How China’s media has reported the Hong Kong protests
By Michele Penna Oct 03, 2014 12:57PM UTC
It was hardly a good National Holiday to begin with: Beijing was soaked in rain, a gray sky looming low on a wet capital. It was made even worse for Chinese policymakers by Hong Kong’s present to the motherland: the biggest protest to challenge the central government since the days of Tiananmen.
Not many people would know about it though: little information has been allowed to filter through the ‘great firewall,’ as China’s online censorship system is called. As usual, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were down, but for the occasion Instagram was blocked, too. Photographs of protesters holding banners and being tear-gassed in downtown Hong Kong would have ruined the patriotic mood – or they might have stirred sympathy, which is likely why the photo-sharing platform was shut down.
Chinese social media have faced a sharp hike in controls. According to Weiboscope, a project which monitors censorship and is supported by the University of Hong Kong, the number of Weibo posts which were deleted increased five-fold over last weekend. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) quoted Dr. Fu King-wa, the professor responsible for the project, as saying that “you can see that the keywords [in censored posts] such as ‘police’, ‘justice’, they are all linked to protest in Hong Kong.”
A timeline provided by the South China Morning Post shows that last Saturday the number of inaccessible posts tripled to 98 and the following day about 152 posts per 10,000 messages were deleted, or “about five times the preceding week’s average.” The paper also reported that the access to posts with the hashtag ‘Hong Kong’ was blocked on Monday and “later removed from its [Weibo’s] rankings.”
http://asiancorrespondent.com/127199/how-chinas-media-has-reported-the-hong-kong-protests/
What is the Hong Kong government waiting for?
By Michele Penna Oct 23, 2014 6:28PM UTC
Talks were scheduled between the Hong Kong government and the protesters. They were held. Yet, so far, they have failed. Everyone expected it: when the administration led by Chief Executive C. Y. Leung called for discussions last week, it was immediately clear that a deal would be hard to reach.
The Chief Executive himself shut the door on the most relevant discussion point: universal suffrage. As he called for talks, he also told the public that anything that will be agreed upon needs to be “based on the Basic Law and the decision by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee”. “There is no issue of making a compromise or not,” Mr. Leung said. “We can’t turn something unlawful into [something] lawful.” In an interview reported by the Wall Street Journal, he conceded that “There could be a compromise somewhere in between by making the nominating committee more acceptable to the students.”
This is not the first time that talks have been suggested; authorities agreed to listen to the protesters’ demands two weeks ago. However, as the number of sit-ins began to diminish, the meeting was called off. This decision ignited a large rally on Oct. 10, and gave further substantiation to public belief that authorities are simply trying to lure them away from the streets.
Furthermore, Mr. Leung made an insensitive mistake when he warned foreign media that “If it’s entirely a numbers game and numeric representation, then obviously you’d be talking to the half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than US$1,800 a month.”
http://asiancorrespondent.com/127644/what-is-the-hong-kong-government-waiting-for/
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