Big Lychee, Various Sectors

So what’s been going on in my absence? On the financial front, I notice that Swire Pacific, the biggest single holding in my equities portfolio, fell some 18% suddenly last week. At the same time, the conglomerate spun off part of its Swire Properties real-estate business in a separate listing (with the rather retro-sounding trading code of 1972 – the date the unit was founded, I think).

To hear all the waffling among analysts beforehand, Swire Pacific was to be reduced to a hollowed-out shell retaining a mishmash of undesirable aviation, distribution and shipping assets, while the subsidiary landlord would be where all the action is. As it turns out, the valuation of the Swire Properties shares that have recently materialized in my portfolio accounts for the 18% drop almost perfectly. This is what you would expect, but it also raises the question: why bother? The holding company is somewhat diluted as a property play, but on balance I don’t see an iota of extra (or reduced) value for shareholders. I guess we’re supposed to wait years for exciting results.

In fairness, the big Swire bosses look very pleased with themselves having added a fourth counter to their existing line-up of Swire Pac, Cathay Pacific and HAECO to the Hong Kong stock market. Maybe that was the point, in which case how can we not share in their joy, and indeed thank them for brightening up our lives during these gloomy times?

As a landlord, Swire benefits from the ongoing influx of Mainland tourists in Hong Kong. This same influx, of course, imposes a variety of unpleasant and damaging costs on the rest of the city’s population and economy. From my point of view, this may seem Panglossian, serendipitous kismet – but it is all part of a carefully designed plan: if the invasion of Mainland ‘locusts’ continues, I earn higher dividends; if an outbreak of SARS or something drives them away, I have a nicer town to live in. The Big Lychee’s government constantly blathers about ‘win-win’ situations, but this is the real thing.

While I was away, the Hong Kong-Mainland cultural clash – at least partly rooted in pressure on housing, hospitals, rents and babies’ milk powder – grew in intensity. The Great Dolce & Gabbana Siege of 2012 was followed by the now-infamous YouTube video of Mainland scum dribbling noodles all over the floor of our pristine MTR trains, leaving noble Hongkongers with no choice but to push the emergency button to bring the full wrath of mass-transit justice upon the messy peasant invaders. Peking University’s embarrassing Professor Kong Qingdong accused Hong Kong people of being running dogs of British colonialism, and the next thing we know, the culture war is world news. The Cantonese ‘bastards, dogs and cheats’ are now launching ‘anti-locust’ websites.

Yesterday’s South China Morning Post pleaded for moderation, and its business columnist wrote a defence of Mainland shoppers’ importance to our economy that curiously played down the negative impacts of the large-scale influx of tourists on those of us who are not landlords or owners thereof. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Hong Kong officials – wisely keeping their heads down publicly in all of this – are calling editors and begging for some badly needed harmony to help calm things down.

Meanwhile chatterers are wondering how much Professor Kong’s views reflect those of Beijing. His outburst was on an obscure Internet broadcast, but it gained sufficient attention to get it pulled by censors had it been referring to, say, Tibetans or Uighurs. You can get away with insulting Japanese or Westerners this way online, however, which would imply that Beijing deep down sees Hongkongers on a par with foreigners. Then again, you can also smear other fellow Chinese or Taiwanese in this manner, provided they do not enjoy government favour.

It would be nice to think that the latest Ngong Ping 360 Death Ride disaster would keep tourist numbers down, but I fear it will take far more than that. I can’t see anti-tourist Facebook pages helping, either. I bought my Swire shares back during the SARS crisis, when airlines were grounded and malls deserted, and they were going for a fraction of today’s price. Taking subsequent dividends into consideration, I pretty got them for free, which is why I can be even more philosophical about their and Swire Properties’ current fate as Hong Kong ponders the Mainland Mass-Tourism Menace. It would take another earth-shattering outbreak of deadly pestilence or an equally cataclysmic crash of the Chinese economy to bring the share price/visitor numbers down. More’s the pity. When do we start seeing Swire Properties dividends?

