Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Two recent South China Morning Post articles explain the pro-democracy Occupy Central movement’s philosophy and planned strategy in as much detail as most of us will probably want.

There are seven components, including non-violent action, civil disobedience, ‘citizen authorization after deliberation’, social awakening and public dispute resolution. This is about process: the theories of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and various Californian radicals-turned-academics converted into flowchart form. It starts off with the first of three deliberation days, in which activists will be joined by 100 randomly chosen members of the public to ‘set the agenda of the movement’. The 100 citizens will each be paid HK$100 travel expenses, so even the penniless single parents and semi-literate elderly of the Northwestern New Territories can take part.

It’s almost unbearably earnest, high-minded, liberal, Judeo-Christian and 1960s. Consider the potential for unintentional condescension and other social embarrassment should any Tin Shui Wai public housing dwellers make it to the gathering of intellectuals at Hong Kong University. Imagine the phone calls when the lucky 100 get their invitations: “You want me to give up a day’s cardboard-scavenging to do what?” “I haven’t set foot on Hong Kong Island since the 1970s.” “What kind of scam is this?”

Countering the idealism are pro-Beijing forces under orders to savagely attack Occupy Central as an unconstitutional and treacherous threat to city and nation. It is a ‘path to hell’ of chaos and dysfunction and a ‘wicked plot’ to oppose Beijing and mess up Hong Kong. Harmless moderates in pro-establishment circles – as we saw a few days ago with the HK General Chamber of Commerce – are expected to nod along sagely to this mouth-frothing. Anyone willing to ‘reach out’ and serve as a bridge across the divide can forget it. This is classic United Front tactics: freeze out the dissenters and make it clear that anyone not with us is against us. Scratch the stuff about harmony. ‘Let’s just chill out and get on’ is not an option.

The Hong Kong people are mostly nowhere to be seen. Not keeping their heads down – just somewhere between uninterested and mildly oblivious. Neither side in the struggle seems to care much about the public/middle-ground/silent majority’s hearts and minds. Whatever Occupy Central’s ongoing abstract deconstructionist conceptualization is about, it isn’t housing, prices or jobs. And the Cultural Revolutionary ranting and screeching is the same old high-decibel overacting as loyalists, functionaries and toadies vie to please the Beijing officials. The icing on that cake: something to declare the weekend open with in the form of commentator Lau Nai-keung descending gloriously into one of his classic bouts of end-times insanity…

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over HSBC’s new ATM cards, which have a super-micro-digital-blah-blah chip in addition to the old-style, less-secure magnetic strip. When I received mine a few months back, I noted that the accompanying letter mentioned that I had to activate (or authenticate, or authorize or whatever) the card via an ATM in some way before using it overseas. The impression I got in my short-attention-span way was that the simple act of using it in a local ATM would accomplish this.

While using a different bank’s new-style card recently, I noticed the ATM screen offered an ‘activate’ (or whatever) function. So I did it, and then came away with the impression that I had in fact de-activated the thing – so I repeated that process to undo it. I think. The normally chatty ATM (“Please take your card! Please take your cash!”) was silent, presumably out of shame.

So: have I activated the card(s) or not? I rarely have the patience to queue at HSBC’s overcrowded ATMs, and when I do pull cash out from one, I’m not pondering the mysteries of ‘activation’. Have the legions of angry HSBC customers complaining that their cards don’t work overseas brought the problem on themselves by not having the telepathic powers necessary to follow HSBC’s directions?

There is a second element to this fiasco/non-fiasco (as it may be). When I got my new card, I also noticed the little UnionPay logo on the back. I don’t recall ever really noticing this anywhere before (although the design is in every shop, it is so weak that it merges into the surroundings). Now it jumped out at me as simply not belonging on my very own, new, shiny bit of plastic. I immediately felt repulsed by the brand; it triggered something subliminal in my mind saying ‘this is cheap, this is shoddy, this is low-class, it’s a piece of crap, it’s something to do with some backward, corrupt, nepotistic, state-owned monolithic Mainland disaster of a company’. Who would ever imagine that a never-consciously-seen logo could provoke such strong feelings in such vivid detail?

