Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Like Chief Executive Donald Tsang, I decided not to vote in yesterday’s by-election/de facto referendum in view of its unique nature – specifically that it was being held on exactly the same day that I was due, with a little effort, to attain Genius Pixie level in the addictive pastime known as Flood It. To the surprise of no-one, 83% of Hong Kong’s voters stayed away from the polls. For every person who abstained on principle, like Sir Bow-Tie, many more stayed away because they couldn’t see the point in turning up for a one-horse race.

More than a few also resented the fact that, in each constituency, the ‘horse’ concerned had been solely responsible for holding the race, leaving the whole event looking like an exercise in self-indulgence. This was not just because Beijing pulled the plug on a contest by ordering its supporters not to run. It was also the fault of the pro-democrats taking part for their insistence on framing the non-clash in their usual rarified, abstract and idealistic rhetoric.

For example, the pro-democrats urged us to cast our ballot to somehow pressure Hong Kong/PRC officials to define what they mean by ‘universal suffrage’. This is begging the question; Beijing cannot and will not offer a definition because to do so would implicitly accept the right of the people to peacefully change their government if they choose. It won’t happen. So long as China is under the rule of a Communist or any other one-party system, any election in Hong Kong must and will be rigged. Asking Beijing to describe how it will not rig our elections is cretinous.

As, sadly, is the pro-democrats’ whole strategy of demanding that a dream be turned into a reality, complete with timetable and legally watertight fine print. Far better to start with the reality and try to turn it into something better and attainable.

Hong Kong is currently run by a little group of out-of-depth bureaucrats who allow a cabal of tycoons to rip off consumers and hog opportunities and private and public wealth. If the government’s political reform package for 2012 is passed, we end up with exactly the same system. This should be the loudly and clearly and frequently proclaimed reason why the pro-democrats will vote to veto the package. It could be a spicy message, complete with names of officials, developer buddies and wasteful projects, and vivid examples of the harm done to ordinary people’s lives through the bad housing, schools and hospitals that result. The pro-democrats have parliamentary privilege, right? Use it.

But no: they are too absorbed in their noble fight for pure righteousness in the form of democracy in our small patch of totalitarian state. Their arguments are impeccably logical but irrelevant; the enemy they think they are struggling against is barely aware they exist. As yesterday showed, they perceive both success and (even better) a dash of martyrdom where the rest of us see a time-waster intruding into the important things in life, like making Genius Pixie. You have to wonder whose side they are really on.

What is Forbes magazine for? For most people, it’s something to flick through while waiting to see the dentist. Its breezy, glossy Cosmo-style vacuity (Ten Tips for Spring Cleaning Your Career) triggers an instant, Zen-like clearance of thoughts from the brain, while the never-ending lists of top billionaires and zippy tech start-ups provide that all-important inner numbness (mesmerize yourself with America’s Most Popular Car Colors and a root canal is nothing).

Compared with his closet-gay/biker/socialite father Malcolm of Capitalist Tool Boeing 727 fame, proprietor Steve Forbes perhaps seems a little colourless. His editorial stance is undoubting, inherited-wealth conservative. Rather than take the publication to court, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew writes an opinion column for it. Immaculately coiffured Indian businessmen you’ve never heard of get star treatment – in the Asian edition at least – while the likes of Gordon G Chang monitor China’s coming demise.

Coverage of the Big Lychee is usually pretty thin, consisting of rankings of tycoons and glowing reports of obscure European luxury brands setting up shop in the city. So a non-celebrity article on one of our less renowned economic sectors raises an eyebrow. Especially when it is titled Why Hong Kong is China’s New Tech Hub.

For many right-thinking people, the idea that this city can be a tech (as in research) hub is laughable – it’s about as likely as the place becoming a sporting powerhouse, a creative and cultural centre or a green, zero-emissions paradise. And, because our government has indeed on occasions announced plans to miraculously turn us into Asia’s tech (sports/creative/cultural/green) capital, the idea is also rather distasteful, even disturbing. Tung Chee-hwa was right? Economic planning by bureaucrats works?

