Big Lychee, Various Sectors

“The people have lost the confidence of the government; the government has decided to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one.”

China’s leaders have lost trust in Hong Kong.  So says Executive Council member Cheng Yiu-tong.  I was always led to believe that a government that cannot trust its own people is, by definition, unfit to govern.  But obviously I am out of touch.  It seems the Big Lychee’s population is not worthy of its rulers.  Maybe they should return us to the previous owner.

Self-appointed messengers for Beijing are like people who claim to know what God thinks: we can ignore them, mock them, feign interest out of politeness or nervousness, or pay attention just in case the supreme power concerned really is speaking to us.  Cheng certainly wishes that we had not been listening; like several others who strut around conveying the Politburo’s innermost thoughts to us mere mortals, he has backtracked, and will probably be taking sleeping pills for the next few weeks while getting over the trauma of being caught putting words into the emperor’s mouth.

Also as a result of the fracas outside the central government liaison office on Sunday, Oracle Cheng revealed, we might be given an “even more Beijing-friendly” chief executive.  This is an interesting comment. First, we have to wonder: “even more Beijing-friendly” than what?  Donald?  Henry?  CY?  Second, he is clearly implying that Beijing-friendliness is, to Hong Kong people, some sort of a threat, maybe even a form of punishment.  That is not the official line, nor, given that President Hu and Premier Wen outperform our local leaders in public opinion polls with ease, is it even particularly true.

On a brighter note, the Standard’s obsequious gossip column passes along the mind-numbingly predictable word that Lan Kwai Fong landlord Allan “even more Beijing-friendly” Zeman is in line to become chairman of the Hong Kong Tourism Board.

If someone tried to give me a job currently occupied by former Liberal Party boss James Tien, I would be tempted to hit them, or at least strike them off my Christmas card list with maximum prejudice.  Could there be any greater insult?  But Zeman will no doubt regard it as a great honour.  (He might even find something useful for the organization to do – for example, use it as a storage place for his bars’ non-perishable supplies, so Central doesn’t get clogged up so much with delivery trucks bringing in tons of beer, Perrier and peanuts all day.)

Anyway, for those who can tear their gaze away from the great entrepreneur’s leering visage, the eye-catching thing about the Standard’s remarks on the ex-Canadian is the use of inverted commas around his citizenship, as in ‘he became “Chinese” in 2008’.  His passport may say Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo on the front, but obviously he can’t really be one of us – the Standard/Sing Tao writer knows – because he’s white, and the whole thing’s just a sort of funny novelty, like dressing a chimpanzee up in a T-shirt and shorts.  And they’re shoe-shining him.

The “deep-rooted contradictions” premier Wen Jiabao underlined in his meeting last week with Hong Kong’s increasingly distressed chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen were, Sir Bow-Tie insisted, economic.  So we will have to find another word to describe the plain weirdness in today’s papers, since the underlying problem would appear to be a political structure in which the opposition rather than the government has the electoral mandate – rather than, say, weak GDP growth.

First, a group of engineers born since the 1950s who favour democracy proclaim their support for the HK$67 billion high-speed rail line, and thus their contradiction or whatever to the youthful idealists born since the 1980s who favour democracy and oppose the project.

The graying professionals essentially criticize the youngsters for being misled by radicals (Long Hair’s League of Social Democrats) and imperiling prospects for universal suffrage by politicizing the infrastructure boondoggle.  The fact that this argument itself drags political reform into the debate seems to escape them, but is a well-known characteristic of human nature that when our personal interests are involved, objectivity and conscience about the greater good go out the window.

To complicate matters, a parallel group of engineers – the Professional Commons, who have mounted an informed and detailed campaign to slash the costs of the platinum-plated rail line – lash out at officials for (though they’re too polite to put it this way) lying behind their backs about their proposal.  The sheer poverty of confidence, intellect and integrity in the administration makes the charge impossible to disbelieve.

Cue transport secretary Eva Cheng justifying the rail link on the grounds that her recent trip on the Wuhan bullet train didn’t make her dizzy.  She obviously wasn’t thinking about that astronomical sum of money.

From pro-democrats fighting for corporate handouts to tycoons claiming to want political reform: tycoons such as Hopewell Holdings’ Gordon Wu, Chinese Estates’ Joseph Lau and Stanley Ho’s daughter Pansy proclaim themselves members of the silent majority.  Even if the cost leaves her unfazed, Eva’s head will surely spin at the (non-contradictory) incongruity of this.

Who would be so cruel as to shove poor old Sir Gordon into this assembly of second-rate real-estate flippers?  The fingerprints of the Chinese government’s local liaison office – the Rich Patriots’ Astroturfing Department, to be precise – are all over the place.  But why?  Are we seriously expected to be inspired or persuaded by an extremely wealthy and privileged group of Beijing’s useful idiots?  Does someone genuinely imagine that we hero-worship Gordon Wu, think Joseph Lau is a hunk or have a picture of Pansy pinned to the wall at our bedside?  This isn’t contradiction so much as hallucination.