Many of the people complaining that they cannot withdraw cash overseas, like the recent South China Morning Post letter-writer who was in Brazil, blame the Mainland-owned UnionPay network, with which HSBC has replaced the previous Plus settlement system. (Conspiracy theorists, and no doubt a lot of level-headed folk who have seen far too many non-Mainland companies shoot themselves in the foot in attempts to please Beijing, see HSBC as playing politics at customers’ expense.)

All this is of interest to me, as next month I will be spending a few days in an unremarkable suburb in the capital city of an exotic – as in ‘not terribly advanced’ – corner of Asia.

To prepare for this trip, I went to the airline’s website and started punching in flights, dates, my phone number, and a hotel address (false, but it insisted on one), and then filled in my credit card details. I knew what was going to happen next, because it has happened before on the rare occasions I’ve tried to book a flight or hotel online. This time I had the presence of mind to get a picture of the screen before it timed out…

I don’t get this when I buy books from Amazon or pay by credit card in person; just with travel arrangements. So of course I took immediate remedial action*: I emailed a friendly and helpful human travel agent, who – unlike the website – patiently let me prevaricate between taking a morning or afternoon flight, and kindly reminded me about visa requirements. The one thing she has in common with the website is that she won’t take my credit card, so I transferred the funds into the travel agency’s account – something too difficult for hotels/airlines to do online, apparently. (I could wonder whether this has something to do with the magic, code-generating black box number-pad used for on-line banking, but life is too short.)

Anyway, the really cool bit: the ticket from the travel agency is a bit cheaper.

So we have moved back from using credit cards online to directly manually transferring funds into accounts online. And when I go off to this Indochinese Hicksville, I will be taking a bundle of Ben Bernanke’s finest paper fiat-currency US Dollars. An HSBC card might have worked there once, but now – who knows? (My other bank, a blatant shoe-shiner of its Mainland counterparts, is also on UnionPay.)

Of course, if  consumers could switch banks as easily as buying beer from 7-Eleven instead of Circle K, none of this would be happening. Instead, we have progress, HSBC-style. My travel agent, being ahead of the curve where such trends are concerned, also takes cheques and is preparing to migrate to Babylonian clay accounting tablets.

*Phone the numbers in the ‘Conditional Authentication Blah Blah’ box? Me? I don’t even phone people I like - I’m certainly not going to call people who irritate me.

A Family Planning Association of Hong Kong survey shows that 39% of women have fewer children than they would like, and zero- and one-child families outnumber two-child ones more than ever, at 23.4%, 37.5% and 32% of the total respectively; the South China Morning Post somehow interprets the data to mean…

The FPA says that more than half of respondents might have more kids if they had ‘subsidies’ for education, medical services and housing. Government provides free education, but many parents want the private sort instead, and they assume that the more they spend on tutors, the better their kid will do – so economics and an obsession with academic credentials encourage couples to focus resources on one child.

Housing must limit household size: with families living in an average of something like 400-500 square feet of space, it is amazing any of them find room for a second kid. The high price of homes also acts as a form of birth control, since couples usually don’t marry until they can afford (or get allocated) their own apartment. The FPA cite late marriage as a leading factor in reducing fertility.

Still, as the SCMP points out, Hong Kong’s birth rate of 1.2 babies per woman is no worse than Singapore’s 1.2 and Taiwan’s 1.1; those governments do not have deranged policies forcing people to live in overpriced rabbit hutches. Maybe their education systems are as out of alignment with parents’ preferences as Hong Kong’s.

The FPA used to devote its energies to reducing births. Most people were a lot poorer then, but it didn’t stop them having babies. Although they were living in 100-square-foot hovels and made the kids help out assembling plastic flowers, could it be that families in those days saw a better future ahead, and today they don’t?

Which brings us to today’s list of things you may or may not wish children to be born into. We’ll just mention the first item: Chief Executive CY Leung’s biggest supporter in the Executive Council, Barry Cheung, takes leave from all public offices as police investigate his HK Mercantile Exchange, and CY’s top media aide resigns, citing – you couldn’t make this up – problems with her eyes and ears.

