Vice-President Zeng Qinghong, the man tasked with slapping Hong Kong about after its untrustworthy, British-brainwashed populace got uppity in 2003, stands down from his official role in China’s leadership. Will this mean a more constructive and mature attitude on Beijing’s part towards the pro-democrats and the majority of the Big Lychee’s people who have the temerity to support them? Or will the United Front tactics of treating anyone with deviant ideas as non-persons be redoubled? It was also Zeng, after all, who mounted the 2005 charm offensive that briefly enabled personae non gratae opposition legislators to set foot on the Mainland.
Ted the loveable, cheeky, Cockney teacher of glottal stop-ridden English at low-rent night schools, introduces a friend who has retired to Thailand, who proudly announces that he owns five buffalo. I ask him why – for breeding, or plowing perhaps? – and he becomes slightly defensive, saying that he just has them. When I ask where he keeps the beasts it transpires that he has only ever seen photos of them. They are in a distant, impoverished province, where they are prized assets and outward signs of wealth. Suspecting a financially inadvisable entanglement with a native female, I probe further and learn that an apparently lovely bar-girl several decades his junior talked him into providing them for her family. If the two wed, which he says is a possibility, she will be his third wife. He married his previous one for the sole reason that she looked like Mia Farrow. A strange thing to do with a woman who looks like Mia Farrow. Were I confronted by such a lady I would be more inclined to cover her up with something – sacking, perhaps. Either way, a hooker with five buffalo is probably quite a catch in comparison.
Mon, 22 Oct
A slightly desperate but serviceable excuse would be that it’s a typo – the ‘9’ should be a ‘6’, referring to the island’s occupation by Ming Dynasty loyalists fleeing Manchu invaders in the mid-17th Century, before coming under Qing rule a few decades later. That still wouldn’t be good enough for patriots, for whom Taiwan is a sacred and inseparable part of the Motherland, and has been overflowing with Han people for every minute of the 5,000 years of non-stop civilization. But most objective historians would agree with it. It would also probably have been fine by Mao Zedong, who in the 1930s put Taiwan in the same category as Korea – a place under Japanese colonial rule whose people deserved comrades’ sympathy but no active involvement.
As the column’s writer points out, China’s leaders have painted themselves into an impossible corner over the one province where Communist Party rule has never reached. Everyone in the Mainland under the age of 60 has been brought up to believe with extreme passion that Taiwan is theirs and must be returned to the fold whatever the cost, while everyone who visits the place cannot avoid noticing that it’s an independent country. If the Taiwan Government wants a bit of fun, it should open the island’s doors to tourists from across the Strait and let them see that their leaders lost the place ages ago. Meanwhile, I will discreetly turn The Standard’s Opinion page and pretend I never saw what I just read.
Anson Chan, fragrant puppet of imperialists and expensively coiffeured oppressor of the masses, presents herself as the anti-grey roots but pro-grassroots candidate in the upcoming Election of the Century for a Hong Kong Island seat in the Legislative Council. The conversion to champion of the downtrodden working class is partly by necessity. Fearful of the wrath of Beijing, business figures who have long been more or less well-disposed towards her have slunk away and are now hiding under their giant rosewood desks, curled up in the trunks of their limousines, or lurking quietly at the fringes of a distant golf course. Dame Conscience now regales her adoring people with tales of her deprived early childhood, crawling in rags through heaps of garbage, eating tree bark, etc, etc.
In the presence of much-loved heritage feature and former colonial official David Akers Jones and the half-Martian, pleasure-domed publican Allan Zeman, Dowager of Demi-Democracy Regina Ip unveils her Legislative Council election platform. The masses, however, cast it aside and pounce instead on the lady’s proposals for political reform, which date back over two weeks.
Were this plan implemented in full, Beijing would continue to choose the Chief Executive and appoint him (or her, to be precise) via a ritualized, make-believe election in which a handful of people representing the usual ‘sectors’ take part. No substantial change, in other words. This is why the DAB are saying that she has adopted their preferred model.
