Big Lychee, Various Sectors

It would be surprising if the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1861, were not pro-establishment. In many ways, it is the establishment, or at least a major traditional pillar of it. But during the journey from, say, 1970s colony to 2010s Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong’s ruling class was transformed. The Westerners who once dominated the hierarchy were largely displaced by local Chinese, while pro-British tycoons and officials had to awkwardly – not always convincingly – reinvent themselves as having been patriotic sons and daughters of the dragon all along. (The one constant has been the status of the devout local Communist Party loyalists, who have been social outcasts all along, though now tolerated in small doses for symbolic reasons. Mainland officials, conversely, have gone from public enemy/security risk status to demigods worshiped unconditionally by the great and good.)

At the same time, relations between business and government have gone from correct, detached and sometimes mutually suspicious to almost so intertwined as to become one vested interest pitted against the rest of the population. Hardly a coincidence, needless to say.

So in the case of the HKGCC, it has been bye-bye Sir Jimmy MacGregor (ex-military Brit 50s-60s civil servant who fought corruption and became Chamber director), hello Lily Chiang (tycoon’s daughter who became Chamber chairman in 2007 before getting imprisoned for fraud). OK – this might be a bit unfair: a better comparison would be with the current Chamber chief executive, ex-bureaucrat Shirley Yuen, but we need to spice the story up. We can see the transition taking place in a letter from tycoon’s kid James Tien, today of the Liberal Party, disowning MacGregor as the Chamber’s man in the Legislative Council in the early 90s. (We’re not trying to get dewy-eyed and nostalgic here; it’s a jolt to remember that colonial-style rule continued so long and thus became so anachronistic.)

So it’s no surprise to find the HKGCC today dutifully joining in the pro-Beijing United Front effort to smear the organizers of the harmless and well-intentioned, if naïve, Occupy Central movement. The strongest outburst comes from the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, which will endorse anything China’s local officials ask it to; a few years back, it mounted a turgid public education campaign on the evils of the Falun Gong. The line it is pushing this time is that a bunch of people sitting in the street singing We Shall Overcome will mysteriously shut down the stock exchange, which in turn will mysteriously cause the economy so much harm that we will never recover. HKGCC members silently endorse this twaddle without a murmur, but then their gutsier forebears had fought the Japanese, the Communists and corrupt cops.

Not that it hugely matters: when was the last time anyone took any notice of the HKGCC? The American Chamber, presumably because many of its members are expats being rotated through town, is less interested in politically correct shoe-shining and more outspoken on things like air pollution.

What is interesting is the Occupy Central people’s reaction to this contrived and laughable attack. They should mock the business groups for being used as puppets and spouting ridiculous slogans about extremism and economic damage. Instead, they respond on their poodle-critics’ own idiotic terms – terms calculated to alarm passing members of the public – and are reduced to claims not to be anarchists. A battle between an alliance of Communist cadres, selfish bureaucrats, inherited wealth and shoe-shining hangers-on on the one hand, and nice, polite, middle-class academics and lawyers on the other was never going to be pretty.

Then-Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s policy initiatives in the mid-late 2000s were so gut-wrenchingly awful they are best forgotten. Think Zhuhai bridge, Lok Ma Chau Loop, education hub, high-speed rail tunnel to Shenzhen, Islamic bonds hub, arbitration hub, wine hub, cooperation, partnership and a host of other multi-billion dollar white elephants, cross-boundary blather and desperately naïve straw-clutching. Among Sir Bow-Tie’s miasma of absurdities was the idea of a commodities trading hub, but the existing Hong Kong Stock Exchange saw it as a money-loser (as if to prove the point, they later blew the most stupendous amount imaginable to buy the London Metals Exchange).

