Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the abrupt ending of the Great 2012 By-Elections Bill Filibuster Outrage is that Legislative Council president Tsang Yok-shing didn’t push his emergency ‘halt’ button sooner. It is possible to draw all sorts of depressing conclusions, and we haven’t heard the last of it, and it’s a Friday – so we turn to some arguably more cheerful news, which only the exceptionally alert among us noticed a few days ago.

Supermarket chain Park N Shop is pulling out of Shanghai; at its peak, it had 21 outlets in the city. They say they will be back, but it seems they have an uphill struggle ahead of them. The retailer has had problems adapting…

“ParknShop started out as a standard supermarket, which was effective in Hong Kong because of limited space and high rental fees,” said an executive from a local supermarket. “But that model does not apply well in China, where hypermarkets are the norm. ParknShop has not been able to adapt to that norm,” he added.

As all shoppers in the Big Lychee know, this part of Li Ka-shing’s sprawling business empire shares a near-duopoly with Jardine’s Wellcome. The two players’ prices often fluctuate in tandem, suggesting that either they are engaged in cut-throat competition with each other, or they are colluding to keep prices up – or (I have a sneaking but unfounded suspicion) they maintain a semi-rigged but not overly exploitative blend of the two designed to rip us off gently but forever. We do know for a fact that they lean on wholesalers not to supply independent stores that undercut the big boys, an act that would be completely illegal in most developed capitalist markets.

These store closures could be part of an industry-wide consolidation affecting lots of other big merchants. But reading between the lines of the news reports on this (also here and here) it is hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that Park N Shop’s main problem in Shanghai was that it couldn’t handle a market where space is affordable and competitors are allowed to exist. At least they tried: the other conglomerates that dominate Hong Kong’s consumer market mostly don’t even bother expanding operations overseas, no doubt knowing they wouldn’t last five minutes. Amusingly, one of the companies beating the Hutchison subsidiary in Shanghai is the French Carrefour chain – which failed in Hong Kong essentially because our property and retail cartels froze it out.

Global Times points out that Park N Shop still does well in Guangzhou. Presumably the chain established itself in the Pearl River Delta at an earlier stage, and local consumers were and are very familiar with the brand from watching Hong Kong TV. That’s a nice-size region to complement the mature Hong Kong market, but letting Carrefour, Walmart et al have the other 90% of the country to themselves is hardly what we would expect of our beloved ‘Superman’.

I think Ming Pao mentioned this story, but I don’t recall seeing it feature prominently – or at all – in much mainstream Hong Kong press. (It’s there, but hardly obvious.) Even if the closure of a couple of stores is relatively trivial, Li Ka-shing is always worth a few column inches. Perhaps we are seeing a bit of Hong Kong’s famous media self-censorship here: Park N Shop is a huge advertiser, as are several other Hutchison/Cheung Kong retail, property and telecoms interests.

And we wouldn’t want to read too much into it, would we? CY Leung usurps the Chief Executive quasi-election at the last minute; anti-graft police kick Henry Tang’s basement door down at midnight; Sun Hung Kai’s Kwok brothers are led off in handcuffs; and now… KS Li’s Mainland empire mysteriously disintegrates. On what happier note can we declare the weekend open?

It’s that time of the year again. Water spontaneously oozes from every concrete pore of every building, leaving an embarrassing damp patch stretching all the way from Pokfulam to Quarry Bay. Battalions of cockroaches push and shove their way out of drains and alleyways, pausing briefly to blink in the daylight before executing their giant annual pincer movement around the whole city. And – by far the worst of all – tiresome clichéd self-interest masquerading as public-spiritedness spouts from the mouths of scoundrels and wastrels.

Former government officials insist on ‘serving the community’, whether the community wants it or not. Legislator Regina Ip has been loudly proclaiming her determination to ‘serve’ us for a while now, daydreaming of being Chief Executive, and now angling for a post in the next government. All in our interests, of course.

She is not alone. It is hard to see how someone who manages to spectacularly lose a rigged make-believe election can be of much help to anyone, except maybe a writer of tragic comedy. But there he is: Henry Tang, announcing with a straight face that after all his basement/wife and other disasters, he wishes to ‘serve the public’. (Serve a sentence, perhaps. And by one of those cosmic coincidences that fill our lives with unceasing wonder, what arrives on my desk at this very moment but a second-hand copy of You Are Going to Prison from Amazon?)

