Big Lychee, Various Sectors

A heartfelt conversation in a Starbucks this morning reveals that at least one person in Hong Kong feels deep sympathy for Henry Tang. Despite being groomed from back in the 1990s as Tung Chee-hwa’s likely successor, Henry lost out in 2005 when Beijing suddenly dumped the Crop-Haired One and installed mild-mannered and mildly competent pen-pusher Donald Tsang. After waiting patiently and loyally for seven more years, Tang has the position offered him on a plate only to fumble it up with one of the most memorable displays of public grotesquery the Big Lychee has ever had the pleasure to witness.

It is the twofold dashing of Henry’s hopes that makes the tale such a moving and tragic one, to my (female, it probably goes without saying) companion. The sight of tears welling up in his eyes on Sunday after the votes were counted was almost too much to bear. She even clutches a tissue herself as she recounts the shocking heartlessness of her husband, who it seems looked upon the scene with undisguised glee – like 7 million others. Pity, remorse and sadness for Henry. I have seen everything.

Now we wait to see who and what CY ‘Will Tackle Property Tycoons’ Leung actually is. Will he prove to be a long-overdue Thatcher-style reformer who eats vested interests for breakfast, turns a moribund society round and ends up being hated by everyone for it? Or would he prefer to go down in the history books as a slimy turncoat who delivers his fellow-citizens into Singapore-style, Communist Party-approved white terror, abolition of civil liberties and Stalinist economic planning? Or some sort of in-between hodgepodge that pleases no-one? At the very least, can we be rid of the sort of policymaking ridiculousness that requires average-earning Hong Kong people to send their kids to substandard schools while subsidizing a college restricted to the very rich to the tune of HK$600 million?

CY might prove effective where education is concerned. I’m not sure exactly what happened during his chairmanship of the Council at City University – something to do with a veterinary school, and, inevitably, remuneration for the publicly funded staff. If he had done evil, it would have been included in the West Kowloon, Triad and other smears aimed at him in the last couple of weeks. Instead, his detractors didn’t mention it, almost as if the decisive action that produced such wailing on the campus reminded them of their own inadequacies where governance is concerned.

On the subject of inadequacy, it comes to my notice that ‘certain people’, as Mainland leaders like to say, are doubting the accuracy of the Hemlock crystal ball that forecast Henry to be CE. The prediction was a dead cert (apart from the assumption that Beijing would flag the winner at an earlier stage), and indeed made allowances for a meteorite-style extreme change of circumstances. The Time Out feature used the example of Henry being eaten by a panda bear. Statistically, this was more probable than being caught with an illegal basement and taking PR advice to blame it on his wife. And you have to be really stupid to get eaten by a panda.

Just days after being rudely woken by Democratic Party lawmaker Emily Lau raging on the radio, we are dragged from our dreams this morning by another lengthy pan-democratic rant courtesy of Cyd Ho. Her complaint is that Chief Executive-elect CY Leung included the Chinese government’s Liaison Office as he did the rounds yesterday of people you need to see after being ‘elected’ CE. By the time I am brushing my teeth, the Civic Party’s Audrey Eu is also on air making a similar point, if less hysterically.

The pro-democrats’ problem, it seems, is not that CY actually visited the Mainland officials who last Wednesday suddenly started calling up loyalist members of the Election Committee urging them to switch their votes away from Henry Tang. It was that he did so too brazenly and stayed too long. Or smiled too much. Or something like that.

Hong Kong’s next CE is loathed by the property tycoons and the civil servants – the most parasitical and reactionary forces in the city today. If the pro-democrats had just a little common sense, they would surely identify a potential opportunity for some sort of constructive engagement with our new leadership. (In practice, some pro-democrats have professional or personal ties with parts of the anti-CY establishment, but let’s assume for the sake of argument they are all politicians first and money-grubbing, radical-chic lawyers second.) Rather than declaring their enemies’ enemy their friend, as all good cynics should, they have adopted their usual default stance of outright antagonism to whoever is in charge on the grounds that he is unclean and untouchable owing to the undemocratic manner of his selection. But is it simply ideological purity? It sometimes seems the thought of not opposing scares them.

