Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Hong Kong government warns its seven million alert and enterprising citizens against deliberately ingesting the parasitical nematode Ascaris to lose weight.  Ascaris is the reason we don’t eat pork rare.  Most of us, of course, even if we could usefully shed a few pounds, instinctively know not to swallow the eggs of worms that grow to over a foot long and congregate within us in enormous, intestine-clogging clumps:

Who exactly are the small minority who would actually do this?  I would like to think they are drawn from the less-educated among us; they are probably exceptionally vain and shallow, and – it grieves me to say it – almost entirely female.  The average young Hong Kong working woman spends around 30%* of her income on cosmetics and quack skin treatments involving gamma rays, capsules of ‘serum’ and masks of exotic green mud that purport to turn faces cadaver-white and even change the shape of the chin.

The idea is that, by investing all this wealth in her appearance and scrawniness, she will attract and marry a rich man who will enable her to live the sort of lifestyle portrayed in TV commercials for quasi-luxury apartments, swishing between sports cars and ballrooms in long dresses, surrounded by out-of-focus sparkling objects and murmurings about elegance and exclusiveness.  If she saved and invested the same amount of money at that age, she could look forward to a life of economic independence – but how do you market index tracker funds as the glamorous accessory every helpless, simpering, emaciated, vacant-looking bim must have?

Oddly enough, in the same breath, the very same Big Lychee government is welcoming a public petition in favour of a different, and far more nefarious, form of bloodsucker.  The 1.1/1.3/1.6 million signatures collected by the pro-Beijing camp backing the administration’s non-reforms to the electoral system are a bit too numerous to ring true; only the Communist-backed Wen Wai Po and Ta Kung Pao give the story serious prominence, and even the Standard quotes skeptics pointing out that the signatures must have been pouring in at the rate of 14.9 a minute.

Still, it is surprising that anyone not named Li or Kwok would put their name to a campaign in favour of retaining a political structure all but designed to enable a few rich families to cartelize domestic markets in essential goods and services and thus leech off the general population.  It’s double-standards for parasites.  Infect a handful of anorexics, and officials hurl abuse at you for causing vomiting, diarrhea, malnutrition and pancreatic duct obstruction; screw the whole community through padded power, grocery, transport and housing bills, and they give you functional constituencies.

*Or 25% or something – a lot, anyway.

The Standard’s lead story today is about the woman who hurled herself and her four-year-old child from the seventh level of a shopping mall.  Among other things, the tragedy appears to be yet another unambiguous thumbs-down for Hong Kong’s local education system.  The South China Morning Post shoves the gore to one side and reports that Chief Executive Donald Tsang is agonizing over whether to vote in the Great By-Election Referendum Uprising Saga of 2010.  With Beijing’s local agents organizing a United Front boycott and establishment tut-tutting campaign – even General Chamber of Commerce chairman Andrew Brandler has been enlisted to whine about how horrid it all is – it is hard to see Sir Bow-Tie exercising his democratic right on this occasion.  But if he declares that he won’t vote, how many people will be spurred into going along to the polling station just to show what they think of him?

Of more interest was the SCMP’s front page on Saturday, which breathlessly reported a story that is… 30 years old.  Leung Chun-ying, Executive Council member and over-eager aspirant to succeed Donald, was a member of the Hong Kong Observers back in the late 1970s and early 80s.  This has been common knowledge ever since anyone got to hear of Leung; nor is it remotely surprising, unless viewed through a very narrow contemporary lens.

The Observers were not exactly the post-80s generation of their time.  It was a colonial era when the patriotic, pro-Beijing camp was a tiny, self-contained, almost-criminalized group of extremists shunned by apolitical mainstream society, rejected by most employers and harassed by security agencies.  Outside of that circle, there was no real divide between pro- and anti-establishment, at least as we now know it.  The young professionals who formed what was essentially a discussion group about Hong Kong’s future were daring, perhaps, just for gathering, but hardly radical.

