Big Lychee, Various Sectors

…said a Swiss government spokesman on the radio this morning, after 58% of her country’s voters opted to ban the construction of mosques’ towers in a referendum (turnout: 53%).  It would be hard to imagine Alpine German-speakers supporting the prohibition of a distinguishing feature of synagogues, wouldn’t it?  But, then again…

If minarets were spreading in such numbers and heights that they were obstructing views of the Matterhorn, it might be understandable.  But in Switzerland, with a grand total of four of the things at the moment, nothing goes unregulated, and you can be sure there are laws, rules and codes galore on building sizes.  What the plucky little cuckoo clock and chocolate specialists are doing here is nothing more or less than picking on a particular minority religion.  For that reason, the result of the referendum will apparently be overturned by the courts.

Obviously the structures themselves are not the issue; it is what Swiss people think they symbolize or even presage.  The 5% of Switzerland’s inhabitants who are Muslim are mainly from the Balkans and Turkey.  Few, if any, are likely to make creepy political statements through the contrived adoption of archaic Arab practices like wrapping women in niqab or pressuring men to grow lengthy beards – as Islamists of North African or South Asian descent in some other parts of Europe do.  Even allowing for their famed stolid conservatism, the Swiss have relatively little reason to freak out about Islam.

If this is a sort of collective punishment, or at least bullying, there is a huge list of provocations.  In Saudi Arabia, forget a ban on steeples: Christian or other non-Muslim churches and public worship are simply illegal.  In the Netherlands, a film maker was killed for producing a (lame) documentary criticizing the Koran.  Mouth-frothing hairy weirdoes from Pakistan to Birmingham ranted and burnt flags after a Danish newspaper carried a series of (mostly pitiful) cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed.  From Indonesia, to Malaysia, to Afghanistan, to Palestine, to Morocco, eccentrics, often officially proscribed, call for judicial amputations, beheadings, suicide bombings, the slaying of infidels and all manner of lunacy, inspiring not only disaffected locals but occasionally pathetic young Westerners of the sort who might otherwise drift to Scientology.  Although they are pre-Islamic tribal traditions arising in places like the Arab Crescent , Kurdish, Pakistani and (Sikh) Punjabi and Kashmiri regions – unknown to, say, Berbers or Malays – honour killings are widely perceived in the West as a Muslim thing.

Islam has a serious PR problem.  A strand of xenophobic fanatics are working to provoke an anti-Islamic backlash among infidels through terrorist acts like 9-11 and thousands of lesser words and deeds of belligerence, such as taking offence at every possible perceived slight.  They want Westerners to react by insulting, bullying or attacking run-of-the-mill Muslims who see their faith as separate from politics; the idea is to alienate the latter and drive them towards piety and openness to fundamentalism.  The amazing thing is that so many non-Muslims in the West are sticking to their pluralistic and tolerant values in the face of this aggression, and that so many Muslims are still eschewing radicalism and just getting on with their lives.  The Swiss vote is a victory for the Islamist extremists.

It could be that the whole Islamist nonsense is a fad that will blow over in the years to come.  Better governance in Arab and other Muslim countries would do much to end the deprivation that nurtures self-pitying victimhood and in turn anti-Westernism and anti-modernism.  (A less materialist, decadent, values-optional culture in Western countries might not hurt either while we’re attacking root causes, though I’d sooner pass on it myself.)  Meanwhile, we just have to wait and hope non-Swiss non-Muslims keep their patience, and – most of all – a few Muslims get off the fence and start getting tough with the in-your-face veils-and-beards brigade who are giving them a bad reputation.  If they want to avoid becoming victims of intolerance from non-yodeling, non-Muslim Westerners, they need to practice a bit of it themselves.

It is worth remembering that the Big Lychee’s own insular mountain-dwellers up in the New Territories beat the Helvetic bigots to it a few years back.  Fighting a proposed mosque (or “temporary temporary religious institution,” as only Hong Kong bureaucrats could term it) the villagers of Lo Uk claimed a Muslim house of worship would be…

…a completely incompatible religious institution which would easily stir up conflicts and spoil the peaceful life and the local customs … … and would affect … environmental hygiene, bring noise nuisance and threaten security … [and] attract strangers that might affect law and order…(p.29-30)

Anyone who knew these people immediately saw through such flimsy pretensions to Swiss-style racism in the city that’s too money-grubbing to hate: the land concerned was, of course, earmarked for free transfer to local men under the ‘small houses’ scam.

