While I was dining at a Causeway Bay restaurant on the night of National Day, one of the staff turned on the television apparently to view the telecast of the fireworks over the harbour. TVB Jade was showing a variety show of sorts, apparently in honour of the special day.
At that point in the show, a troop of about two dozen dancers in faux Red Army uniforms (not People's Liberation Army, as announced) were running about the stage with rifles.
The 'unit' menacingly pointed rifles directly at members of the audience at the broadcast venue, as well as straight at the camera. All of us in the restaurant, locals and foreigners alike, cringed in silence at the shocking sight of the uniformed dancers rushing about the stage in a menacing frenzy, waving their rifles to and fro, accompanied by stirring martial music.
As a Hongkonger (yes, many of us foreigners so consider ourselves) and as the husband of a third-generation local Chinese woman, I must protest against TVB Jade's highly emotive, insensitive and inappropriate display of a tableau which could only be considered a not-so-thinly-veiled message to us all.
The chilling effect of this broadcast was palpable upon every single person in the restaurant, many of whose own families suffered so much at the hands of marauding bands in uniforms not too long ago, not too far from here.
TVB Jade and any other television outlets which broadcast this shameful spectacle owe us all an apology, if not an explanation of how such a macabre and bizarre episode became part of their broadcast. Are they now nothing more than propaganda mouthpieces?
Shame on them!