It is unlikely that CY Leung will burst into tears because the pro-dems won’t be his friend. In fact, you have to wonder whether he even realizes what a divisive figure he is. Nearly everyone in Hong Kong’s political and business class hates everyone else today. The big boys who first declared support for Henry Tang last year have been left out on a limb after sticking by their man to the end – hoping no candidate would get a majority of votes. The timid shoe-shiners who dutifully followed them acted at least partly out of deference to (or fear of) CY’s powerful pro-Henry enemies. Then they had to obediently switch sides at the last minute and vote for CY – leaving them looking and feeling like idiots. There is a lot of finger-pointing.

Henry Tang is leaving town for a few weeks. Who wouldn’t? The poor guy is finished: the Chinese government will never forgive him for somehow managing to screw up an election rigged especially for him, nor for losing self-control in his final desperation to do CY down and apparently betraying information about confidential meetings.

Bank of East Asia boss David Li is left in the sad and unusual position of having backed the wrong guy and thus being an outsider. (He might adapt: his father served the British, the Japanese and the British again in the 1940s.) He has more bad news on the way: industry gossip has long held that he would arrange for his son to inherit his banking functional constituency seat in September’s Legislative Council election, but it seems the Bank of China Group – a big bloc of votes – wants its own man in there.

Anthony Wu, the ultimate smug, insider Donald-man, heading up the Hospitals Authority, the General Chamber of Commerce and the Bauhinia Foundation think-tank pushing bureaucratic interests, would like to serve the new regime if it needs him. This raises the question of how inclusive CY will be. Outgoing CE Donald Tsang drew on a very small pool of sycophants to fill his multitude of advisory and other bodies. But there are 7 million people in the city, and a lot more talent than the previous self-styled elite would like to admit. So… maybe not Anthony, but thanks.

And this just in: the Liberal Party’s Selina Chow accusing legislator and former Security Secretary Regina Ip of, well, lying in her attempts to re-ingratiate herself with the next administration. “Regina, you told me CY would hurt people.” “No I didn’t Selina.” “Did.” “Didn’t.” “Did.” “Didn’t.” Slap, scratch, bite.

Just when you thought life couldn’t get more amusing… The Chinese government may reduce taxes on luxury goods, thus making it much cheaper for the Mainland nouveau-riches to buy their designer-label locust-goodies at home. Hong Kong, we are invited to believe, is ‘especially vulnerable’. Crack open the champagne!

And to think we worked so hard to think up the name 'Italy Station' for our 'Milan Station'-copycat handbag store in LKF

If anyone suggested this time last year that we would be getting CY Leung as next Chief Executive, they would have been considered a bit eccentric, at the very least. Even around six months ago, when the outline of the two-horse pseudo-race took shape, it was obvious that Henry Tang was the anointed one and Leung was there as the too-creepy-to-be-feasible fall guy, to make the process look more like a real election. Indeed, just six weeks ago (Henry’s basement hit the headlines mid-February) the idea that Beijing would choose someone other than the tycoons’ favourite seemed fanciful.

The Chinese leadership had not expressed a preference, presumably seeing 2012 as a test for the guided, semi-rigged form of universal suffrage likely for 2017. And, crucially, Beijing made it known that the next CE should have a fair degree of public support. Despite all this, the deciding factor was Henry himself. Whoever it was exactly in Hong Kong, the Liaison Office and the Mainland who took part in the planting and detonation of the basement bomb, and whatever their precise motives, they still probably could not have succeeded without his ineptitude. Henry was like a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin character blundering from one painful, slapstick accident to another – more sad than funny.

The Hemlock mega-feature in July’s Time Out said of CY Leung’s chances: “We should be so lucky.” Philip Bowring in today’s South China Morning Post puts it neatly by saying: “It would indeed be nice to see the tycoons’ dislike of Leung to be well-grounded.” But not everyone is so blasé about the mysterious, Transylvanian-featured, Communist-admiring, wolf-man deliverer of (no doubt Li Ka-shing-made) plastic flowers.

As Beijing finally – and unsubtly – came out in favour of CY last week, some folk took fright and argued frantically that rule by tycoons would be better, since at least we would keep our freedoms of speech and assembly and basic economic rights. Former Chief Secretary Anson Chan, for one, pleaded with pro-democrat members of the Election Committee to cast their votes tactically for Henry, thus aligning themselves with the smug, parasitical tycoon-bureaucrat establishment that has been feeding off Hongkongers for the last 10-plus years. The pan-democrats, while sticking to their undisciplined mix of abstentions and votes for Albert Ho, talked of ‘white terror’ and unprecedented interference by Beijing in Hong Kong’s internal affairs.