Looking through the piece, it seems we are talking about a small but real Hong Kong success story. This is not about hundreds of geeky code-writers in Beijing patching together Microsoft’s latest user-loathing, giant hairball of an Office upgrade. Nor is it about dozens of fresh graduates in Shenzhen reverse-engineering and improving gizmos that the original inventors still haven’t finished. It’s about pairs and threes of local whiz-kids working out ways to make – this is key – a fast buck from (I would guess) silly-but-clever apps for iPhones and the like.

So we can breathe a sigh of relief. Grandiose government visions, science parks and multi-billion dollar funds have had nothing to do with it. It’s a bunch of spiky-haired kids who are too shy to be property agents devising inane and profitable downloads for Asia’s millions of easily amused mobile device users.

The Forbes agenda is to underline how the evil Reds on the Mainland are at a disadvantage compared with the freedom-loving, market-oriented Hongkongers. And the list (Eight Ways You Can Wipe the Floor with the Commies in their own Backyard) looks pretty impressive. Mainland China is poor, censored, monopolized, bureaucratic, state-run and hates foreigners; Hong Kong, on the other hand, is just seriously cool. Perfectly valid points, no doubt.

And then Forbes hits an interesting little nail on the head: the Big Lychee’s officials don’t draw attention to these advantages. Out of fearful, obsequious pragmatism (“deference”) they don’t advertise Hong Kong as the bit of China where there is no censorship, thus no persecution for resisting censorship, no favouritism for state companies, no weird legal decisions to undercut foreigners, plus all the YouTube and Facebook you could ever want, and you can incorporate in a day. Unlike you-know-where.

Our local leaders are silent on this. They just sit there awkwardly, too patriotic to say why we’re better, preferring instead to unnerve us all with fatalistic blather about how our only chance is integration and cooperation and partnership, and getting excited only at the prospect of a mention in the next Five Year Plan.

Not a totally new point (it’s all part of the post-colonial pre-emptive cringe), but interesting enough to keep me away from Forbes next time I am in the dentist’s waiting room.

As the last howls of anguish about unaffordable housing echo through Hong Kong’s avenues and alleyways, a new and contrasting chorus of screeching and wailing rises to warn the city of an even greater peril: property prices that are too low. The dread prospect of the middle class being able to purchase a home and still have enough cash left over for food follows the dismal failure of our leading real estate company, the Lands Department, to auction a scrap of reclamation out at Tung Chung for the sort of bubble-about-to-burst sum that seemed inevitable a few weeks back.

Yesterday’s land auction. The government will invest the revenue raised in continued research and training to perfect the you-wouldn’t-believe-how-important-we-are looks on the faces of Lands Department pen-pushers.

The developer that won the auction, privately held Nan Fung – accustomed to making do with inferior lots the big boys don’t want – had to bid against itself to meet the reserve price. The lack of interest shown by Cheung Kong, Sun Hung Kai and the other cartel leaders is probably due to weakening market sentiment and upcoming auctions for bigger and better locations. But the Standard’s fictitious columnist Mary Ma floats the possibility that the barons are boycotting government land sales to protest new rules that make it slightly harder for them to rip off people deluded or desperate enough to buy their nasty overpriced rabbit hutches.

They have done this before; it was back in the old days when the Hong Kong government measured its total reserves in billions rather than trillions and genuinely needed the flow of revenue from land sales. The developers have less clout these days (not that officials realize it). So the ‘Mary Ma’ theory, we can safely assume, is an attempt by the Sing Tao Group’s proprietor to help out his fellow tycoons/advertisers by starting a lame rumour: if this wanton persecution of innocent property moguls continues, the righteous wrath of the cartel shall be visited upon the government’s fiscal well-being for this and for 10 generations to come.

According to the Business Week article, the auction price of HK$2,426 a square foot translates into apartments going for HK$4,500 a square foot. This is 7% above current home prices in the far-flung pollution trap that is Tung Chung – hence the panicky, wrist-slashing, end-of-civilization tone of the Standard’s bed-wetting reporters in their story about the seller who had to trim his asking price from HK$2.8mn to HK$2.65mn.  “Small concrete box beneath mosquito-infested hills out near airport worth less than gullible nonentity thought! Read all about it!” The horror.

To quote today’s guest artiste, singing some of the most erudite lines ever composed on the subject of Hong Kong’s property-scam pyramid scheme:

…everybody’s wheeling
everybody’s stealing
all the low are living high.
Every city’s got em
can we ever stop em
some of us are gonna try.