So along came the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange, owned by all-purpose establishment/business figure Barry Cheung, two state-owned Chinese mega-companies and Russia’s Putin-backed Rusal minerals giant. It was supposed to be a trading platform for fuel-oil futures but ended up doing precious metals. For a while it was the focus of avid bureaucrat-driven hype, with its luminaries smugly swanning around as great visionaries while every shoe-shiner in town had orgasms at the thought of the Big Lychee becoming the Solar System’s number-one Yuan-denominated gold derivatives centre-hub Yeah Baby mega-complex.

And now it turns its trading licence in ‘to re-align its strategy with the new industry environment since its trading revenues have not been sufficient to support operating expenses’ – which I think means ‘gone bust’ in plain English. Dreams of well-connected, crony-friendly, luxury-offices-at-Cyberport, space-age, high-tech, middle-aged whizz kid intermediaries making zillions of easy-easy-money in a frenzy of Beijing-linked, Hong Kong-bureaucrat-endorsed rent-seeking – all evaporated in the face of some reality or other: competition, hubris, incompetence (tick more than one if necessary).

Everyone wants to know the dirt about Barry Cheung’s personal, or at least, financial details. As Chairman of the Urban Renewal Authority, he has been overseeing a bureaucracy with a genuine licence to print money, by evicting slum dwellers and teaming up with the big property tycoons to develop luxury apartments for corrupt Mainland officials to buy and leave empty. Then, maybe out of idealism, possibly because of a gift for spotting shifting winds a mile off, or perhaps as a sheer lunatic gamble, Barry sided with Leung Chun-ying in advance of the 2012 Chief Executive quasi-election. So there is no shortage of people ready to pontificate about how dreadful it would be if, as a member of the Executive Council, he was in a state of financial embarrassment.

But the real story is about the futility and bankruptcy of Hong Kong’s policymaking when it comes to things like broadening the city’s economic base – attempting to untangle extreme distortions without upsetting any of the interests that benefit from the distortions. And trying way too hard.

As if he doesn’t have enough burdens, on at least several occasions each week, the purchaser of the South China Morning Post receives a heavy glossy supplement of some sort, typically promoting a line of ugly luxury clothing or some preposterously named housing development next to a landfill somewhere. These extravagantly produced, full-colour publications go straight into the nearest bin. The old woman who picks it out for recycling is happy; the company that thought people would read it is none the wiser; the SCMP advertising sales team get their bonus.

I’ve just heard that the glossy thing that comes with the paper every Thursday isn’t supposed to be thrown away. It’s called 48 Hours and has the slogan ‘Your guide to the weekend’ (it has movie and concert listings at the back). It also says ‘Complimentary copy’, which suggests that at some point, when we have become addicted to it, they will publish it as a separate entity and expect us to pay for the thing. I am reliably informed that its mission is to ‘kill’ the Hong Kong edition of Time Out magazine. As if to prove its editorial determination in this regard, this week’s issue has an extensive, in-depth, searching feature on pizzas.

The SCMP recently confirmed that it has bought HK, the cheerful free listings magazine that makes up for lack of bulk by carrying Dan Savage’s extreme and un-put-downable ‘Savage Love’ agony aunt column. Does the rather chaotic BC free magazine still exist? Either way, the SCMP has made a cramped market even more crowded, and acquired a big chunk of it at the same time. Either they are happy to cannibalize the local English-medium lifestyle mag scene to bits, or they are planning to scrap one of (or merge) HK and 48 Hours – even if they succeed in slaughtering poor old Time Out (which at least had the guts to run the ultimate rant about our local tycoons).

While HK and Time Out have usually dabbled a bit in weightier content, 48 Hours seems totally devoted to trivia/arts/food. So any consolidation of the market could in theory lead to a slight reduction in the amount of more-or-less serious writing floating around – but not so much that you’ll probably see much difference. A paranoid would see this as an attempt by aging Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok’s family to monopolize local English media in order to brainwash us all into loving the motherland more. More likely, the younger Kuoks want to turn this troublesome little bit of their empire into a more productive asset, either to keep or sell on.