Meanwhile, that old spurious, hypocritical, whining, lame attempt at emotional blackmail ‘civil service morale’ rears its head again, with the inevitable price-tag attached. The government actually takes ‘civil service morale’ into consideration when deciding on what it blandly calls the bureaucracy’s pay adjustments. Other factors include “net pay trend indicators … the state of Hong Kong’s economy, the Government’s fiscal position, changes in the cost of living [and, ludicrously] the staff sides’ pay claims.” Does anyone – anyone working in the private sector, perhaps – notice something missing from this list? A word beginning with ‘P’?

As numerous commentators have noted over the years, no-one else in Hong Kong seems to have morale, or at least morale problems. Not the population as a whole, nor socio-economic or geographical groups within it. So far as we see or hear, elderly men condemned to living in cages or families having to bring up kids in subdivided slums somehow manage to keep their spirits up. But enjoy job security, allowances, salary levels shockingly higher than private-sector equivalents, plus free pensions on full salary for life, and you become a psychological wreck unless you are pampered and worshipped and spoon-fed and reassured every hour of the day. No wonder they can’t drag themselves away from ‘serving the community’.

Actually, one segment of our capable, determined, can-do, non-state-employed citizenry suffers from self-centred, infantile poor-pitiful-me syndrome: Cathay Pacific flying staff. On the radio the other morning, the news team gave CX management around 10 seconds to explain why they were offering cabin crew voluntary unpaid leave – a popular option among those who want a sabbatical – followed by what seemed like an hour of some union leader droning away about how awful it would be if such a scheme were compulsory, oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t.

CX crew have their own equivalent of ‘civil service morale’ emotional blackmail. The same union leader is now bleating about her members having to work round-trips back to Hong Kong on regional routes. The stress and strain, she insists, could jeopardize passenger safety. (Quick reminder: the work is essentially light waitressing.) No, what is really at jeopardy here – we might conjecture because we’re nasty that way – is cabin crews’ overnight allowances, which are hefty and paid in cash so the Hong Kong tax authorities don’t know about it.

You might think that the big, tough, highly qualified, often military-trained guys in Cathay’s cockpits might be less prone to whimpering about every little inconvenience that comes their way. But in today’s Standard the awful truth comes out: some of the poor little mites travel between duty stations on cargo flights, and even sleep on the floor!

I’ve been on one of these freighters. People hitching a ride on one do not get shoved down in the cold, dark metallic bottom of the fuselage, squatting between containers of electronics and shipments of seafood. The bubble behind the cockpit has low-density business-class seating, with restroom and, if I recall, a small galley. It’s nicer than a passenger flight. And, yes, that means you can stretch out on the floor. But the pilots’ union is talking of taking the airline to court. If the poor, highly sensitive and vulnerable wretches have to take positioning flights without a choice between fish and chicken, 25 movie channels and a neck massage, there will be tantrums, foot-stamping and ‘questions about flight safety’. Then you’ll all be sorry.

Who is this guy in all the newspapers this morning? The morose, equine-featured face looks vaguely familiar. He must have been famous once, but I just can’t quite put a name to him.

He has been on the radio to talk about having an illegal structure at his home. That means he is not one of the zombie-herd of Hong Kong residents who live in identical boxes in mass-produced high-rises. Maybe he has an illicitly converted loft in a disused warehouse authorized for commercial use only, or an old walk-up with a wooden shack, full of character, proudly jutting out of the roof. Whatever it is, he is one of us: free-spirited, independent-minded, anti-government, and liberated – liberated from the tyranny of the planners and their despotic regulations designed to force productive, peace-loving families into inhumanely small living space.

He is making the wild assertion that the Independent Commission Against Corruption are investigating his property’s original, unique and charming talking-point feature. Could he be a bit… strange? Maybe he’s one of those people who thinks extraterrestrial life-forms are in contact with him, is into crystal healing for pets, and will be at next Monday’s New Moon Ceremony for Manifestation. But he doesn’t look like that type.