Or then again maybe not.

Two of the five candidates for Hong Kong Island in next Sunday’s exciting Legislative Council by-election have sent me material begging for my vote. They are Spencer Tai Cheuk Yin of the Kuomintang, no less, and Tanya Chan of the Civic Party. Both want democracy and the abolition of functional constituencies; Tai also wants help for Hong Kong students in Taiwan and is proud to uphold Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People (which, as we all recall, are nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood).

Tanya is the candidate everyone has heard of, not least because she caused the by-election in the first place by resigning her Legco seat along with fellow pro-democrats in the other four constituencies.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. The pro-democrats hoped to highlight public support for universal suffrage by forcing a city-wide poll that could serve as a de-facto referendum. But the exercise has turned into an embarrassment. Not only did the Democratic Party refuse to take part but the entire opposition are boycotting the by-election after being scared off in no uncertain terms by Beijing, whose officials, incapable of seeing the funny side of a make-believe plebiscite, went into one of those mouth-frothing fits we see all too few of these days.

A referendum is unconstitutional, they ranted, even though (or because, according to their logic) the Basic Law makes no mention of such a device. Pro-Beijing supporters dutifully and loudly echoed this nonsense, while enjoying – as indeed we all did – the sight of government officials awkwardly defying their Mainland masters by obeying the law and organizing the by-election. To make up for it, Chief Executive Donald Tsang will, though he doesn’t want to say it openly, abstain from voting in what he declares to be an unnecessary and wasteful poll. Long accustomed to urging participation to give our rigged elections a stamp of legitimacy, the government is this time implicitly discouraging us.

Who would Donald cast his ballot for anyway?

Apart from the used-car-salesman-like KMT guy and Tanya – whose sullen, leaflet-distributing presence next to the Mid-Levels Escalator is brightening up our mornings so much this week – there are three choices.

The first, pretty-boy student Leung Wing-ho, is one of the young idealistic activists who decided to run in the by-elections so the CP and LSD candidates would be sure of having opponents. (Otherwise, candidates would be returned automatically, and you wouldn’t have the all-important ‘referendum’ effect. Perhaps the idea was that you would vote Tanya for a ‘yes to democracy’ and Leung for a ‘no’, though of course he is as pro-universal suffrage as she is really. The latest theory seems to be that simply turning up and voting is a ‘yes’, though some Beijing loyalists unreceptive to the ‘boycott’ directive are vowing to spoil their ballot papers. The sheer problem of how we are supposed to read the results of these by-elections is in itself a good reason to stay in bed on Sunday.)

The candidate with the inauspicious number 4 is one Wong Hing, representing the grumpier end of the independent faction. We were supposed to have ‘Bus Uncle’ Roger Chan running on Hong Kong Island, but he screwed up his nomination, and the chance of a hint of sanity in the campaign was tragically lost.

That leaves us with Lee Chun-hung, who it seems was catapulted into politics by the treatment of a lady friend who was fired from the Vocational Training Council. The lady friend is his campaign manager, and her Indonesian maid is helping out too. Any money left over from the campaign fund-raising drive will go to Asian Tsunami orphans. There are eight million stories in the naked city, and this one is about par for the course but comes with a more-colourful-than-average website.

The government will really, really hate it if people vote. Other than that, the only reason I can find for traipsing off to the polling station on Sunday is to be able to say in years to come that I once voted Kuomintang. A mild thrill, at best.

According to the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong public hospitals’ 200-300 psychiatrists can spend only five to 10 minutes in consultation with each of their annual total of 150,000 new patients. Perhaps we should be grateful that mentally ill people run amok and chop up passers-by with meat cleavers only once every few months or so. This is, after all, a flow of 410 newly diseased minds per 24 hours – though perhaps the most amazing thing is that 6,999,590 of us stay sane every day.

As usual, the latest such incident, in which two people were killed and three seriously wounded, prompts hand-wringing and complaints. Residents of the public housing estate concerned are angrily demanding that schizophrenic and similarly afflicted neighbours be moved somewhere else. They don’t say where. I would suggest Discovery Bay, which for several decades now has housed thousands of people who have quietly gone mad, far away from the daily lives and thoughts of the rest of the population. Activists and do-gooders meanwhile demand that the government allocate more resources; it takes one year, apparently, for someone suffering from depression to have their first appointment with a specialist.