And anyway, there’s always the Harbour Times! So far, the libertarian publication seems to be taking compulsive-ideological articles from US pro-market/anti-tax quasi-think-tanks and adding a few paragraphs on Hong Kong to them. A bit of humour or just plain free-thinking would be nice, but hey – it’s more interesting than pizza.

And we always have books! I’m currently on Forgotten Souls by Patricia Lim. Yet another history of the horrors that were the 19th Century colonial Big Lychee, but with the added twist that the main characters are buried in Hong Kong Cemetery. Apparently, people in those days were obsessed with silly titles like Justice of the Peace and judged one another simply by their raw wealth… 

…I can’t imagine what it must have been like.

With all the eager and gleeful anticipation of a million schoolchildren awaiting the reflating of the giant rubber duck, I declare the three-day weekend open.

The great thing about someone who has achieved nirvana is that you don’t have to get them a birthday present.

The excitement over the Court of Final Appeal’s ruling to allow a male-turned-female transsexual to marry a (hopefully aware) male continues. The victor in the case proclaims the judgment to be the will of God and says that she looks forward to getting married in a church. This obviously calls for a comment from the Society of Truth and Light, who predictably view the idea with some distaste. The South China Morning Post goes on to ask the government’s Secretary for Security what he thinks, only to get an even more predictable pile of cluelessness.

(Bright and alert people will at this moment jump up to ask what the government minister in charge of the police, firefighters, prisons, customs and immigration has to do with this. Simple answer: the Immigration Department registers marriages, therefore they – rather than, say, the Home Affairs Bureau or Justice – must be experts in policymaking and other philosophizing on family issues.)

Any squeamishness we might feel when reading phrases like ‘post-operative’ goes out the window when confronted with the Society of Truth and Light, who are surely uglier and more grotesque than anything consenting adults get up to behind closed doors. It would be worth legalizing marriage between humans and goats to see these people getting worked up.

Meanwhile, a local religious group takes out full-page ads in newspapers warning against weird stuff not involving a man plus a woman plus production of progeny…

Casual bystanders flicking through the pages might assume that this is the work of some evangelical fundamentalist creationist types of a Truth and Light persuasion, enjoying a quick rant before planning their next trip to the Biblically accurate Noah’s Ark at Ma Wan. But they would be wrong. It is from the local Catholic Church’s Diocesan Pastoral Commission for Marriage and the Family, which was one of then-Cardinal John Wu’s 10 favourite suggestions out of a modest 177 back in 2002. They agonize over such conundrums as whether unmarried parents should have paternity leave, so you don’t have to.

Anyway – the cosmic bit: they sent out the request for subscriptions for the newspaper ad one month ago. So they couldn’t have known the Court of Final Appeal was going to deliver its trendy, liberal, worldly decision on Monday, May 13. Which makes you wonder whether some divine intervention took place and whether the transsexual is perhaps being a bit presumptuous in claiming the support of the Almighty. On a slightly less-cosmic note, the ad was specifically planned to mark today – the International Day of Families. Contrary to the less-than tolerant spirit of the Catholics’ ad, the theme this year is ‘advancing social integration’. They say God moves in mysterious ways; maybe he’s just hopelessly indecisive.

Hong Kong starts the day with a smirk. The Securities and Futures Commission orders the ‘unwinding’ of the sale of hotel suites at Cheung Kong’s Apex Horizon project on the grounds that it was technically an investment scheme that needed its authorization. In other words: give the mugs their money back.