Why would the ICAC be involved? Illegal structures are the jurisdiction of the Buildings Department – as all of us who have one know, having thrown countless dozens of their logo-emblazoned, impertinent letters in the bin over the years. When you see the jackbooted thugs coming up the hill you tip a table across the threshold, and point a shotgun in their general direction. Yes – you shout – I am guilty of enjoying a 200-square-foot kitchen and a 180-square-foot bathroom, when I am supposed to have the same cramped 1-yard-across hovels everyone else has. Come and get me. And of course they scuttle away. But the ICAC are different.

The ICAC would only be interested in an illegal structure case if there were some suspicion of graft. Let’s say someone slipped an architect or builder some cash for agreeing to submit fake plans to the government building-permit department, or paid a lowly civil servant to overlook a minor detail during some inspection. But being decent, law-abiding folk, those of us with unauthorized building works wouldn’t dream of such a thing.

The depressed-looking, almost-recognizable fellow on the radio says it’s all a plot to give the impression that someone is taking revenge upon him. (If I read it correctly, he alleges that the public believes that the ICAC’s presence is someone’s form of retribution against him, but that he thinks the public is wrong. Which suggests the ICAC do indeed have a valid reason to be kicking his door down. Perhaps he is a bit confused after all.)

We UBW-dwellers stick together. We are a silent libertarian uprising in defence of livable homes in authentic neighbourhoods, bound together by knowing looks, secret handshakes and – perhaps the clincher – obscenely good connections. The higher up in society you go (I don’t mean ‘new money’, Mainlanders, etc) the more illegal structures you find. It’s uncanny. So I could really help this poor guy. If only I could remember his name.

Chief Executive-elect CY Leung warns legislators not to ‘play politics’ – which raises the question of what exactly we elect them to do. The lawmakers concerned are the radicals of People Power and the League of Social Democrats currently attempting to filibuster the government’s by-elections bill. The pro-government forces are seeking to portray the spoiling tactics as an irresponsible waste of time and, of course, money. The pan-democrats are, as ever, splintered and not articulating a convincing defence of their position (or positions).

The by-elections bill was prompted by the ‘five constituencies referendum’ in February 2010. One pro-democrat legislator from each geographical constituency resigned, thus triggering by-elections that, they maintained, could serve as a direct, popular vote on a single issue. This stunt – occasionally used in fully democratic jurisdictions – could have worked magnificently had the pro-democrats chosen an appropriate time and purpose. Instead, it was a flop.

The Democratic Party didn’t take part but just sat by in a huff. The pro-government parties were under orders not to take part in the by-elections, leaving the polls one-horse races and pointless. And the burning issue of principle over which the five resigned was constitutional reform – of endless fascination to them, but mind-numbingly uninspiring by then to most of the population.

To Beijing’s officials, however, this mechanism posed a serious theoretical threat to the Hong Kong government’s legitimacy and ability to rule, and thus ultimately to Communist Party control. Although a by-election could never serve as a true, binding referendum, it could be presented as one, and even accepted as one by the populace. To cadres who are uncomfortable enough with plain everyday opinion polls, legislators’ ability to trigger a by-election had to go.

Calling the stunt a loophole, and emphasizing the financial cost of by-elections, the government set out to do Beijing’s bidding. Officials found, however, that leaving vacated seats empty would be unconstitutional, and passing them on to runners-up in the previous election too absurd for the public to accept. Eventually, they found a sort-of solution to address what they called the Mischief arising from resignations of five Legislative Council Members. It bars a resigning legislator from running again for six months, but it could still be used to trigger a by-election/quasi-referendum. Beijing probably doesn’t really like it. Public opinion seems unmoved. The only positive outcome, if you can call it that, is that then-Constitutional Affairs Secretary Stephen Lam emerged with his role as a paid liar intact.

Now the bill is being filibustered. As with the by-election stunt, Beijing’s officials in Hong Kong will be telling their local counterparts to ban such procedural sabotage; again, the device is, theoretically, ultimately a challenge to the Communist Party’s right to absolute political power. And again, we hear these tactics described as an ‘abuse’ or a ‘loophole’.

Although we have all heard of filibusters elsewhere, it’s not often we get to see one up-close (pro-establishment lawmakers and then-Constitutional Affairs Secretary Michael Suen did it in 1999 to kill off the Urban and Regional Councils, but no-one’s mentioning that at the moment). They’re incredibly hard work. CY Leung would like the electorate to take revenge against lawmakers using such tactics in September’s elections. Another possibility is that the radical legislators will attract a new wave of admiring voters for their stamina and determination in introducing 1,300 amendments and quoting chunks of scripture at snail-pace in the chamber. Indeed, both could happen. Hong Kong has not seen the last electoral fun in 2012.