Last but not least, the South China Morning Post devotes its front page to CY Leung’s Hong Kong Journal article, concluding more or less that it is both an election manifesto and a public rebuttal of Donald Tsang.  There isn’t much Donald can do about this, because of course there is no deep-rooted or other contradiction to be seen here; even taking CY’s Executive Council Convenor badge away would be out of line.  Nothing strange about a cabinet member running around bad-mouthing unpopular official policy and making himself a man of the people while the chief executive-in-waiting Henry Tang has to sit in silence doing his nice-but-dim act.  Nothing odd at all.

We must focus on the economy.

As if I didn’t have enough reading material to choose from after a much-anticipated Christmas-related parcel from Amazon arrives, the latest edition of Hong Kong Journal appears.  It is a curious little on-line publication, funded by a Carnegie endowment, edited by former South China Morning Post editor Robert Keatley and ignored by virtually everyone, except me.  Despite occasional content of questionable value – an article by ex-Liberal Party boss James Tien, inheritor of Shanghai textiles wealth, for example – it usually has a few items worth looking at.

For example, former journalist and government advisor Leo Goodstadt discusses Hong Kong leaders’ aversion since 1998 to social expenditure, justified by scaremongering about the burden of the elderly, despite having excessive amounts of revenue, rising poverty rates and deteriorating standards of health care and education for the masses.

Then there is the piece by Leung Chun-ying, “considered by many,” the Journal says, “the leading candidate to succeed Donald Tsang in 2012 as the government’s next chief executive.”  Among members of the Leung household, maybe; I can think of some 7 million people who assume that Beijing will hand the crown to chief secretary Henry Tang, inheritor of Shanghai textiles wealth, with a senior civil servant-turned-minister to act as his eyes and ears (not to mention at least one other organ of the head).

More’s the pity.  CY would like the job, and after the rolling disaster stories known as Tung Chee-hwa and Donald Tsang Yam-kuen it would be nice to have someone who is neither the scion of a Shanghainese fortune nor a lifelong bureaucrat stuck in a 1970s policy time-warp (let alone a double-act).

On the face of it, he should be a shoe-in.  He is of Shandong extraction (nothing personal, but Beijing feels a bit more comfortable with a non-Cantonese).  He was a paid-up member of the patriotic pro-Communist cause way back in the 1970s, when the Tungs, Tangs, Tiens et al were still furiously licking and polishing the colonial British shoes young Donald daydreamed of one day filling.  But he has a problem.  He is rich, but his wealth is essentially self-made, and it did not come from being a privileged member of the property or old textile cartel-scams.  For reasons that can only be guessed at – probably the growing corrupt linkages between the CCP and Greater China’s tycoon caste – we can be pretty sure Beijing will go for old-money/new patriot Henry.  It doesn’t help that the property moguls detest CY.

CY does have (or at least has had) a faction that supports him in the upper reaches of the central people’s government.  But he must feel his only real chance is to play the public opinion card.  Beijing learnt the hard way with Tung that a Hong Kong chief executive has to be acceptable to the city’s people – that’s what we like to think, at least – and in this Journal article CY turns the volume of his 2012 election campaign up another notch.  Quite an important notch, too, as for the first time he is pretty openly criticizing the current government, of which he is a rather enigmatic and aloof non-executive member.

He makes many of the same points as his fellow-contributor:

…over the last decade … labour productivity improved by almost 4% a year even though real wages rose by an annual average of less than 0.5%. (Goodstadt)

…a million people – about 30% of Hong Kong’s workforce – earned less in 2006 than they did in 1996. In the same decade, GDP per capita increased by 34%. (Leung)

His analysis, more forthright than in his undeclared campaign up to now, is an indictment of the policies of Donald Tsang and his deputy, Henry Tang: our problems require internal reform not external intervention; inequality is a serious threat; probably only around a quarter of the population are getting a fair deal; homes are far too expensive and far too small; suspicions of collusion are widespread; is it any wonder people vote for Long Hair?

Leung adds a barely disguised attack on our officials’ self-conscious and nervous relationship with mainland counterparts, the message being of course that he has contacts and decades of experience up there, and the Tsang-Tang bunch don’t even know how to play the game.  For good measure, he proposes a style of governance that many in Hong Kong as well as Beijing might like to hear: a strong executive with little time for legislators, in exchange for people-based policies.

If you’re looking for a commitment to universal suffrage, or even existing rights like press freedom, you won’t get it here.  But there is probably no need to worry, because CY’s proto-candidacy is a long shot.  Originally founded to defend the downtrodden masses, the CCP is gradually turning into another crony- and corruption-riddled Kuomintang, with inherited political power becoming harder to disentangle from inherited or state-connected wealth.  Self-made entrepreneurs are outsiders. CY is an outsider.  I’m an outsider.  You’re an outsider.  The “poorest in the community who live in public housing” are outsiders.  The “90% of Hong Kong’s population that feels entirely disengaged from the world-leading financial services economy being ‘challenged’ by Shanghai” are outsiders.

Henry it will be.