I am spending the week in a small, distant town so obscure that, when you Google its name, you get the name of moderately successful band named after it. I am here to say a final farewell to a loved one, but the mood is not one of moroseness or grief so much as resigned annoyance at the impertinence and unpredictability of nature.

By coincidence, this is the town of my birth. Just a few hundred yards away, past the frozen fields overlooking what passes for sea, I find the long-abandoned tennis court of my first school. The establishment was run by nuns for ‘girls and infants’ until, just as I arrived, it became hard up and the Belgian order had to let repulsive boys join their straw boater-wearing angels.

Around the corner and up the hill, I find the school has vanished. The convent, far smaller than the mighty and mysterious edifice I remember, is boarded up and covered with graffiti. Not before time. I will never forget the incredibly disgusting food: cabbage that smelled of something more like carrion and could have been sucked up through a straw after being cooked by arc-plasma device. One dish – allegedly a cheese tart – is so indelibly etched upon my consciousness that I can induce myself to vomit within seconds just by imagining its rancid smell and its shimmering, orange surface covered in tiny beads of sweat.

This windy part of town lies on the crest of a ridge and includes aging suburban development, with identical homes with numbers. The house I was born in is in a world apart, downhill and thus inland, with no hint of the coast. It was a gently sloping, winding road where every house and cottage was different and identified by a name. Its feel was that of a village, right down to elderly women looking like Margaret Rutherford wearing hats and carrying shopping baskets.

I have a long-recurring dream in which I am at the top of this tranquil lane where it turns and the last houses give way to hedges and trees. Within a few paces the greenery on either side is so tall that it joins at the top, turning the road into a dark tunnel. I think you can get to the top of the hill where the convent and more urban neighbourhood are, but the farther I press on, the more difficult it gets. The lane narrows, twists and looks impenetrable. Sometimes it gets too steep or too overgrown to carry on; other times it leads to a tiny ledge perilously high on a cliff top. There is no getting through.

Today, awake, I am coming in the other direction. After the last of the 1930s semi-detacheds, I pass a few small rough fields of sheep and horses, and there, off to one side, descending into shrubbery-shrouded gloom, I see what I am looking for. The exit. I always knew I wasn’t imagining it. Making the journey backwards is surprisingly quick; everything has shrunk when you have grown up. After a few minutes strolling down the dark, narrow lane – you are actually going into a valley – a long-forgotten row of cream cottages appears, and I turn down past the Joyces, past the Wilcoxes and past my own old home (now valued at around 150 times what my parents paid for it, not counting inflation). Even a Margaret Rutherford-type makes an appearance.

Later, I stop off for lunch in a pub. Retirees line up to take advantage of a two-for-one offer, and the barmaid is patiently tailoring their orders to suit their requirements. “Would you like peas with that?” “No, no peas, dear.” “Would you like the salad on the side?” “Oh, no thank you.” God forbid any non-starch plant matter should blight their platters. These people are a generation ahead of me and for all I know were even more badly traumatized by inedible school lunches than I was.

Comments will be cleared… eventually

…to ward off the Monstrous Mainland Mother Menace

Problem: Mainland mothers are making ever more determined efforts to give birth in Hong Kong to qualify their kids for an eventual ID card and residence rights. Hospitals now have quotas to limit Mainlanders’ deliveries, and pregnant women from over the border without a booking may be intercepted by immigration officials and turned back. To get round this, some mothers-to-be enter Hong Kong before the bump gets too obvious, hang out in an illegal apartment-hostel for a while, then turn up at the public hospital emergency room after contractions begin. This endangers them and their kids, and – more to the point for angry Hongkongers – increases pressure on medical services and taxpayers’ costs, especially when the rascals run off without paying the bill.

Non-solutions: Hong Kong’s Basic Law guarantees residency to all born in the city. Changing this would be difficult politically and practically. (Amending the BL – a Chinese law – would legitimize Western-style rule of law and lose the Communist Party face. Chinese-style ‘interpreting’, under which we would be invited to believe drafters really meant to exclude Mainland babies all along, invites ridicule. Besides, the accumulation of Mainland residents in Hong Kong seems to be a policy of Beijing’s.  There would also be problems with discriminating against fellow Chinese vis-à-vis overseas nationals living here.)

