Big Lychee, Various Sectors

With the Grand World Tiddlywinks Championship about to take place in South Africa, will Hong Kong be treated to the precious sight of threatened mass self-immolation by Westerners unable to see the exciting blow-by-blow live tedium in the exact TV broadcast format they desire?

The displeasure of the Big Lychee’s working classes has already been aired in the Legislative Council via a question asked by the Hon Ip Wai-ming. The poor do not have TVs with [something called] DTT decoders, he lamented, and thus cannot see the exciting blow-by-blow etc for free! What is the government going to do about this appalling infringement of human rights?

With no-one to stand up for them in the corridors of power, anguished expatriate males compelled to stare at televised sports at strange hours of the night have no alternative but to wail loudly and repetitively about the wantonly cruel, traumatic injustice of it all. It is like being deprived of Rugby Sevens tickets, only day after day after day. Imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The All-Planet Tiddlywinks Competition will appear only on a satellite channel we can’t get here! It will not be in 3D! It will not be in stereo! It will not be in wide-screen! It will not be in high-definition! The screeching commentary will not be in English! The commercials will break in at the wrong time! And – Oh, the humanity! – we will have to pay for it!

The official concerned, quite rightly, told the pro-grassroots legislator that his constituents would be best advised to get a good night’s sleep, perhaps after reading an improving book or two, in order to get ahead in life and avoid the fate of an old age spent picking through garbage and wet market leftovers. But the government has no real answer for Hong Kong’s white middle-class men as they pour fuel over themselves and light matches amid shrieks of “Call this Asia’s World City?” Perhaps an offer of free one-way tickets to Rotherham, Huddersfield and other places of dark obscurity, complete with discount coupons for plates of sausages and baked beans, would put all concerned out of their misery.

Or maybe there is no misery. Perhaps, while I was distracted, market forces, government arm-twisting and sheer serendipity contrived to have the Global Tiddlywinks Finals broadcast to everyone, everywhere in the televisual configuration that those mysterious forces beyond his control demand he have – complete with shining, sparkling, DTT decoder. What a letdown.

Mid-Levels residents trundling down the hill on the famous Escalator this morning receive their free copies of the Standard wrapped in a glossy cover publicizing something called the Meisterstuck Montblanc Diamond, with the zippy slogan ‘Excellence at the tips of your fingers’. According to the blurb, it’s a “black precious resin writing instrument … adorned with platinum plated fittings and a handcrafted 14k gold nib with a rhodium-plated inlay.” (Out of academic curiosity, I took the bait. Rhodium (Rh, atomic number 45) is a platinum-like metal currently trading at around double the price of gold. Its only tasteful use is in catalytic converters.)

But wait! There’s more! “Simultaneously,” the copy continues, “the Montblanc Diamond is gracefully featured in the dome, as if suspended in mid-air.”

So desperate are the manufacturers to get this tackiness in our faces that even removal of the wraparound offers no escape: the Standard has prostituted its front page to the jewel-encrusted pen.

I once received a Montblanc in a fancy beribboned box at a function where everyone had giant flowers pinned into their lapels and we all had to stand around balancing teacups on saucers while exchanging business cards. It summed up the event admirably, being pointless, irritating and a waste of effort. That said, pricy fountain pens have an important role to play as a warning to right-thinking people that they are in the presence of an over-serious and tiresome oaf begging for a cruel come-uppance. I forget what happened to the last person I saw refusing to lend someone his ‘writing instrument’ for a moment on the grounds that he had broken in its nib and it would now only conform to his handwriting. I think it involved Ex-Lax.

As it happens, I have just finished reading Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller. (More here.) We all know that people who buy overpriced brand-label designer goods are pitiful, gullible idiots. When I once asked someone why he bought and wore a US$4,000 watch, his response was to mumble about craftsmanship and design, before insisting defensively “I like it,” and ultimately confessing that it made him feel good. It was so tragic I have never asked anyone since.

We also all know that the morally superior and intellectually fitter among us who eschew such baubles in fact like their own inverted snobbery, which makes them feel good (not least if they have, like me, invested spare wealth in the Chow Sang Sang jewellery chain or some other company that profits from the purchasing habits of the feeble-minded but rich).

Where Miller goes further is in taking a Darwinian view of consumerism as evolutionary behaviour – an unconscious attempt to signal our personality traits to potential mates. It is something we have evolved to do, just as peacocks have developed outlandish tails. Our consumer choices, whether it is a Rolex or organic muesli, are driven by the urge to attract the best or most mates. He criticizes the marketing-voodoo industry for not fully appreciating the primeval instincts that underlie consumer behaviour. They half get it, as all the subliminal or overt allusions to sex in advertising show, but they could do much better if they got a few evolutionary psychologists on board.