Good article about being CE though, CY; as the pile in the photo shows, I should read more fiction.

Flicking through the South China Morning Post’s international section this morning, I am delighted to find no fewer than three opportunities to re-read whole, hefty-sized articles that I perused in detail yesterday in the New York Times on-line.  They are ‘Clinton friends deliver US pavilion for Expo’, ‘Millions in US survive on food stamps, no cash’ and (I wasn’t busy) ‘Asian carp stirs legal tussles between Great Lakes states’.  Not only that, but I also have the excitement of these three hitherto unseen headlines, which were crafted from scratch by the SCMP’s sub-editors as original works to fit their own publication’s layout.  As it happens, one enjoyment of each story was enough, but it is thoughtful of them to give us the choice.

Back in the days when we were poorer but happy, readers lunged at two-day-old overseas news items and devoured them.  A weekly airmail edition of a newspaper from the old country – printed on ultra-thin paper – was considered a highly pleasant luxury.  Members of the Foreign Correspondents Club would bicker over the previous week’s London Sunday Times.  I would cross the harbour to treat myself to surprisingly fresh and cheap issues of top overseas papers from an elderly newsvendor outside Kowloon Star Ferry, who got them from her son, who cleaned out aircraft cabins at Kai Tak.  I should have kept the front page that showed a photo of a major air crash and had ‘Courtesy of Cathay Pacific’ stamped in purple on the all black-and-white disaster.  If the idea of colour pictures in newspapers seemed far-fetched in those days, Internet publishing belonged to science fiction: instant news anywhere and anytime.

And free.  Mostly.  It is ironic that if I want to read about Michigan suing Illinois over non-native fish on the SCMP’s website today, I have to be a paid subscriber; but seeing it at www.nytimes.com yesterday cost nothing.  The fact that the SCMP has the nerve to charge for access seems to incense some people, but to the extent that it offers a unique product – (debatably) quality comprehensive English-language coverage of Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta – it would be crazy to give it away.  Probably, too few people (and representing too disparate a demographic) crave English reportage on the Big Lychee on-line to attract advertisers, but they will pay money for it if they lack an acceptable alternative.

Only two other choices exist.  The free Standard is journalistic junk food; indeed, the target audience seems to be the secretaries and accounting ladies that line up at McDonalds in the morning.  Its tabloid prurience, pro-Beijing prejudices and adoration of tycoons make it amusing, but it’s not sustenance.  RTHK3 broadcasts on-line and posts the hourly news.  But it can’t rival a print publication for news depth or what we might call ‘ease of flicking through’ (though if you could skim through it, you would probably find it beats the SCMP’s analysis and commentary, much of which is repetitive or written by people trying to say or stimulate or offend as little as possible).  So, by default, we seem to be stuck with the SCMP and its vestigial two-day-old foreign news.

Having already absorbed Hilary’s Expo fund-raising and the food stamps traumas, I have a bit of time on my hands before today’s New York Times is ready on-line.  So I shall write to the Chinese government suggesting that they change the name of their capital city to Beixing.  This is partly because it could do with re-branding (the new name would mean ‘northern star’, which has a nice ring to it).  Mainly though, it would bring the pronunciation vaguely into line with that used by RTHK3, where newsreaders still, to this day, persist in enunciating the ‘j’ in Beijing as if it were the ‘s’ in ‘pleasure’ (or very roughly the ‘x’ in ‘xing’) when it is approximately an unaspirated ‘ch’ – which is what a ‘j’ basically is, as in, say, ‘jibberish’.

I will also recommend that they change Premier Wen Jiabao’s name so it is pronounced ‘when’ (RTHK-style) rather than ‘won’.  The problem here is that Mandarin Chinese words, and thus Pinyin, don’t really have a sound like the ‘e’ in ‘when’.  So they will have to invent a new letter for the Pinyin alphabet.*  Or maybe Wen could be persuaded to change his family name to something RTHK can’t get wrong, like Ma or Wu.

The SCMP doesn’t cause problems like this.

* Bingo: ê

Two of the worst parts of the body in which to receive a non-life-threatening bullet wound must be the knee and the hand.  So I am mightily impressed by the marksmanship displayed by the Danish police – and right in the middle of the hungover festive season, no less – for getting two bone-shattering rounds into just those delicate and indispensable organs when shooting a Somali axman possessed with a dire need to chop a man to pieces for drawing a cartoon.  Or maybe the Aarhus cops were in too much of an akvavit haze to aim straight and, after much wild firing and ricochets, just got lucky.  In which case, it was the will of God.

Police estimated the crowd at 4,600 (later 9,000).  But for every marcher there was at least  one (apparently sympathetic) spectator.

Lyndhurst Terrace, several blocks away. Some 60 bus routes were diverted, though of course you could park your SUV illegally anywhere you liked

Activists, onlookers and cops prepare on Queens Rd before the procession starts

The marchers assemble on Chater Rd under watchful eyes. Nice day for a walk, in fact

0.0657% of the Hong Kong population storm Queens Rd

Plenty of stickers and leaflets being handed out