8/11/2013 : The Pulse

Free TV Licences and the P&P Ordinance

The controversy over the government's refusal to award a free TV licence to HKTV reached new levels this week with an attempt in the Legislative Council to invoke the Powers and Privileges Bill to investigate how that decision was made. What the public wants to know why the number of new licences was limited, why two applicants who had apparently done little to prepare for the offer were awarded licences, and why the government is applying a protectionist attitude to the industry. This week, pan-democratic legislators introduced a motion to the full council in the hope of obtaining documents involved in the process of vetting the applications.


Cold War attitudes on the mainland?

In recent weeks a documentary surfaced on the internet on the mainland. The documentary, called "Silent Contest" was made by China's National Defense University for the People's Liberation Army, and labels all Hong Kong's aspirants to democracy as being stooges of America and the UK. That has ledsome people to ask whether the administration actually wants to create a new Cold War with the West? Given the rhetoric of "Silent Contest" and Xi Jinping's recent hardline comments on controlling the Chinese internet, is the country spiralling towards a new age of Cold War rhetoric, or are the attempts to backpedal on these issues sign of a struggle going on within the country's top echelons? With us in the studio are David Zweig, who is among other things, the Director of the Center on China's Transnational Relations and the University of Science and Technology, and veteran China watcher Willy Lam.