Part of the reason for this panic must have been the heavy handed methods used by the Liaison Office officials to whip pro-Beijing voters into line at the last minute and apparently persuade a newspaper to twist its editorial position to pro-CY. However, the truth is that Beijing has not interfered in this election more than in previous ones. On the last three occasions, China openly picked a winner from the start – how much more can you interfere? This time, the charade was more sophisticated and the more-feasible candidate made himself utterly unacceptable to the populace at large late in the day, requiring far more visible and hasty manipulation of the quasi-vote.

The main reason for the fear of CY’s illiberal and authoritarian potential is CY himself. Anyone monitoring his speechmaking over the weekend would have noticed a sudden and new-found obsession with Hong Kong’s rights, liberties and core values – even democracy. For a sense of the anxiety he causes, here is an email (slightly amended for clarity) received by an elected politician from a constituent over the weekend…

This is a mini 1949 KMT (Kuomintang) vs CCP (Chinese Communist Party) situation. Then, the Chinese people were duped into believing CCP because KMT was too corrupt, ineffective, like the HK people is being duped, because the Bow-Tie govt was inert, ineffective and bad. HK people, including Dr Choi Kin etc, are willing to risk freedom of expression to have a change. [Choi Kin announced the Medical Association’s decision to back CY.] The situation is this bad.

The Commies are not to be trusted. The Pan-Dems should vote Tang, keep quiet about this beforehand, and publicly rebuke and warn Tang and associates afterwards. Irrespective of the voting result, they have betrayed HK and sent HK people into the arms of the commies. Please pass it on to the Pan-Dems.

Heaven bless HK

Hongkongers can be hyper-sensitive about perceived threats to their freedom and rule of law, and this is one of the main reasons many assume that CY, while hardly the warm and cuddly type, can only be better than continued misrule by tycoons. He won’t dare mount a Communist clampdown; look what happened to Tung Chee-hwa and indeed Henry. But not everyone is so laid back. There are quite a lot of people out there, many of them educated, middle-class and middle-aged or older, who are in a state of dread about CY Leung’s arrival in Government House. Nervous ninnies who can’t accept some post-1997 realities and symbolism, or wise elders who know something the rest of us don’t?

For anyone who has problems sleeping at night: the normally mouth-frothing nationalistic Communist propaganda organ Global Times says Hong Kong’s distinctive pluralism and radical ideas are really cool.

Click to hear ‘Clap for the Wolfman’ by the Guess Who!

Perhaps unaware that Hong Kong has just undergone a sort of coup d’etat – or simply to try and keep the excitement going for another 48 hours – the South China Morning Post describes Sunday’s Chief Executive ‘election’ as virtually too close to call, with a second round a distinct possibility.

The reality of this carefully rigged system is that Beijing can and will control the outcome, and that outcome will be CY Leung. There is a complication in that part of the Election Committee’s inbuilt pro-Beijing majority is seething with resentment at this. The Inherited Wealth Spoilt Brat Sector, mainly the Liberal Party and allies, is in a fit of disbelieving pique at the last-minute tossing aside of Henry Tang. As former Education Secretary Arthur Li amusingly puts it, they are “acting like a group of children who don’t want to play with him [Leung].”

However, Beijing knows full well that the Liberals’ grasping selfishness and opportunism make them unreliable (such as when they pulled the plug on the Article 23 security law in 2003). The rigged system has enough built-in redundancy to do without them. After refusing to be drawn at any point in the campaign, the totally dependable Federation of Trade Unions has unanimously declared it will plump for CY. Its stable-mate the Democratic Alliance for the Blah Blah of Hong Kong will do the same later today. Then we have all those tragic folk like the Chinese Medicine Sector who, after complaining no-one had told them who to vote for, have now had this gap in their knowledge filled. Added to existing supporters, this probably gives CY a good 80% of the votes he needs.

