Big Lychee, Various Sectors

A predictable and unappealing – not to say slappable – gang of pro-Beijing business folk and politicians announce the formation of the Alliance for Constitutional Development to encourage the silent majority to contribute to the debate on the Hong Kong government’s proposed non-reforms to the political structure for the 2012 elections.  One member, accountant Fanny Lai, said on the radio this morning that the idea was to get the views of people who “don’t feel comfortable,” as she more or less put it, “writing in Chinese or English.”

The phrase ‘silent majority’ goes back at least as far as Richard Nixon, who used it in a famous 1969 speech appealing to the non-chattering classes to support his Vietnam policy.  That such a group exists and outnumbers those who follow (and drone on endlessly about) current affairs is undeniable.  They are not necessarily inarticulate or semiliterate, but they are probably non-ideological.  They probably abdicate themselves from participation in debate for a variety of reasons: they are too busy with family or work to think about politics; they believe nothing they do will make a difference; or they find sport more interesting.  Unlike Singaporeans, Hong Kong people do not have to keep quiet out of fear.

One possible common characteristic of this unheard mass of our population is that they see no irony in apparently being reached out to by a few dozen rich, well-connected members of the ‘elite’ seeking to preserve ill-gotten privileges.  Another is that, if offered the chance to bid in an auction for the right to whack a moderately heavy wet fish against the chubby, self-satisfied cheeks of Maria Tam (nasty floral outfit, above), they would decline.

Although they deny it, the Alliance initiative is prompted by the plan by two pro-democracy parties to force by-elections for the Legislative Council that would serve as a referendum on universal suffrage.  With the pro-democracy camp split on it, and too far up their own backsides to connect with the ‘silent majority’ who have traditionally voted for them, the idea has a lot of faults.  But there is one intriguing thing about it: it scares the government silly.  The Alliance project, which has an element of astroturfing about it, could in theory raise awareness among the more timid residents of the Big Lychee and spur them into turning up to vote against the pan-democrats if the quasi-referendum happens.

Three newspapers – the Mainland-funded Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao (with no readers) and the tycoon-adoring Sing Tao – are participating in the effort to prompt the voiceless hordes to utter an opinion.  Or will once they get their act together.  So far, Ta Kung Pao is the only one providing an on-line petition supporting implementation of the non-reforms.  Dissenting comments (and I tried) mysteriously fail to get through.

Most residents of the Big Lychee take it for granted that, in return for paying no more than 16% salaries (as opposed to the broader ‘income’) tax, they must lie back and enjoy being rigorously screwed by a wide range of monopolies, duopolies and cartels controlled by a small group of immensely wealthy local families.  Even if you bought and paid for your home years ago, buy groceries from old ladies in street markets and order consumer goods on-line from overseas, you cannot help paying these conglomerates whenever you switch on the stove or light, or take a bus or ferry.  Or make a phone call.

It is an unwritten but blatant government policy to support and defend this system.  The exact reasons for this are murky and go back to colonial times, but it is probably not a coincidence that the cartel-operating dynasties began to pay exaggerated obeisance to the communist rulers of China in the years leading up to the transfer of Hong Kong from the UK in 1997.  It may be that at the time the families successfully fooled China’s unworldly leaders into thinking that they create much of the city’s wealth, when in fact all they do is skim it off. Today, the PRC is increasingly run for such tycoons.

How strange, then, that our officials have taken the side of the ever-exploited consumer after hearing complaints that mobile phone networks are essentially cheating customers through high hidden charges attached to text services.  Of the telecoms companies involved, four are part of the property-cartel-family complex and one is owned by the motherland herelf:

• 3, part of Hutchison, property developer and supermarket/drugstore duopolist, and part of Li Ka-shing’s bigger empire, which includes other retail, electricity generation, construction materials supplies, ports, radio broadcasting and anything else where there isn’t much competition.
• PCCW, part-owned by Li Ka-shing’s number-two son, Richard.
• CSL, ultimately part-owned by New World, the property developer that also runs Citybus and various ferry services, part of Cheng Yu-tong’s empire, including Macau gambling interests.
• SmarTone, ultimately majority-owned by Sun Hung Kai, giant property developer run by the three Kwok brothers.
• Peoples, ultimately owned by the famous apostrophe-using Republic of the same name, via the state-owned China Mobile group.