It would be surprising if the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1861, were not pro-establishment. In many ways, it is the establishment, or at least a major traditional pillar of it. But during the journey from, say, 1970s colony to 2010s Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong’s ruling class was transformed. The Westerners who once dominated the hierarchy were largely displaced by local Chinese, while pro-British tycoons and officials had to awkwardly – not always convincingly – reinvent themselves as having been patriotic sons and daughters of the dragon all along. (The one constant has been the status of the devout local Communist Party loyalists, who have been social outcasts all along, though now tolerated in small doses for symbolic reasons. Mainland officials, conversely, have gone from public enemy/security risk status to demigods worshiped unconditionally by the great and good.)

At the same time, relations between business and government have gone from correct, detached and sometimes mutually suspicious to almost so intertwined as to become one vested interest pitted against the rest of the population. Hardly a coincidence, needless to say.

So in the case of the HKGCC, it has been bye-bye Sir Jimmy MacGregor (ex-military Brit 50s-60s civil servant who fought corruption and became Chamber director), hello Lily Chiang (tycoon’s daughter who became Chamber chairman in 2007 before getting imprisoned for fraud). OK – this might be a bit unfair: a better comparison would be with the current Chamber chief executive, ex-bureaucrat Shirley Yuen, but we need to spice the story up. We can see the transition taking place in a letter from tycoon’s kid James Tien, today of the Liberal Party, disowning MacGregor as the Chamber’s man in the Legislative Council in the early 90s. (We’re not trying to get dewy-eyed and nostalgic here; it’s a jolt to remember that colonial-style rule continued so long and thus became so anachronistic.)

So it’s no surprise to find the HKGCC today dutifully joining in the pro-Beijing United Front effort to smear the organizers of the harmless and well-intentioned, if naïve, Occupy Central movement. The strongest outburst comes from the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, which will endorse anything China’s local officials ask it to; a few years back, it mounted a turgid public education campaign on the evils of the Falun Gong. The line it is pushing this time is that a bunch of people sitting in the street singing We Shall Overcome will mysteriously shut down the stock exchange, which in turn will mysteriously cause the economy so much harm that we will never recover. HKGCC members silently endorse this twaddle without a murmur, but then their gutsier forebears had fought the Japanese, the Communists and corrupt cops.

Not that it hugely matters: when was the last time anyone took any notice of the HKGCC? The American Chamber, presumably because many of its members are expats being rotated through town, is less interested in politically correct shoe-shining and more outspoken on things like air pollution.

What is interesting is the Occupy Central people’s reaction to this contrived and laughable attack. They should mock the business groups for being used as puppets and spouting ridiculous slogans about extremism and economic damage. Instead, they respond on their poodle-critics’ own idiotic terms – terms calculated to alarm passing members of the public – and are reduced to claims not to be anarchists. A battle between an alliance of Communist cadres, selfish bureaucrats, inherited wealth and shoe-shining hangers-on on the one hand, and nice, polite, middle-class academics and lawyers on the other was never going to be pretty.

Then-Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s policy initiatives in the mid-late 2000s were so gut-wrenchingly awful they are best forgotten. Think Zhuhai bridge, Lok Ma Chau Loop, education hub, high-speed rail tunnel to Shenzhen, Islamic bonds hub, arbitration hub, wine hub, cooperation, partnership and a host of other multi-billion dollar white elephants, cross-boundary blather and desperately naïve straw-clutching. Among Sir Bow-Tie’s miasma of absurdities was the idea of a commodities trading hub, but the existing Hong Kong Stock Exchange saw it as a money-loser (as if to prove the point, they later blew the most stupendous amount imaginable to buy the London Metals Exchange).

So along came the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange, owned by all-purpose establishment/business figure Barry Cheung, two state-owned Chinese mega-companies and Russia’s Putin-backed Rusal minerals giant. It was supposed to be a trading platform for fuel-oil futures but ended up doing precious metals. For a while it was the focus of avid bureaucrat-driven hype, with its luminaries smugly swanning around as great visionaries while every shoe-shiner in town had orgasms at the thought of the Big Lychee becoming the Solar System’s number-one Yuan-denominated gold derivatives centre-hub Yeah Baby mega-complex.

