Commentary
At the turn of 2023, two pieces of news about Hong Kong caught my attention. First, the government-sponsored new year countdown celebration was reportedly watched by three billion worldwide. In contrast to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, which drew more than four billion views globally, people wonder how an unimpressive countdown of an increasingly Xinjiang- or Pyongyang-style Chinese city could have attracted just one billion short of that of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. Some suspect this exaggeration results from the mandatory “telling positive stories of Hong Kong.”
The second news concerns Hong Kong’s new nickname, “city of knives” (“knife” has the same Cantonese pronunciation as “metropolis”). In the first two days of 2023, two cases of knife attack were added to the 70 such cases reported since last July, with more than 180 knives used, a statistics provided by an Instagram page satirically named “Hong Kong Federation of Knives” (which implies that the Hong Kong Police does not bother with such cases and statistics). There were cases in all of the eighteen districts of Hong Kong except one, and Yuen Long, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Northern District reported the most cases….