It’s been two weeks since I have last been able to write anything here? I said to myself, I’ll have to write two blog posts to catch up, but I won’t to lie you, I’m not. Carrying on from my last post, in the past week that I heard on the radio. It was an interviewee on the Radio New Zealand Saturday Morning programme.
The professor being interviewed referenced him in a weird way I thought. Saying that the protestors of the Occupy movement were using their very presence, their bodies were the message as I extrapolate, occupying the places they were protesting. And sadly once they left the message was gone, evaporated.
While that is true, the occupiers are gone, the message was conveyed. It still has the same meaning now that they have left the premises. The protesters in Hong Kong are what sparked that conversation, so to some extent they are carrying on the discourse between state and resistance. Futile may it be someone has to have it.
Which brings me to the discourse, or lack thereof, that you will find on platforms like WeChat. Particularly, reviewing the comments on a typical China Daily political post you will only find the commenters echoing and supporting the party agenda. It’s quite chilling and you think to yourself, what would happen if I posted a challenging comment? Would it be censored? Would my handle be put on some watch list? I don’t really want to find out, but the answer is: yes, it would.
A BBC article on this topic:
The next 30 years are not looking like a very comfortable place to live in. And this will span the last portion of my life. So there is work to do. There is writing to do. The question is when to do it? Better be quick because there is not that much time left for it in the day.
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