And now it turns its trading licence in ‘to re-align its strategy with the new industry environment since its trading revenues have not been sufficient to support operating expenses’ – which I think means ‘gone bust’ in plain English. Dreams of well-connected, crony-friendly, luxury-offices-at-Cyberport, space-age, high-tech, middle-aged whizz kid intermediaries making zillions of easy-easy-money in a frenzy of Beijing-linked, Hong Kong-bureaucrat-endorsed rent-seeking – all evaporated in the face of some reality or other: competition, hubris, incompetence (tick more than one if necessary).

Everyone wants to know the dirt about Barry Cheung’s personal, or at least, financial details. As Chairman of the Urban Renewal Authority, he has been overseeing a bureaucracy with a genuine licence to print money, by evicting slum dwellers and teaming up with the big property tycoons to develop luxury apartments for corrupt Mainland officials to buy and leave empty. Then, maybe out of idealism, possibly because of a gift for spotting shifting winds a mile off, or perhaps as a sheer lunatic gamble, Barry sided with Leung Chun-ying in advance of the 2012 Chief Executive quasi-election. So there is no shortage of people ready to pontificate about how dreadful it would be if, as a member of the Executive Council, he was in a state of financial embarrassment.

But the real story is about the futility and bankruptcy of Hong Kong’s policymaking when it comes to things like broadening the city’s economic base – attempting to untangle extreme distortions without upsetting any of the interests that benefit from the distortions. And trying way too hard.

As if he doesn’t have enough burdens, on at least several occasions each week, the purchaser of the South China Morning Post receives a heavy glossy supplement of some sort, typically promoting a line of ugly luxury clothing or some preposterously named housing development next to a landfill somewhere. These extravagantly produced, full-colour publications go straight into the nearest bin. The old woman who picks it out for recycling is happy; the company that thought people would read it is none the wiser; the SCMP advertising sales team get their bonus.

I’ve just heard that the glossy thing that comes with the paper every Thursday isn’t supposed to be thrown away. It’s called 48 Hours and has the slogan ‘Your guide to the weekend’ (it has movie and concert listings at the back). It also says ‘Complimentary copy’, which suggests that at some point, when we have become addicted to it, they will publish it as a separate entity and expect us to pay for the thing. I am reliably informed that its mission is to ‘kill’ the Hong Kong edition of Time Out magazine. As if to prove its editorial determination in this regard, this week’s issue has an extensive, in-depth, searching feature on pizzas.

The SCMP recently confirmed that it has bought HK, the cheerful free listings magazine that makes up for lack of bulk by carrying Dan Savage’s extreme and un-put-downable ‘Savage Love’ agony aunt column. Does the rather chaotic BC free magazine still exist? Either way, the SCMP has made a cramped market even more crowded, and acquired a big chunk of it at the same time. Either they are happy to cannibalize the local English-medium lifestyle mag scene to bits, or they are planning to scrap one of (or merge) HK and 48 Hours – even if they succeed in slaughtering poor old Time Out (which at least had the guts to run the ultimate rant about our local tycoons).

While HK and Time Out have usually dabbled a bit in weightier content, 48 Hours seems totally devoted to trivia/arts/food. So any consolidation of the market could in theory lead to a slight reduction in the amount of more-or-less serious writing floating around – but not so much that you’ll probably see much difference. A paranoid would see this as an attempt by aging Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok’s family to monopolize local English media in order to brainwash us all into loving the motherland more. More likely, the younger Kuoks want to turn this troublesome little bit of their empire into a more productive asset, either to keep or sell on.

And anyway, there’s always the Harbour Times! So far, the libertarian publication seems to be taking compulsive-ideological articles from US pro-market/anti-tax quasi-think-tanks and adding a few paragraphs on Hong Kong to them. A bit of humour or just plain free-thinking would be nice, but hey – it’s more interesting than pizza.

And we always have books! I’m currently on Forgotten Souls by Patricia Lim. Yet another history of the horrors that were the 19th Century colonial Big Lychee, but with the added twist that the main characters are buried in Hong Kong Cemetery. Apparently, people in those days were obsessed with silly titles like Justice of the Peace and judged one another simply by their raw wealth… 

…I can’t imagine what it must have been like.

With all the eager and gleeful anticipation of a million schoolchildren awaiting the reflating of the giant rubber duck, I declare the three-day weekend open.