Like the group Meeting Point, formed by ex-students, the middle-class Observers included not only figures who went on to become pro-dems but future conservatives, including more than one Executive Council member.  This milieu of early civic awareness included future Liberal Party founders Selina Chow and Allen Lee, not to mention current CY Leung supporter and rabid scourge of dissidents, columnist Lau Nai-keung.  Why doesn’t the SCMP mention this?  Because the idea is to burnish CY Leung’s credentials as a progressive man of the people.

And why would the SCMP want to do that? To put it another way: who put that story on the front page?  Robert Kuok, who owns the SCMP is not really a Leung sort of guy; the tycoons, especially those with property interests, do not like CY one bit.  Maybe the younger Kuoks are getting friendly just in case Beijing makes him, rather than blue-blood Henry Tang, the next CE.  Maybe the SCMP’s editor has a soft spot for CY.  Maybe CY’s people got to the reporter who wrote the story, and his bosses ran with it because there was nothing else going on.  The point is, the ‘story’ is there because someone wanted it there.

At least they didn’t claim it was an exclusive.

Exercising her right – and fulfilling her duty – as a legislator to hold the executive branch to account, Emily Lau on Wednesday asked Secretary for Mainland and Constitutional Affairs Stephen Lam to answer three questions.  The questions were submitted in writing ahead of time, and the answers delivered orally.  To make what would otherwise be a dry and dreary exchange intensely fascinating, I will present them here as a live cross-examination, using ‘plain English’ versions of the questions in green, but leaving Lam’s carefully, if not tortuously, drafted replies as they were. The original, full text is here.

Thanks to the venerable traditions of English common law, defendants and witnesses in court can refuse to answer questions on the basis that they cannot be required to give evidence against themselves.  Lam is more or less taking this tack, though he has to avoid incriminating government in general – not just Hong Kong’s but the nation’s.

Also thanks to our legal heritage, anything not specifically banned by law is permitted.  The Hong Kong Basic Law is silent on the subject of (or ‘does not provide for’) referendums; thus there is no constitutional bar to the holding of such a poll should the local government ever want to hold one.  But mainland officials have declared that a referendum is indeed illegal.  Under their system, the meaning of a law’s wording is flexible and decided on a case-by-case basis by the same leadership that holds ultimate power over all branches of government.  Ask Liu Xiaobo.

Essentially, Emily Lau is trying to force Stephen Lam to say either that Beijing officials are wrong, or Hong Kong’s traditional legal principles have been abandoned.   Lam is cunningly evasive or willfully obtuse, according to taste:

Lau Are the pro-democrats who claim to be holding a referendum in the form of by-elections breaking the law?  If so, how?

Lam Under “One Country, Two Systems”, the HKSAR must comply with the provisions of the Basic Law. Conducting a so-called “referendum” on the issue of constitutional development is not consistent with the provisions relating to amendments to the electoral methods for the Chief Executive (CE) and the Legislative Council (LegCo) in the Basic Law and the interpretation and decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC).

Lau Doesn’t the common-law ‘you can do anything not prohibited’ principle mean that Hong Kong may in fact hold a referendum?  You have checked, right?

Lam The Basic Law does not provide for any “referendum” mechanism. As a local administrative region of the People’s Republic of China, the HKSAR has no authority to determine or change its political structure on its own, or to create a “referendum” mechanism.

Lau Beijing says the pro-democrats who resigned have broken the law, so waddya gonna do about it, weasel boy?

Lam The Basic Law does not provide for any “referendum” mechanism. Conducting any form of so-called “referendum” in Hong Kong will have no legal basis or effect whatsoever, and will not be recognised by the HKSAR Government…

The nearest Lam seems to get to answering any part of the questions is when he says that Hong Kong “has no authority to … create a ‘referendum’ mechanism.”  But this is simply restating the obvious point that it is not mentioned in the Basic Law.  Hong Kong’s government similarly has ‘no authority’ to mount a public consultation exercise on vacuous constitutional reform proposals, appoint sycophants to the position of Justice of the Peace or put posters everywhere telling us to take care of our old folks’ teeth, but they still do it.

