Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Anyone in search of 15 definite photographs (plus one probable) of Bauhinia Foundation chairman Anthony Wu can do no better than to pick up the first edition of the think tank’s 16-page newsletter, Bauhinia Perspectives.  Even before you open it, your eyes have no fewer than three images of his chubby and smiling visage upon which to feast.  Foundation Director Lawrence Lee comes in second place with a total of eight appearances.

This modest-sized organ has little in the way of absorbing think-tankish content, and is only an averagely interesting example of its genre: the corporate publication designed primarily to ego-massage the people who made the decision to have a corporate publication and who approve every issue.

It does, however, introduce the Friends of Bauhinia and the concept of the Foundation as an organization that should be involved in advocacy.  The FoBs would appear to be a sort of Opus Dei of the Big Lychee establishment: 500 people (almost certainly not from all walks of life) willing to flagellate themselves through focus group-attendance in return for the possibility of meeting someone important in the government.

Although it claims to be apolitical, the BF is tycoon-funded and distinctly friendly with the administration of chief executive Donald Tsang.  It could be seen as the proto-political party of our plutocracy-bureaucrat ruling coalition, or perhaps the extreme-cosmopolitan/bourgeois fringe of the Chinese Communist Party’s united front in Hong Kong.  A glance at the youngish professionals seated in the lush ballroom at the FoB’s Dialogue with Bow-Tie (p.2) suggests a calculated effort to co-opt the sort of people who, not long ago, would have been temped to identify with the pro-democracy camp.  Of course, many of the non-civil servants hired as government assistant secretaries and political assistants to be ‘groomed as political talent’ came via the BF.

In one of my discrete social circles, secondment to the Bauhinia Foundation to help out with research is something of an occupational hazard.  Some resent being dragged away from their office for a couple of months, while others are flattered; by all accounts, the experience is fairly restful.  The BF takes the Asia’s World City thing seriously, so the odd token gweilo gets roped in.

Some projects seem to serve a vaguely conservative, pro-business agenda, examining ways to limit social spending, for example.  Others revisit the Big Lychee’s ultimate, politically correct piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense – pan-Pearl River Delta integration, partnership, metropolis, blah-blah, blather, blather.  One project, which has been in the pipeline for ages and ages now (hasn’t it?) is looking into the possibility of shaking up the fascistic rules that ban people from doing anything fun in public parks.  Might even be useful, if they ever finish it.

Well, lookie here – I’ve found a 16th!

Victims of bullying, experts say, are typically anxious and insecure and have low self-esteem.  They also may appear to lack humour, have few or no friends and tend to use money or toys as bribes to gain popularity or protection.  The idea that some sufferers ‘ask for it’ has been widely discredited.

Hong Kong has recently witnessed a tragic case involving an individual called Donald.  On two especially noteworthy occasions, boorish toughs have picked on him for no good reason at all, even accusing him of wrongdoing when all he wanted to do was good.

He tried to encourage everyone to buy energy-saving light bulbs; the bullies claimed, with no evidence, that he had a secret agenda to help his son’s wife’s father’s business.  On realizing that an accusation of such long-distance nepotism was implausible, his detractors tormented him for not anticipating their allegations.

Then it became known that his brother’s wife had received help from her friend the legislator; more cries of favouritism rang out, though Donald was uninvolved and the assistance possibly left her worse off.  (In my experience, intercession of a string-pulling acquaintance in the Legislative Council yields disappointingly meager results – probably why most people use triads.)

So now, like a big boy told by mama to roll his sleeves up and be a man – or shall we say (in the interests of drama) a wild beast cornered in a tight spot – Donald has angrily hit back about being smeared.  Some people will be tempted to sympathize; Apple Daily, after all, compared him to Taiwan’s corrupt ex-president Chen Shui-bian.  Others may think he is being over-sensitive as well as anxious, insecure and suffering from low self-esteem.  Either way, he is mightily frustrated.  And that brings us to the basic problem: however unfairly, some of the mud people are throwing at him is sticking.

It is unlikely that Donald will pause to ask why so many people seem to hate him.

It would take a lot of time.  The list of reasons would stretch back to his furious banishment of pro-democrats into the wilderness after his political reform bill failed to get through in late 2005, and his “if you agree with me I will listen” approach to critics.  It would cover numerous real or perceived instances of favouritism towards big business interests and the rich, and/or neglect of the weak and poor.  Plus real or perceived insults for the in-betweens, like recent throwaway remarks intended to make the middle class feel good about not being able to afford a home.  It would cover the undeniable widening wealth gap and his lack of a convincing response.  It would cover a shift in the community ethos from admiration for those who have made it, to jealousy and resentment of the self-styled elite.