Tycoon Li Ka-shing’s deputy assistant sub-running dog Justin Chiu puts on a brave face, saying in effect that Cheung Kong is 100% in the right and could easily mash the crummy little SFC to a pulp, but won’t because social harmony is so important. Coming after Li’s discomfiting brush with striking dockworkers, this is the sort of thing that brings a little ray of sunshine into our lives. (All this and the giant rubber duck…)

The Apex Horizon fiasco could get even funnier. Several dozen buyers have already flipped their units to earn such life-changing quick returns as HK$85,000. Cheung Kong will nonetheless try to repurchase the properties via them, which assumes that these speculators know or care about the whereabouts of the secondary buyers (or tertiary ones?) and are, in principle, willing to give back that fast, easy profit they made – if they haven’t blown it in Macau. Presumably, Cheung Kong will end up waiving this and paying off that to get the suites back.

So heart-warming is this story that the Court of Final Appeal’s ruling to allow a transsexual to marry gets relegated to second place on the front pages. The Equal Opportunities Commission and others are predictably happy to find that bewigged senior members of the judiciary are so hip and groovy about gender identity and, by implication, the ever-growing array of other sexual minorities. One part of the judgment in particular stands out…

The Court further held that whether a consensus regarding a transsexual’s right to marry exists among the people of Hong Kong is not a relevant consideration since reliance on the absence of a majority consensus as a reason for rejecting a minority’s claim is inimical in principle to fundamental rights.

In plain English, this says two things. First, regardless of how many guitar-playing pastors and mewling teachers the mouth-frothing Biblical-literalist freaks of the Society of Truth and Light gather at protests, they can go stuff themselves. Second, there are such things as universal rights, and apologists for the Chinese Communist Party and others who dismiss the idea as a Western plot can go stuff themselves as well, so there.

Finally, something interesting – a bit, anyway – happens in the world of local publications. Behold: Harbour Times.

From what I can gather after an extensive few minutes’ snooping around, this is a libertarian project with links to our very own Lion Rock Institute and the US-based Center for Freedom and Prosperity. In the manner of so many think-tanks-turned-lobbyists, the latter is a proponent of flat taxes and our inalienable right to stash our profits offshore beyond the Internal Revenue’s grasp. Among interviews and features concerning politicians, diplomats and various policy areas, readers can expect a lot of emphasis on free markets and, specifically, warnings of threats to banking secrecy and offshore low-tax regimes, not that Hong Kong needs much convincing on these matters.

So it sounds like some Koch Brothers’ front pushing the interests of billionaires who don’t want to pay tax. However, they say they want a forum for Hong Kong’s entire political spectrum to engage in lively and civil discourse. It’s bilingual, will be in print as well as on-line, will have some sort of companion publication for local diplomats and will be free for political VIPs (and probably not very widely read if it charges the rest of us). It will take advertising. Intriguingly, it specifically mentions political advertising – a field in which Hong Kong is sadly backward.

Note that the title uses the British spelling for ‘Harbour’. This could be a clever device to disguise radical right American corporate funding and ideology. (The Koch brothers are, of course, trying to buy up mainstream media. Could this be Step 1 in grabbing the South China Morning Post and Sing Tao)? Then again, the publishers are talking about selling subscriptions and carrying ads, which suggests they’re hard up, so it could just be that the Canadian editor can’t abide ‘Harbor’. Either way, a bit more anti-Communist, Western cultural-imperialist propaganda is always welcome. 

Click to hear Phil Ochs’ ‘Pleasures of the Harbor’!

A slightly tiresome, make-believe game of chicken plays itself out in the battle between the Hong Kong government and radical legislators filibustering the 2013-14 Budget. According to Financial Secretary John Tsang, failure to pass the bill on Wednesday could cause disruptions to welfare payments, health care, education, the courts and, of all things, electricity subsidies. It is an interesting list of items, carefully chosen to include something to affect most of us. Pro-establishment lawmakers parrot the official ‘fiscal cliff’ Armageddon line, while the radicals make the dubious claim that any forced cuts will be the government’s fault for not meeting their demands for a universal pension.