One of the many interesting points in the book concerns the function of arty, glossy ads featuring deviant-looking models pushing unpronounceable brands that leave you none the wiser even about what the product is. Why put such ads in cheap mass-market magazines (or free newspapers popular among secretaries and maids)? Is it to make the readers desire, and save their scarce pennies until they can afford the luxury goods? No. Is it to make those who cannot afford envy those who can? Closer, but still no. The reason, Miller says, is to reassure the suckers who have already acquired the overpriced goods that everyone else is aware of the brand’s existence. The ads are aimed at those who have already bought. Now I know. And into the garbage goes the Montblanc cover.

Down near the bottom of tomorrow’s Legislative Council agenda (part V. 1), the Civic Party’s Ronny Tong moves the following motion:

That, as the SAR Government and the Chief Secretary for Administration have repeatedly stated in public that the existing functional constituency elections do not comply with the principle of ‘universality’ and ‘equality’, and as universal suffrage models should comply with this fundamental principle and Hong Kong people also hope that discussions on universal suffrage models can commence as soon as possible, this Council urges the Government to proactively motivate various sectors to engage in extensive and in-depth discussions and studies on the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination in accordance with ‘democratic procedures’ as provided under Article 45 of the Basic Law and on the way to deal with the issue of functional constituencies, so as to forge consensus on universal suffrage models and implement dual universal suffrage as early as possible.

In plain English for the young folk: “We all know functional constituencies suck, so start kicking some ass on election systems.”

Two amendments follow, one from toy manufacturer Jeffrey Lam, transforming the passage into a call to pass the non-reform reform package, and one from radical Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung turning it into a demand that anyone should have the right to run for Chief Executive.

At the same time, deputy boss of the National People’s Congress Qiao Xiaoyang defines what universal suffrage in Hong Kong means – or tells the city’s opposition to forget any concessions on the reform proposal – depending on taste. Qiao is the man whose job it has been for some years to announce one delay after another to the Big Lychee’s democratic development, notably the 2005 decision to pretty much freeze everything for 2012.

What he is saying – or not saying – essentially responds to the motion and to Long Hair’s amendment, but as usual the phrasing is oblique. It would make life a lot easier if Qiao were to come clean and say openly that the Communist Party requires total, unchallenged control, and Hong Kong’s electoral system post-2012, post-2017, post-2020, or post-anything-you-want must accommodate that. Instead, you have to infer it, or simply accept it as a leap of faith and then watch how everything suddenly makes more sense. Neither pro-government nor pro-democracy camps do this; both prefer to read what they want to see into the Delphic comments from the nation’s capital.

Beijing must keep something like functional constituencies because it needs to control sufficient votes in Legco to block bills or amendments that possibly threaten it. Under the current system, shoe-shiners with commercial interests like Jeffrey Lam do Beijing’s legislative bidding. In return, as a glance at Lam’s platform shows, these mercenary lawmakers feel entitled to numerous free lunches at the expense of the general population; this leads to disgruntlement and disharmony, which would be far worse if the pro-democrats were not so inept at exploiting it. The grasping excesses of FC representatives need to be reigned in, but Beijing must retain ultimate control over that bloc of votes. How to do it?

Long Hair’s amendment to the motion is aimed at pre-empting the answer. Qiao’s definition of universal suffrage is that everyone has the equal right to vote; he says nothing on the right to nominate candidates or run as one. The Chief Executive is currently chosen by Beijing. We are heading towards a system where Beijing chooses two possibilities, possibly two-plus-a-joke to make it look better, and the rest of us will get to vote on which we prefer. The FCs seem increasingly certain to follow a similar model: a dependably rigged nomination system will produce several candidates per seat, all guaranteed to obey any voting instructions from the Liaison Office, and everyone will have an ‘equal and universal’ vote for such a representative. It is pretty clear that this is where we are going, yet the Ronny Tongs, Jeffrey Lams and Long Hairs remain oblivious to it.

The management has received a minor but hard-to-ignore flurry of emails pleading for Something To Be Done about a nuisance that has made itself at home in this website’s comments. One suggestion is that the root cause of the problem is a condition whose sufferers:

…are fighting the reality of their insignificance and lost value and are trying to re-establish their self-esteem … believe that they’re superior to others and have little regard for other people’s feelings.

and who display

inability to admit wrongdoing … [proneness] to severe bouts of anger …  the ability to write friends off forever. 

Sad.

