Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Sunday Post today carries a heartfelt letter to the editor arguing that the Hong Kong taxpayer should indeed blow HK$59 billion on a 16-mile stretch of rail track:

Why Hong Kong needs an express rail link

It was interesting to read the comments by Raymond So Wai-man, of Chinese University, on the new high speed connection to Guangzhou (“Is express link on the wrong track?”, November 1).

It has been almost 100 years since the Hong Kong section of the Kowloon to Canton railway opened in April 1910, and to much the same criticisms as today. It was the most expensive railway per kilometre built in the world at that time. How could it make a profit? The governor, Sir Frederick Lugard, fought the British and Chinese governments and Legco on costs and benefits. His vision was that “Hong Kong should be the final outlet of the main trunk railway in China”.

The existing rail link to Guangzhou is totally unsuitable for the 21st century. Hong Kong needs a fast link to other parts of southern China for business and tourism, and a station that deserves the status of China’s southern terminus. The best stations are near the centre of a city, and they are easily accessible and cut down travelling times. They must give the many travellers that will come to Hong Kong from all over China the service they deserve. That makes it expensive, but it has to reap rewards for the future, and be ready for the next 100 years.

We have one of the best airports in the world; let’s have the vision to do the same with the rail link.

Rory O’Grady, Kowloon Tong

Having a nasty, sordid and shallow little mind, I immediately assume that this is the work of someone in the Hong Kong government.  The Chinese propaganda machine has done this at times: concoct a missive to an English-language newspaper declaring, for example, that Tibet has been a happy, loving, integrated and inseparable part of the Chinese nation since 12,000BC, and sign it with a suspiciously bland Anglo name like Bill Jones or Simon Brown of a suitably nonentity-crammed neighbourhood like Shatin.

As we would expect, a Big Lychee official does a classier job, crafting a moniker too silly sounding to be made-up – Hibernian, indeed, to add a dash of the credibly exotic – and a bolder choice of address, namely the most expensive residential area outside Hong Kong Island.  (The sort of place, in fact, where the only Westerners will be people on generous expatriate terms.  Employed, in other words, by a company that makes very big money.  But not finance, because he would live closer to Central.  So, an industry that rakes it in from huge government contracts.  Infrastructure, say.)

To confirm that there is no such person and Rory O’Grady is the figment of a government information officer’s expansive creative capacity, I Google it.  And… oh, dear.  Steel Structures Coordination Manager at Maeda Hitachi Yokogawa Hsin Chong JV. Proudly worked on Stonecutters Bridge, a pointless engineering marvel that, at HK$3.7 billion, looks like a bargain next to the high-speed rail link.

If the rail project suffers cost overruns comparable with those of the bridge, originally slated at HK$2.7 billion, it will cost us over HK$80 billion – a figure already predicted by some sceptics.

Where have we heard the name Hsin Chong before?  It was the construction company barred from government contracts for a few years after a short-piling scandal in the late 1990s.  With most of Hong Kong’s 7 million people being too dim-witted to be allowed to take part in government in any fashion, it is only natural that we can find personal links between the firm and officialdom.  Specifically, HK executive council member V Nee Yeh is a scion of the company’s founding family and former chairman.  Unlike letter-writers in newspapers, of course, Exco members have to declare interests.

What am I saying?  There must be thousands of people in Hong Kong called Rory O’Grady.

Everyone has known for years that Chinese local authorities operate detention centres in Beijing to prevent their citizens from petitioning central government about corruption back in their home counties and towns.  Except, apparently, Human Rights Watch, which has only just found out.

Still, better late than never – because President Barack Obama is about to visit China.  While there, he will express his horror at the torture, rape and sheer inhumanity of these “black jails” and the injustices around the country that lead desperate working people to go to the capital to seek redress.  His host, President Hu Jintao, will reply, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.  We are always eager to learn from our foreign friends how we may improve governance in our country.  These terrible problems should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and I will fix them immediately.”

