Saturday 21 January 2012

Hongkongers are dogs; and some observations on Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong media

All over my Facebook News Feed tonight is this video of someone repeatedly saying "Hongkongers are dogs" and "Hongkongers are bastards".


This guy is supposed to be a professor from Peking University. I guess each part of the world has their fair share of barking academics, but China is probably the only place where someone like this wouldn't get fired.


If he has half a brain he'd know that by stirring this stuff up he'd get himself seen, read etc. all over the interwebs - and guess what, we all fell for it. (Fuelling the "us and them" mentality - how creative). Maybe it was the channel's idea. The broadcaster that aired it is V1, which I'd never heard of. A quick check told me that they're a "new media" company - the conspiracy theoriest in me thinks they're just looking for a way to boost their ratings and visibility in the crowded internet news market.

Anyway, the bottom video, "reported" in that highly sensationalised manner typical of Hong Kong news (now that is something to talk sh*t about) shows a Hong Kong man shouting at a Mainland Chinese family for eating on the MTR. The shouting is indeed very rude, but you'll notice that about a third of the way through, the man explains to the MTR staff that he had tried telling them to stop eating before he went bezerk. Now, whether that's true is up to your interpretation - but it's funny that that never even came up in the arguments. If anyone has a longer video to share, it would be great to get a backstory.

I hope this isn't China's way of getting back at us because of that survey data that came out the other day about Hongkongers not identifying themselves as being "Chinese".

The Year of the Dragon will be the 15th year Hong Kong's been handed back to China. That's 35 years till we're no longer "one country two systems". Mounting fear, tensions, uncertainties are not surprising, but not exactly the best kinds of things to ring in the new year with, hey?