Anyway, it takes a big man to learn what he is doing wrong from his enemies.  So Donald will no doubt get more paranoid, withdrawn, distrustful, anxious, insecure, etc.  Once-loyal supporters, already tiptoeing to one side if you look carefully, will continue to edge away.  He will make more mistakes, unless he has the good sense to play dead.  And all the time the baying mob will surround him and poke him with sharp sticks and jeer and spit.  Just like they did with Tung.  Except maybe this will be less heart-breaking to behold: occasionally someone comes along who really does seem to be asking for it.

Who are all these spotty, malnourished, mis-coiffeured and untrustworthy-looking people in cheap suits seen gathering at IFC Mall yesterday morning?  They are, of course, products of the Hong Kong education system doing the only thing they are equipped to do: trying to make a fast buck as intermediaries.  Specifically, they are real estate agents pushing Sun Hung Kai Property’s new (indeed, still only half-built) Aria development, which is located somewhere out near Clearwater Bay Road at Fei Ngo Shan, which the company prefers to call Kowloon Peak – emphasis on the second word.

Ask any one of them and they will tell you that this residential project will redefine luxury with the finest architecture and superb views of Victoria Harbour, and residents will be pampered with tailored comfort and pleasures that reflect their taste.  Appear unimpressed, and they will assure you and any passers-by within hearing distance that 100% financing is just a signature away, and within a few weeks, when the developer suspends sales in the hope of ratcheting up the current average HK$9,200 per-square-foot price, you will be able to flip the yet-to-be-finished apartment for a quick 5%, 10% or whatever profit.  Fail to drool at the prospect of easy money, and they will lose control, drop to their knees, hug your legs and beg you to think about their sick grandmother, missed sales target and the misery of depending on commission for a living.

There are more of them than there are units for sale.  They pester most adults passing through the (SHKP-owned) shopping centre, ignoring only those who are clearly manual workers or – usually – non-Chinese.  This supports their promises of higher property prices, as it is a well-known fact that by the time Westerners start to buy real estate, the market is peaking and about to burst.

Meanwhile, literally the best part of a universe away, we have JKCS041: a galaxy cluster that NASA says is the most distant, thus oldest, object ever seen.  It is 10.2 billion light years away.  What does this have to do with SHKP?

The three Kwok brothers who run the company would almost certainly refute NASA’s findings.  They are evangelical Christians who believe that the Book of Genesis is the literal truth (hence the life-size Noah’s Ark at another of their housing developments).  So far as they are concerned, the universe – including light, of course – was created around 6,000 years ago, and it is not possible that the plucky little photons reaching Earth from JKCS041 have spent 10.2 billion years getting here.

Fundamentalists usually insist that geological formations and dinosaur fossils are very recent, left over from the flood that necessitated the then-600-year-old Noah to round up a pair of every life-form and cram them into his boat.  However, when pressed with such science as radiometric dating, astronomical light sources more than 6,000 years old or the evidence of evolution all around us, some of them relent somewhat and say that this is part of God’s test.  Evangelicals believe that they will be judged by their faith rather than by earthly works (which goes back to Luther’s rejection of the Catholic Church’s sale of fast-track-to-Heaven indulgencies).

This is a tough test, if we think about it.  Which is easier: a) giving a bit of money to charity and being nice to people; or b) believing that God placed light particles in such a way as make them appear to have traveled 99.9% of the way from the far end of universe he was building so, 6,000 years later, he could use them to sort out the faithful from rationalists and scientists, whom he could send to Hell for rejecting him?

Further evidence that SHKP’s devout management have cunningly picked the right side comes from a glance at the publicity material.  Only divine intervention could make the US space agency’s graphic of its distant galaxies look less credible than a Hong Kong property developer’s artist’s impression.

Finally, while SHKP enjoys amazing profit margins, and took HK$1.8 billion in revenue from the Aria alone a couple of weekends back, cash-strapped NASA faces savage budget cuts as a result of the US government’s terrible deficit.  Could the Almighty possibly make it any clearer?   They are doing the Lord’s work at IFC Mall.