Bank of East Asia Chairman Dr the Hon Sir David Li Kwok-po, GBM, GBS, OBE, JP is to quit the Legislative Council. (And let’s not overlook Legion d’Honeur.) The longest-serving lawmaker announces his decision in a rather bitter-sounding interview with Sing Tao, and thus the Standard. He was probably going to stand down in the September elections anyway, but with the dawn of a new regime under Chief Executive-elect CY Leung, his departure is symbolic and possibly points to a bigger pattern.

Li has represented the Finance functional constituency in the legislature – a constituency with less than 150 corporate, or non-human, electors – since it was created in 1985. No-one has ever run against him, apart from a young whippersnapper in 2000, who lost by 89-32 votes. His main claim to fame was in having the legislature’s second-worst attendance record, though he made a point of dropping into the chamber for a few minutes on Wednesdays to be counted as present.

In the interview, he denounces politics as a waste of time and says he wishes he had never entered, complaining that “in the past what was said could actually be done [but now] there can be a change of plan at the last minute.” It is hard to resist interpreting this as a reference to Hong Kong’s favourite last-minute change of plan this year: the decision in late March by Beijing to have CY Leung rather than dim rich-kid and former Chief Secretary Henry Tang win the Chief Executive quasi-election.

When Henry officially declared himself a candidate last year, Li latched onto him as his ‘campaign manager’, just as he had with Donald Tsang in 2005 and 2007. It was a way to be identified as a firm supporter of Beijing’s chosen one and to bask in a bit of reflected glory – an ultimate example of intra-Hong Kong establishment shoe-shining. If anyone had any doubts that Henry was to be the next CE, Li’s endorsement sealed it. It was utterly unthinkable that David Li would back someone not bound to win in the charade. To Li – and for such pro-Donald ‘elite’ luminaries as Anthony Wu and Ron Arculli, and Sing Tao, and the civil servants who joined in the smearing of CY earlier this year – Beijing’s last-minute kowtow to public opinion and abandonment of Henry was a humiliating slap in the face, and indeed an overturning of their world.

Henry’s ‘campaign’ was a non-event that largely dispensed with glossy leaflets, hand-shaking and manifestos; what was the point, when the job was being handed to him on a plate? This sense of entitlement found among such movers and shakers comes through in Li’s moans about sometimes having to show up at the Legislative Council at 9am. He gets the seat unopposed, along with the relatively high position on page 6 of the Big Government List of Really, Really Important People, lots of medals, a special airport lounge and other perks, but God forbid you should actually sit on a bills committee or turn up to vote; that’s what ordinary folk do. (Similarly, ordinary folk resign from the Executive Council instantly when they get into an insider-trading case with the US Securities and Exchange Commission; Li departed the body only after Donald Tsang came under considerable public pressure, mainly about Hong Kong’s overseas reputation.)

In the interview, Li pretty much says he has selected his successor in the Legislative Council, giving the impression that he regards the Finance seat as his own property. This is half-true. It has been no secret in functional constituency (small) circles that he was intending to bequeath the seat to his own son – a plan that pissed off more than a few bankers, and which government officials feared would bring the ‘rotten borough’ system into greater disrepute than ever. It is the Bank of China group, which influences a generous number of votes in the tiny franchise, that has chosen Ng Leung-sing as the next lawmaker for the finance sector. The BoC is owned by the same government that ditched Henry at the final hour in late March.

Ng’s background is in a couple of Hong Kong’s less-known financial institutions, now merged into BoC, one catering for Fujianese, the other serving Indonesian-Chinese (the latter usually being the former). Li is of solid Cantonese stock, and UK-born. Ng was an appointed (and not inactive) legislator back in the 1990s, and, it goes without saying, a patriot, being a delegate to the National People’s Congress. Li, by contrast, can be outspoken and even led a group of bankers in suits on a march to protest the Beijing massacre in 1989.

The outcome: one more reliable and active pro-government legislator. This is a pattern that we may see repeated in one or two other functional constituencies easily manipulated by Beijing; perhaps the Sports and Culture FC, currently occupied by Timothy Fok, who has the legislature’s worst attendance record. The idea would be to make sure CY Leung has a more dependable and loyal support base within the legislative arm. Here is a South China Morning Post report from yesterday to put this in context…

Chief executive-elect Leung Chun-ying should strengthen the executive-led system of government after he takes office in July, a top adviser to Beijing says.