The one danger is that people who don’t much like either CY or Henry will abstain and CY’s share of the vote will fall just short of a simple majority. The Liberals have been discussing the blank ballot as if it were a noble gesture. Mainland officials have responded by making it clear that not ticking a box is a dirty, unpatriotic trick and part of a pro-democrat plot. This is absurd, as the mainstream pro-dems have their own third candidate, Albert Ho, to vote for; but Beijing needs to patch the United Front back together, so (as with Tibetan unrest and so many other problems) it blames ‘foreign forces’. The bottom line is that most of the Election Committee members tempted to indulge in the non-voting fad would, if they had a gun pointed to their head, dutifully tick the CY box. Here, in China Daily, you are looking down the wrong end of the barrel…

So, officially, the pro-Beijing camp is all one big happy family, with excited nonconformist supporters of CY, gloomy plutocrat friends of Henry, dullards who nod at anything, and hardline party automatons all joining together to confront the true enemy, the evil pan-democrat opposition. The truth is that some puffed-up, self-important ‘elites’ have lost big face in the last week, and they are bitter. That said, they are shallow and greedy and easy to buy off. It will be interesting, though perhaps ultimately a bit nauseating, to see how CY goes about meeting Beijing’s wishes to get them back on board. Meanwhile, because stringing them up from lampposts is sadly probably not on the agenda, we can dream that Hong Kong turns on its tycoons.

Click to hear ‘Let’s Get Together’ by the Jefferson Airplane!

If the New York Times says that Beijing has dumped the tycoons’ choice in favour of a ‘populist’ as Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive, it must be true. Yet this is a populist few seem to like.

Vintage pro-democrat Martin Lee claims appointment of the alleged card-carrying Communist CY Leung will violate the spirit of the Basic Law and endanger rule of law. Former Chief Secretary-turned-democrat Anson Chan says CY is a chameleon who doesn’t share Hong Kong’s core values. The Civic Party’s Alan Leong declares that CY sends shivers down his spine. The Democratic Party’s Albert Ho warns that CY in power will be “ruthless … unscrupulous and reckless and may be bold enough to do many things.”

Bold enough to do things? Gulp. If (and it is at least a medium-size if) Hong Kong is witnessing the toppling of its fundamentally corrupt coalition between parasitical tycoons and self-serving bureaucrats, the pan-democrats’ complaints raise a couple of questions.

The first is: what did the pan-democratic camp contribute to this fight to break the tycoons’ grip? The answer is nothing; they have spent 15 years getting nowhere towards universal suffrage while the property cartel and friends have been merrily plundering away.

The second is: how much are we willing to give up in terms of core values in exchange for having a fairer, less-feudal economic structure? Of course, there is no reason in theory why there must be such a trade-off. “You can have affordable homes provided you pass the Article 23 national security law” sounds illogical. So does, “You can have better help for the elderly and better health care provided you accept restrictions on press freedom.” Yet that, the pan-democrats seem to imply, seems to be the deal, and we might hazard a guess that pullers of strings in Beijing’s Hong Kong Liaison Office wouldn’t see anything wrong with such realpolitik.

CY certainly frightens the tycoons and establishment. Mega-plutocrat Li Ka-shing will vote for Henry regardless of what Beijing’s officials advise. Henry’s former partners in the Liberal Party refuse to vote for CY – even if, ludicrously, they can’t bring themselves to stand by the pitiful, philandering basement-builder. Former legislator Rita Fan echoes mutterings heard throughout the Big Lychee’s ‘elites’ today about how CY will lack credibility in office (just as much as Henry would have – that’s what they are reassuring one another, even though scandals and smears have left Leung far less damaged). Some still hope for a hung result and a fresh ‘election’. This suggests that CY really does pose a threat to property hegemony, collusion and other evils.

Which is great. But what, if any, price will there be to pay in terms of the ‘core values’ that protect our rights and freedoms? The sensitivity surrounding Article 23 has made rational debate on the thing very difficult. Seen as a symbolic re-statement of existing laws against theft and violence in a national security context, you could say it is a bogeyman used by pro-democrats to frighten us all. Or maybe it really is a way to enable a clampdown on dissidents. And of course if the crushing of Hong Kong’s un-Chinese liberties is so important, there are plenty of other ways to do it, bit by bit, here and there.

Yet Hong Kong people have a track record of getting very touchy when core values seem under threat; look at the backlash against poor CE Donald Tsang after his luxury jet trips came to light. Mainland officials might like the idea of ‘integrating’ our culture of protest and dissent out of existence, but they also want the Big Lychee to be basically untroublesome. CY, with an eye on victory in 2017, presumably feels the same.