Refusal to hand over the birth certificate without payment of fees – and perhaps of some sort of deterrent fine – is, I am reliably informed by a lawmaker who suggested it, not possible for some constitutional or legal reason that escapes me. Lame politicians like Chief Executive hopeful Henry Tang offer silly ideas like barring the mothers from Hong Kong for two years, as if that would make any difference.

Click to hear ‘Death of an Elf’ by the Reverend Glen Armstrong!

A real solution: I hereby solve the problem neatly and vividly in three simple steps.

1  All un-booked, potentially bill-skipping Mainland babies shall henceforth be impounded (what’s the phrase – taken into care?) by the child welfare and social services people straight after the nurse severs the umbilical cord. The grounds for this are that any woman willing to risk her and her child’s well-being by staggering in after her waters break is unfit to be a parent.

2  The newborn children will be offered up for adoption (maybe we could charge the new parents a fee to cover the costs of the delivery and the repatriation of the unfit mother). Local families would get priority, but most of the kids would no doubt go to those slightly creepy but no-doubt well-intentioned Americans who hanker after a Chinese baby to dress in cheongsams and teach Mandarin.

3  As word of the new policy spreads extremely quickly, watch the illicit mothers vanish overnight, and the pressure on our hospitals noticeably lessen.

Tomorrow I will solve the problem of illegal parking in Central through selective – and in practice relatively rare – public garroting.

Comments will be cleared eventually…

Click to hear ‘Donald Tsang Please Die’ by My Little Airport!

Hong Kong’s hearts have been gushing with pride as that time of the year comes around again and Chief Executive Donald Tsang proudly gets his pat on the head from the Heritage Foundation for running the world’s freest economy. The important thing is that we all smile and pretend this is a different Heritage Foundation from the American hegemonist one that rants about the Beijing Communists’ evil global designs in ways guaranteed to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.

Part of the annual ritual is a stern reminder from the Foundation that Hong Kong could lose its number-one spot if it doesn’t watch out. In the past the the think-tank has warned that a minimum wage or a competition law might threaten our ideological purity. This year, their spokesman on the radio said on Friday, the danger is Hong Kong’s inclusion in China’s Five Year Plan.

You can see his point. What greater harm could come to a laissez-faire economy than to be subjected to Stalinist-style targets for tractor or wheat production? But that’s not really what it’s about. The Big Lychee is mentioned in the Five Year Plan in order to send us a heavy-handed subliminal message that we are both dependent on and a beneficiary of Beijing’s generosity – which can of course be withdrawn if we don’t shut up and behave.

Still, it is good to see someone call attention to the idiocy of it. Maybe the Heritage Foundation could question some of the things Sir Bow-Tie says on the subject. When Donald says that Hong Kong’s inclusion in the Five Year Plan shows that the city’s role as a financial centre is not threatened by Shanghai, the Foundation could laugh and point out that Shanghai has no free movement of capital, no serious legal, accounting or regulatory systems, no free flow of information, and there are state-owned or –linked corporations as far as you can see, plus corrupt administrators. The only sort of person who could suggest it rivals Hong Kong is either stupid or trying to undermine Hongkongers’ confidence by suggesting otherwise. And what sort of person would do that? Why, the sort of shoe-shiner who knows how to get a pat on the head from Beijing as well.

Comments will be cleared eventually…

That Chief Executive election race that glimmered briefly for a few days before Christmas recently sparked back into life. There is something rather contrived about the spat between candidates Henry Tang and CY Leung. CY has called for upgrading the hospital authority (chaired by Henry-supporter Anthony Wu) and for a new financial authority (to supplement the existing Monetary one, formerly run by Henry supporter Joseph Yam). In response, Henry has criticized the work of the Urban Renewal Authority (run by CY supporter Barry Cheung).

