Written by Steven Thompson
WED,10 SEPTEMBER 2014
Joe Chung and the cultural roots of China’s political dictatorship
How much did Joe Chung anger the Hong Kong and Beijing establishment, and what were the results?
Chung was one of the most controversial authors on the popular but now-defunct House News, a Hong Kong-based news website and content aggregator founded by former radio personality Tony Tsoi and others to cover covers politics, business, lifestyle, media, and local news.
Tsoi abruptly killed the site on July 26 despite a readership of 300,000 unique visitors a day. He has been incommunicado since. However, in a notation on the website, he said he and his family were under pressure and that he was particularly fearful of what he called the White Terror.
Some observers credit Chung’s aggressiveness as one of the factors in the closure. Among other articles, his allegations of academic plagiarism of Xi Jinping’s PhD were believed to have caused House News to be shut down for several days due to hacking allegedly carried out by Chinese hackers.
The author, who writes only in Chinese, has for decades argued that despite enormous increases in per capita income, China is no closer to democracy than it was a decade ago. The answer, he says, may lie in the roots of China’s complex political culture, particularly the dogma that China must remain unified at all costs.
Chung’s books have been banned on the mainland because he finds fault both with the one-party state and with the traditional culture that sustains it. His claim that Taiwan has the right to independence, published in the Hong Kong Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao in 1994, led to death threats from nationalists in Hong Kong.
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