Telecoms are almost unique among major domestic business sectors in Hong Kong in that it is an area where the authorities specifically abolished a monopoly – a process set in train under the British.  It is also one where competition is relatively simple to enforce and where the government has taken an interest in ensuring consumer choice; attempts by residential property developers to force households on their estates to sign up to their own conglomerate’s telecoms services have been slapped down.  (It is possible that policymakers understand the economy-wide benefits of cheap communications, but then wouldn’t cheaper rents, food and transport boost the city’s competitiveness as well?)

The sector is also unusual because the property tycoons goofed up massively by getting into it.  So accustomed were they to rent-seeking or otherwise sucking profits from captive markets that they piled in without realizing how deregulation and new technology could provide a real, level playing field.  Bewildered by the need to create value, they have floundered, with at least a few either trying to sell out or digging themselves into deeper holes through overseas expansion and/or early adoption of unpopular technology.  And, it now seems, preying on children and the mentally feeble through text-message scams.

Although the authorities are resorting to weak-sounding ‘urging’ and some sort of voluntary code of practice, their swift response indicates that they are serious.  (Put briefly, officials are newly aware that the rapaciousness of the tycoons – exploiting pro-green loopholes to boost property profits, for example – is testing the public’s patience.)  So the poor telecoms firms have lost what was probably a nice little effortless revenue source.

What unbearable sadness: I will break down in tears of grief for them if I think about it any more.

What is wrong with the nativity scene on the Christmas banner outside the Hong Kong Swatow Christian Church next to the Mid-Levels Escalator on the corner of Shelley and Elgin Streets?  (Let’s leave aesthetic considerations aside in this season of goodwill.)

My knowledge of pre-Islamic Middle Eastern architecture is limited, but I do know that at the time of Jesus Christ’s birth there were no mosques and minarets in Nazareth.  Or anywhere.  Minarets obviously originated from other sorts of tower, but the rocket-with-crescent design follows the founding of Islam in the 7th century AD.  It raises the question of how much members of the Swatow (ie Shantou – Teochew/Chaozhou/Chiuchow/whatever) congregation know about the history of their own faith.

In defence of the designer of the banner, I can think of two points.  1) It’s not as if there were any Swiss in Galilee back in those days to hold referendums, so that might tilt the odds very slightly in favour of the ‘early minarets’ argument.  2) If a virgin could give birth there, what other inexplicable phenomena might have been going on?  (For example, maybe there were Swiss there, in which case… oh, never mind.)

This brings me rather neatly to two theological misunderstandings of my own.  As a young Catholic child I frequently had to recite: “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee/Blessed art thou among women/And blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus.”

Which prompted the obvious question, “What’s a womb?”  It was explained to me briefly that a womb was a pear-shaped thing in a woman’s body where babies grow.  So it was clear: the fruit of thy womb was a pear (a green one as I pictured it).  The good news is that I didn’t make a connection with the Garden of Eden’s famous forbidden fruit, which would have further confused things.  However, I misinterpreted the last line as a direct compliment to Jesus, perceiving it as praising him for the blessedness of his womb.  Or at least its pear.

It was around that time that I have my earliest memories of music associated with Christmas.  I noticed that the melody of one of two songs much heard at the time was based on the other’s.  Amid all the bewilderment the Catholic Church saw fit to sow among its progeny, I concluded that this was a copy – quite a lame one, I thought – of this.  This is how members of the flock start to stray.

‘Crossing the river by feeling for the stones’.  The phrase tends to be attributed to late leader Deng Xiaoping, who supposedly used it to describe his pragmatic approach to economic reform (like not worrying overly about the colour of a cat who catches mice or whether flies come in when you open the window).  It conveys a willingness to achieve results while admitting a lack of necessary knowledge.

Down in Hong Kong, the leadership adopts a slightly more carefree approach that might be described as ‘winging it’, or just ‘making it up as you go along’.  Two stories today illustrate this haphazardness, as applied to two areas most communities take seriously: schools and hospitals.

The problem – one of several – with the Big Lychee’s schools is medium of instruction.  Former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, who is looking better with the passing of every day and is probably due for a revisionist historical treatment at some stage, decreed soon after the handover in 1997 that kids should be taught in a language they can understand.  This outraged parents who wanted their children to attend (supposedly prestigious) English-medium schools, regardless of teachers’ or students’ ability to speak or read the language.