Zhu Yucheng , a former deputy director of Xinhua in Hong Kong, made the suggestion a day after pan-democrats succeeded in delaying a Legislative Council debate on a by-elections bill for the second week running.

“What we have to pay attention to now is the original meaning of ‘one country, two systems’,” Zhu said yesterday on the sidelines of the opening of Tsinghua University’s first Hong Kong and Macau affairs think tank. “The political system [of Hong Kong] is an executive-led system, not a separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary.

“Leung will have an advantage [in implementing this principle] as he did a large amount of research and investigation when the Basic Law was drafted.”

It is not the first time a Beijing official has said Hong Kong does not have separation of powers. It is ultimately true: the sovereign power can overrule our courts through ‘interpretation’ of the Basic Law, and it can veto Legislative Council votes through the essentially rigged nature of the Council’s composition. Indeed, it has to be so because no separate source of power can exist in a one-party state. But these comments suggest that CY Leung will be given the opportunity to wield greater executive clout than his predecessors. Along with a stronger loyalist bloc – expect dirty anti-democrats campaigns in the election in September – we may see revised parliamentary procedures to reduce legislators’ delaying tactics (like the current filibustering). The new administration would probably also like to curb the public’s use of judicial review as a means of pushing the government around, and it will no doubt also want to kick some bureaucrats into shape. That’s executive-led government.

If CY uses a slightly more Singaporean-style of control to push through popular and/or necessary measures, it would go down well. Vested interests, bureaucratic inertia, the constant need for compromise and consensus and plain lack of vision have left Hong Kong standing still in the last 15 years. But if he uses the extra clout to enforce unpopular decisions – with by-elections, filibustering and judicial reviews all off-limits as avenues of public resistance – it could mean trouble.

Greek chaos threatens world economy. The disaster you forgot: Portugal. Spain in danger zone. Then again, France looks like a catalyst for Euro doom. Yes, I pretty much think the Euro is doomed.

And if you think you’ve got problems, take a look at this person’s weight situation – about five seconds will be enough.

It all puts the formation of Hong Kong’s next government into context. Not everyone may welcome the prospect of ex-Security Secretary Regina Ip getting her Machiavellian ambition behind the closed doors of the Executive Council, but things could be worse. China Daily summarizes the tally (all officially just rumours) so far: Carrie Lam as Chief Secretary, Rimsky Yuen at Justice, and so on. The Standard adds a few more: Ko Wing-man as Secretary for Food and Health; once-Education Secretary Arthur Li displacing the (once-) ubiquitous Anthony Wu as Hospital Authority chairman; lawmaker Jeffrey Lam as an unofficial member of Exco.

Ko goes back a while. Professor of medicine Arthur Li’s main achievement as Education Secretary under Tung Chee-hwa was overruling panicky parents and ordering all the kids back to school after the first week or so of full-blown SARS panic. A breath of sanity and calm. He also introduced kindergarten vouchers, an equally rare stab at a market-based solution to inequality. Lam presumably gets onto Exco at the behest of Beijing in the interests of ‘harmony’ – a sop to the Liberal Party/Economic Synergy/inherited-wealth faction who did all they could to get Henry Tang into office.

There are still some gaps. Will Tsang Tak-sing, Donald Tsang’s token out-of-the-closet Communist loyalist, stay on at Home Affairs? And what will the Home Affairs Bureau be doing? If the new Culture Bureau takes over the museums, it will be very quiet in there, dreaming up slogans about the dangers of excessive gambling and the joys of multi-ethnicity.

The South China Morning Post focuses on the most crucial appointment the new administration has to make: chairman of Ocean Park, and will pro-Henry businessman Allan Zeman keep the job? My inclination would be to close the place, auction the panda bears and aquarium off to exotic restaurants and use the land for something useful – hopefully something that repels, rather than attracts, tourists. But don’t mock the SCMP’s headline suggesting popular demand for keeping Zeman. It’s true.