On a brighter note, Lam deserves credit for not once using the phrases ‘move ahead’ or ‘the way forward’ (as in “the government and the majority of the community wish to move ahead and find a consensus on the way forward”).  These expressions invariably refer to popular opposition to a policy proposal that is subject to a public consultation process rigged in order to arrive at the government’s predetermined decision.  Their absence on this occasion is a refreshing ray of sunshine.

It might be hard to believe that anyone would be moved to write a song about our Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs, but behold: Sharing Out Stephen Lam’s [monthly] HK$300,000 Salary by My Little Airport.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s Department of Countdowns to Special Events unveils a special countdown clock to mark the 88 days before the exciting Shanghai World Expo.

The arrest of Svengali-like, leering, mystic lothario Tony Chan Chun-chuen by Hong Kong’s valiant police is greeted with widespread glee across the Big Lychee today.  I am not sure whether his supernatural powers include divination, but I doubt he was surprised to find himself being detained and questioned after a court found him to have claimed deceased rich widow Nina Wang’s fortune with a forged will.

However, two things – in these conspiratorial times – raise concerns in my sordid and suspicious mind.  First, the police action was swift and sure in the extreme: they grabbed him as he came home from lunch, and did so in large numbers.  Second, the capitalist (as opposed to Party-funded) pro-Beijing press have taken great delight in publicizing the proceedings and making no secret of their antipathy to Chan (with the Standard, for example, declaring him a liar in its headline).

Where have we recently seen this combination of uncharacteristic constabulary eagerness and gloating pro-establishment media coverage?  Why – the arrest of allegedly gorgeous post-80s activist Christina Chan Hau-man as she left a radio interview three weeks ago, prompting her to accuse the police of ‘white terror’.  Could there be hidden parallels between the two episodes?

Let us recall yesterday’s comment about

‘flamboyant’ property tycoon Cecil Chao congratulating the [Wang] family … reminding us that Wang’s fortune was simply shoveled into her lap courtesy of the Hong Kong government’s high land-price policy, at the expense of the city’s home-dwellers.

L-R: Albert Yeung, Charles Ho and Jospeh Lau enjoying quality male-bonding time together

Nina Wang and Cecil Chao, like Standard and Sing Tao proprietor tobacco magnate Charles Ho, entertainment mogul Albert Yeung, property man Joseph Lau and certain others, comprise a sub-caste of the Hong Kong tycoon species.  Their public tastes, mores and connections set them apart to some degree from the polite society in which our top government officials and conglomerate-owners mingle.  (Ho is savoury enough to straddle the boundary.  Mainland officials are less fastidious minglers.)

This somewhat outré demi-monde of the establishment has sympathizers among our law enforcement community.  The police apparently allow their and other tycoons’ bodyguards to stop passers-by on the sidewalk so the great men can stroll unhindered from their (illegally parked) luxury cars to Fook Lam Moon restaurant.  When a young woman of modest background complained that someone had posted naked photos of her on the Internet, the cops did nothing.  When it happened to starlets working for Albert Yeung’s group, it became crime of the century.

Selective zealousness, incidentally, is becoming a hallmark of the Hong Kong police.  Andrew To was charged with assaulting a cop in October yesterday, just after being elected head of the radical League of Social Democrats, masterminds of the by-election/referendum saga.

Happier days: lawyer Jonathan Midgely and Nina Wang leaving court during a case about a forged will. (Not the current case about a forged will, obviously – a different one. Haven’t you been paying attention?)

So where does all this leave Tony Chan?  It could be argued that he is, as a former bartender who once lived with his wife’s family in a public housing apartment, a man of the people.  A humble ‘small potato’, at least before Nina Wang started to remunerate him generously for his companionship and he bought Peak properties, executive jets and so on. Therefore, his current plight could be viewed as the persecution by a vengeful, moneyed elite of an interloping social inferior (think Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed).