An excellent choice on Henry’s part for mud-slinging electioneering, I must say: it hits a popular nerve, it isn’t entirely fair and, coming from an ex-Chief Secretary, it’s hypocritical. On the face of it, the URA deserves to be stomped on for its strategy of tearing down old neighbourhoods in league with for-profit developers and replacing them with oversized unaffordable luxury towers. However, although the authority at times seems to have gone about this with undue relish, the whole approach has been 100% directed by government policy, which seems to be to reduce the amount of affordable housing. The Development Bureau rushes to defend its offshoot, as well it might. They will have to report to Henry in a few months, and this is upsetting to them.

What is amusing about this little outbreak of negative campaigning is its setting: a stage-managed process, culminating in a make-believe election in March at which 1,200 mostly obedient make-believe voters will do what Beijing tells them and ritually elect Henry Tang as CE. What is different (and unexpected) about the charade this time is that Beijing still hasn’t made its preference known, so it remains technically possible for CY Leung to get enough nominations to get onto the ballot.

It seems that this pseudo-election is being used as a dry run for 2017, where the whole electorate will – assuming the Central People’s Government keeps its word – be able to vote. What will probably happen is that two candidates broadly acceptable to the Communist Party will get onto the ballot, and we will be allowed to choose between them. Beijing seems to be testing how easily it can guide two competing candidates, how tempted they might be to resort to populism and negative campaigning, and troubleshooting other potential problems with this scarily uncontrollable (well, managed) democracy thing.

Indeed, what are the chances that when universal suffrage with Chinese characteristics comes to Hong Kong in 2017, it will take the form of a ballot offering Henry Tang, hoping for a second term, and CY Leung, drooling at the prospect of his first?

Spot (ha ha) the difference (from recent editions of the SCMP). Top: a vendor at the Canton Trade Fair selling worthless junk made by someone else; bottom: decorative and functional avant-garde art…

Click to hear ‘The Gallery’ by Joni Mitchell!

Everyone I know has an iPad, and with a long and not entirely pleasant trip ahead, it looks like the ideal companion for flights and airports: books, magazines and films, all with email and web-browsing. But first I must prepare myself for the mental torture of entering a shop and buying something, so I Google for advice on how to set up one of the devices.

The first thing I learn is that I can relax: you control the contraption in the same way as an iPhone. Fine, except I have never touched an iPhone. Anyway, you get it home and out of the box, it seems, and plug it into your computer. It then starts to do something to (or from) iTunes, though I neither have nor want anything to do with iTunes. I assume that the gizmo will play the MP3s I have gathered over the years rummaging around in the dustier and perhaps less law-abiding recesses of the Internet, though the emphasis seems to be Apple proprietory this and Apple proprietory that, with all ‘Apps’ of course, Apple-approved. Does the user own the product or vice-versa?

Plus, some idiot decided it would be really cool not to have a USB port. God forbid you besmirch the machine’s beauty by making it usable.

So I look through recommendations for alternatives, perhaps made by technology companies rather than a designer-label fashion house that wants to separate you from the life you keep on a 32GB thumb drive.

There’s a thing called the Samsung Galaxy, and another called the HP Touchpad, both of which seem pretty much the same. Still no proper USB port, though you can get adaptors. (This really does seem to be for aesthetic purposes. There was a demented soul on the old IceRed message board who planned to be circumcised because he thought it would look nice; it seems he’s now in tech design.)

I happen to go past a branch of Fortress, so I drop in and look around. There is a Samsung Galaxy thingy, clamped to a display base and encased in a bullet-proof glass cabinet. As I peer at it, one of Li Ka-shing’s socially inept, acne-ridden salespersons approaches me nervously. Go away. I hate shops. Hutchison retail outlets, packed to maximize revenue per square foot, give me claustrophobia and drive the staff who work in them into jittery wrecks like battery-chickens. The sales guy wants to say something but doesn’t know how to start. Clearly, one of us is going to have a panic attack and flee – it’s a question of who breaks first. As it happens, it’s me, and I find instant relief breathing in the fresh Des Voeux Road air in a soothing sea of 10,000 Mainland tourists.