In a discreet branch of Pacific Coffee known only to me and about five others this morning, I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation between a rich, bossy British woman with an ‘expat accent’ and her iPad-tapping teenage daughter about the possibility that CY Leung would discard the Lan Kwai Fong landlord. The girl in particular seemed most concerned about the idea of Ocean Park without Zeman at the helm. Even the Filipino maid, trying to fend off incessant offers of cakes and sandwiches from her ma’am, joined in, saying how much her own kids had liked the place. Up on the Peak, this will make or break the new administration.

Leaving the billionaire panda and beer merchant aside, CY’s alleged line-up taken as a whole looks disappointingly like ‘more of the same’ – so grey that Ada Wong, a barrister, looks refreshing and original. CY may have a problem attracting, or even considering, certain people because many tycoons and bureaucrats hate him. He’s not the back-slapping networking, friend-making type, so it’s not like he has a long list of personal contacts to help him out. There is also the problem of Beijing and its positive-vetting approach to approving appointments; many political and even personal backgrounds probably just aren’t acceptable. Not least, there is a class- or caste-type hierarchy; it’s fine to have been born into public or police housing, but if you haven’t risen into a fairly narrowly defined bracket of material success, you don’t cut it. Tsang Tak-sing barely fits in with his non-job. It’s hard to imagine someone along the lines of, say, labour activist Chan Yuen-han joining the pearl-bedecked, handbag-carrying ranks of policymakers. Too earthy.

Seven million people to choose from, and it still keeps coming back to yet another uninspiring un-dream team. Just as well we don’t have other people’s problems.

Switching on RTHK Radio 3 in the morning without knowing the exact time is a bit of a risk. The aim is to catch the 6.30 news in full, freeing me to get on with waking life by the time the 10-minute recitation of Italian soccer results starts at 6.50. Switch on too late, and I might miss something important or find myself plunged into the midst of a rant by legislator Emily Lau. Switch on too early, and my delicate dawn psyche is assaulted by the preceding show, which is presented by a DJ who sounds like he is on speed and shrieks about himself – frequently repeating every sentence – over pop tunes that are all in the same 2/4 time signature and tempo.

One day, I will take advantage of one of the many technological or horological solutions to this problem that I know exist. Meanwhile I just take my chances. This morning, the body clock is a bit late and I awake to hear former Security Secretary Regina Ip playfully assuring an interviewer she was not prepared to resume her old job, which we all recall she left under a cloud in 2003. However, the lady insists, she is in discussions with Chief Executive-elect CY Leung about a possible position in his administration.

She hints that this means a non-official seat in the Executive Council. Take a glance at the current unofficial members (scroll down past the ministers): Ron Arculli, Charles Lee, Lau Wong-fat, Anna Wu, one-meal-a-day fund manager V Nee Yeh, Marge Yang, and so on. They come in two flavours: shoe-shiners being given a pat on the head (the first three mentioned above), and tame, trustworthy ‘moderates’ willing to lend a dash of (relative) glamour, intellect or bohemianism to the line-up. Has a single one of them ever produced or even influenced a policy decision in their time ‘serving the community’ in this capacity under CE Donald Tsang? It’s unlikely.

Things might be a bit different under CY, and Regina is not one to meekly agree with whatever the boss says – as we can well imagine, say, Ron Arculli doing. And a seat in ExCo could be a springboard to greater things; how long before we’ll need a new Financial Secretary?

The names of two more ministers-in-waiting are doing the rounds. One is Ada Wong, Wanchai arts busybody of many years’ standing, who is tipped for Culture Secretary. She is the sort of establishment-but-independent sort who maybe wouldn’t quite have fitted into Sir Bow-Tie’s mutual admirers’ club of insiders. The other is ‘green architect’ Wong Kam-sing, possible Environment Secretary. He “lacks the necessary administrative experience,” which is a promising sign: he’s not a civil servant. Greenpeace, the money-crazed, anti-science, anti-capitalism theatrical group, also have misgivings. Even better. After the lackluster incumbent, anyone would be an improvement.

***** 

Great moments in photo-editorship (a.k.a. ‘They thought no-one would notice’)… Today’s Standard carries this story about a rescue at sea off Lantau by a ‘government helicopter’…

A look at the picture shows that it is indeed a government helicopter: a US Coast Guard Eurocopter Dolphin HH-65, to be precise. My expert in such matters guesses the location to be the Gulf of Mexico, owing to the flashy marlin-fishing boats in the background. My money’s on Miami. Not Lantau, anyway.

