Dotting Hong Kong on the Map

The Hong Kong government has no creativity with its ads

The Hong Kong government continues to waste taxpayers' money in the most creative ways.

Now there is an advertisement going around on social media trying to promote the national security law, again with scarce details.

So how can you sell it without any persuasive points?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">😒This is the best they could come up with? What a waste of money. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Article23?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Article23</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/HongKong?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#HongKong</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/HongKongProtests?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#HongKongProtests</a> <a href="https://t.co/y20jdTkSDo">pic.twitter.com/y20jdTkSDo</a></p>&mdash; Hong Kong World City☔️🖐🏻 (@HKWORLDCITY) <a href="https://twitter.com/HKWORLDCITY/status/1268846060350275584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 5, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The 13-second ad starts off by showing Hong Kong as a dot that is part of a zillion dots that make up China, to emphasize the point about how small the city is.

Then a narrator says: "Without a country, there is no family."

Huh? Why do you need a country to have a family? According to Confucianism, the family is more important than country. Maybe it sounds more poetic in Chinese, but this sentence makes no sense in English.

Then he says: "Upholding national security is the duty of every citizen" and then the ad ends.

It all sounds so... cryptic and illogical.

What are they going to come up with when the actual national security law is passed?

One person on social media commented by re-posting the District Council election results last year, changing the dots in Hong Kong from red to yellow:

That is a fact that the Hong Kong government can't change...