What this means is that his defence lawyer, the (not identically) flamboyant Jonathan Midgely – or whoever has the job – has an exciting opportunity to turn the case around in style.  He should now assert that Tony Chan was on a mission to reclaim the Hong Kong people’s rightful wealth.  The Wang legacy, remember, comes from the rigged, cartelized property market through which most of our tycoons effortlessly extract enormous sums from hard-working people.  Tony, according to this new approach, planned to take Nina’s estate and divide it up among all the poor and poor-ish in the city, giving them back their due.  He is, in a way, just another Christina Chan or Long Hair, though peculiarly happy-looking, and with a dash of Robin Hood.  The perfect story: out of the slammer, and a hero.  What more, apart from the jet, could he ask for?

It’s as if the Gods of News have all fallen ill or maybe gone on strike.  Developing stories have been abandoned to sag and fall in on themselves, like mushy, failed soufflés.  The meticulously intertwined threads of current events have been left to loosen and come apart like strands of DNA in a diseased cell.   The tide in the affairs of man has mysteriously failed, leaving the waters still and stagnant.  That sort of thing.

To no-one’s great surprise, a court declares that the signatures on the will leaving late tycoon Nina Wang’s entire estate to grinning feng-shui toy-boy Tony Chan Chun-chuen were forgeries.  The tax officials are circling around Chan like vultures, and his new hairstyle seems to have been designed to save the Correctional Services Department the bother of doing it.

But the saga is unresolved and unsatisfying.  The towering pile of unctuous audacity that is Tony Chan* is perhaps looking for a new lawyer to appeal the ruling.  We have no idea how much the estate is worth (HK$10 billion?  HK$100 billion?).  The charity Nina’s family want the money for is a cipher of a chimera of a known unknown.  And then we have what the Standard calls ‘flamboyant’ property tycoon Cecil Chao congratulating the family, and reminding us that Wang’s fortune was simply shoveled into her lap courtesy of the Hong Kong government’s high land-price policy, at the expense of the city’s home-dwellers.

Similarly, to no-one’s surprise at all, the Democratic Alliance for the Blah-Blah of Hong Kong has ‘decided’, after putting on a show of not instantly obeying orders from Beijing, to boycott the forthcoming by-election.  Again, this is a non-story.  Where is the crunchy, chewy substance here?  The only prospect of a worthwhile sound-bite comes from the mainland officials with their mental hair-triggers poised to detonate an explosion of mouth-frothing, screeching rage at any moment about how referendums that aren’t taking place are forbidden by Basic Law clauses that apparently don’t exist.

Other than that, it has all the makings of a big flop.  The government and its supporters are mumbling words that sound vaguely similar to Beijing’s about how the pro-democrats’ actions are sort of, well, un- (da-dee-da) -consti- (dum-dee-dum) -tutional.  Legislator Emily Lau will ask the increasingly tragic Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Secretary Stephen Lam today (Item 5) to make it clear.  “Spit it out, you smarmy, weasel-faced, born-again dog-dropping,” she’ll scream –  “legal or illegal?” 

The pro-democrats who have resigned from the Legislative Council would, if they had an ounce of wit, produce handcuffs at a press conference and dare the authorities to arrest them or shut up.  If they had half a pound of wit, they would declare the by-elections to be nothing other than (say) a vote on the property tycoons.  If you think they’re evil exploitative scumbags undermining our economy and society – come out and vote (for any candidate!).  If you think they’re upstanding pillars of the community creating jobs and prosperity – stay at home.  But that would be too simple, too attention-grabbing and too irresistible.  We can’t have that.

