Top Google search result for HK anthem leads to updated site

Google has placed the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau's bilingual website with the Chinese national anthem as the top search result.

It comes a day after the bureau uploaded the March of the Volunteers' audio file for international sports organizers to directly download, without having to link to the central government's Chinese site.

The bureau uploaded audio and video files of the national anthem in .mp3, .mp4 and .mov file formats, with a download description.

A search result for "Hong Kong national anthem" in English at 8pm yesterday showed the website as the top search result.

But a search for the same phrase in Chinese still showed a Wikipedia page for a song linked to the 2019 protests that was played in place of March of the Volunteers at a men's international hockey tournament in February in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Another blunder was averted last week during the Hong Kong women's ice hockey team's golden performance in Romania.

Last month, the Hong Kong Ice Hockey Association said the links listed in a set of guidelines by the coordinating body of funded sports associations in the SAR, the Sports Federation and Olympic Committee of Hong Kong, were of little help.

The statement said the CMAB website only provided a link to the website of the Chinese government on which download links were available, but the page was in simplified Chinese only.

Clicking the English version of the page only brings the user to an English version of the homepage of the government website, which was why organizers were unable to download the correct anthem, the association said.

An archived version of the CMAB page on the national anthem dated March 14 corroborates claims that the linked website would have been unintelligible to the organizers in Sarajevo.

But at the bottom of the archived CMAB page is a URL linking to a Chinese government page with download links labeled in English. The CMAB page does not label the URL as a link to an official recording.

The website has now been updated to show direct download links.

On Monday, the page was updated to list two download links to the "instrumental version" and "original version" of the anthem at the top of the page, both in .mp3 format enclosed in separate .zip files labeled "National-Anthem-Original."

A video of the anthem is also available in two formats, .mp4 and .mov, labeled "guoge," which refers to the pinyin romanization of "national anthem" in mandarin Chinese, and "guoge-mov" respectively.

The download links are placed underneath a two-sentence description stating that March of the Volunteers is used as Hong Kong's national anthem.

Meanwhile, Lawmaker Michael Tien Puk-sun questioned whether the move to update the website reflected the government's and the SF&OC's inadequacies. And a CMAB spokesman said the government always provides download links to the national anthem on "relevant websites" and it updates content from time to time for the convenience of users.

cjames.lee@singtaonewscorp.com