The great thing about someone who has achieved nirvana is that you don’t have to get them a birthday present.

The excitement over the Court of Final Appeal’s ruling to allow a male-turned-female transsexual to marry a (hopefully aware) male continues. The victor in the case proclaims the judgment to be the will of God and says that she looks forward to getting married in a church. This obviously calls for a comment from the Society of Truth and Light, who predictably view the idea with some distaste. The South China Morning Post goes on to ask the government’s Secretary for Security what he thinks, only to get an even more predictable pile of cluelessness.

(Bright and alert people will at this moment jump up to ask what the government minister in charge of the police, firefighters, prisons, customs and immigration has to do with this. Simple answer: the Immigration Department registers marriages, therefore they – rather than, say, the Home Affairs Bureau or Justice – must be experts in policymaking and other philosophizing on family issues.)

Any squeamishness we might feel when reading phrases like ‘post-operative’ goes out the window when confronted with the Society of Truth and Light, who are surely uglier and more grotesque than anything consenting adults get up to behind closed doors. It would be worth legalizing marriage between humans and goats to see these people getting worked up.

Meanwhile, a local religious group takes out full-page ads in newspapers warning against weird stuff not involving a man plus a woman plus production of progeny…

Casual bystanders flicking through the pages might assume that this is the work of some evangelical fundamentalist creationist types of a Truth and Light persuasion, enjoying a quick rant before planning their next trip to the Biblically accurate Noah’s Ark at Ma Wan. But they would be wrong. It is from the local Catholic Church’s Diocesan Pastoral Commission for Marriage and the Family, which was one of then-Cardinal John Wu’s 10 favourite suggestions out of a modest 177 back in 2002. They agonize over such conundrums as whether unmarried parents should have paternity leave, so you don’t have to.

Anyway – the cosmic bit: they sent out the request for subscriptions for the newspaper ad one month ago. So they couldn’t have known the Court of Final Appeal was going to deliver its trendy, liberal, worldly decision on Monday, May 13. Which makes you wonder whether some divine intervention took place and whether the transsexual is perhaps being a bit presumptuous in claiming the support of the Almighty. On a slightly less-cosmic note, the ad was specifically planned to mark today – the International Day of Families. Contrary to the less-than tolerant spirit of the Catholics’ ad, the theme this year is ‘advancing social integration’. They say God moves in mysterious ways; maybe he’s just hopelessly indecisive.

Hong Kong starts the day with a smirk. The Securities and Futures Commission orders the ‘unwinding’ of the sale of hotel suites at Cheung Kong’s Apex Horizon project on the grounds that it was technically an investment scheme that needed its authorization. In other words: give the mugs their money back.

Tycoon Li Ka-shing’s deputy assistant sub-running dog Justin Chiu puts on a brave face, saying in effect that Cheung Kong is 100% in the right and could easily mash the crummy little SFC to a pulp, but won’t because social harmony is so important. Coming after Li’s discomfiting brush with striking dockworkers, this is the sort of thing that brings a little ray of sunshine into our lives. (All this and the giant rubber duck…)

The Apex Horizon fiasco could get even funnier. Several dozen buyers have already flipped their units to earn such life-changing quick returns as HK$85,000. Cheung Kong will nonetheless try to repurchase the properties via them, which assumes that these speculators know or care about the whereabouts of the secondary buyers (or tertiary ones?) and are, in principle, willing to give back that fast, easy profit they made – if they haven’t blown it in Macau. Presumably, Cheung Kong will end up waiving this and paying off that to get the suites back.

So heart-warming is this story that the Court of Final Appeal’s ruling to allow a transsexual to marry gets relegated to second place on the front pages. The Equal Opportunities Commission and others are predictably happy to find that bewigged senior members of the judiciary are so hip and groovy about gender identity and, by implication, the ever-growing array of other sexual minorities. One part of the judgment in particular stands out…

The Court further held that whether a consensus regarding a transsexual’s right to marry exists among the people of Hong Kong is not a relevant consideration since reliance on the absence of a majority consensus as a reason for rejecting a minority’s claim is inimical in principle to fundamental rights.

