Editor’s note for Wednesday, September 7, 2022

My thoughts today:

According to a Hong Kong law that has been on the books since Britain ruled the territory, any person who “prints, publishes, sells, offers for sale, distributes, displays, or reproduces any seditious publication” may receive up to two years in prison.

Five speech therapists were convicted of that crime today, and now await sentencing. They had played a role in the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists’ publishing a series of kids’ books that a judge said would “incite hatred or contempt” against the Chinese “Central Authorities or against the Government of Hong Kong.” The books feature a village of kind sheep who defend themselves against a group of marauding wolves, an apparently intentional reference to the government in Beijing and its local enforcers.

The verdict is a loud reminder of how things have changed, not just in Hong Kong but in Beijing.

Just over a decade ago, in 2011, a Southpark-like musical animation went viral in China. It was produced by a Beijing animation studio and featured some some bunnies who are treated so badly by the authorities — with the abuses based on actual incidents — that they go on a murderous rampage killing all of the representatives of the oppressors. The creators of this video suffered no harm, but they have long since stopped producing such content and the video has long been scrubbed from the Chinese internet.

You can, however, still watch the bunny rampage on Youtube here.

Our word of the day is seditious publication (煽動刊物即屬犯罪 shāndòng kānwù).