Thanks to modern technology, it is possible to spare innocent bystanders the distress of witnessing this unpleasantness, and – more important – to offer the afflicted person/s an opportunity to wean themselves from their obsession with this site for long enough to obtain professional help. But it does mean that, for the time being, (civil) comments may be delayed for a while after they are submitted.

The Malevolence Filter whirs into action. Now we can now go and deposit our monthly 10-guinea cheque from MI6.

For the second weekend in a row, Hong Kong’s tireless government officials hit the streets (or shopping malls, to be more accurate) in an attempt to persuade the public to somehow support the political reform package with no real reform in it.

The previous weekend, Chief Executive Donald Tsang and his colleagues gave no warning before cruising through town on an open-topped bus and handing out leaflets to passers-by. The idea behind this novel concept of a secret publicity blitz was to avoid the vast hordes of the tiny unrepresentative minority of troublemakers who would come out to jeer. But the anticlimactic mood of the event provoked its own mockery, not least from the media, who were upset at not being invited along.

This time, the Information Services Department reckoned the solution was to give the press a couple of hours’ notice each time of our T-shirted leaders’ appearances. By the time protestors had telexed or faxed one another about the time and place, and taken rickshaws or trams to travel there, the great Act Now Show would have moved on to the next location, leaving thousands of enthused citizens avidly supporting the government’s proposal. For some reason, this devious scheme failed to work, and large numbers of the tiny minority turned up to heckle and hurl personal insults at Sir Bow-Tie, as in “scurrying rat”. Donald, safely behind lines of police, ended up shouting back, declaring not “L’etat c’est moi,” exactly, but insisting that the detractors were the minority.

The hope is to get 70% of the public to tell pollsters they think, at least grudgingly, that the package should get through. Yet the (in some ways unprecedented) direct appeal to common decent folk is turning into yet another clash between an inept and unpopular administration and a sizeable proportion of the thinking population. (It would be interesting to know how many of yesterday’s protestors turned up after being invigorated by the 150,000-plus turnout for the June 4 vigil and/or angered by the ham-fisted police statue-confiscation drama that surely prompted it.*)

Will perceptive government advisors (if any) suggest cooling the propaganda campaign as provocative and confrontational, and adopting a more humble, honest and respectful approach, treating the public as adults and appealing even for their sympathy? With the seedier end of the pro-Beijing spectrum reduced to offering cash to people attending a rally in favour of the non-reform reforms, officials can justifiably plead with us to look at what sort of support they currently have to put up with, and take pity. A flock of winged pigs will circle the Peak beforehand.

Meanwhile, fans of Hong Kong government promotional materials will be delighted to know that a new TV commercial featuring such semi-celebrities as a spiky-haired young inventor, a starlet and her baby, and a soccer player is now on the air. Note the target demographics: young educated/geeky types, young dimmer/dreamy women, young riffraff/gambling guys – the whole youth vote in one ad (apart from the obedient patriotic/Evangelical kids, who are already on board). This comes after the last attempt to woo admirers of boring middle-aged Executive Council members. At least they had the sense not to insult us with perennial government stooge Jackie Chan.

This just in: Hong Kong’s great national pastime ‘How many 7-Elevens can you see from one street corner?’ has now officially been replaced by ‘Spot the most Act Now banners’.

*The one theory no-one has yet considered: someone in government ordered the cops to pull the stupid statue-confiscation stunt and thus boost turnout at the vigil in order to send a message to Beijing about the futility of heavy-handed action. I think that covers every possibility.

“June 4th is an understandably sensitive subject, but regardless of your stance on this controversial issue, we Hongkongers should be proud that our city is the only part of China that can openly commemorate the event.” Thus says an awkwardly fence-sitting Time Out HK, nervous perhaps of the possibility of scaring advertisers with a big mainland market to develop. The magazine has its roots in late 60s/early 70s counterculture, but – like Lonely Planet, Body Shop, Ms, Rolling Stone and much else – turned joyously corporate. The Hong Kong edition is a franchise.

A more partisan approach to the anniversary of the Tiananmen-and-environs Massacre comes from Epoch Times, a publication of the quasi-Buddhist-wacko Falun Gong sect, which likes to equate its own persecution in China with Beijing’s ruthless expunging of the 1989 killings from public consciousness. Now, it implies, the same treatment is progressively unfolding in Hong Kong, where the police confiscated activists’ statues. “Hong Kong … had a democratic system under British colonial jurisdiction until 1997,” the writers lament (these people also believe they are cultivating a ‘law wheel’ in their lower abdomen).