His reputation as an authoritarian largely comes down to appearances. He got into Communist-ruled China in the late 1970s, when it was still extremely unfashionable, indeed suspect, to do so. It wasn’t just eccentric but almost sinister. And of course he physically looks the part, with that austere demeanor and those creepy eyes. But the only firm evidence we have at hand is this list of insults about CY’s supposed tyranny as Chairman of City University’s Council. Either he turned the place into hell (as the document says) and the Hong Kong media failed to pick up on the outrage – or certain people didn’t get their way on staff perks and department budgets and have been frothing at the mouth about it as only academics can. Who knows?

However – a valuable clue about the real CY has just come to light (so to speak). CY’s team is cancelling an election rally tomorrow in Tsimshatsui. Among the reasons given is the weather, which they say is forecast as ‘not good’. The Hong Kong Observatory, as of 10.15am, calls for above-average sunshine for the day. And the word is that every voter at the ‘election’ on Sunday will be issued with a string of garlic along with their ballot paper.

Click to hear Skip Bifferty’s ‘Man in Black’!

Any hopes of drowsing in bed this morning are dashed when the Democratic Party’s Emily Lau comes on the radio, waxing irate at full volume about Beijing interfering in Hong Kong’s chief executive election. It is impossible to believe that, after all these years, Emily thinks the ritualized selection process is a real election or imagines that it is not rigged to produce the outcome earlier decided by the Central People’s Government. The compulsion to rant overrides any logic.

For the rest of us, Beijing’s decision to finally put CE candidate Henry Tang out of his misery and tell its obedient supporters to vote for CY Leung on Sunday comes as a relief. Relief tinged perhaps with slight anxiety about what rule-by-wolf-man is going to mean in practice. But we can worry about that in good time. Right now, we have something to relish.

Beijing’s last-minute oblique announcement of Sunday’s winner is a long-overdue humiliation for the tycoons who backed Henry. Being summonsed over the border to receive orders is not unprecedented: in the late 90s, the big boys flew to Beijing to be reprimanded for bad-mouthing Tung Chee-hwa. But on this occasion, they have been very publicly taken down. After all our smug establishment elite’s pompous strutting around with their automatic presumption that they pick the CE, they are suddenly swept aside as irrelevant. It is worth endlessly repeating: he who lives by the shoe-shine dies by the shoe-shine. The Chinese Communist Party has no permanent friends, and it will kick its most loyal supporters/groveling sycophants in the teeth with all the empathy of a psychopath when circumstances require it.

Hong Kong’s pro-Henry tycoons will devise a face-saving narrative to explain what has happened. Their candidate turned out to be disappointingly unlucky, being caught with the sort of extra-marital affairs and basement problems any of us could have had. And to make matters worse, he tragically failed to articulate his rights and immunities as a holder of great inherited wealth at all convincingly. The damage was blown up out of all proportion by trouble-making newspapers that go too far or are out of control. Another problem was that factional struggles in Beijing sent confusing signals, though this is little consolation to a feudal caste to whom identifying and kowtowing to the right emperor-in-waiting is a primal instinct.

It would be too much – indeed, probably rash – to hope that the new administration will take a swift hatchet to the cartels (it might be better for it to decimate some senior civil servants first).  But the bad blood between the CY camp and the plutocrats who loathe him is real. All the bowing and scraping in the world cannot eradicate it, and even a bit of uncertainty is uncomfortable to our entitlement-minded tycoons. What they will not admit as they nervously ponder the future, because the implications are too awful to contemplate, is the deciding role played in all this by the Hong Kong people. They had a veto, and – lo and behold – they used it.

The opinion polls following the Chief Executive candidates’ debate last night show: CY Leung 36%; Henry Tang 21%; Albert Ho 14%; None of this rabble 20%; Don’t know 9%. This brings CY’s lead over Henry well within the 20-point range that landlord Allan Zeman judges to be necessary to qualify Henry for appointment. Those of us with a more demanding definition of credibility may consider 36% a bit of a stretch – and that is presumably the pro-Henry camp’s hope in this bitter struggle: drag CY’s ratings down so he becomes as unthinkable as CE as their own candidate.

Henry announced at the debate that he had gone to the Independent Commission Against Corruption to make an official whine about CY’s accusation that he was lying when he said CY wanted to tear-gas Article 23 demonstrators in 2003. It seems the ICAC has become a sort of notary public willing to accept sworn statements on any subject from politicians who have been, or wish to appear to have been, slighted.