Legco, on the other hand, would see functional constituencies scrapped and replaced with directly elected at-large members. Each elector would have one vote for their existing geographic constituency and one for the Hong Kong-wide poll. It is a clever formula, in that it still offers well-heeled, nice-but-dim political dilettantes who inherited part of a cartel some chance of winning a seat. (“It is expected that people with professional experience and expertise would be encouraged to enter LegCo.”) The Liberals, fearing a reduction in their ability to gouge free lunches for their industries out of the Government, hate it but are under orders to play along. Thanks to this part of her plan, the pro-democracy Civic Party are expressing their delight that Regina has adopted their preferred model.
Since only pro-democrats and heavy opium smokers seriously imagine that the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China would actually allow a major city’s leader to be chosen through universal suffrage, Regina’s political reform can be said to be pragmatic, and thus rather on the boring side. The only reason she is bothering with any of this is that she has her gleaming eye on the Chief Executive’s office, which is why we pick our copies of her overall platform back off the floor and have a flick through.
It is the usual policy mishmash of the naïve, the vague and the obvious. But certain phrases leap out and wave their arms around. “Jumpstart economic restructuring.” “A new economic transformation.” “Widen Hong Kong’s economic structure.” “Integrated technology parks.” “Lok Ma Chau Loop.” “Develop hi-tech clusters along boundary.” “Technology collaboration with Mainland China.” Clutching my wallet in fear, I find myself confronted by a vision. It’s Singapore run by a Hong Kong civil servant who studied Elizabethan poetry and got seduced into 1970s-style Colbertism by freeloaders spouting cyber-waffle. Not good.
The Big Boss is in one of his defensive moods in the morning meeting. “It’s alright for him – he’s only got three or four of those people on his payroll. What about us?” He is referring to CY Leung, the part-Rumanian property dealer and Executive Council member, who has loudly announced to the world at large that his company is giving its lowest-paid staff members a major pay rise. (In percentage terms. By his own admission, the difference to the firm’s bottom line is sub-atomic in scale.)
This follows dynamic Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s latest visionary attempt to win the Most Desperate Poverty Alleviation Band-Aid Award. After setting up a voluntary minimum wage ‘movement’, which embarrassingly few actual employers of security guards and cleaners joined, he is now leaning on businessmen to be good sports and jack up wages for employees whose remuneration currently falls on or around the mark where the Hong Kong poverty line would be if we had one. And if they don’t, he will (out of concern for their service levels, apparently) bring in a statutory minimum wage.
So, years after email came along, high school dropouts in maroon uniforms plod between floors in search of envelopes to carry. Every department comes with a gaggle of middle-aged women whose working day consists of counting paper clips, watering plants or getting stuck into a Mickey Mouse colouring book. When the extremely hard-working and over-burdened Company Gwailo complains about a flickering light, four men in overalls come to his office to change the tube, complete with bossy female supervisor to ensure quality control. By how much would unemployment rise if Hong Kong’s inefficient old family firms countered a minimum wage with maximum layoffs of redundant staff? It’s something the Big Boss, now he mentions moral blackmail, might like to invite Donald to consider.
Another skirmish in Hong Kong’s culture wars breaks out on the Legislative Council’s doorstep, as a motley assortment of working-class patriots come to accuse pro-democracy multi-millionaire lawyer Martin Lee of being a traitor and a disgrace to the Chinese race. Lee’s sin against the glorious motherland was to write a Wall Street Journal article that was so riveting no-one noticed it for a week. (Or did they? I have a vague recollection of turning a page in the paper some time in the more-or-less recent past, and seeing something that had something to do with him. Or at least I have a very hazy memory of my eyes glazing over upon seeing something – which in retrospect may well have been the offending column. But maybe I dreamt the whole thing.)
The article included a pious plea to US President George W Bush to somehow use the 2008 Beijing Olympics to pressure the Communist leadership into risking its own downfall by allowing its subjects to say what they want. How amusing that the very things that make Martin so exciting in the eyes of a Dow Jones op-ed page editor make him such a bore to his fellow Hongkongers! But the cultural gap of most interest today is surely that between the Big Lychee’s pro-Beijing proletariat and its refined, upper-middle-class campaigners for universal suffrage.