City-states that make their living from money-laundering and peddling tacky, overpriced real estate come in two categories: the big boys and the wannabes.  The Emirate of Dubai sadly shows itself to be in the latter league today, as state-owned conglomerate Dubai World suspends debt repayments and shakes global markets.

Two characteristics distinguish the sheep from the goats.  First is attitude.  In Dubai, they committed the cardinal sin of self-consciously yearning for greatness, visibly exerting themselves in order to attain success, as represented by structures and events.  It is all heavily contrived, vanity-driven and, most horrifying of all, state-run.  Private-sector hideousness and pretentiousness is fine, but when government ownership lies behind the palm-shaped reclamation, the world’s tallest tower, silliest-looking hotel, most expensive hotel opening party, the car racing, golf tournaments and all the other hubristic tat, you have failed.  Even Singapore’s overbearing leadership doesn’t have to try this hard.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, is the world’s ultimate city-state/funny money/property hub because it doesn’t sweat at it.  It just is.  Admittedly, its current government shows depressing signs of low civic self-esteem, embarrassing the populace by embarking on frantic attempts to promote the place as a centre for Islamic banking, wine trading, and trendy/creative/bio/tech/blah-blah industries.  Since taking over from the British in 1997, the Chinese government seems to have encouraged a more-or-less subtle but systematic campaign to undermine the Big Lychee’s self-confidence, hence the constant threats of isolation and irrelevance if we don’t indulge in all that partnership and cooperation with the mainland.  But those of us without a vested interest in the latest integration-or-marginalization scam treat it all with a healthy disregard.  To be real, success and superiority must be effortless – otherwise it’s just fake.

The second factor in wealth-recycling, luxury apartment-churning city-statehood is of course people.  The natives of Dubai account for only 10% of the population.  Unlike American or Australian aboriginal inhabitants, they retain title and sovereignty over their homeland, but otherwise they have vanished into practical day-to-day insignificance.  There are only two circumstances under which members of the majority foreign population will ever meet a Dubaian: either being tortured on film by him in the desert, or getting jailed for offending local morals after having drunken sex on a beach.  Which brings us rather neatly to the class of outsiders attracted to the Emirate.  The white-collar/skin expatriates tend to be low-bred British, rutting on the aforementioned seashore after a champagne and baked beans buffet, or Russians who are not quite classy enough to hang out in Phuket.  An English soccer star who can barely speak his mother tongue is considered a desirable neighbour.  Meanwhile, Pakistani, Filipino and other Third World toilers do all the menial work and sleep in stacked-up containers.  In Dubai, even the outsourcing is outsourced.

In Hong Kong, 100% of the people are hard-working immigrants.  The Cantonese majority are born of parents who cast their vote of confidence in China by swimming through shark-infested waters to get away; they built this city into what it is.  Laziness is rare, and there is an admirable tradition of spotting ways to perform intermediary services (in particular) better, cheaper and faster.  Dusky locally born or migrant workers do some of the sweeping, washing and cooking, but are generally treated like humans.  The westerners, apart from some distinctly unappealing exceptions allowed in back in the days when the place was less fussy, are fine-looking specimens with university degrees who read books and practice moderation in all things.

European and American stock markets slumped with a vengeance on hearing of Dubai World’s embarrassment.  The Hang Seng Index starts the morning 3% down as well.  But we’re too cool to seriously wet ourselves over the laughably self-described Big Lychee of the Gulf.  It’s a buying opportunity.

Like a pack of crazed boarding school girls when passions boil over one night in the dorm, the Big Lychee’s pan-democrats are scratching each others’ eyes out.  We shouldn’t enjoy watching the unseemly brawl, but who can resist watching Muffy (played by Long Hair) splatter an explosive feather-stuffed pillow against Ursula’s (Albert Ho) face?