Our officials are made of sterner stuff. The SCMP reports that Permanent Secretary for Labour and Welfare Paul Tang says that such incidents are inevitable and “We have already increased the support for the mentally ill over the past several years.” In short, it’s no big deal, and anyway these evil, dangerous lunatics have too much already.

One possible solution, given that sorting out the deranged on a case-by-case basis is such a drag, is to gather them all up and launch them into outer space.

Which brings us rather neatly to the government’s call for high school students to volunteer for Young Astronaut Training Camp. The lucky youthful Hongkongers, hand-picked from the millions who are independent, extrovert, confident and proficient in Putonghua, will be sent to the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre to undergo such enjoyable experiences as blood redistribution adaptability training – otherwise known as being strapped to a chair upside-down.

The exercise is being run by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (ultimate boss: imprisoned student Communist activist and now Home Affairs Secretary Tsang Tak-sing) in the shape of the Space Museum – the nearest we have to NASA. The Chinese General Chamber of Commerce and The Hong Kong Institute for Promotion of Chinese Culture are also involved. The CGCC, which organizes frequent and unforgettably exciting pro-motherland cocktail gatherings as well as such events as anti-Falun Gong exhibitions, is presumably chipping in some money. The HKIPCC, a group for arty types from academia and the media, with friends in government and the intellectual wing of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, will perhaps help out with the non-astronomical part of the syllabus.

In short, this is part of that large-scale effort to introduce harmonized and correct standards of mental health across the community: the United Front. The students will return in tiptop condition, not only in adaptability of blood redistribution, but in the adaptability of their fresh young minds, untainted by the colonial-era thinking that make some older Hong Kong people unhinged, violent time-bombs – rampaging around challenging the Communist Party with meat cleavers in their insane quest for democracy.

The Hong Kong government plumbs new depths of spiritlessness today with a plaintive and almost childlike appeal on its news website to whoever happens to pass by: ‘Please support the 2012 constitutional package’. As in ‘Please mister, will you help get my pet kitten down from the tree?’

Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s meek administration was painted into a corner by Beijing on the issue of political reform. When Donald first took over in 2005, much of the population were rejoicing at the replacement of the tragic Tung Chee-hwa with a smart British-trained local boy, and the traditional pro-Beijing patriots were aghast at the appointment of this colonial running dog to the top position. Sir Bow-Tie hubristically declared that he would fix political reform once and for all.

Then he presumably had a behind-the-scenes run-in with reality: it wasn’t going to be up to him. The electoral arrangements he proposed in late 2005 for 2008 with contrived aplomb represented a minimal, at best, step forward. The defeat of that package by the pro-democrats was a massive humiliation for Donald. He is now obediently submitting the package for a second time, and, without trying to sound at all apologetic about it, explaining in effect that this is the best he can do; the roadmap we used to hear so much about was never really an option.

A second rejection would seal his place, to the extent a Big Lychee Chief Executive has one, in the history books. Here lies the man who tried, twice, to get an insubstantial and barely even cosmetic change to the city’s political structure through a rigged legislature in the midst of widespread public indifference – and failed. Given his lack of other achievements (health care finance, a sales tax, pollution, etc), he will go down as an even bigger waste of space than old Tung.

In the course of grasping firm control of constitutional development in Hong Kong, Beijing too painted itself into something of a corner. Basic Law ‘interpretations’ and ambiguous but menacing utterances by Central People’s Government emissaries may have been intended to dampen expectations and enthusiasm for democracy, but if anything they increased polarization and made things worse. If those grim officials could turn the clock back, they would probably be more open about what they mean by ‘universal suffrage’ and more relaxed about developing the rigged system they have in mind but no-one openly talks about. But they can never be wrong.

So failure will be Hong Kong’s fault entirely, for not having a consensus – and for that, the Chief Executive must accept responsibility, uncomplainingly. Barred by his masters from offering anything of any substance, Donald has no choice but to grovel pathetically in a nothing-to-lose attempt to avoid a second burning slap in the face and two years’ inglorious lame-duck-hood.