The Royal Hong Kong Police on June 4, 1989 – as suggested in the very photos I took that day outside the Xinhua headquarters – were impeccably behaved and low profile. Since the handover in 1997, however, many people have perceived a gradual toughening. Some of this, such as the enforcement of deliberately inconvenient restrictions on marches, seems to be home-grown, grumpy intolerance, of the sort we might expect from a government that is inept, under siege and panicky, and infested with authoritarian born-again Christians.

The most attention-grabbing signs of a clampdown, however, are those where the intended audience is in Beijing. The confiscation and subsequent return of the Goddess of Democracy made the cops look clueless rather than brutal. The Immigration Department’s ritual refusal to admit sculptors of Tiananmen-related works gets the city bad press overseas. The forthcoming confrontation at Chinese University over placing one of the statues on campus leaves the school administration looking foolish, almost arguing that the institution must bar any object that displays a political bias – which surely includes newspapers, student union posters and many of the books in the library.

It is hard to believe Beijing specifically orders such actions. The almost hapless manner in which local authorities go about being tough on selected June 4 activities suggests that it is largely pre-emptive. It’s like Time Out trying to put advertisers’ minds at ease. Subliminally, we are supposed to see a cadre flicking through the Big Lychee’s English-language lifestyle glossies, looking for seditious comment which can be used to persecute multinationals that have unwittingly endorsed it by taking out a double-page spread in the same publication. But the editors used the words ‘sensitive’ and ‘controversial’, so – phew! – it’ll be OK.

The Hong Kong government clamps down on the odd statue (and turns overseas Falun Gong adherents away) because senior officials are afraid of what might happen otherwise. As pro-Beijing loyalists like to point out, ‘two systems’ can only exist within the framework of ‘one country’. The Basic Law, which defines Hong Kong’s autonomy, is a law of the PRC, not Hong Kong. So, when something hyper-sensitive crops up, like the evil cult or the unmentionable events of 1989, we have to put on the right sort of show. The trick is to make a mountain out of a borderline molehill: a statue without an entertainment licence, an overseas visitor whose presence might sort of not be conducive to the public interest. Beijing takes note, presumably. Meanwhile, the main event tonight at Victoria Park carries on. Your statutory rights are slightly screwed around with, but not that much really.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong government chooses this moment to ask for your views on its implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights? Do you not agree, for example (para 19), that we can assure the United Nations that slavery and servitude remain illegal here?

Some government departments have too much money, and it shows. The Hong Kong police, when they are not raiding trendy T-shirt shops or confiscating statues, like to dress their surplus men up in big macho boots and berets and send them strutting around the streets looking as unpleasant and unapproachable as possible to check the ID cards of people with brown skin. Public works officials, petrified of seeing their budgets slashed if they don’t spend it all by the end of the financial year, install railings and paving slabs on unvisited hillsides and concrete foundations beneath remote boulders that have been immovable since the Middle Cambrian era. And then there’s the bureau that gives low-income families guided tours of my neighbourhood.

No-one asked whether residents of the lower Mid-Levels wanted to host Family Joy Tours, as the Commissioner for Heritage’s Office is calling them. We just woke up one morning and found them all getting off their bus after their 45-minute ride down from the housing estate in Tsuen Wan. Their guide lectured them on the historical significance of the area, while an Information Services Department camera crew filmed the event. The visitors themselves looked around, slightly underwhelmed.

This was Hong Kong Island, where all the powerful people work in their shiny offices, and the rich folk live up the hill, and now they finally had a chance to be in the place and all they could see was old buildings that should have been pulled down ages ago: an unused police station with something carved in English along the top, a huge house that some Christian chief lives in, and these narrow streets of 1960s low-rises with glitzy-looking restaurants with no Chinese on the menus but huge prices.

We get our fair share of tourists wandering through the area – the first ones grappling with their maps while sweating in plastic raincoats were spotted just yesterday. They are usually Westerners or Japanese, in search of the mythical exciting dining scene. Then there are groups of Mainlanders, just released after four hours in a jeweller’s shop, riding on the Mid-Levels Escalator, which costs the tour company nothing, before being herded into the next retail death trap.

The New Territories visitors are not intended to have a good time. The idea, says the Heritage Commissioner, is community outreach. In exchange for a free ride on a bus, plus lunchbox, the working class get their minds improved through exposure to Hong Kong’s built history. It is rather like the school field trips we get from the same poorer and distant parts of town, with the teacher trying to look cool in front of her students by not joining them in staring at all the white people. The old buildings are OK to have your photo taken in front of, but it is the contemporary exotic – the soaring private apartment blocks up the hill and the strange inhabitants – they have probably come to see.