In plain English, this says two things. First, regardless of how many guitar-playing pastors and mewling teachers the mouth-frothing Biblical-literalist freaks of the Society of Truth and Light gather at protests, they can go stuff themselves. Second, there are such things as universal rights, and apologists for the Chinese Communist Party and others who dismiss the idea as a Western plot can go stuff themselves as well, so there.

Finally, something interesting – a bit, anyway – happens in the world of local publications. Behold: Harbour Times.

From what I can gather after an extensive few minutes’ snooping around, this is a libertarian project with links to our very own Lion Rock Institute and the US-based Center for Freedom and Prosperity. In the manner of so many think-tanks-turned-lobbyists, the latter is a proponent of flat taxes and our inalienable right to stash our profits offshore beyond the Internal Revenue’s grasp. Among interviews and features concerning politicians, diplomats and various policy areas, readers can expect a lot of emphasis on free markets and, specifically, warnings of threats to banking secrecy and offshore low-tax regimes, not that Hong Kong needs much convincing on these matters.

So it sounds like some Koch Brothers’ front pushing the interests of billionaires who don’t want to pay tax. However, they say they want a forum for Hong Kong’s entire political spectrum to engage in lively and civil discourse. It’s bilingual, will be in print as well as on-line, will have some sort of companion publication for local diplomats and will be free for political VIPs (and probably not very widely read if it charges the rest of us). It will take advertising. Intriguingly, it specifically mentions political advertising – a field in which Hong Kong is sadly backward.

Note that the title uses the British spelling for ‘Harbour’. This could be a clever device to disguise radical right American corporate funding and ideology. (The Koch brothers are, of course, trying to buy up mainstream media. Could this be Step 1 in grabbing the South China Morning Post and Sing Tao)? Then again, the publishers are talking about selling subscriptions and carrying ads, which suggests they’re hard up, so it could just be that the Canadian editor can’t abide ‘Harbor’. Either way, a bit more anti-Communist, Western cultural-imperialist propaganda is always welcome. 

Click to hear Phil Ochs’ ‘Pleasures of the Harbor’!

A slightly tiresome, make-believe game of chicken plays itself out in the battle between the Hong Kong government and radical legislators filibustering the 2013-14 Budget. According to Financial Secretary John Tsang, failure to pass the bill on Wednesday could cause disruptions to welfare payments, health care, education, the courts and, of all things, electricity subsidies. It is an interesting list of items, carefully chosen to include something to affect most of us. Pro-establishment lawmakers parrot the official ‘fiscal cliff’ Armageddon line, while the radicals make the dubious claim that any forced cuts will be the government’s fault for not meeting their demands for a universal pension.

The pro-establishment camp demands that Legislative Council President Tsang Yok-sing uses parliamentary devices fair or foul to curtail the delaying tactics. The more moderate pro-democracy legislators insist on the sanctity of the legislative branch’s rights and liberties to check the executive. Tsang Yok-sing, though as pro-Beijing as they come, is reluctant to damage the Council’s powers (the Legco presidency has a funny effect on people).

The government might be tempted to cut off handouts to starving widows and orphans, switch off kidney patients’ dialysis machines and turn kids away from exam halls, in the hope that an angry population would take it out on Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung and his comrades. But to the extent that people would find it hard to believe serious cuts in day-to-day public services were necessary, it would be officials who would get the blame for playing politics at the community’s expense. So the government should blink first. But since it can’t meet the radicals’ demands, it can blink all it wants, to no avail. Perhaps we are just heading for some dull compromise – a few obscure bits of the bureaucracy closing for a day, and a vague official promise to rethink welfare for the elderly.

Former civil servant Mike Rowse proposes a HK$6,000-per-month universal pension in today’s South China Morning Post. Unlike the HK$3,000 plan put forward by an alliance of welfare and other groups last year, it might actually be enough for the indigent to live on. However, the idea is still flawed.

First, experience overseas shows that politicians like to increase entitlements but not the taxes that pay for them, with the inevitable result being government bankruptcy. At some point, the US, Japan, Europe, etc will have no choice but to abandon or drastically scale down the universal entitlement model. It’s simple arithmetic. (There are theoretical systems like the negative income tax, which put everyone on a lifelong state pension and take it from there. The days when Hong Kong – or Long Hair, perhaps – was that cutting-edge are sadly gone, if they ever existed.)