Sunday’s South China Morning Post ran a story about the Hong Kong City-State Autonomy Movement, which had petitioned the UK Consulate to complain about China’s interference in the Big Lychee. The group is pleased to display the piece on its Facebook page.

With a claimed 20 core members, it might be pushing things to call the HKAM a ‘movement’. But it is certainly part of one, namely the anti-Mainlandization, anti-locust, anti-Mainland mother, anti-Mainland cross-border car, anti-simplified character crusade that sprung to life last year. The backlash against Mainland tourists and homebuyers was hardly surprising to anyone who had noticed – and they were hard to miss – the crowds, the influx of luxury outlets and the closures of small local businesses in recent years. To local and Beijing officials rejoicing in ‘integration’, however, the phenomenon is decidedly unwelcome: this is Hong Kong people going massively off-message. Being (apparently) organized and having a quirky sense of symbolism, the HKAM is a particularly unnerving example of it.

The HKAM’s logo is a flag – and not just any flag, but the colonial-era coat of arms, as seen waving in the breeze, and printed on ID cards, tax forms and everything else, back in those days.

The banner appeared at the Dolce and Gabbana protest in January; it also hangs on the wall – 1970s revolutionaries-style – in YouTube videos, and of course you can get it on a T-shirt. The group also likes to unfurl it at the Cenotaph to honour the city’s fallen. If Beijing wanted to arrange a group of ‘subversive’ agents provocateurs to justify pushing an Article 23 security bill through, this is what it would look like, though it is unlikely Chinese officials would have the sensitivity to get the cultural nuances right (yes that’s I Vow to Thee, My Country at the Cenotaph).

If it comes to that, do HKAM’s members fully grasp the provocative nature of this use of the heraldry? They say they admire the juxtaposition of the Chinese dragon and the not-so Chinese lion as an emblem of the city’s unique identity and status, which suggests they don’t realize how spiteful this symbolism is towards the regime in Beijing. So HKAM could be a calculated, if slightly clumsy, attempt to piss off local and Chinese officials as a protest. But there is something more to it. The HKAM people avoid uttering the word ‘independence’ (unlike some weird friends), but they do enjoy theorizing about the city-state and autonomy, and they are into history and heritage. To the extent that they are serious, it is a romantic sort of nationalism, based on an extremely idealized and selective notion of what Hong Kong was like under the British.

That’s still hugely offensive to the Chinese government, and indeed the local administration. Communist newspaper Wen Wei Po carried an opinion piece last year accusing the US Consul-General of masterminding the group. He had previously served in the Kyrgyz Republic – home of a dreaded ‘colour revolution’ – and Taiwan. It all adds up; you can imagine a US diplomat being into Holst. This is standard Beijing logic: Hongkongers want to be less influenced or affected by the motherland, therefore it must be a foreign splitist plot.

Cooler heads are prevailing, however. The incoming administration of CY Leung has vowed a drastic reduction in Mainland mothers’ access to Hong Kong delivery rooms. Officials have modified plans to allow more cross-border road traffic and to introduce ‘national’ civic studies into schools. YouTube clips of unruly Mainland tourists, protests about simplified characters in Agnes B cafes and graffiti on ads aimed at Mainland visitors are signs that something is going wrong (cue heart-tugging HKAM video of property prices rising, shops closing, etc). Waving colonial flags brings the point home by hitting some raw nerves. It gets results. Expect to see them on 1 July.

I present an alternative, for people less enamoured of colonial government, and which neatly sidesteps the simplified-traditional character debate…

Since the end of the week was declared mid-Friday, the world has been a busy place.

Within a couple of days of giving an apparently unsolicited press interview about his innocence, the third of Sun Hung Kai Property’s Kwok brothers, Walter, is arrested by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, as were his two siblings and ex-Chief Secretary Rafael Hui around a month before. It sort of looks as if he was offered immunity in return for testifying, and refused – so inevitably a rumour to that effect is going round.

What are the chances that the whole thing will fizzle out with the ICAC failing to make a case or at least get convictions? The thought that we won’t see billionaire tycoons and a pompous ex-bureaucrat marched off to a dungeon in chains is intensely disappointing. But it would be in keeping with the ICAC’s lack of noteworthy action in years past and Hong Kong law enforcement agencies’ general tendency to create nagging doubts of some sort in high-profile cases. One obvious nagging doubt here: what’s keeping the super-sleuths from charging the (alleged) rascals? Get on with it, please.