The idea of resigning from the Legislative Council in order to force by-elections that could serve as a referendum on universal suffrage would have been brilliant in, say, 2003, when – bliss it was in that dawn to be alive – anything seemed possible to the Hong Kong people.  Since then, Beijing has made it implicitly but abundantly clear that real democracy isn’t going to happen.  The government’s proposed electoral reforms for 2012 are a blatant declaration: the mainly cosmetic expansion of the franchise from 1998 to 2007, agreed in pre-handover days with the British and written into the Basic Law, are as far as the process will go.

Meanwhile, with no cohesive opposition to make trouble, the city’s leaders are free to fritter the people’s wealth away on pointless projects that benefit their friends – mostly tycoons, but also faded bureaucrats in need of parasitical little empires to run.  The director of audit has zeroed in on the hallucinogenically named HK Productivity Council for waste, notably vanishing computer and lab equipment.  (Here and here; for masochists only.)  Like the HK Trade Development Council, the HKPC is a remnant of our 1960s manufacturing-based economy and has expanded as fast as its role has shrunk.  If it were possible to detach such organizations from their public-sector financial lifeblood yet maintain and harness the impulses behind their growth, we could achieve a perpetual motion machine.

One clear piece of evidence that a publicly-funded enterprise is just another bunch of money-squandering scumbags is the ‘sponsored feature’ that they pay to have published in the newspapers.  Yesterday’s South China Morning Post featured yet another desperate, full-page attempt to sell us the HK$50 billion-plus high-speed rail link to Shenzhen. Today it’s the turn of the HK Science Park.

Like Cyberport, the HK Science Park offers publicly subsidized accommodation and facilities for enterprises  fortunate enough to be in sectors that bureaucrats consider worthy of encouragement; in other words, industries that are more economically viable somewhere else.  Just as Cyberport is trying to incubate a cluster of fancy creative companies with cheap offices and access to a digital media suite, the Science Park is offering a special Biotech Centre in which, we are told, start-ups can be nurtured to venture-capital stage.  Biotech research in Hong Kong: it’s as likely as Scotch Whisky distilleries in Riyadh.  Or the pro-democrats being productive.

The hallmark of a publicity campaign by a Hong Kong public-sector organization is the photograph of workers awkwardly posed to look like they are having just another buzzing day toiling away at their many important tasks.

Couldn’t they just take a surreptitious snap with a hidden camera and get a more natural portrayal of them all hard at work?

There’s a naïve question.

Radio listeners awoke today to the sound of radical activist ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung complaining that the Big Lychee’s government is following in the steps of the Singapore regime by using civil law to try to bankrupt dissidents.  To quote the South China Morning Post:

Five Citizens’ Radio activists and the operator of the unlicensed station have each been ordered to pay a fine of HK$10,000 and contribute HK$50,000 to the government’s HK$1.44 million legal bill, in a civil contempt of court case.

The broadcasters have already been fined in criminal proceedings.

The government applied for the order given yesterday when the criminal charges, brought under the Telecommunications Ordinance, stalled because a magistrate in January last year held the provisions in the ordinance unconstitutional. The criminal charges went ahead when the magistrate’s order was suspended.

Yesterday, Mr Justice Michael Hartmann, sitting in the Court of First Instance, ordered the civil penalties after finding on Monday that the activists had been in contempt when they defied an injunction last year banning them from broadcasting for eight days.

Clearly, there is nothing very Singaporean about the independence of the Hong Kong courts.  The Citizens’ Radio crew have flagrantly broken the law since 2005 by broadcasting without a licence.  When the government took out an injunction against them, they argued that the practical impossibility of getting a licence (only two big corporations operate private stations) infringed their constitutional right to free speech.  The court, to the amusement of everyone except humourless officials taking everything personally, initially agreed; it later ordered the broadcasts to stop.  Citizens’ Radio stayed on the air as an act of civil disobedience.  The government then came back with both a criminal prosecution for illegal broadcasting plus a civil contempt of court action for breaking the injunction.