Second, Hong Kong’s demographics suggest a temporary, rather than perpetually growing, problem with old-age poverty. Future generations of retirees will have enjoyed far better levels of education, earnings and opportunities to save than those born and raised in the chaos of the 1920s-40s. We do need to transfer more wealth from rich young to poor old at the moment (as Chief Executive CY Leung conceded by doubling the Old Age Allowance), but that’s not a permanent state of affairs.

Mike Rowse, the Alliance for Universal Pension and many others have a hang-up about the concept of means-testing. Traditionally, Hong Kong bureaucrats have taken sadistic delight in making welfare application humiliating, but it doesn’t have to be so (as CY’s reform shows). The alternative to form-filling and verification is, on a net basis, subsidy of the rich(er) by the poor(er).

Having said all this, there are some intriguing unknowns and contradictions here, because our politicians and bureaucrats compartmentalize everything beyond recognition. For example, elderly welfare, a sales tax and health financing are all considered entirely separate subjects when they’re All The Same Thing.  So, it could be that the middle-aged middle class will be able to pay for their own retirement provided property prices don’t crash, while the young middle class won’t be able to pay for their own retirement unless property prices do crash. The people who got us into this mess are the ones on the biggest pensions of all.

Update: the filibuster is put out of its misery.

Forget the Japanese occupation, the 1960s riots or SARS. Chief Executive CY Leung declares that Hong Kong has never been in such a crisis as this – the filibustering of the 2013-14 Budget in the Legislative Council. The consequences if the budget isn’t passed will be dire and irreversible. What will happen? Will public hospitals turn dying patients away? Will schools close forever? Will senior civil servants have to take the bus rather than their chauffeur-driven cars? No, the worst thing CY can think up in response to a pro-Beijing legislator’s loaded question is damage to something called our ‘global reputation’. ‘Huge’ damage, no less.

Oddly enough, this is the same fate that we are told befalls us if the Occupy Central movement goes ahead and does its sit-down thing on the streets next year. As well as reputational harm, such a protest will also cause huge economic losses, and some extremely important people known as ‘investors’ will run away.

The stock market’s response is to start the day up 24 points.

The demonization of radicals and pro-democrats through exaggerated and often plainly false claims of the supposed damage they do is not new. A few years back, officials and pro-government media successfully convinced much of the public that lawmakers who resigned in order to force by-elections were wasting vast public wealth. If there is a silent majority, it may well be the part of the community that is receptive to the notion of opposition as disruption or vandalism rather than opposition as promotion of better ideas and policies.

One reason is that the political structure (and the colonial mentality of the bureaucracy) gives opponents few choices other than to be obstructive and loud. Another is that the pro-democrats are not too hot on better ideas and policies. The filibustering radicals like ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung are demanding a universal pension – a bad policy that lacks overwhelming public support. And pro-dems seem to find it hard to articulate rebuttals to smears about them hurting Hong Kong. The Occupy Central people could make a case (because it’s true) that their civil disobedience could be huge symbolically but of little consequence to the economy. Worst-case scenario: commuters downtown have clean air for a few days. But they don’t.

For every po-faced official who gets away with portraying the pro-democrats as naughty children costing the taxpayer money and imperiling civilization, there’s one who seems determined to undermine the government’s credibility at every opportunity. And usually, that’s Police Commissioner Andy Tsang, whose valiant boys in blue have just arrested a semi-obscure activist called Melody Chan on a two-year-old charge – not long after she raised her minor public profile working with Occupy Central. Several other radicals have also been charged with offences dating from the 2011 protest. Now it’s the pro-dems’ turn to fling mud, typically in the form of the phrase ‘white terror’.

The police chief swears that this isn’t a politically motivated crackdown. I’m inclined to believe him: if the idea is to marginalize or intimidate dissidents, this is an extraordinarily humiliating, and anyway inept, way of doing it. Even the Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ editorial rolls its eyes in exasperation at the cops’ claim that it took them all this time to track down vicious 26-year-old trainee-lawyer Melody. Just as Occupy Central is starting to look a bit directionless, along comes Andy Tsang to declare the weekend open by delivering the movement a boost in public sympathy and credibility.