The pro-establishment camp demands that Legislative Council President Tsang Yok-sing uses parliamentary devices fair or foul to curtail the delaying tactics. The more moderate pro-democracy legislators insist on the sanctity of the legislative branch’s rights and liberties to check the executive. Tsang Yok-sing, though as pro-Beijing as they come, is reluctant to damage the Council’s powers (the Legco presidency has a funny effect on people).

The government might be tempted to cut off handouts to starving widows and orphans, switch off kidney patients’ dialysis machines and turn kids away from exam halls, in the hope that an angry population would take it out on Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung and his comrades. But to the extent that people would find it hard to believe serious cuts in day-to-day public services were necessary, it would be officials who would get the blame for playing politics at the community’s expense. So the government should blink first. But since it can’t meet the radicals’ demands, it can blink all it wants, to no avail. Perhaps we are just heading for some dull compromise – a few obscure bits of the bureaucracy closing for a day, and a vague official promise to rethink welfare for the elderly.

Former civil servant Mike Rowse proposes a HK$6,000-per-month universal pension in today’s South China Morning Post. Unlike the HK$3,000 plan put forward by an alliance of welfare and other groups last year, it might actually be enough for the indigent to live on. However, the idea is still flawed.

First, experience overseas shows that politicians like to increase entitlements but not the taxes that pay for them, with the inevitable result being government bankruptcy. At some point, the US, Japan, Europe, etc will have no choice but to abandon or drastically scale down the universal entitlement model. It’s simple arithmetic. (There are theoretical systems like the negative income tax, which put everyone on a lifelong state pension and take it from there. The days when Hong Kong – or Long Hair, perhaps – was that cutting-edge are sadly gone, if they ever existed.)

Second, Hong Kong’s demographics suggest a temporary, rather than perpetually growing, problem with old-age poverty. Future generations of retirees will have enjoyed far better levels of education, earnings and opportunities to save than those born and raised in the chaos of the 1920s-40s. We do need to transfer more wealth from rich young to poor old at the moment (as Chief Executive CY Leung conceded by doubling the Old Age Allowance), but that’s not a permanent state of affairs.

Mike Rowse, the Alliance for Universal Pension and many others have a hang-up about the concept of means-testing. Traditionally, Hong Kong bureaucrats have taken sadistic delight in making welfare application humiliating, but it doesn’t have to be so (as CY’s reform shows). The alternative to form-filling and verification is, on a net basis, subsidy of the rich(er) by the poor(er).

Having said all this, there are some intriguing unknowns and contradictions here, because our politicians and bureaucrats compartmentalize everything beyond recognition. For example, elderly welfare, a sales tax and health financing are all considered entirely separate subjects when they’re All The Same Thing.  So, it could be that the middle-aged middle class will be able to pay for their own retirement provided property prices don’t crash, while the young middle class won’t be able to pay for their own retirement unless property prices do crash. The people who got us into this mess are the ones on the biggest pensions of all.

Update: the filibuster is put out of its misery.

Forget the Japanese occupation, the 1960s riots or SARS. Chief Executive CY Leung declares that Hong Kong has never been in such a crisis as this – the filibustering of the 2013-14 Budget in the Legislative Council. The consequences if the budget isn’t passed will be dire and irreversible. What will happen? Will public hospitals turn dying patients away? Will schools close forever? Will senior civil servants have to take the bus rather than their chauffeur-driven cars? No, the worst thing CY can think up in response to a pro-Beijing legislator’s loaded question is damage to something called our ‘global reputation’. ‘Huge’ damage, no less.

Oddly enough, this is the same fate that we are told befalls us if the Occupy Central movement goes ahead and does its sit-down thing on the streets next year. As well as reputational harm, such a protest will also cause huge economic losses, and some extremely important people known as ‘investors’ will run away.

The stock market’s response is to start the day up 24 points.

The demonization of radicals and pro-democrats through exaggerated and often plainly false claims of the supposed damage they do is not new. A few years back, officials and pro-government media successfully convinced much of the public that lawmakers who resigned in order to force by-elections were wasting vast public wealth. If there is a silent majority, it may well be the part of the community that is receptive to the notion of opposition as disruption or vandalism rather than opposition as promotion of better ideas and policies.