That Long Hair and other illegal broadcasters committed a crime is undeniable, and a few weeks ago they were fined (fairly small sums) for broadcasting without a licence.  If they refuse to pay, they could end up in prison as martyrs to free speech, which is why the powers will no doubt make sure, if necessary, that an anonymous benefactor pays on their behalf at some stage.

Was the government’s decision to pursue the civil case and demand costs, vindictive, malicious, an act of bullying, a warning to us all, or some other form of vile Singaporeanism?  Our officials and their apologists would argue that the taxpayer should not have to pay all the financial burden imposed on them by injunction-flaunting radicals.  The activists would argue that their disobedience was in the public interest.  My argument would be that maybe the taxpayer should not also have to pay for a certain 16-mile high-speed rail track I can think of – or at least choose which of the two causes he would prefer to subsidize.

It is hard to believe that our top officials, in deciding to demand a small slice of costs, seriously think they will cow critics into silence and instill a fascistic, Lion City-style climate of fear in the population.  They’re lots of things, but they’re not that.  More likely, it was 10% hand-wringing about the principle of the thing, plus 90% good old-fashioned, bloody-minded spite by an over-sensitive, short-tempered government out of its depth and looking for someone to lash out at.  And who better than Long Hair and gang?

I look forward to seeing the bailiff kick the door down and try to work out how much the laundry basket of unwashed Che Guevara T-shirts will fetch at auction.

On a sadder note: Shanghai’s new Disneyland is reportedly going to be smaller than ours.  This apparently means we are stuck with the state-owned Rodent Theme Park in Lantau for a while more.  So that’s what all those “sighs of relief from Hong Kong,” we hear all around us this morning are about.

It’s an anagram of Herman Van Rompuy, who, we are invited to believe, is president of Europe.  He was chosen in a process that combines the transparency of a papal election with the credibility of the few hundred votes cast for Hong Kong’s Beijing-selected chief executive.  Indeed, lack of credibility seems to come with the job. Perhaps it’s an essential qualification.

First, he is not president of Europe.  Europe is a geographical term, so he can’t be president of that.  There is the European Union, but that is essentially an international organization – think of a puffed-up version of NATO largely devoted, even now, to farming and trade – so there is nothing to be president of there, either.  He is in fact president (as in chairman) of the EU Council, a board made up of the democratically elected heads of the countries that comprise the EU.  They are the not the sort who answer to obscurities called Herman, which is why, after bickering behind closed doors, they picked him.

Second he is from Belgium, a place that only barely counts as a country.  My memory is a bit vague here, but if I recall correctly it was at one stage the Spanish Netherlands, a land of compulsory Catholicism and flamenco dancing in clogs.  Then it was left to someone’s nephew in a will (or given as a wedding present or something) and it became the Austrian Netherlands.  Then, later on in the history course, we did Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna, the age of steam, and the rise of liberal democracy, and eventually the creation of plucky little Belgium because no-one wanted anyone else to own it.

A country was born.  Mayo on fries: national dish.  A little statue of a boy having a wee-wee: the all-important icon.  Three vertical or horizontal stripes in colours not already used by too many others: yet another indistinguishable European flag.  It’s not surprising that among the sprawling international bureaucracy in Brussels it is the Belgians who delude themselves that the EU is, is becoming, or will become, a country.  They don’t know what a country is.

Most of the rest don’t know what the EU is, or at least what it is for.  To the Germans, it was originally a restraining device to wean them off invading France.  To the French, it was supposed to be a stage on which they could play out their fantasy of attaining the global supremacy denied them by the UK and US for two centuries.  To the Italians, it was a communal piggy bank to be raided when the profligate and overall hopeless country went bankrupt.

It started off as a free-trade group, designed to integrate the French and German agricultural and industrial sectors.  Today, it is a classic example of bureaucratic imperial expansion, with pretences to authority in areas like immigration, labour rights and defence.  To its enemies, these expanded competencies are like cancerous growths eating away at national sovereignty.  The EU’s Belgian and small number of other fans see the eradication of national governments as the whole point.