Tung at least partially stuck to his guns, and within 10 years mother-tongue teaching had become somewhat more accepted among the city’s lower orders – though there was still resentment that the rich and powerful ordering the new policy made damn sure their own precious offspring went nowhere near (traditionally losers’) Chinese-speaking establishments.  With student numbers declining, however, schools grew desperate to attract parents, and pressure to regain an English-medium tag became irresistible.

So the government of Donald Tsang Yam-kuen broke down, and essentially let schools go back to teaching English during history and chemistry lessons, even though it doesn’t work.  The reversal is called ‘fine tuning’.  It’s bad enough that the education system is focused on rote-learning of facts to be repeated mindlessly in exams – but repeated mindlessly in an unlearned language?

This is ‘crossing the river then turning back and not bothering’.

On the health care side, the administration is offering four plots of (fairly undesirable) land for private operators to set up new hospitals.

The original idea was to encourage inbound medical tourism as a service export; this was to be one of six new activities officials decided should complement the four ‘pillar industries’ they had earlier earmarked as the foundation of our freewheeling market capitalist economy.

However, the bureaucracy’s desperate planners had failed to consider whether Hong Kong had a comparative advantage in this sector.  The main Asian centres for medical tourism are India and Thailand, and their success is essentially due to their very low costs, which attract patients from high-price places like the US, Europe and… Hong Kong.  Officials may as well have tried to make the Big Lychee into a hub for cheap plastic toys.

So they backtracked and mumbled hopefully about possibly pulling in mainlanders or others seeking niche services (boob jobs?) before bowing to reality, as articulated by David Ricardo 200 years ago.  The plan now is to encourage investors to build new hospitals for the local market; in return for cheap land, the new facilities would have to offer a wide range of services, priced low enough to be accessible to the Hong Kong middle class, who currently clog up the virtually free public sector.  (Or they go to Bangkok, so there’s a dash of import substitution here.)

There is a wide gap between our public and private hospitals in terms of fees and clienteles, and with demand rising, new mid-range options would be useful.  But as is always the case when the Hong Kong government tries to attract investors into unviable industries through the lure of cheap land, there is a major tension.  Companies bidding for the leases will be looking for loopholes: how to convert the unpaid-for value of the space into maximum profits while appearing to stick to the bargain struck with the government to serve social interests.

In the past (Cyberport, ‘green’ features in buildings, hotels that turn out to be apartments, etc) business has run rings around bureaucrats – so effortlessly that it has looked suspiciously like connivance.  But public tolerance has worn thin, and top officials will be having sleepless nights if and when tenders start to come in.  Maybe they will plead behind the scenes with non-profits to take an interest.  One thing is certain: if any of the usual big names, like developers, submit bids, it will not be out of a desire to provide affordable health care to anyone.

This is ‘crossing the river by turning back and choosing a smaller one’.

The Far Eastern Economic Review has printed its last issue.  The title was founded in Hong Kong in 1946, but several distinct publications used the name in succession.  The weekly I started reading in the 1980s was knowledgeable and sometimes so in-depth as to be barely penetrable to any but the most devoted follower of Asian political and economic affairs.  Where an averagely dutiful student of the region would find one or two columns enough – on the political situation in Laos, say, or a business deal in Korea – FEER would deliver three fact- and analysis-filled pages.  You would get a picture if you were lucky.

In the late 1980s, Dow Jones took full ownership.  Outsiders could infer from grumbles and goings-on that the new American overseers were culturally mismatched with the old-school British, Australian and Indian reporters.

In the 1990s, Karen Elliott House, assistant (and wife) of Dow Jones boss Peter Kann, would swoop into town from time to time to sack people and beat a more Wall Street Journal type of ideology into the editorial stance.  FEER started to show unmistakable signs of dumbing down.  To the old Asia hands who had worked at legendary editor Derek Davies’s regional journal of record, this was the beginning of the end, and part of the evil Dow Jones plan.

It was true that the magazine competed with the WSJ’s up-and-coming Asian edition, so DJ had an interest in differentiating it (and in not selling it to a rival publisher).  But advertising space was already getting harder to sell, as all sorts of new media appeared in various languages around the region, and later on-line.  Readership was also already declining; as we shall see, this was arguably caused by a cultural trend no owner or editor could have overcome.

