Beware the wolves in Hong Kong’s Sheep Village

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam speaks to the media. Picture: AFP.

Beijing boasts of its “wolf warriors”. Hong Kong, under the draconian national security law, is run by a woman named Lam. So, wolves and lambs abound in the animal farm of the Paranoid Republic of Coercion (PRC).

In a new twist to George Orwell’s classic fable, the Hong Kong police last week arrested five people for the publication of a trilogy of children’s books about sheep defending their village against wolves.

You wouldn’t read about it, as they say. At least, Beijing and its minions don’t want the children of Hong Kong to read about it.

Of course, the satirical children’s books are intended to be subversive, just as Orwell’s Animal Farm was intended to be. Consequently, the Hong Kong authorities have responded to them as the Beijing regime does to any murmur of dissent.

After Xi Jinping was depicted by Hong Kong satirists as Winnie the Pooh and Carrie Lam as Piglet, the very image and name of Winnie the Pooh were banned in China. You couldn’t make this stuff up. But here we are again: gifted satirists facing repression by a paranoid regime that is plainly so insecure it is made nervous by children’s story books.

Those arrested – two men and three women aged between 25 and 28 – are from the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists. They include the chair and vice-chair, secretary and treasurer. All five were detained under the Crimes Ordinance on suspicion of conspiring to publish seditious material.

There’s a rich irony in this. Speech therapists arrested for exercising freedom of speech and charged with inciting – well, a satirical view of the muzzling of democratic speech acts. In fact, the forewords in two of the books openly link the Sheep Village stories to the mass democratic protests of 2019.

Hong Kong is under increasing restrictions from Beijing. Picture: AFP.

In this trio of animal farm stories, democracy supporters are portrayed as sheep living in a village surrounded by wolves. In the second book of the trio, Janitors of Sheep Village, cleaners in Sheep Village, protesting against the wolves for leaving litter all over the village, declare a strike.

But this leads to nasty action by the wolves and things escalate from there. In the third book, The Twelve Heroes of Sheep Village, a dozen sheep flee the village by boat to escape from the increasingly predatory behaviour of the wolves.

The allusion is plainly to 12 Hong Kong protesters who tried to flee to Taiwan in a speedboat, only to be intercepted by the Chinese coast guard and sent to a detention centre in Shenzhen – “mainland” China. The Lam government did not intervene on behalf of these members of its flock. So much for the “special autonomy” of Hong Kong.

In the story, several days after the 12 sheep attempted to flee, an underling of Big Grey Wolf goes to the public square in Sheep Village beaming with pride and declares to the assembled woolly creatures: “You disobedient little sheep! I’ve got some good news for you. We caught the 12 sheep and sent them to Wolf Village for the wolves to feast upon.”

The little lambs are terrified, concerned and outraged. Yet, as the story goes, they become determined to use all means possible to rescue the 12 endangered little heroes.

“Have the wolves already eaten the 12 heroes?” they ask one another. “Or are they being devoured even as we speak?”

At a press conference, senior superintendent Steve Li, of the national security department, declared with a straight face (through a Covid mask), that the sheep represent Hong Kong people; the wolves represent mainlanders.

Heaven forbid that stories about mainlanders as wolves should circulate among the children of Hong Kong in the wake of all that has happened on Xi Jinping’s watch. According to Li, those arrested were attempting to stir up public – and especially young children’s – hatred towards Hong Kong’s government and judiciary, and to incite violence and illegal acts.

Who’d have thought the people of Hong Kong would want to challenge their government after it overturned the thumping democratic mandates of district council elections prior to the imposition of anti-democratic rule last year? I mean, really. How seditious of them.

Right now, the Hong Kong “Special Autonomous Region” authorities are set to notify some 60 councillors that they are not eligible to take an oath pledging allegiance to the SAR and to uphold the Basic Law, despite having been duly elected. This is in addition to 300 of the 388 pro-democracy district councillors having already been disqualified under the flagrantly discriminatory Public Offices Ordinance passed by the Legislative Council in May.

Some 230 of the 479 elected district councillors had already resigned, citing personal reasons. They, one imagines, will have snapped up copies of the newly suppressed children’s fables about the sheep and the wolves. But not only can they not take their seats in a legitimate manner, they now can’t legally even read such therapeutic fables to their little ones.

So, Hong Kong is headed by a Lam sheepish in her subservience to the Communist Party, which is itself a flock of sheep in wolves’ clothing – except for the Big Grey Wolf. All this censorship, repression and ballyhooing about sedition spell out, loud and clear, that the party feels insecure and is terrified that its mandate will be undermined by children’s books and cartoons.

In democracies, we revel in satirical cartoons. It is symptomatic of authoritarian personalities and movements that they cannot abide ridicule. There is a good case, therefore, for heaping it upon them. That speech therapists should be arrested and charged with sedition for exercising freedom of speech is itself rich material for satire.

Imagine cartoons showing speech therapists working with “Sheeping Jing” and “Village Lam” on their pronunciation of the phrases “Special Autonomous Region” and “People’s Republic”. They stutter so badly that children are invited to show them how to pronounce those phrases. Whereupon the words sheep, lamb, wolf and speech therapist are all banned in China. Try that on, Master Xi.

Paul Monk is the former head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018) among other books.