On the other hand, it could be that timing forced the ICAC’s hand during this window. These people were involved in the small-circle quasi-election for Chief Executive, and moving in on them before end-March could have been seen as blatant interference, which as we all know is somebody else’s job. Wait for June-July to roll round, and it would look as if new Chief Executive CY Leung was personally ordering our friendly local property developers to be rounded up and herded onto cattle trucks. Patience is a virtue and will be rewarded. I’d love to see the look on Thomas Kwok’s face when realizes his 90-square foot cell at Stanley is really only 70-square feet, with the other 20 being in the exercise yard. Schadenfreude squared. Cubed.

Meanwhile, the media invite us to find it interesting that Chief Secretary Stephen Lam will be leaving for England to study theology (or “delve into The Bible,” as the print edition of the Standard puts it, italicizing the book’s name as if it were something knocked out by JK Rowling). As Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, Lam was a paid liar, insisting that public opinion wanted/agreed with/accepted policies and measures designed specifically to deprive Hong Kong of representative government, when it was plainly untrue. “Should thy lies make men hold their peace? and when thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed?” (Job 11:3).

The third big excitement of the weekend was of course Financial Secretary John Tsang’s speech on the property market, which began with embarrassing Brit-speak on cricket and boat races.

My main memory of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race was when I was aged seven or so. A friend and I were exploring the local haunted house, heard a creaking noise from upstairs exactly like that of a malevolent ghoul, and ran from the place in terror – I of course falling over and getting a nasty gash in my hand. Back home, my mother phoned the doctor and drove me round to his house. At his living-room table, he washed, injected, stitched and bandaged the wound, all the while listening intently to live coverage of the action-packed event on the Thames on the radio. The scar remains.

Tiresome sports analogies out of the way, Tsang proceeds to present some surprising claims. Did you realize, for example, that the shortage of land supply and strong demand for homes are but a ‘market perception’, no more real than the ghost a kid hears while trespassing in a dilapidated building? Did you know that the government’s strenuous efforts in the last three budgets have kept the property market on ‘an even keel’? (To be fair, he defines ‘even keel’: “As of March this year, prices were 82 percent higher than late 2008 levels.” You ought to see his uneven keels.) He then recounts the various measures the government has introduced, like small boosts in land supply and hikes in stamp duty; they are largely token and symbolic, or virtually irrelevant – but why not, if the problem is simply a perception?

The truth is that Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s property policy since assuming office seven years ago was to push prices up by starving supply. (Although perverse in the eyes of most sentient beings, such an approach does have some logic to our zombie-like bureaucrats, and it, um, coincidentally serves the tycoons very well.)

In all fairness to the government, they were not to know at first that we were going to be stuck in an ultra-low interest-rate environment in the early 2010s, or that Mainlanders would enter the local residential market in such numbers. They belatedly realized that they had not released enough land but also became gripped by fear that over-reaction would cause a crash, hence the nominal measures aimed mainly at mollifying the public while waiting for a (or ‘the’) correction. The higher prices went, the more petrified they became about taking serious action.

The Economist calculates that Hong Kong property is 58% overvalued. Bulls (speculators/investors who generally have the upper hand on the world’s longest-ever chat room thread on the subject) cite our low direct taxes and even our low car ownership, along with the ever-popular ‘fiat currencies’, as evidence that prices have further to rise. Will a euro-printing anti-austerity backlash led by President Francois Hollande push global inflation up? Will a Mainland property crash drag Hong Kong down? All we really know is that prices cannot get infinitely pricier, but we have no idea where the limit is.

CY Leung is inheriting a situation where his housing policies coincide with the inevitable reverse, and he gets the blame when all the suckers who bought at the peak start committing suicide – it would be the second time in his political career. If I were him, I would put it in my first speech in office. “Housing prices must, one way or another, become more affordable for the mainstream middle class. An ordinary end-user on an average income buying at today’s prices is stupid. At worst, he could end in bankruptcy. At best, he will miss the chance of waiting and getting cheaper options, which I will ensure are coming on-stream by the next CE election in 2017. I will have no sympathy for anyone whining about negative equity this time round. You have been warned.”