Before Rooster Year ends…

As you start the New Year, so it will continue. That’s why people prepare for the festival by cleaning the house. It is particularly important for debtors to repay outstanding loans – or at least get their credit situation into halfway decent order.

Mega-conglomerate HNA, leveraged to the moon after its wanton asset-acquisition spree, is finding this hard, so it is trying a different tactic – portraying itself as a victim. It faces, its co-chairman says, the same ‘reactionary forces countering China’s rise’ in a ‘conspiracy against the Communist Party Central Committee with Xi Jinping at its core’.

We have no idea who ultimately owns HNA. If it holds wealth on behalf of Beijing’s current ruling insiders, the claim that anxious bankers and dumpers of bonds are hostile to the nation would have some resonance. But if that were the case, it could make some discrete phone calls.

Assuming that HNA is not that well-connected, this looks like a desperate and opportunistic appeal for solidarity and empathy from lesser to greater factions of China’s kleptocrat elite. As a diversion, this is ‘the dog ate my homework’ for grown-ups to the nth degree. And as a display of shoe-shining, it is magnificently putrid – these guys make Hong Kong’s toadying tycoons look like pathetic amateurs. Playing the national leadership’s very own whiny victimhood card shows an audacity bordering on panache.

To end the 12th moon on such a bold, death-defying note might be greatly auspicious. Or maybe HNA (and Dalian Wanda and others) are in for a really crappy Dog Year of panic-selling and unravelling, with implications of horrible bad luck for the whole state-capitalist debt-pyramid mafia regime. I look forward to finding out.

 

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6 Responses to Before Rooster Year ends…

  1. Joe Blow says:

    I remember the SCMP when it was respected, well written and very profitable. That was a long time ago and that paper does not exist anymore.

    We now have the almost-impossible-to-give-away-for-free AliBaba People’s Daily which is committed to chronicle China’s never ending rise and to tell the world about it.

    Having said that, why don’t you people (and myself) simply stop commenting on the drivel columns of Shoeshini (good one !), Alex Lo and you-know-who LaTooToo ? Likewise, ignore George.

  2. Old Fishmarket Close says:

    I used to rather enjoy reading NTSCMP a few years ago – until it slipped. Now, Adams’ sustained personal attacks on the writer of this blog are vindictive, vicious and utterly lacking in humour. They contain no wit, only aimless hectoring.

    I think it’s a shame because there’s room enough in Hong Kong for more satirists, given the spate of continual political blunders, the incessant, impulsive mainland cock gobbling by officials, our farcical paper of record, et cetera. It seems one wages a lonely campaign against the other fed by jealousy and regret. And we have to read about it.

    How sad.

  3. Des Espoir says:

    As a Lantau resident, in the good old days when we had slow triple decker ferries, the SCMP used to last me all the way into HK harbour. Now I am all through it and on to the Sudoku before Captain Wong has even cast off from Mui Wo….

  4. gweiloeye says:

    My Circle K sells SCMP for $1 discount after 12pm.

  5. According to HNA, enemies of the state have been plotting against the company for a long time. Strange, because most people had never heard of it until recently. Perhaps HNA should take accounting lessons from Jack Ma to resolve its financial difficulties.

  6. Red Dragon says:

    OFC, I quite agree.

    One little quibble. Adams is not and never has been a satirist. He is and always has been a twat.

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