China’s top-down system by which central edicts are enforced by threats passed down through the chain of command goes back centuries.  A rough example:

Minister to sub-minister: “Produce result, or your chances of making Politburo will be hurt”

Sub-minister to Province chief: “Produce result, or you won’t be promoted to Beijing”

Province chief to city boss: “Produce result, or we’ll transfer you to a town too poor to pay decent bribes”

City boss to county boss: “Produce result, or you won’t get a bonus at the end of the year”

County boss to township boss: “Produce result, or you’ll lose two months’ salary”

Township boss to cadres and cops: “Produce result, or I’ll fire you and your family will have nothing”

The threat of punishment from above is why vicious fights, even to death, break out between low-level municipal enforcement officials and illegal street vendors: one group will lose its livelihood – it’s just a question of which.  It is why Falun Gong practitioners have been murdered by local police.  It is why local officials, with strict birth limits to enforce, compel women to have abortions.  It is why tens of millions starved and people in Guizhou turned to cannibalism in the early 1960s when officials falsified food production data.  It is why SARS killed nearly 300 people in Hong Kong when Guangdong cadres covered up the disease rather than warn us.  Higher officials don’t order juniors to fix problems; they just demand that there shall be no word of problems and aren’t interested in how that’s arranged.

This “who needs carrots when you’ve got huge sticks” system is an especially effective way of implementing quotas.  In the 1950s, Mao Zedong handed down minimum percentages of the population to be executed as counter-revolutionaries.  During the anti-rightist campaign around 1957, work units were given quotas of subversives to expose; managers who failed to produce enough were denounced themselves for hiding fellow rightists.

Is this any way, Obama could ask Hu, to run an emerging superpower?  Hu might ask what alternative there is, given that the Chinese people are too immature to exercise accountability over their leaders, or the conditions aren’t ripe, or foreigners are plotting to plunge the nation into chaos, or whatever the reason is these days.  Or he could be honest: the system works extremely well in a society where the power-holders have always seen the population as their property.

Speaking of which… Next week: Human Rights Watch organizes an underground railroad to help slaves in Maryland escape to Canada.

Predictable lawyerly frothing at the mouth ensues after Zhang Xiaoming, deputy director of Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, praises Macau’s judiciary for co-operating with the former Portuguese territory’s executive and legislative branches.  (Sleaze City is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its handover.)  This, he declares, is more “constructive” than the system in Hong Kong.  In other words, our independent judiciary impedes effective administration.

This is not new.  National People’s Congress chairman Wu Bangguo denounced the separation of powers two years ago, which would have been fine except it was during a conference on Hong Kong’s Basic Law.  The concept of checks and balances is simply not compatible with Chinese Communist Party supremacy and one-party rule, nor does it resonate with Chinese political tradition, notably the principle that the law means whatever the emperor/CCP wants it to mean, and the sovereign itself is above it.

Since the handover in 1997, Hong Kong’s courts have found against the government on such issues as right of abode, privatization of shopping and parking facilities in public housing estates, a different age of consent for gays and the right to free speech via unlicensed radio broadcasts.  In some cases, the administration has succeeded in overturning the decisions in higher courts, but in others it has had to back off and even re-write laws.  Applying for judicial review – walking in off the street and asking the court to rule on whether a government action is lawful – has become a valued tactic for dissenters among the Big Lychee’s disfranchised people.

Over in Macau, meanwhile, the leaders have not found the courts especially troublesome.  The city’s top public works official up to 2006, Ao Man-long, certainly didn’t imagine that they would cause him any problems as he brazenly took some US$100 million in bribes from developers in return for un-tendered rights to public land.

It is hard not to notice when, year after year, parcel after parcel after parcel of land gets handed out with no public tender (though lack of an independent legislature, opposition press or assertive civic society helps).  No-one in Macau imagines that Ao, who reported directly to Beijing-appointed chief executive Edmund Ho, could have been in on this alone.  Many rather charmingly believe that Beijing made Ho pay for a 2008 rebate to every citizen out of his own pocket as punishment.

The equivalent in Hong Kong would have been if secretary for development Carrie Lam had doled out Cyberport-style private land treaties for years to every tycoon in town and then, when the smell became overpowering, was exposed with HK$15 billion stuffed in her Bottega Veneta handbag, while her boss and colleagues declared themselves, like Captain Renault, “shocked… shocked!”

(The whistle was blown by Hong Kong officials who noticed vast quantities of cash flowing through the banking system from Ao’s direction and reported it to the central authorities.)

When the decision was made, by whoever made it, to pin it all on Ao, it happened efficiently.  He was tried in Macau’s Court of Final Appeal (with, of course, no right of appeal), his indictment was never made public, and the whole trial was over in weeks.

This, in Beijing’s eyes, is better, more constructive, governance than Hong Kong’s.  Scary.

Imagine an institution that encompasses the vanity of Hong Kong tycoons, the grubbiest sort of money-making, determined shoe-shining and the Communist Party’s united front.

