Here’s something. Hong Kong officials and civil servants are lately being required to study up on all things pertaining to the CCP Way and Xi Jinping Way (“Hong Kong officials, civil servants study doctrine of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Communist Party theories,” Hong Kong Free Press, November 22, 2023).
Meanwhile, according to Hong Kong’s still extant Civil Service Code, Hong Kong civil servants are supposed to be politically neutral.
I guess the stipulation of political neutrality means that members of the Hong Kong government must uphold without fear or favor only sensible, objective laws that respect the rights of the individual and must ignore all the laughably vapid, misleading and obfuscatory, brain-killing one-party-state political stuff that they are currently being force-fed.
Launched in July, the Civil Service College course consists of 12 monthly lectures, the first of which was on the Chinese Communist Party and contemporary China.
In addition, top officials and civil servants have also studied Chinese constitution and the tradition of Chinese politics….
According to the Civil Service Code, Hong Kong’s Civil Service is a “permanent, honest, meritocratic, professional and politically neutral” institution.
According to the code: “[Civil servants] shall not allow their own personal party political affiliation or party political beliefs to determine or influence the discharge of their official duties and responsibilities, including the advice they give and the decisions or actions they take.”
What can explain the apparent contradiction?
Well, perhaps dimensional axes have shifted and we are no longer living in the universe in which Chinese and Hong Kong officials have been crushing dissent and wiping out democracy in Hong Kong, have put bounties on the heads of pro-democracy activists living in exile, have been pushing to outlaw the Hong Kong protest anthem, have been throwing pro-democracy protesters in jail, and so forth.
Perhaps, instead, we are now living in a parallel universe in which the Hong Kong government and its civil servants, hewing to the doctrine of political neutrality, do studiously ignore all purely political considerations. The only other possibility is that the code’s provision about political neutrality has become meaningless.