The last straw for me, and apparently many others, was a glossy multi-page feature on our friend the chilli pepper and its role in Asian people’s lives.  I don’t recall whether the article contained any recipes, but I don’t think it was that useful or factual.

Five years ago to the month, issue No 1, Vol 168 of FEER came out.  Except it wasn’t FEER.  What appeared was a monthly journal in paperback format published by the same part of DJ that produced the Asia Wall Street Journal.  Unlike the 1980s FEER, with its network of correspondents and reporters, it had nothing but a tiny in-house staff.  Subsequent editions revealed a focus that was largely on policy, and contributors who were predominantly dry, obscure academics and – even worse – self-important, blather-ridden conference-whores like former Philippines President Fidel Ramos, via ghost-writers.

That could have been the end of the story.  But against the odds – given that DJ didn’t seem to take it very seriously – the monthly FEER perked up and started to get material from authoritative people in journalism, finance and elsewhere with interesting things to say.  In 2006 it attained the ultimate accolade for a publication worth reading by being banned in Singapore.  This month’s last-ever issue was one of the best.

The crusty old denizens of the classic pre-90s version of FEER will never forgive DJ for deliberately killing the organ that carried much of their life’s best work.  They will doubtless be infuriated by an alternative view of the magazine’s demise offered in the final issue (by someone from the DJ side of the fence).

According to this analysis, FEER belonged to a milieu from a bygone age:

For several decades spanning the era of late colonialism in the 1950s to the spread of intense globalization in the early 1990s, a unique cultural niche sprang up in Asia. It was a transitory and transnational community peopled by Western expats—diplomats, executives, scholars and travelers—and local Asian elites in business, government and education who were themselves products of the colonial era.

It is not just that the younger generations have a much broader range of international and local media to choose from; they have a different way of seeing things from the fundamentally ‘British Commonwealth’ (not that he says that) outlook of the old hands.  FEER, according to this analysis, catered for the expats in safari suits who had long liquid lunches on Saturdays before heading back to close the office, and the local civil servants who couldn’t stop writing memos in English after independence.

Having witnessed their twilight days, I think he has a point.

The main thing: How many millions will my copies of the first and last monthly FEER be worth on eBay in 20 years?

To no-one’s great surprise, High Court Judge Andrew Cheung Kiu-nang rules that Hong Kong’s Basic Law does not bar non-humans from voting in elections.  The inert entities concerned are companies and other organizations that currently have the right to cast ballots for (human) candidates running for functional constituency seats in the Legislative Council.  (In practice, a warm, breathing, flesh-and-blood chairman or chief executive exercises the right, though many of these races for seats representing very small franchises are uncontested.)

This is the result of a judicial review sought by the League of Social Democrats, everyone’s favourite radical trouble-makers.  Abolishing corporate voting is viewed as a relatively minor but essential step in making the functional constituency system more democratic and thus reducing the political clout of particular business interests.  Certain tycoons register numerous companies in order to wield multiple votes, and they make sure that serving or hopeful legislators know it.

The government, in its low-key public consultation on proposed non-changes to the political structure for elections in 2012, asks us:

Do you agree that the method of replacing “corporate votes” with “director’s / executive’s / association’s / individual votes” should not be adopted?

To which the correct answer is, of course, “Yes, I really want non-humans to continue having votes, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

Yesterday’s South China Morning Post featured an article by HK University visiting law professor Richard Cullen arguing that for various reasons the democratization and ultimate removal of functional constituencies will have to take place in phases.  He then says:

A smart way to approach this task would be to establish a fully independent, statutory, functional constituency electoral commission.

How touching it is to know that naïve, dreamy idealism is alive and well in the ivory towers up at Pokfulam!

The professor overlooks one crucial fact here, and that is that our supreme sovereign power is the Chinese Communist Party, and they do not do independent, statutory, functional constituency electoral commissions – in fact, they don’t do independent anything.

Beijing insists on us having easily manipulated functional constituencies specifically to ensure that we do not have an independent legislative branch.  That won’t change; it cannot, in a one-party state where no possible rival source of political power is permitted.

Similarly, we do not have ultimately independent courts.  As we have seen with the various ‘interpretations’ of the Basic Law since 1997, Beijing can overturn the Hong Kong judiciary’s decisions simply by declaring that the law means something different from what is written.  Whatever the specific arguments in the High Court judicial review on non-human voters, Judge Andrew Cheung surely knew there was no point in bothering to go there.

