mediocracy – all reduced to the lowest common denominator to ensure equality. This cancer has invaded all our institutions, which is why we are where we are.
Spot on !
Thought provoking but I think the author hasn’t fully explained how or by which attributes hierarchy is established in a mediocrity.
This is important in understanding how seemingly mediocre people come to get power and rule over us.
The article was very good I did enjoy it. But to offer a possible route for the mediocre to gain a leg up for power, I would suggest the mediocre types propensity to go to University and get a degree in a subject of equally mediocre value gives them the grounding in the essence of inflated self worth. Which because of their inflated opinion of self, deem themselves the custodians of the right opinions, to be imparted upon those less fortunate.
We are being ruled by a class (if you prefer) of people with a purported academic knowledge of subjects that bear no relationship to the material and operational functions of a living society. Everything is possible to them as they have never learnt from or experienced a failure. When the lights go out and their laptop battery runs out through lack of power, the failure their Net Zero policies will merit their greatest achievement.
University as in Blairs dumbbing down and renaming he entire FE sector universities. That guaranteed mediocrity.
Nicely put. It also seems that in increase in the Blair type Uni grad population, is equal to the regression of and non productive society we see today.
So you’re saying hierarchy in a mediocracy is established by a system of bogus credentials.
That’s probably part of it.
A significant part to me is one’s ability to create social networks. People with social networking skills have higher status and power.
And I would venture to suggest that there is a negative correlation, perhaps not a very strong but significant one, between social networking ability and actually productive skills.
It is the productive skills that promote civilisations advancement, the rest is just a noise that some of us, I am happy to say, do not listen to, but equally are aware of its power to influence those who are susceptible to it.
May I make a shout-out for the more well-known Peter Principle where people in any organisation, including government, will rise to their level of incompetence, or ineptness to use the terminology of the article.
This is particularly true of our current crop of political leaders. The jury is still out on Farage, but he has shown his mastery at PR in that the whole country is talking about him today. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
In a similar vein is C.Northcote Parkinsons definition of a ‘Spastic Organisation’ where incompetents fill departments up with people ‘just like them’. The function of the organisation moves away from its raison-d’etre, and its objectives become unclear until the structure reaches critical mass, at which point the people of genuine merit are out of there, but the organisation continues to fill up with useless people. This seems to sum up every school I come into contact with btw. It does feel as though Parliament itself has now become a spastic organisation. Parkinson suggested two solutions. First that such an organisation could be saved by people of genuine merit getting into positions by stealth, and slowly replacing mediocrity with merit. Second and more likely, it should be closed and swept away.
Interesting, but I have an alternative theory: wealth creates the opportunities that generate a lifestyle which allows the purchase of an affordable belief system. Wealth purchases not just material items, but also the moral correctness of the top tier of society that maintain the wealth. That tier continues to expand their wealth and so continue to expand their virtue. The political class sit at the elite level, either through direct wealth or the propagation of wealth, and so have all purchased or had purchased for them, an affordable belief system. That belief system is neither driven by meritocracy or mediocracy, but the comforting certainty of faith.
I am a great believer in the idea that the whole of human existence is a paradox and that the physical laws that operate at an atomic level have effects in the meta physical. However I had a lot of trouble with the phrase “successful representatives of the inept”. In theory these people can’t exist? Or maybe it’s all relative. The most adept of the inept, rule the inept?
They are less than mediocre admittedly few of them seem to show any brilliance but their attitude isn’t just a matter of a lack of understanding. Some of them understand very well but feel that they might as well do as well as they can for as long as they can in order to be in a better position when it all collapses. The British do like a game of last man standing. If by merit you mean the ability to go beyond, intellectual transcendence or the man of action – that was crippled a very long time ago and the two wars finished it off entirely. The plebian nature of society, the chavs, the weak etc are entirely a creaion of the ruling class. The plebicization of the intellectual class and the ruling class is a result of the actions of the ruling class. You found it expedient to breed pygmies and then you complain about the stature of the pygmies. Not to mention a hundred years of a scientifically crafted western propaganda model. It is a wonder that there is any nous or dissent left at all.
👍
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” Act II Scene 5 of Twelfth Night.
In the case of politicians in positions of government & power, the conditions that must be met to get elected and the working conditions that one must endure, selectively on their own, ensure only the mediocre will ever expose themselves to such a system.
Time to dust off the copy of Atlas Shrugged ?