I can probably get a cheap better-than-the-authentic ripoff iPad up at Shamshuipo. Do I need anything that badly? Or I could just admit defeat and enter the clean and spacious Apple palace at IFC and beg forgiveness for all those things I said and start being a trendy contributor to Steve Jobs’ estate.

Then again… This is about something to read on the plane. The latest Economist will be on the newsstands in a few hours. What was I thinking? (Though things may be quiet around here until Dragon Year.)

Yesterday’s puzzle: why is Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department so keen to use dirty and old-fashioned incinerator technology to solve our garbage woes when clean and fruitful Plasma arc molecule separation and gasification appears so obviously better? A comment-writer says…

It has taken over 10 years to get the proposal this far and the technology was not that old when EPD started the process … In 2009 the nice Japanese old technology suppliers took an awful lot of EPD bureaucrats, local Lantau pollies and the Heung Yee Kuk (of course) to Japan for an all-expenses paid incinerator and karaoke tour.

This sets off a few synapses. Much rummaging around fails to uncover it, but I do recall seeing an official document containing lovely photos of pristine Northeast Asian incinerators. They were so gaily coloured that they doubled up as tourist attractions, and the reader was in no doubt that communities must have been squabbling over the right to host the things. And the document did have a curious sort of karaoke-style, relaxed and cheerful mood to it.

Speedily weighing things up yesterday, I pondered the possibility that the Plasma arc warp-factor antimatter technology looks a bit too good to be true, and the pragmatic civil servants therefore may have sound reasons for wanting to spend billions on building a giant smoky ash factory on Shek Kwu Chau. Now it looks a little more as if this would be a good subject for some incisive ‘Incinerator-gate’ investigative reporting. What a pity no such thing exists in Hong Kong.

Which brings us to another puzzle a watchdog press would sniff around: Why is the government so desperately eager to push us into building a third airport runway (at a mere HK$132bn)? Even by the standards of the Big Lychee’s conniving and arrogant officialdom, the public opinion poll showing the population begging to have the thing built without further ado was a contrived and laughable bit of propaganda. P.A. Crush, the South China Morning Post letters page’s voice of reason from Shatin, explains…

Air traffic fell in Wuhan after high-speed rail arrived, he adds, and Hong Kong’s own air cargo throughput is peaking.

This sounds all too believable. Dare I take the logic a step further and pose the question: Why did the government/MTR planners ram the HK$80bn high-speed rail link proposal through with such urgency? Answer: To beat the airport bureaucracy’s third runway to it.

Another bit of civil service skullduggery a hypothetical investigative journalist might tackle is the Government Hill controversy.

Not everyone appreciates the architectural wondrousness of the old Central Government Offices on Lower Albert Road – the soaring flying buttresses, the gleaming Corinthian columns and the mist flowing through the willows and ponds in the surrounding gardens. But many sensible folk have a soft spot for the site’s historic significance, and just about everyone apart from an evil alliance of bureaucrats and developers are united in opposing plans to build an office tower/car parks/Dolce & Gabanna-type temple to tackiness and landlords. 

The government portrays a translucent tower barely visible among lush greenery – hanging gardens, no less – spilling down from a park-like forested hill, and creeping like untamed jungle along overhead walkways and westwards right along the side of Queens Road away from the Ice House Street junction. Why, you can hear the hissing of the pythons dangling from the branches…

Opponents say it is all a load of BS, and even places like Battery Path face despoiling in some way or other, not least because of higher traffic levels. At the bottom of it all, however, is the question of why the place needs redevelopment of any sort at all. Short of possession of bureaucrats’ souls by mysterious demonic powers, no-one has a satisfactory answer.

The Hong Kong government asks whether we think charging households for the waste they produce is an option. The nervous phrasing of the question becomes understandable when we see the Standard’s headline, Talking Rubbish. Getting people to pay for something they consider free by right, or already paid for via property management fees or taxes, will be a challenge.

Inevitably, the consultation document offers the public a choice of three stupid options and the one the bureaucrats have already picked.

Non-starter 1 would charge us in proportion to our water bills, which would incentivize us to cut water use while still producing tons of garbage.