The Standard’s tragic combination of gushing, groveling coverage for the rich, like Allan Zeman, alongside exposes of nonentities’ sex scandals backfires a bit today…

He who lives by the shoe-shine, dies by the shoe-shine.

The tycoon-owned South China Morning Post and the tycoon-owned Standard today put the spotlight, in their own ways, on scions of Hong Kong’s biggest and richest business dynasties – typically beneficiaries of the tax-farming cartel that is the city’s real-estate industry.

The SCMP reports that Ambassadors of Design wants to co-run the old police quarters in Hollywood Road, which the government has decided to preserve as some sort of hub for creative industries.  Board members include:

Sino Land executive director Daryl Ng Win-kong [Robert Ng’s son]; Alan Lo Yeung-kit, son of Gold Peak Group chairman and former Executive Council member Victor Lo Chung-wing; and Calvin Tien, son of Tourism Board chairman James Tien Pei-chun.

Cynics who see a naked property grab coming can probably relax.  All these 20- and 30-somethings have track records of taking an interest in more or less cultural matters (collecting art, running innovative restaurants, etc), at least by their fathers’ philistine standards.  And without redevelopment (which is not allowed) the site’s potential profitability is pitiful – again, by daddy’s standards.

Ranged against the spoilt rich kids are a group of actual working designers calling themselves the Creative Professionals Association, who would like the premises for people like themselves – lowlier-born types who came up in the world the hard way.  The fear is that the well-heeled culture cabal will pull strings to get the place.

For an idea of what sort of strings they can pull, we need look no further than the Ambassadors of Design’s annual ball. The guests of honour were Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Rita Lau Ng Wai-lan and Deputy Director of Beijing’s Hong Kong office Li Gang.  The event had a tongue-in-cheek Red China theme that presumably went over Li’s head, and the “full support of the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong SAR and the Y. Elites Group.”

So too bad, Creative Professionals.  Choose better family backgrounds next time.

The Post also reports how a tycoons’ kids’ organization called the Y. Elites Group (of Ambassadors’ Ball support fame) sponsored an ATV current affairs show that featured glowing coverage of itself:

Six members of the group were interviewed, including group chairman Jaime Sze Wine-him, who is the son of Sze Chi-ching, a local delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Group vice-chairman Kenneth Fok Kai-kong – grandson of the late Henry Fok Ying-tung, a vice-chairman of the CPPCC – also spoke. Four other members spoke – with all but one driving home the same point: Y. Elites Group was not only for young tycoons – it was not a “gang of princelings”.

Except it is.  The organization is essentially aimed at shoe-shining Beijing in order, presumably, to help ensure that the Central People’s Government and Chinese Communist Party continue to apply the dictatorship of the proletariat in such a way as to guarantee the economic and political privileges enjoyed by these families as the older generation fades from the scene.  People not born into or otherwise exposed to it will just have to put up with the video to get a taste of life in this other-worldly milieu.  (Air motion discomfort receptacle advised.)

(While we’re at it, let’s not forget Centum Charitas.  Drawn from a similar, if slightly older, group of scions to Y. Elites, this group was founded in 2007, probably at the behest of Li Gang, to portray the next generation of cartel operators as socially responsible citizens committed to the well-being of all the little people and thus social harmony.  Peter Lee Ka-kit, heir to Henderson Land, is the leading light.)

Over at the Standard, the above two stories about the next generation of our distinctly non-meritocratic, competition-shy business elite mysteriously go unmentioned.  The paper does, however, devote ample space to the upcoming issue of its fellow Sing Tao publication, The Peak.  The obsequious glossy’s December edition features 29-year-old Adrian Cheng Chi-Kong, grandson of New World property empire’s Dr Cheng Yu-tung, son of Henry Cheng Kar-shun, and Committee Member of the All-China Youth Federation, Member of the Tianjin Municipal Committee of The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Consultant of the Beijing Municipal Committee of The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Chairman of China Young Leaders Foundation, Honorary Chairman of Fundraising Committee, Wu Zhi Qiao (Bridge to China) Charitable Foundation – and Chairman of the Y. Elites Forum Organizing Committee.

“A young master’s touch.”  The Peak cover, Dec 2009

“The cadres of our Party and state are ordinary workers and not overlords sitting on the backs of the people.”  Mao Zedong, Jul 1964