One reason is that the political structure (and the colonial mentality of the bureaucracy) gives opponents few choices other than to be obstructive and loud. Another is that the pro-democrats are not too hot on better ideas and policies. The filibustering radicals like ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung are demanding a universal pension – a bad policy that lacks overwhelming public support. And pro-dems seem to find it hard to articulate rebuttals to smears about them hurting Hong Kong. The Occupy Central people could make a case (because it’s true) that their civil disobedience could be huge symbolically but of little consequence to the economy. Worst-case scenario: commuters downtown have clean air for a few days. But they don’t.

For every po-faced official who gets away with portraying the pro-democrats as naughty children costing the taxpayer money and imperiling civilization, there’s one who seems determined to undermine the government’s credibility at every opportunity. And usually, that’s Police Commissioner Andy Tsang, whose valiant boys in blue have just arrested a semi-obscure activist called Melody Chan on a two-year-old charge – not long after she raised her minor public profile working with Occupy Central. Several other radicals have also been charged with offences dating from the 2011 protest. Now it’s the pro-dems’ turn to fling mud, typically in the form of the phrase ‘white terror’.

The police chief swears that this isn’t a politically motivated crackdown. I’m inclined to believe him: if the idea is to marginalize or intimidate dissidents, this is an extraordinarily humiliating, and anyway inept, way of doing it. Even the Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ editorial rolls its eyes in exasperation at the cops’ claim that it took them all this time to track down vicious 26-year-old trainee-lawyer Melody. Just as Occupy Central is starting to look a bit directionless, along comes Andy Tsang to declare the weekend open by delivering the movement a boost in public sympathy and credibility.

An op-ed in the South China Morning Post a few weeks ago called for a freeze in the number of tourists arriving in Hong Kong, and an end to the provision of land or public funds for facilities catering to outsiders rather than to the local population. China Daily has had two columns this week (so far) blaming tourism for poverty and the city’s overall malaise. Our officials, meanwhile, see the imminent opening of the vast, publicly subsidized, HK$7 billion cruise terminal at Kai Tak as something we are supposed to cheer. Aside from a Tourism Board many people love to hate, we have an entire government department trying to cram yet more overseas guests into our streets.

The obvious reason for the bureaucrats’ obsession with boosting tourist numbers even as the city is clearly reaching its maximum capacity is plain obtuseness. Our officials try to boost tourism year after year for much the same reason an inbred, mentally retarded inmate in an insane asylum rocks backwards and forwards for months on end: it’s wired in, and they aren’t even aware that they’re doing it.

A more pernicious explanation would be that our policymakers are in cahoots with vested interests. The main beneficiaries of our tourism industry are commercial landlords. The sector is therefore essentially a subset of the tycoon-run property cartel that, with the all-too obvious blessing of policymakers, controls housing, retail, distribution, transport, energy, construction and … is there anything I’ve missed?

Either way, experience has shown that the people of Hong Kong can bend the powers-that-be to their will if they are sufficiently roused. From an administrative point of view, cutting the tourism menace down to size is simple: you slap a 50% tax on luxury goods, with a promise to reduce it in tandem with similar levies as they are lowered on the Mainland. (Such a move damages our reputation as a shopper’s paradise? That’s the whole idea. Abercrombie & Fitch’s Pedder Building branch folds under the weight of its HK$7 million-a-month rent? That’s the whole idea.)

The problem is convincing the government to reverse its avidly pro-tourism stance. Making a pair of visitors wait two hours for their bus so they freak out is a start. I myself have broken the deeply ingrained habits of a lifetime and started to be less than polite when physically moving tourist-obstructions staring at maps out of my way when they block my path. Although I am happy with the idea in theory, I still can’t quite bring myself to give visitors deliberately bad directions, like putting them on the number 112 to So Uk Estate when they want to go to Stanley Market. I was too well brought up.