Then, a final, depressing, lumpy, grey mass of gruel-like reportage: sex-offenders name-shame background checks shock trauma outrage horror!!! You’ve read the story everywhere else on the planet, now it’s our turn.  My eyes glaze over.  I suppose I should read the article, but just a quick skim is all I can bear.  I don’t have kids.  I don’t molest kids.  I have no idea whether the sex-beast phenomenon is an ever-present evil, a recently erupted threat due to plastics in the food chain, or a big scare created by the media.  I am fairly certain that, if someone is a danger to anyone else, they should be locked up, and if they’re not, they shouldn’t be – in which case they should not have any past crime tattooed on their forehead, be fire-bombed or be used for modern-day bear-baiting.

I don’t hire people for childcare positions, so I am clueless.  But is a workplace or neighbourhood safer accommodating an ex-offender with a criminal record for burglary, or knifing old ladies for spare change, or pyromania, or racist murder?  For any of them: if they’re still a threat to us, put them back in detention.

The Gods of News are helpless with this one.  It is, if my skimming is correct, a modest scheme to enable various people to check various things about various other people in a well-intentioned attempt to reduce an unquantifiable risk of something bad or maybe very bad, but in such a way that nothing serious will happen as a result in practice, give or take a small mountain of paperwork.  Maybe that’s reading too much into it.

The South China Morning Post mentions that background checks will include foreign workers, such as Southeast Asian maids who look after people’s kids.  So every middle-class Hong Kong family will be trying to contact whatever authorities exist in some dirt-track village in Indonesia to ask if the 23-year-old girl they’ve just hired is a weenie-wiggler.  There might just be a news story there.

*Yes, I would have serviced the old girl for a few million bucks a time, too – no-one’s saying they wouldn’t have.

While the world was mourning, or at least fervently discussing, JD Salinger, a far less famous but more influential figure breathed his last: British diplomat Percy Cradock.  He typified a generation (or two) of senior UK officials, statesmen and bureaucrats who saw their primary responsibility in the 1960s-80s as expertly and calmly managing Britain’s decline from pre-World War II superpower to a barely significant has-been of a country like, say, Spain.  Despite the extreme modesty inherent in this aim, they carried out their work with all the arrogance of their 19th Century predecessors who had carved out the empire on which the sun never set.

Their defeatist mission was rooted in reality.  From 1947, when the UK’s lack of resources forced the US to step in to aid and protect Greece and Turkey from the Soviet threat, it was obvious the UK was no longer number-one, or even a convincing joint number-two.  By the 1970s, US or US client forces had replaced the British in the Far East and the Gulf, and whatever global influence the UK retained was largely due to ‘soft power’ – typically historical ties – or perceived closeness to the US.

But the grey bureaucrats and politicians of those years saw it as their duty to pre-empt the historical trend and prepare the UK for, and indeed actively steer it to, an even lowlier status.  The resignation to membership from 1972 of an increasingly bureaucratic, centralized and philosophically alien European community was the prime example.  Better off in than out: it was not so much withdrawal from imperial overstretch as a fear for future viability as a nation-state.

Margaret Thatcher, elected prime minister in 1979, was skeptical of this belief, just as she was with the consensus among the mandarins and establishment that welfarism and labour unions’ political power were unavoidable components of the social contract.  It was at this time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that the future of Hong Kong came up.

Percy Craddock, according to the more hagiographical interpretation, used his ‘old China hand’ expertise and ruthless pragmatism to get the UK and Hong Kong a good deal in the face of Chinese insistence that the colony be handed over in 1997, especially given the unrealistic expectations of the nationalistic Thatcher, emboldened after giving the Argentine junta a bloody nose over the Falkland Islands in 1982.  A less sympathetic view would portray him as a conceited, all-seeing mandarin who knew better than a mere politician about his country’s interests or values, and who even saw his own side as the main worry.

It is possible that in the first few years of Deng Xiaoping’s rule in the late 1970s, Beijing would have been open to leaving Hong Kong under some form of British administration after 1997 – provided the British didn’t force the issue.  It is hard to imagine such a cautious approach from the assertive China of today, so it is no loss that the UK did demand that Beijing make its plans for the city clear.