I stumbled upon it while perusing the on-line thoughts, charms and theories of newly listed property giant Evergrande’s boss Xu Jiayin (2^nd from right) and noticing that as well as the titles Mr, Chairman and Professor, he answers to ‘Dr’.  This is because Hui Ka-yan, as Cantonese know him, received the World Outstanding Chinese Award, which comes with an honorary degree thrown in from a little heard-of American university – in this case, one West Alabama.

A bit of rummaging around, and we find that Emperor Entertainment Group boss Albert Yeung (far left in the group) also received the Award and the West Alabama honorary doctorate.  Whether the other three fine, upstanding businessmen in the picture – Charles Ho, Joseph Lau or Cheng Yu-tung – have been similarly recognized, I am not sure.

Some tycoons have a curious hankering for symbols of rank, and seem to feel it keenly when they are for whatever reasons not deemed worthy of the better-known academic qualifications or civic honours.  So there is obviously a market opportunity.  Antares Cheng of King Power, for example, not only got the Outstanding Chinese Award, but was feted as one of China’s Top Ten Financial and Intelligent Persons at Diaoyutai state guest house, no less.  This is a sort of parallel universe of recognition.  Most of us, if we have ever heard of Leung Lun of Lung Cheong toys, know him as the sweatshop-factory owner investigated by labour rights activists in 2005.  To readers of the CCP-backed Wen Wei Po, however, he is the Outstanding Chinese Awardee who gets a full-page spread.

The universities offering the honorary doctorates in conjunction with the Award are not, perhaps, household names.  Dr Chrissie Wo of Charmonde Group got her title from a place called Armstrong that receives a less-than-glowing review from one student.  Tony Wong of Jade Dynasty got his from New Castle (or Newcastle), which has no ‘.edu’ extension but claims accreditation from an agency in the Kingdom of Wallis and Fatuna Islands.  (No such place, though a small French colony has a similar name.)

What’s going on here?  The World Outstanding Chinese Association is run by the United World Chinese Association, a united front vehicle.  It also runs Outstanding World Chinese Entrepreneur, Capital-raiser, Investor, Designer, Doctor, Artist, you-name-it associations and awards.  The mainland body that names asteroids after famous Chinese seems to be buried away in here somewhere.  The Awards are handed out every year, usually at the HK Convention and Exhibition Centre, in the presence of a few local worthies from the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – the parliamentary equivalents of Armstrong and New Castle Universities.

The deal (I happen to know) is that you make a suggested donation, perhaps in the US$50,000-100,000 range.  The nomination form rather presumptuously asks you on the back page to fill in your hat, shoulder and other sizes, so you can wear academic-looking robes at the conferment ceremony when academic-looking white men hand you your doctorate.  Everyone approached is both wealthy and firmly in the patriotic, pro-Beijing milieu.

A bit of harmless fun for self-made rich people sensitive about being poorly educated?  Cruel and sad exploitation of vulnerable, shallow and miserable millionaires?  Or perhaps it is something more sinister: a way for the forces of darkness in Beijing to accumulate leverage over people for possible future blackmail – do as we say or we’ll tell everyone about that time you paid for a phony doctorate from New Castle U.

Or… could it be a devilish plot to undermine the integrity of the Western world’s higher education institutions in the eyes of sensible Chinese people ?  If so, I’m impressed!

Another Remembrance Sunday in honour of the war dead, another moan about why the Hong Kong government sends the lowest-level official it can find.

Between bombing Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and accepting the surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942, Japanese forces took Hong Kong.  The city was poorly defended and its British, Indian, Canadian and locally raised troops had as good as lost within days.  In the history of the war – Japan had been conquering parts of eastern and central China for over four years and was now taking over oil- and rubber-rich Southeast Asia – it was a sideshow.

For Hong Kong, it was a disaster.  Take a glance at the shelves in local English-language bookshops, and you get the impression that it was the British who fought, the British who were killed or interned in appalling conditions, the British who suffered, and the British and loyal supporters who continued the war behind enemy lines.  Books like Not the Slightest Chance focus on the stirring tales the target audience wants to hear, and they do it brilliantly.  But the British courage and suffering were largely irrelevant compared with the wider conflict.