While I ponder ‘the way forward’ (a ‘Re-Occupy Central’ movement?), I have an interesting task. I’ve got to (because my neighbours are too distant or senile to do it) call Richfield Realty to demand that they come over and fix the empty, leaky-when-raining apartment they own in my block. They buy up units in old buildings with a view to eventually knocking them down for redevelopment (by their buddies Henderson Land). The twist is that they are (allegedly) scum and have a reputation (allegedly) for deliberately causing problems like leaks in buildings in order to drive other owners out.

The observant and alert may have noticed a recent outbreak of particularly enigmatic Hong Kong government posters in locations usually reserved for exhortations to Look After Your Grandparents’ Teeth and Stamp Out Dangerous Bicycle Riding Now. The minimalist design simply says ‘Home Hong Kong’ and ‘Hong Kong, Our Home’ in Chinese and English respectively.

At first I thought it was some sort of all-purpose propaganda they use to fill empty billboards after the Kids Say Yes to Healthy Websites announcements get taken down, before the re-launch of the Stop Blowing Chickens’ Backsides campaign. Then I noticed a logo tucked away in the corner, and one of those funny barcode things you can’t use unless you have the right app, which no-one does. Still, I shrugged and walked on. Probably some subliminal message about dangerous trees.

Then a week or so ago, I heard some public service radio ad breathlessly extolling the wonder and excitement of something called the Hong Kong Games. And a day or so later some senior government officials had their photos taken cleaning a wet market. Still I thought nothing of it all – just random occurrences. And then yesterday I happened to overhear a conversation in which someone mentioned Gracie Foo. Gracie Foo, as we all know, is Deputy Secretary for Home Affairs. Someone mentioned in passing that Gracie is Convenor of the Hip Hong Kong Working Group.

My curiosity got the better of me, and now everything is starting to fall into place.

Behold the HK Our Home Campaign. Launched by Minister of Everything Carrie Lam with great, but sadly little-noticed, fanfare on April 23. It does not require additional funding, Carrie insisted, and ‘is not a sign of negative sentiments’ – as if anyone would imagine otherwise. To do their bit, pop icons Jackie Cheung and Eason Chan sang from the heart, which may well be a first for them. The campaign runs for the rest of this year, no less, and is divided into four colour-coded themes: Hip Hong Kong, Vibrant Hong Kong, Caring Hong Kong and, of course, Fresh Hong Kong, each under the experienced convenor-ship of a Director or Deputy Secretary of a relevant bureau. Gracie she’s-so-cool Foo’s Hip Hong Kong is, as we would expect, all about nurturing young people’s leadership and commitment. Funky or what? As Charles Ramsey would no doubt tell Gracie, “You gotta have some pretty big testicles to pull this one off, bro’.”

But wait! There’s more! In fact, an incredible 480 events (all compiled here) are coming our way as part of the ‘HK Our Home’ Campaign. Looking through the list, it becomes clear how Carrie can deliver such a bloated package of activities with no extra funding: they were all going to happen anyway. Beach-cleaning, for example. The inaugural berthing at the Kai Tak cruise terminal sounds especially desperate. (Yippee! More tourists!) I look forward to the ‘no-waste lifestyle’ promotion, no doubt organized by the same people who thought up the Zhuhai Bridge and HK$60/70/80 billion Kowloon-Shenzhen High-Speed Hole. And, just in case senior citizens thought they could enjoy a bit of peace and quiet in their retirement, there’s an ‘Opportunities for the Elderly Project’. The grassroots are also going to get hassled, courtesy of the Shatin Methodist Church ‘Lord’s Grace in Neighbourhood’ bash. Even a Correctional Services Department bar-bending training course for convicts gets dragged into the sprawling attempt to apply the ‘HK Our Home’ brand to everything.