Who paid for the ‘sponsored feature’ that takes up the top half of page A4 in this morning’s South China Morning Post?  Stupid question.  I did.  The government, in its desperation to spend HK$1.5 billion of taxpayer’s money (or whatever the latest estimate is) per kilometer on its high-speed rail project, is now dipping into our pockets again to buy space in the media to convince its 7 million child-like citizens that it’s a brilliant idea.

The headline screams that a project already HK$30 billion over-budget will make us richer.  A rather thuggish-looking landlord/restaurateur/government spokesman Allan Zeman declares it will change our lifestyle.  That’s one way of putting it: cost over-runs bring the total cost up to HK$100 billion and half our hospitals and schools close.  (Neglecting to consider that readers, or at least their stomachs, may be of a sensitive disposition at this hour of the morning, The Standard’s Mary Ma editorial insists that the rail network will “pump unlimited nutrients from the mainland into Hong Kong.” Eeww.)

Aside from dangling before us the lure of five-hour rides to Wuhan, the advertisement tells the tale of easy-to-relate-to football fan Alex Cheung, who boards this space-age transport system one fine day in 2015 and marvels at the speed with which he is taken to the throbbing metropolis that is Shibi (the suburb 45 minutes by metro away from downtown Guangzhou, where we all assumed the high-speed rail station would be).  The tone of breathless wonder brings to mind those old forecasts decades back of how we would live in 2000: Dad flies to work in his personal helicopter, while mom makes a glorious dinner out of little plastic packets zapped with gamma rays powered by free electricity thanks to our friend the atom.

What happens next to Alex, as, wiping the last dribble of gourmet coffee from his chin, he steps off the hypersonic module onto the gleaming platform of the Shibi intergalactic transport hub and makes his way past the ranks of robot-porters out into the dazzling new world of connectivity that will ultimately benefit a variety of sectors?  Sadly, we hear no more of him.  We simply get quotes from a ‘government paper’ assuring us, with an air of hope rather than conviction, that this is an opportunity we can “ill-afford to miss out upon.”  But what more can we expect from an advertisement created by civil servants pushing the expenditure of HK$69 billion-and-counting on a 16-mile stretch of rail?

In early September, three Hong Kong reporters covering unrest in Xinjiang were beaten by police.  Blurred shots of the incident appeared on TV back in the Big Lychee, prompting righteous anger across the city’s political spectrum.  Officials in Urumqi, surprised and miffed at this negative reaction, made up stories to give the impression that the journalists had brought it on themselves, even though it was clear to everyone here that they were nice decent kids who give up their seats to old ladies on the MTR, thus stirring even more outrage in China’s small but perfectly formed Land of the Free.

Hong Kong’s leaders promised to have words with important people in Beijing.  Meanwhile, our legislators decided to impose the ultimate sanction on whoever on the mainland was to blame: a non-binding motion.  Pro-democracy legislator Emily Lau’s resolution failed to win enough votes in the Legislative Council yesterday either in her original version or in the sanitized form proposed by pro-Beijing lawmaker Dr the Hon Philip Wong.  The whole thing, with all proposed amendments, is at the very bottom of the meeting’s riveting agenda.  Here is the meat of it, with Emily’s bits that were arguably disrespectful to the Communist leadership crossed out and replaced (in italics) by whoever drafted Wong’s more calming, non-confrontational revision.

Defending freedom of the press
Hon Emily LAU: (Translation)
That according to media reports, recently some Hong Kong journalists, while covering news in Xinjiang, were assaulted, handcuffed and detained by law enforcement officers, and even accused slanderously alleged by the local information office of inciting disturbance and violating the rules on news coverage; also, some Hong Kong journalists covering news in Sichuan were alleged by law enforcement officers of suspected possession of drugs and prohibited from going out; the above incidents have seriously undermined obstructed the freedom of news coverage and the public’s right to know as well as damaged affected the core values of freedom of the press; this Council condemns expresses grave concern about such acts and urges the Government to adopt the following measures:

a)  to solemnly reflect to the Mainland authorities the concerns of the press in Hong Kong that the Mainland authorities are expected to ensure that the law enforcement officers on the Mainland be requested to will respect civic rights and freedom of the press, refrain from illegally detaining, arresting or assaulting journalists, and request the Mainland authorities to impose severe punishment on the offenders and ensure that similar incidents will not happen again, in order to prevent such incidents from happening;

b)  in regard to the unjust investigation of the abovementioned incidents and the slanderous serious accusation against journalists by the Mainland authorities in the abovementioned incidents, to request the Mainland authorities to make clarifications and apologies, conduct a just investigation afresh and release the investigation results to the public;

[drivel not worth amending]

The Hong Kong government obviously took it all very seriously, because they dragged some pro-Beijing lawmakers who rarely turn up into the chamber in order to defeat the original motion.  What – if anything – is vaguely interesting is that the two versions are not that different.  Emily’s hectoring polemic gets tossed out in favour of insipid and neutral phrases so as not to chastise the Central People’s Government.  But the core of it – that local officials were out of line – is intact.

