As it’s owned by the central government, we were pretty unsurprised when Xinhua News Agency’s recently released, uber-patriotic music videos celebrating the handover turned out to be completely cringeworthy and got ripped to shreds by Hong Kong netizens. What we didn’t expect, however, was the revelation that a state news outlet – which should really know the importance of intellectual property – had actually stolen footage from an independent filmmaker for one of the music videos.
Yesterday, Xinhua pulled their “original” music video for a song titled My Hong Kong from social media after Hong Kong filmmaker Francis So pointed out that they had actually ripped hyperlapse footage from his award-winning short film Escape, failed to credit him, and even cropped out his watermark. But, because nothing ever dies on the internet, here’s a backup version we found on Youtube, with Escape below it for comparison (1:38-2:03):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEAvqXCefkc?t=103
Given the breakneck nature of So’s filmography style, it’s hard to capture exact stills for comparison, but the clips speak for themselves (even though Xinhua appears to have slightly slowed the sequences down and converted his originally-4K video into potato quality).
After So publicly commented on Xinhua’s post about the theft and said he’d reported the video to Facebook, the story got covered by local media outlets and Xinhua’s video was removed from the social network by 2:50pm yesterday. It’s still available on Chinese websites and some industrious netizens have also uploaded backup copies to Youtube (like the one above).
Ethical sketchiness aside, My Hong Kong was already getting flak prior to yesterday. The video, which was actually the Cantonese version of a Mandarin-language song, attracted criticism from Hongkongers for its strangely stilted lyrics — they used the exact same characters as the Mandarin song, but didn’t take into account Cantonese’s additional two tones and different sentence structure.
Not to mention the content of the lyrics, which were dubbed “cheesy” and “like propaganda”. Our favorite examples include “you must keep in mind how good one country two systems is”, “we most love the bauhinia when it’s over a red background”. The most befuddling, however, is this string of nonsense overlaid on a photo of Xi Jinping:
Three Chinese speakers in our office could not pin down the exact meaning (because it doesn’t really make sense in either Mandarin or Cantonese), but it’s just word salad about prosperity and dignity. Google Translate says it means “I believe in the dignity of the ideal”.
There is however, a tiny — negligible, really — silver lining: at least the Cantonese version doesn’t have a heinous rap verse, unlike the original Mandarin recording. But that’s it.