The irony is that this area was, until fairly recently, distinctly proletarian. Elderly men with T-shirts rolled up over their pot bellies worked toothpicks, women went to the hairdressers in their pyjamas, and kids played badminton in the street. Then the Escalator opened, and the gentrification happened. I remember this neighbourhood when it was full of people like you, I could tell the sightseers.

A couple of Filipino maids, overseen by a pair of impatient housewives, have scrambled up ladders to drape a huge banner across the road between the 7-Eleven and the fake Greek café. “Mid-Levels Residents Warmly Welcome Their Less Privileged Co-citizens. Please Take Your Litter Home With You.”

This town is our town / This town is so glamorous / Bet you’d live here if you could / And be one of us

The Hong Kong government’s new Consultation Framework on Subsidising Home Ownership, is a masterpiece of cynical, pointless, consultation-farce. Usually, these public engagement exercises on health care finance, tax reform or whatever ignore some options altogether, while including others that are unacceptable or unworkable, plus one more. The citizen’s job is to spot the one the bureaucrats have already decided on. In this particular case, we don’t even have to do that.

The bottom line is: we must have a ‘healthy’ property market!

What is that exactly? It is one where everyone who has bought an apartment is sitting happily on a nice fat profit and yet, simultaneously, everyone who is yet to buy finds the prices deliciously attractive.  Not possible.

On top of that, certain local characteristics make the idea of a ‘healthy’ property market even more elusive. Our currency peg denies the government the ability to tweak interest rates upward to cool asset price inflation, so officials just resign themselves to bubbles (and, in the case of housing minister Eva Cheng with her HK$60 million apartment for the kid, make a healthy profit by buying at the right time).

Most of all, the government itself is confused about its own purpose and that of physical space in this city. As things currently stand, the government’s primary raison d’etre is to raise revenue, and the main use for land is to be converted into that revenue. The interests of the people and the economy come second. The result is an artificial scarcity/expense of space for housing and business, and an economy dominated by a few families who act as tax farmers taking it in turns to distribute the small amounts of land the officials make available.

From time to time, buying a vaguely habitable home gets too beyond the reach of many Hong Kong people, and this leads to much whining. Tackling the root cause of the problem (also known as ‘the root cause of Eva’s 200% paper profit on her flat’) is obviously not going to happen. All we can do is sit back and wait for interest rates to rise. This Consultation is simply designed to give worriers and naggers something to do in the intervening period.

Note that the government is inviting us to consider ‘subsidising’ home ownership. This, like ‘socialized’ medicine to American conservatives, is a loaded term. What we are really talking about here is homes on which Cheung Kong, Sun Hung Kai or Henderson Land do not make a 50% profit margin, and the buyer does not contribute as much as usual to the government’s capital works reserve fund, much of which ends up flowing to privately-held construction companies owned by the same families that own the aforementioned real estate giants. It would be more accurate to call them non-subsidy homes: the purchaser does not have to subsidize the property tycoons.

My humble solution, crafted painstakingly in the shower this morning, is aimed to fix the problem of over-priced little apartments while at least possibly avoiding a sudden crash in prices, which would cause not only Eva but many other people great anguish – of the sort that had negative-equity homebuyers committing suicide back in 1998. The idea is to create a ‘healthy’ property market by ending the insistence that residential real estate can be both a home and an investment.

In a way, we already do this through the public housing estates. But these are deliberately designed to be nasty and undesirable, and are theoretically reserved for the poor. The better off can only either rent (ie, pay off someone else’s overpriced investment) or take out a mortgage on an investment of their own and work the next 20 years for the Lis, Kwoks or Lees.

Under my modest proposal, the government would look at a map of Hong Kong and notice the surprising amount of empty space (like out at Junk Bay) and land that could be freed up by evicting freeloaders like Disney, the Science Park, golf courses and cruise liner terminals. The resulting land – equivalent to maybe half of Kowloon – would be earmarked for fairly dense development of large apartments, say 1,000-1,500 sq ft. They would be rented to taxpaying families with children for an amount related to their income (say, 150% of their salaries tax bill). There would be no frills: no car parks, no club houses, no chandeliers in marble foyers – just an MTR station, bike racks and a public swimming pool. Anyone caught subletting would have a hand chopped off.

People who wanted to carry on buying and selling little concrete boxes would be free to do so in other parts of town. These new areas would be havens for people – maybe several hundred thousand households in time – who want to opt out of all that and just have a place to live in and put their savings into mutual funds.

Simple. Tomorrow, I will solve the Middle East.