Which suggests that neither our pro-democracy nor pro-Beijing lawmakers seem to realize that there is no freedom of the press or rule of law over the border, and these great things are not transportable by those of us fortunate enough to take them for granted should we go up there.  It’s enough to drive even the mildest and sweetest Xinjiang spokeswoman up the wall in exasperation.

Philatelists eager to obtain Hong Kong’s forthcoming stamp marking Professor Charles Kao’s Nobel award will have to be patient while the city’s resourceful residents vie to produce a suitable design following government spending cutbacks.  Given the imaginative flair of, say, pharmaceutical company Lundbeck’s ad agency, it will undoubtedly be worth the wait.

The Standard meanwhile tells readers that the Danish pill makers are defending the advertisement that appeared in the newspaper yesterday.  Against whom or what, the reporter fails to mention.  I for one have heard nothing but praise for the – how can I put it? – boldness and ingenuity of the ‘concepting’, or whatever the guys in ponytails and orange spectacle frames call it these days.  It seems they had little choice but to try extra hard to push the product:

Benjamin Kwong Yiu-sum, president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Hong Kong, said Ebixa is used for severe dementia but is not a cure. “It only offers a very marginal benefit for the patient but it has quite a premium to pay for.”

A flick through the South China Morning Post reminds me of another of Hong Kong’s great creative industries: food and beverage photography.  It is a sad fact that many a budding Man Ray or Annie Leibovitz has no choice but to earn a living either by snapping young couples before their wedding day or taking arty culinary shots for restaurants’ press kits.  I have watched one of these sessions. The cameraman shoots away, while his assistant arranges the lighting and sprays moisture over the fare, the establishment’s manager looks on nervously and his chef engages in obsessive-compulsive positioning of the garnish.  The result is that every restaurant’s promotional material looks identical.

Or nearly every restaurant.  The SCMP today reviews the hitherto unheard-of Drawing Room in the equally previously-undetected JIA Boutique Hotel in Causeway Bay.  The obligatory PR photo (shouldn’t reviewers take their own pictures?) instantly arouses strong olfactory memories.  Where have I seen such succulent, glistening, juicy chunks of meat before?

Of all the treasures of South China’s great cultural heritage, such as Cantonese opera, porcelain-painting and calligraphy, there is one art form at which Hong Kong truly excels: advertising.  For proof we need look no further than page 3 of today’s Standard, which carries an ad in the form of a Letter to Professor Kao.

Charles Kao is one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics.  Back in the mid-1960s, he worked out how to send electric light signals through hair-sized tubes of glass – without which Asia’s great Internet disruption of early 2007 following the rupture of fibre-optic cables off Taiwan would never have been possible.  According to which newspapers you read he is Chinese, a Hongkonger, British or American.  Since the US and the UK have so far won more Nobels than any other countries, it only seems fair that the land of his birth should celebrate Kao’s achievements, even though he accomplished them in the West (and let’s not even consider what Mao’s Red Guards would have done with him had he been in the Mainland at the time).

So, as with several other Nobel winners and a number of other eminent foreign citizens with the right ancestry, the motherland lauds Kao as its own.  Fair enough: he was born in Shanghai.  And Hong Kong claims him too, on the grounds that he was head of Chinese University and lives here.  Leaders and academics rushed to congratulate him, and Hongkong Post will probably feature him on a stamp.  (Inevitably, it all gets a bit messy as nonconformists debate the need for ethnic pride and the role of exile in Chinese success.)

Then it all went a bit sour as it emerged that the distinguished professor would not be doing many interviews, guest appearances and projections of glory in which riders of coat-tails could bask.  Sadly, he has Alzheimer’s.  At times, perhaps, he is one of the few people in town who have never heard of Charles Kao.  His devoted wife Gwen does the smiling and talking, and no doubt much else, for him.  For most of us, at least, this took the shine off the story.  But not for everyone.