And just 18 days to go to… Positive Energy Day. Details are still to be announced, but basically on May 26 Carrie Lam will march into your home with her sleeves rolled up, drag you out of your bed and beat you with a rattan cane until you smile and agree that there are no negative sentiments.

While Working Group Convenors and their underlings rush around slapping the ‘HK Our Home’ logo on everything, 7 million people are asking the inevitable question: What is actually going on here? They can debate two possibilities.

Either the Chief Executive nagged the civil servants for some sort of press-button-make-city-instantly-cheerful miracle plan, and, unaware of the imminent arrival of the morale-boosting giant Rubber Duck, they produced this large-scale but otherwise default, cookie-cutter condescending publicity exercise because they can do no other.

Or desperately underworked bureaucrats eager to justify their air-conditioning allowances by Serving the Community to death pestered the Chief Executive with a vast, loopy patronizing quasi-promotion to make the Big Lychee oh-so Happy and Harmonious, and he swiftly agreed in order to get them out of his hair (I mean, offered enthusiastic backing).

The Hang Seng Index opens an amazing 20% up at 27,500. OK, so it doesn’t (it actually starts the day down a tiny fraction). But it would have done if the South China Morning Post’s front page were to be believed. To read the SCMP, you would get the impression that the Chinese government has decided to go right ahead and make the country’s currency fully convertible, and the wall of money we were promised six years ago is about to come crashing into town.

Look for details, however, and all you get is unattributed vagueness in the passive voice, like “It had been speculated earlier that full convertibility would come by 2015.” Or, as the Standard puts it, “It is believed that Yuan capital account convertibility could be achieved in 2015 at the earliest.” For a clearer idea of what is going on, we turn to Reuters (few other channels are even mentioning this semi-story about another outbreak of reform waffle), which tells us that China’s cabinet has called for plans to ‘help achieve’ convertibility at some stage.

In other words, the only body in the country that can authorize convertibility is openly saying that it still hasn’t got around to planning such a move. Which is hardly surprising. Just last week, the SCMP quoted economist and HK$ peg designer John Greenwood as summing it up nicely: “No country ruled by a communist party has ever permitted free capital flows.”

Karl Marx thought communism would follow what he saw as late-stage capitalism, and would therefore happen first in Britain. In fact, communist regimes took over in societies that had recently been feudal. In the case of China, that meant a Leninist culture of absolute, tight-gripped control was grafted onto an old Confucian imperial one, with a bit of KMT warlordism thrown in. The Chinese Communist Party cannot permit free capital flows for the same reason it cannot permit a free press, a free judiciary, a free legislative branch, free banks, free churches, free universities or free civic and charitable movements: it must control, control, control.

A freely convertible Yuan would require that the Communist Party allow free global markets to decide either the exchange rate or (if they kept the currency pegged) the country’s interest rates. For ‘free global markets’ read ‘evil foreigners who are forever plotting the overthrow of the regime in Beijing in order to keep China down’.

But there is more than just paranoia going on here. By denying the masses the right to move money into another currency or country, the Chinese government forces them to put their savings into local banks. (Alternatives are dismal local stock markets, inflated property or informal and risky savings-and-loans sharks.) The banks are, needless to say, state-owned and pay depositors lousy interest. They can therefore lend to other state-owned companies at very low rates, enabling those corporations to compete unfairly with private or foreign rivals, thus accumulating extra market share and assets. The bosses of these companies are family members and buddies of the country’s leaders, and they stuff their pockets with much of the proceeds, which then leaks out into Macau casinos, Hong Kong money-launderers and Vancouver real estate.

So a non-convertible currency forces the ordinary population to transfer part of the wealth they earn to the modern-day aristocracy. Same old feudalism, in other words. (With Chinese characteristics!) And if you were a member of the Politburo, you wouldn’t have any plans to change it either.