Go directly to jail: how Hong Kong courts are teaching a lesson on the rules of the game

Philip Bowring says social order and political stability have been ensured for the city, with student activists jailed, the opposition decimated, business as usual for vested interests, and resolve demonstrated to higher powers

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Supporters of student activists Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow hold up signs reading “Shame on the Department of Justice” (right) and “Freedom Stolen” as the three leave Hong Kong’s High Court in prison vans, on August 17. Photo: EPA

Published: 9:00am, 19 Aug 2017Updated: 3:04pm, 26 Sep 2017

Hurrah! Hong Kong is one step further towards matching Singapore’s standard of judicial independence. The punishment should not be designed to fit the crime but to teach lessons, and enable the teacher to demonstrate resolve to the headmaster.

Hence, a wise appeals court agreed this week with the government. It replaced soft community service with substantial jail terms for 13 activists and three student leaders involved in separate 2014 protests. The sophistication and cost of the judicial process should also ensure that four elected politicians ousted earlier from the legislature are bankrupted by their failure to pay government legal costs. Serves them right.

‘No political motive’ behind seeking jail terms for student protesters

There can be no greater threat to social order and political stability than for spoiled youths to stir up opposition to progress and profit, joining with ignorant New Territories villagers who stand in way of the future, as though their crumbling old houses should be favoured over a Great Leap Forward for the Pearl River Delta region.

Watch: Three student leaders jailed for storming Civic Square

These counter-revolutionaries would sooner sacrifice the exclusive acres of the Hong Kong Golf Club or build homes on the beautiful New Territories scrapyards and container parks, the land banks on which the future wealth of our famous companies depend. Be thankful that our ministers knew whose interests they represent.

Why is Hong Kong Golf Club more precious than our country parks?

True to the Marxist theory and Leninist spirit of our national leaders, the march of history is towards ever more concentrated ownership of capital, ever rising profits which limit the middle and lower classes wasting their wages on comforts. The party is combining with the forces of monopoly capital. This is surely the “end of history” as predicted by our sages. The achievement is a tribute to the genius of the Chinese people and shows why their superior system is rewriting history to ensure that all neighbouring territories were always its vassals.

The tribute sought from the neighbours is, however, a trifling sum compared with what most of the businesses and people of Hong Kong pay to sustain and enhance the traditional local balance of wealth – as enshrined in the Basic Law. The genius of this document is many-sided. Equality of the sexes and equality before the law are listed as goals. But, naturally, some people are far more equal than others. Thus, for example, the local aborigines, unlike their oppressed brethren in Australia and Taiwan, have special land ownership rights.

Villagers protest against a government initiative on handling unauthorised building works in New Territories village houses, outside the Sha Tin Heung Yee Kuk building in November 2011. Photo: Felix Wong

These sacred sites for worship of ancestors and prayer for wealth date back for as long as the aborigines care to remember – it was 1972 when government officials recognised the utility of such rights in buying the support of patriotic aborigines for colonial projects. These temples are also only open to males, as is appropriate in a China which cleverly melds Confucius with the ever-changing theories of Communist Party leaders. Here there is no fuss about equal rights, gay rights or other impediments to social order.