Non-starter 2 would ignore private households but charge companies by volume of waste, which would incentivize smaller firms, at least, to make their staff take the trash home. And yes, they would.

Non-starter 3 would charge everyone in the neighbourhood the same, which would at least enable a progressive system (assuming the rich chuck more away than the poor) but otherwise offer no incentive to cut waste.

Which leaves us with what I would insensitively term the Confucian Garbage System, the method that induces Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese to create well under half the rubbish Hongkongers do. By law, residents must use special, relatively expensive plastic bags for their trash (it might help if the bags are pink, play tunes like birthday cards when opened and have Hello Kitty on them). The amount of garbage plummets. However, it relies on people resolutely obeying and enforcing rules in the cause of the common good – not one of the Big Lychee’s strong points when it comes to day-to-day civic life.

So, given the Environmental Protection Department’s success in forcing stationary vehicles to switch their engines off, we can safely assume that Hong Kong will continue churning out 19,000 metric tons of junk per day. Meanwhile, our landfills will be overflowing by 2018 or so. With no-one left in this city manly enough to suggest the quick and simple option of dumping the crap in the Mainland, we need to consider incinerators.

The bureaucrats decided to build one on Shek Kwu Chau. It’s one of those islands you’ve never heard of (near Lingding – the Zhuhai-run vice hub of years back) that turns out to be extremely charming, pristine and home to such endangered species as the lesser three-eared pumpkin toad. Click here to see Mr Julia’s glossy travelogue-style video on what the project would do to Lantau, and here for the Living Islands Movement’s thoughts, including a discrete but plaintive appeal they thought I’d miss concerning the impact on property prices in South Lantau.

While the civil servants are shredding the public submissions on the Shek Kwu Chau proposal – to test the thing’s furnace – some citizens are politely suggesting we should be using plasma arc molecule separation and gasification and “not the caveman-technology bonfires” the civil servants want.

As the name suggests, Plasma arc etc involves such stellar temperatures that atoms separate and form new compounds, as explained in a quick Discovery Channel video and the manufacturer’s blurb. Forget perpetual motion, nuclear fusion or creating gold from base metals – this promises to take Hong Kong’s tons of daily junk and convert it into: a) an inert glass-like slag perfect for construction and b) combustible gas ideal for generating electricity. And you should see what it does to virus-laden bird carcasses.

If it’s so wonderful, why are the bureaucrats of the Environmental Protection Department determined to go with the outdated burning-up-in-smoke-and-dumping-ash-somewhere approach?

As a non-scientist, I can only guess at three possible explanations.

One is that the Discovery Channel, Westinghouse and Hong Kong activists with all their PhDs and beards are wrong and EPD civil servants are right. (For example, the space-age arc Plasma stuff would cost the equivalent of 20 Zhuhai bridges.)

Another is that EPD officials are driving their mammoth 8-seater Alp Hards through town seething with rage that a bunch of outsiders living in buffalo-infested villages have come up with a better idea, and they are now going to dig their heels in and cover Shek Kwu Chau with satanic Victorian-era incinerators to defend the honour and face of the world’s most superior civil service.

A third is that one or both of these camps would get a kickback from the suppliers of their favoured technology. But looking at them all – trendy busybodies holding fund-raising barbecues on their villa roofs and pompously professional public servants filling in their air-conditioning allowance claims – it doesn’t wash.

I will remain agnostic, though I must say I have my hunches.

Click to hear the Golliwogs’ ‘Fight Fire’!

Hong Kong’s rarely seen Justice Secretary praises the city’s Court of Final Appeal for “…faithfully apply[ing] the common law in an unprecedented constitutional setting.”  By which he means swallowing the repellent truth that we are part of a Communist one-party state whose leadership can alter the meaning of a law, regardless of its wording, on a whim out of political expediency. The euphemism is ‘interpretation’.