In practice, much of its institutional activism and expansion is symbolic as much as anything else.  The arrival of the UK and, later, ex-communist countries of the east have made the organization too unwieldy for Franco-German or Eurocratic dominance.  More and more national leaders are disillusioned, and their people simply disdainful, at the corrupt, self-serving, top-down arrogance of EU officialdom.  The more morsels of sovereignty the EU bureaucracy tries to cram in its mouth, the closer it gets to choking.  Belgians and federalist freaks might get excited because the European countries’ ships on anti-pirate patrol off Somalia style themselves an EU naval force, but it is a meaningless label to shut up a few bores.  The stark disagreements over involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan show the truth about a single EU foreign policy.

So while the EU’s powers seem to be expanding, the growths are essentially benign.  That is not to say they should not be cut out.  They are parasitical and irritating.  But the creation of this non-job – the office-holder is supposed to rank with Obama or Hu – must finally prove the emptiness of the federalist dream behind the Lisbon treaty.  It’s a pretentious, over-idealistic, other-worldly “piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense,” as Castlereagh said of a previous effort.  And, while indisputably wasteful and tedious until someone inevitably pulls the plug on it, essentially harmless.  Like Herman Van Rompuy, whose 15 minutes – I am looking at the second hand on my watch as I speak – are… now… up.

In 2005, a group of people were less than halfway through building a house.  Work was sporadic, or “gradual and orderly,” as they put it.  They had done the foundation and ground-floor walls and hoped to put in the upstairs, the roof and all the fixtures by 2017 at the latest.  The man ostensibly in charge of the project, a Mr Tsang, gathered everyone around and suggested that for 2007-08 they should upgrade the front door, which didn’t have a handle, with a thicker, heavier and more expensive one, though still with no handle.  Some of the group, decrying the pointlessness of the idea, vetoed it and demanded that Mr Tsang organize some real progress – at least get the second floor finished.  Nothing happened.

Four years later, on November 18, 2009, Mr Tsang sent his assistant, Mr Tang, to get everyone together again and propose a construction plan for 2012: again, the suggestion was to install a thicker, heavier and more expensive front door – but this time with a handle.  The unhappy crowd, wondering how the house could possibly be ready by 2017, decided to show their displeasure the only way they knew how: by walking backwards up a hill.

If they had an ounce of sense, they would have realized long before that Tsang had no intention or even ability to get the house finished by 2017, or ever.  But sadly, they are Hong Kong’s pro-democrats, and the universal suffrage they want to build has them mesmerized.  Once seen as a means to better governance, it has become an end in itself – a symbol, for many of them, of 20 years’ hopes, dreams and tireless toil.  They have put so much of their lives into erecting a gleaming electoral structure that the idea of abandoning it is unthinkable.

This is a pity, because while these idealists have been standing around the deserted construction site calling for the house to be finished, Tsang and his partners have been up to mischief.  They have been buying expensive things no-one needs from their friends with the people’s money.  They have been letting their friends use the people’s land cheaply.  They even let their friends own all the shops and cheat their customers.  The forlorn, would-be house-builders occasionally wander over and complain about all this; but not much.  They can’t wait to get back to the never-finished building work for another march backwards – or, if that doesn’t work, forwards.

It has now got to the stage where you have to wonder whether the pro-democrats actually enjoy being strung along.  It seems they have become so accustomed to this mental torture, reaching out to the emptier and emptier promises dangled before them, that it would break their hearts if they woke up one morning and found that someone had finished the house overnight.  They would stand around it, peering through the spotless new windows at the black leather sofa and flat-screen TV in dismay.  “What now?” the miserable ex-warriors for righteousness would ask.

The good news for them is that it won’t happen.  A communist one-party state abhors universal suffrage as totally as nature does a vacuum.  The bad news for everyone else, is that in the absence of elected representatives willing to kick up an almighty, never-ending, focused, articulate and populist fuss about citizens’, consumers’ and taxpayers’ rights, Mr Tsang and Co will be free to carry on treating his favourite half-dozen families to everyone else’s wealth.

Wait!!!  All is not lost.  Mystics believe that walking backwards reverses the karma, allowing practitioners to correct past errors and sins.  Our one last hope.