Somewhere in the Big Lychee, in an obscure office, in a little-known tower, in an unfashionable street, in a low-rent district, alarm bells went off – the urgent Ke ching! Ke ching! Ke ching! of the cash register, to be precise.

In all fairness, the advertising company and its client had the decency to wait almost two weeks before launching this campaign.  It is a full-page ad in the form of a letter to Kao from “a group of people who concerns [sic] about Alzheimer’s Disease,” expressing sympathy for his plight and gently introducing him to Ebixa®, a new treatment made by a firm called  Lundbeck that “significantly improves functional daily life, eg the ability to talk, take a shower, toileting, to reduce the tasks of caregivers…” Included in the ‘letter’ are some photos of Gwen accepting honours on her husband’s behalf.

Some might call it tasteless, callous and shallow, but I see the bold, imaginative, quick-thinking opportunity-grabbing that has made Hong Kong what it is since 1841.  And Ebixa® is, presumably, less addictive and socially ruinous than some pharmaceuticals traded in the city’s earlier days.  If only there were a Nobel prize for marketing.

(Grubby cynics, full of bias and contempt, will be asking themselves where the Lundbeck company is based.  Wuhan?  Chongqing?  Some smoky grey sprawl in Shandong with a gleaming front office in Shenzhen?  Shame on them.  It’s from Copenhagen, Denmark.  As for the ad agency: pure-bred Big Lychee, surely.)

Citing anonymous pro-Beijing sources briefed by mainland officials, the South China Morning Post reports that next month’s constitutional reform proposals for Hong Kong will be similar to those vetoed by pro-democrats in late 2005.  There is probably some expectations-management going on here; Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s extremely limited repertoire of political tricks revolves around disingenuous leaks to the press.  Four years ago, his administration tended to downplay the possibility of serious change in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make the proposed electoral package for 2007-08 look more meaningful than it really was.  This time perhaps he will do the opposite: try to condition everyone to expect a 90%-identical package for the CE and Legislative Council elections in 2012, then produce one that’s 40% different.

‘Difference’ here is purely cosmetic and nothing to do with the relative degree of democracy contained in any proposal.  It must be tempting for Donald to produce a highly similar package simply out of spite, to rub the pro-democrats’ noses in it and ‘punish’ them and everyone else for rejecting the non-reforms the first time round.  He lost horrible amounts of face at that time and the humiliation seems to burn still.  But if the aim is to get the public to blame the pro-democrats for any lack of progress, the government needs something with a better chance of being passed off as progress.

Either way, it won’t be progress.  Elections in the Big Lychee are rigged to produce outcomes acceptable to Beijing.  China is a one-party state, and the ruling communist regime is not going to allow the faintest chance that one city, even a highly autonomous one, could end up with a mayor or assembly that it cannot control with certainty.  Universal suffrage, by definition, introduces such a possibility and therefore cannot and will not happen.  Democratic elections in Hong Kong and Communist Party rule of the PRC are incompatible: you can have one or the other, but not both.

Pro-democrats refuse to accept this truth, bleating incessantly that Beijing promised us universal suffrage; and so they keep on fighting, apparently relishing in their delusion and denial.  The establishment and pro-Beijing camp play along with the charade – pretending for example that lack of consensus locally is holding up reform – because they can’t voice the truth and imply or admit that Beijing was lying, or has changed its mind, or was misquoted or misunderstood.

As we get closer to the dates when universal suffrage is supposed to become possible (2017 for CE, 2020 for Legco), someone will have to come clean about this, because the numbers will look less and less convincing.  At the moment, some 220,000 people essentially elect a make-believe electoral college of 800 who are allowed to participate in the pretend-election that endorses Beijing’s choice of CE.  The key is that only a small, trusted and loyal minority of the 220,000 actually choose the overwhelming majority of the 800.  It is possible to appear to expand the franchise by increasing these numbers while maintaining the structure that rigs the outcome of the elections.  But at some stage as the figure rises from 220,000 (or 800) to all registered voters (currently 3.4 million), the scale on which the majority will is thwarted will become a complete joke.

The first side to point this out, and demand that we scrap the whole sham of a political reform process at least until China adopts a multiparty system, is the winner.  But it is a race between the unrealistic and the dishonest, and each is trying to lose.