To cut a long story short, Cradock and the Foreign Office’s other Sinophiles (plus UK trade officials and interests, ready to sell Hong Kong out for commercial deals) promised to hand China a Hong Kong as it was in the early 1980s: a business centre that came with a population that was largely invisible except in terms of economic production.  For all practical purposes, they shared their Communist counterparts’ disdain for representative government.  They joined the mainland officials in their mouth-frothing and ranting when, in the early 1990s, politician and non-Chinese speaker Chris Patten became governor and started acting like a modern, accountable city mayor who listens to the voters.

To hear them tell it, everything would have been fine, and Hong Kong would today be a happy place of eager, obedient and unquestioning workers who ask for and expect little from government and care nothing for politics, had it not been for the evil Patten coming in and ruining everything.  Maybe Cradock and his colleagues endorsed or encouraged Beijing’s assumption that this was a permanently apolitical town as a cynical ploy in order to hurry the negotiations up and get 1997 over with.  Maybe they believed it.  Either way, they have a lot to answer for when we look at the broken, colonial-style government and often bitterly divided community we see in Hong Kong today.

The Standard calls it tit for tat.  Predictably, many of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing lawmakers parade out of the Legislative Council, depriving the proceedings of a quorum and forcing the meeting to adjourn.  The five pro-democrats resigning to force a de-facto referendum are left to deliver their personal statements to the crowd and media outside.

To loyalists who see the struggle between the two camps as a sort of boxing match, this is a punch on the nose to the troublemakers who are resorting to wilder and wilder tactics in their campaign for reform.  The walkout gives them the pleasure of getting their own back on the opposition for the resignation ploy with another legal but arguably underhand gimmick.

But it is not tit for tat, as this is not a symmetrical conflict.  The fight is not taking place on a level playing field.  One side largely comprises representatives elected in democratic elections, while many members of the other side had their positions of influence handed to them on a plate.  When the former exploits rules and procedures for tactical gain they can at least point to a popular mandate and a bit of moral high ground.  When the latter pulls a similar stunt, it is from a position of unfair advantage.

If we cast our minds back to 2003 when the Article 23 national security legislation was being pushed through Legco, we might recall the pro-Beijing lawmakers emerging from the chamber one day with smug grins on their faces.  While their pro-democracy colleagues (and some officials) had been away attending an academic conference on the proposed law, they had used their momentary overwhelming majority on the bills committee to wave the remaining parts of the bill through and pass a motion declaring the discussion finished.  As a parliamentary tactic it was legal, and they thought they were being clever.  Fifteen days later, over half a million people were on the streets.

In asymmetric struggles, two sides have unquantifiably different resources and methods.  In Vietnam, one side had the support of B52 bombers while the other had the support of peasant villagers and urban infiltrators.  Hong Kong’s League of Social Democrats, with their Trotskyite influences, have always seen working within the system as a snare; losing their seats in a by-election means nothing to them.  The post-80s generation protesting the high-speed rail link don’t know or care what a quorum is.  The Civic Party are increasingly seeing their presence in the weak, rigged Legco as pointless and are becoming open to other, maybe less lawyerly, forms of action.

The Democratic Party, the grandfather of the pro-democracy struggle, is divided.  Since two of its founders, Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, were kicked off the Basic Law Drafting Committee, its members have invested over two decades of effort into prompting change through logical argument and moral suasion – to zero effect.  Perhaps the DP will divide into two strands: traditionalists dreaming that Beijing will one day sit down and treat them as equals and concede universal suffrage, and activists with their sights on tycoons, cronyism and all the other uneven features of the day-to-day social and economic, rather than abstract ‘political’, side of the playing field.

To those in the pro-Beijing camp enjoying the prospect of more punches of pro-democrat noses, it looks good: the pro-dems are falling apart, and the by-elections look like becoming a humiliating farce apparently boycotted by the vast majority of the voters.  But to the opposition, such setbacks will simply confirm that they should quit the uneven playing field and take their anger and frustration elsewhere.  Not really good at all.