Weird juxtapositions and connections are an inevitable part of such an environment, and today’s come courtesy of the wide overseas reporting of the protest against the Dolce & Gabanna photo-racism outrage, and the arrival of colonial-era officials like former Health Secretary Libby Wong to help the lobby fighting plans to demolish the old Central Government Offices in Central…

The Save Government Hill movement has even, the South China Morning Post reports, unearthed the architect: one Michael Wright, aged 99, of London. Former Chief Secretary Sir David Akers-Jones chimes in, saying: “People are regretting they cared about [conservation] too late. We have given Central away. The time has come to stop.”

The weird juxtaposition manifests itself physically through the appearance of a flag bearing the British Hong Kong arms among the witty props protestors brought to oppose ‘luxury hegemony’ outside Dolce & Gabanna on Sunday. Whoever carried the pre-1997 banner – not unprecedented at anti-establishment gatherings – is probably too young to recall Libby and her penchant for the occasional menthol cigarette, or the all-purpose colonial-era patrician manner of Akers-Jones.

The anti-D&G demo has jarred the overseas press, who perhaps can’t make sense of rich, status-symbol Hong Kong chanting “Death to the designer label!” and claiming to be racial victims of their peasant-compatriots across the border. Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times writers are bemused, but suspect that the up-market mega-stores serving Mainlanders are part of the problem. These are the same stores, of course, that Hong Kong planners wish to accommodate in the proposed Government Hill redevelopment’s shopping mall.

The deluge of Mainland tourists and money, and higher rents, and the subsequent crushing of independent retailers serving local inhabitants has been going on for a good 10 years, and it is if anything getting worse. Mainland mothers giving birth here and stripping supermarket shelves of non-adulterated baby formula add to the alienation. And then all these Mainland investors buy up local apartments to leave empty, while Hongkongers can’t afford to live or start a business in their own city. The property interests evict, knock-down and rebuild to rake in yet more money, while the rest of the Big Lychee gets swept aside as an irrelevance. It’s enough to make young people resort to waving colonial symbols – a largely misplaced piece of imagery, though also possibly more vivid than they realize, being an expression of anti-Chinese sedition. And it’s enough to get these old fogeys who ran the place in the 70s and 80s out of their retirement homes to do something equally unthinkable: oppose the bureaucracy they bequeathed us.

Back in the SCMP, we have a column by Peter Kammerer, who suspects the bags Mainland tourists lug around Hong Kong are stuffed with dirty money, which cannot possibly have crossed the border in accordance with Mainland law…

To get a better idea of what is going on, take a visit to Macau. Its casinos’ revenues have boomed almost exponentially, just like Hong Kong’s tacky designer-label palaces and empty real estate. Peter Kammerer laments that no-one is asking how much of this cash is illicit. They just assume it. Of course this is money-laundering (D&G’s objection to photographs supposedly sprang from a guilty Mainlander not wanted to be spotted in the store). It is not new; Hong Kong’s zillions of little banks and Macau’s former gold bullion market were doing it decades back. Nor is it unique to the Pearl River Delta. North Korea has a casino or two. And the guy who wrote that “Singapore’s success came mainly from being the money laundering center for corrupt Indonesian businessmen and government officials” didn’t get fired for writing fiction.

The key thing is that Macau’s casino expansion, and the liberalization of outbound travel by individual Mainlanders to the two Special Administrative Regions, result from policy set in Beijing. If the two ex-colonies are being transformed into money-laundering centres it doesn’t have to be by accident. Indeed, the Chinese government must know what is happening (it has in the past reduced the number of trips people can make to Macau). Maybe the national leadership sees the outflow of corrupt money as a pressure valve, preferable to trying to keep the ill-gotten gains within China. Seen that way, what is going on around us in casinos and luxury goods and property markets is our contribution to the motherland’s harmonious socialist development.

Portugal lost control of Macau decades ago, but Britain kept Hong Kong relatively insulated from Beijing right to the end. Hence the irritating opinion polls on citizens’ identity, and hence the growing refusal to accept D&G-Mainlander imperialism and the developer-Tsang regime conspiracy to smother the city in Mandarin-speaking, simplified character-using shopping malls.

In an unprecedented constitutional setting, it all makes sense.

Click to hear the Jefferson Airplane’s ‘It’s No Secret’!