The majority of Hong Kong people who survived the assault eventually fled to the mainland in search of food.  Those who stayed often struggled for survival and had little choice but to cooperate with the occupiers.  Many local Chinese businessmen collaborated with the Japanese and in some cases profited handsomely.  Many Indian servicemen switched sides, signing up to a Japanese-run pro-Indian independence movement.

On the mainland, Kuomintang and Communist forces had long been fighting each other as well as – or even instead of – the supposedly common enemy.  The Communists’ agenda was preserving their strength for post-war revolution, while the KMT leadership’s priority was extracting and pocketing aid from the Americans.  Both sides had resistance units in the Pearl River Delta, but the biggest and most effective was the Dongjiang Column, a Communist-led guerilla group that went on to help defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in the region in the late 1940s.  At least, history being written by the victors, that’s the official version.  Given the poor record of the KMT and the traditional strength of leftists in the area it is probably true enough.

Seen in this context, colonial Hong Kong’s traditional marking of Remembrance Sunday always had an insular air about it. The governor turned up in his uniform to lay wreaths at the cenotaph in Central, while members of the garrison lined up and medal-clad veterans in wheelchairs looked on and told reporters about the torture, starvation and death they had seen in the Japanese prison camps.  Some of them were Macanese: mixed-race Portuguese speakers.  In the 1930s and 40s, they had been second-class residents in the notoriously snobbish colony, but now they were heroes; it would not be pushing the truth much to say they were virtually the nearest thing to a Chinese presence in the proceedings.

Soon after the handover in 1997, Hong Kong officially recognized the Dongjiang Column’s role; ex-members living in the Big Lychee received pensions and the names of the fallen were inscribed on the war memorial.  The chief executive stopped attending the Commonwealth-centric commemorative event in November and started to go to a ceremony alongside local PRC officials and Dongjiang Column veterans on the Chung Yeung festival a few weeks earlier.  As well as dispatching the director of protocol – who presumably sends himself – the government still honours Remembrance Sunday with its traditional notice about traffic arrangements.

Will Hong Kong’s pro-democrats be dumb enough to let Beijing split them over whether to accept a promised future deal in exchange for supporting a constitutional reform package for 2012 that changes nothing?  It is not necessarily a rhetorical question, like an enquiry about the Pope’s religion or the toilet habits of forest-dwelling bears.  It should be obvious by now to the entire spectrum of pro-democrats that ‘gradual and orderly progress’ towards universal suffrage is in fact a succession of bait-and-switches and empty promises.

The first two rounds of political reform after 1997, spelt out in the Basic Law annexes, expanded the proportion of democratically elected seats in the Legislative Council to half.  This, combined with the executive branch’s loss of respect generally among lawmakers, has forced administration officials to work harder lobbying and cajoling legislators to get bills passed and funding approved.  But that was the full extent of any redistribution of power.

Any further increase in the proportion of democratically elected seats could shift the balance more seriously.  For example, the administration might find itself forced into boosting social welfare spending in order to get an annual budget approved.  That is why the third round of reform proposed in 2005, intended to apply in 2008, offered no real change.  And it is why the suggested arrangements for 2012 won’t either, even if they appear more substantial.  Democratization of the legislature has gone as far as it can go without putting ‘executive-led government’ in peril – in other words, theoretically endangering the Chinese Communist Party’s absolute control, as exercised through appointment of a chief executive with a pliant legislature.

Where selection of the chief executive is concerned, there has been no substantive change whatsoever since 1997.  As things currently stand, 220,000 citizens supposedly drawn from a representative range of social and economic sectors elect 800 members of an election committee.  Because of the discriminating selection of sectors and their uneven weightings, the result is an overwhelmingly loyalist electoral college, which rubber-stamps Beijing’s choice of chief executive in a ridiculous charade that even the overseas press, to their shame, take semi-seriously.

It is perfectly possible to increase these figures – turn 800 into 1,200 or 1,600, for example – while changing nothing at all in practice, though such a rigged system looks less and less convincing as the numbers rise. Yet Beijing has conceded a possibility of full universal suffrage – involving all 3.4 million registered voters – in the next CE election but one, in 2017.  If so, and if we are talking direct election, the question is: what number is x, in the progression

800 (2008), x (2012), 3,400,000 (2017)?

Or, if we are going the indirect, electoral college, route, what number is x in the progression

220,000 (2008), x (2012), 3,400,000 (2017)?