Henry’s breach of the rule of confidentiality – even if he is in fact innocent of the offense because he is making up the whole tear-gas story – has done him more harm than good. He made himself look better last night on the occasions he pronounced his fulsome support for universal suffrage. It is late in the day and of course, like his protestations about the public interest, totally unconvincing – especially when billionaire supporters joined in the fervent applause. But it highlighted CY’s almost painful reluctance to show any enthusiasm for what hardcore Communist loyalists dismiss as ‘Western-style democracy’.

If the pro-Henry camp want to make the most of an anyone-but-CY-(even-if-not-Henry) strategy, and can’t produce halfway decent smears, the way to go must surely be to highlight CY Leung as culturally alien to Hongkongers. Obviously they have to do it without appearing less than proud as Chinese, but it is perfectly acceptable for the great and good in the Big Lychee to go on and on about how much they cherish freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly and how much they adore common law, and juries and judges in wigs. All these things get Beijing’s stamp of approval on this side of the border courtesy of the Basic Law, even though serious patriots consider them necessary foreign and colonial evils at best, and certainly can’t bring themselves to celebrate them. It is one way the tycoons can drive a wedge between CY and the masses.

CY could fight back more forcefully against apparent smears – but he doesn’t. Perhaps he is hoping that by turning the other cheek and being polite he will please Beijing officials who are shocked and dismayed by the strife within the Hong Kong establishment and have called for a bit more peace, love and understanding. But his reticence isn’t helping him in the polls. If Beijing has abandoned Henry, and doesn’t want the embarrassment of holding a hasty and heavily rigged second campaign, it would help to give the remaining option a discreet boost. Maybe the Liaison Office would like to orchestrate a heavy pro-CY turnout at Hong Kong University’s ‘civil referendum’ on March 23. A 51% share of the vote would do the trick.

In all the excitement, poor old current Chief Executive Donald Tsang seems to have disappeared. Maybe he is keeping his head down and hoping we will soon forget his own humiliation at the hands of public opinion and the media over his tycoons’ yachts and Shenzhen apartment scandals. Lest he slip from our minds completely, I can’t resist this: an SCMP Harry cartoon, rejected by the prissy editors but now appearing in the Foreign Correspondents Club’s magazine…

The death in a local hospital of King George Tupou V of Tonga gets a bit of coverage in the Hong Kong press this morning – the subtext being that no-one knew the guy was ill, or happened to be in town, or (frankly) even existed. But anyone with an interest in the cosmic, fifth-dimension side of things may like to note that he will go down in history for having brought democracy to a smallish, former British colony in the Asia-Pacific.

Which leads us to the inescapable and hilarious chaos of the Hong Kong establishment civil war that has displaced what was supposed to be a neatly scripted Chief Executive quasi-election. This shambles would not and could not have happened were Beijing’s original intended appointee Henry Tang not a total klutz. The man’s ineptitude – or perhaps more accurately his advisors’ – was on full display over the weekend as people pondered his allegation during Friday’s debate that rival CY Leung mentioned the possibility of using riot police and tear gas against Article 23 demonstrators in 2003.

On the surface, this is a relatively clever little smear. It hits the Article 23 button; in local political mythology, the constitutionally required national security law is a demon that cannot be resurrected, or even mentioned. It hits the ‘CY is a creepy authoritarian’ button brilliantly; this is exactly the sort of thing we would expect the stereotype Leung, with his vague reputation for tyrannical leanings, to say. But the main result was to land Henry in the dirt for having breached the principle of the confidentiality of top government meetings.

Of course, if his advisors simply made the story up, he is not guilty of breaking the confidentiality rule – merely of lying. Several people present at Executive Council meetings at the time deny ever hearing CY say such things. Regina Ip manages to maintain that CY is innocent of the remarks but Henry is nonetheless still guilty of breaching the confidentiality principle. The logically impossible is so easy when you are fantasizing about Sunday’s CE poll producing no result, and Beijing plucking you from nowhere to win a second round.

Although it may well be that the ‘tear gas’ allegation is a fabrication, Henry obviously has to admit breaking the confidentiality rule, and he does so on grounds of public interest. But it’s not Zyklon B we’re talking about, and as Tung Chee-hwa discovered, the Hong Kong people will turf out a leader who threatens civil liberties. So: Henry as valiant whistleblower defending the right of Hongkongers to demonstrate without fear of excessive police force? Not very convincing. But nice try.