If x, in the proposals for expanding involvement in the 2012 CE election, is not a number making up significant ground between the 2008 and 2017 figures, it should be finally, abundantly, unambiguously clear to even the most obtuse pro-democrats that they are being strung along.  And a minor tweaking, say raising 800 to 1,600, is more than likely.  (This all disregards structural and procedural details – another dimension of vote-rigging altogether.)

Yet some members of the pro-democratic camp are distinctly more flexible than others, and some could potentially be lured by a vague promise of talks.  Unless they all hang together, an empty, non-reform package will get through, and Beijing will have satisfied its need to appear to be moving forward without freeing Hong Kong from the grip of its ruling clique of bureaucrats and tycoons.

The deal is: if you don’t ask for democracy, you won’t get it; and if you do ask, you won’t get it either.  Ideally, the imminent public consultation on reform will convince the pro-democrats once and for all of this, and they will take the fight somewhere more useful – like a land system that is pretty much designed to force Hong Kong’s middle class to divert a big share of their lifetime’s earnings to half a dozen families via the rigged property market. Nothing more pleases our local self-styled elites than the sight of pan-democrats banging their heads against the universal suffrage wall year after year after year.

On a more serious note, a group of pert but perhaps potentially ferocious young ladies have unveiled the honours that will be awarded to the top athletes at the East Asian Games.  The ancient Greeks, of course gave the winners olive wreaths, and in the early modern Olympics, victorious sportsmen received little gifts like umbrellas.  Since then, it has become the norm to hand out medals made of gold, silver and bronze.

The Hong Kong games, however, will feature a far more creative sort of prize altogether: squashed doughnuts.  It is a long story, going back to the closure of the Big Lychee’s Krispy Kreme outlets last year, involving a collision between a steamroller and a container full of the failed franchise’s coconut-, lemon- and chocolate-flavoured inventory.  And there I was, thinking the East Asian Games couldn’t get any more exciting!

The recent change in season in Hong Kong following the arrival of the winter monsoon coincides with another biannual event: the news report that Shanghai is about to go ahead with its own Disneyland.  It is a story we have read at roughly six-monthly intervals since well before our own Magic Kingdom even opened for business in 2005.  Now it seems it might finally happen.

As part of its negotiations with the Hong Kong Government in 1998-99, the entertainment giant dropped heavy hints that it would walk away from the deal and set up shop over the border, either in Zhuhai (close and dumb enough with money to sound credible) or up in Shanghai (then, as ever, about to take over from Hong Kong).  To hear our leaders tell it at the time, this tacky tourist attraction would give a massive, life-saving boost to our economy.

Whether they believed it themselves is hard to say, but bureaucrats gleefully following orders, like the then-tourism commissioner, stuffed public wealth down the Mouse’s gullet and signed a contract essentially leaving us providing the capital and Toontown taking the profits.  So it felt like an act of betrayal when in 2003 Shanghai officials started mouthing off about hosting a real, proper-size version of the theme park.

Sensitive and nervous Hongkongers, already suicidal because of SARS, the property crash and Tung Chee-hwa, were plunged into the depths of despair.  It wasn’t just that, if officials were right about our Disneyland’s future economic importance, a bigger and better facility in East China spelt doom.  It was the very principal that a mainland city could break our monopoly on something.  How can we make a living if we can’t overcharge people for rubbish because they have no choice?

With far more space and cheaper workers, the Mouse’s Magic Middle Kingdom will easily outperform Hong Kong’s.  Some of our officials will have to take a break from spreading panic about marginalization to tell us why a Disneyland in friendly Shanghai will be a wonderful thing, bringing copious amounts of synergy and partnership and opportunity and integration.  At the very least they will have to explain why our Minnie-version will remain an attraction.  (Hint: they’re 700 miles apart.)

Another challenge for our officials is that their wily Shanghainese counterparts, having watched how the southern barbarians begged Mickey to shaft them, will almost certainly negotiate a much better deal.

The Yangtze River Delta offers space, young graduates happy with RMB1,000 a month and 100 million or whatever spoilt only-children whose parents obey their every command.  They don’t need to grovel: Disney wants to be there.  In Hong Kong, meanwhile (just a few months back), the company successfully used sackings of staff as a way to squeeze more out of our administration.  (“Market leads, government facilitates” in action.)

Citizens of the Big Lychee, noticing which city’s leaders played the better hand, will draw their own conclusions.  For the eternal optimists among us, it sounds like a great excuse to shut the Lantau place down, chop up all the castles and caves and burn them (it’s all made of wood, right?) to keep ourselves warm during the colder months ahead.