Being loyal to Beijing, Henry can hardly try to smear CY for his supposed Chinese Communist Party membership. But as luck would have it, yesterday saw the launch of a book doing just that. My spy at the event says the author, Florence Leung Mo-han, was a member of the Hok Yau Club, a United Front youth organization active back in the 60s, and provides a rather fetching photo of the lady. Eccentric and likeable loner, or superbly disguised secret Henry weapon? (It’s hard to imagine Henry’s team having the inspiration to come up with that wardrobe.)  

Mainlanders are always mystified as to why the CCP is such a sensitive topic in Hong Kong. Having had carnal relations for a while with a former Party member, I can attest that they are just normal people. CY Leung is and will be CY Leung whether he secretly belongs to an underground branch or not. Still, like the ‘tear gas’ story, the red scare might chip a couple more percentage points off his opinion poll rating.

Here is a good-as-any (and admirably succinct) summary of the factional struggle in China, and the parallels with the friction between the CY and Henry camps here in the Big Lychee. In a nutshell: our local division reflects the national one, but Hong Kong is a sideshow and the big boys in Beijing aren’t too fussed about which side our eventual CE represents.

Unless Regina’s dreams about blank ballots and a second quasi-election are to come true, Beijing has just a few days to indicate its preference to all those tragic Election Committee members still unsure who they should vote for. Henry needs a revelation – of midnight sacrificial pedophile vampirism proportions – to make CY more unacceptable than a philandering, basement-building spoilt rich dimwit. And he needs it… now.

The South China Morning Post invites us to spare a thought today for those who, faced with the uncertainties and confusion of modern life, suffer from doubts, a crisis of confidence and consequently great mental anguish. They are the useful idiots who pad out the 1,200-strong Election Committee, which theoretically votes for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. Not only do they vote the way Beijing tells them to – they freely admit it. There they are, all ready to strut around the polling hall on March 25 being big important electors casting their votes, and the great cosmic understanding and acceptance of the inevitability of Henry hasn’t happened.

Kwan Chi-yee of the Chinese medicine sector pleads for help: “I wish that Beijing could give a clearer message of its preference so that we could vote for that candidate accordingly.” The Hong Kong Taoist Association’s Hau Wing-cheong laments that “The central government’s officials did express their preferred candidate [to us] a long time ago, as we understood it. But the situation has changed.”

Maybe Kwan could suck on a cordyceps or do a little moxibustion to clear and strengthen his life energy and come to a decision all by himself. Hau, of course, can always resort to the Taoist concept of Wu Wei – ‘action through inaction’ (always works for me). Funny how a practitioner of unscientific, superstition-based folk healing and an adherent of a religion that isn’t a religion turn up in a charade of an election procedure.

Some EC members are made of slightly sterner stuff. Tycoons and demi-tycoons are increasingly expressing tentative acceptance of CY Leung in public. If Beijing intended to penalize them for not voting for Henry, they would have heard by now; that’s essentially the logic. It presumes that China’s leadership is paying attention at a time when it is wrapped up in reformist/leftist/princeling factional tussles. (The purging of Bo Xilai may be about personality as much as ideology, but it puts a dropping of little Henry in perspective.) Note that this logic – and the agonizing of EC members generally – assumes that the CE ‘election’ ballot papers can and will be checked to see who voted for whom.

To the extent that China’s top officials are thinking about Hong Kong right now, they must be considering the city’s outspoken, march-prone populace, its raucous press and its undisciplined, infantile tycoons. And they must be looking at the porous border, and, being paranoid, pondering the possible contagion of their own simmering masses. And they must be concluding that they have to allow the spoilt former colonial subjects to exercise a veto, to shut them up. The people of Hong Kong have got the Chinese Communist Party by the balls. That’s all nervous, undecided Election Committee members need to know – assuming, of course, that Henry is beyond redemption and/or CY is beyond character-assassination. In which case, we are in for some seriously glum faces. Try to grin and gloat with at least a pinch of decorum.

Click to hear ‘Mexicali Blues’ by the Grateful Dead!

Just above the door in the conference room on the top floor of S-Meg Tower – in the heart of the bustling central business district of Asia’s zippiest international financial hub – is a dark-framed black and white photo of an elderly man. He gazes at the camera stiffly, though with dignity, from the confines of an iron lung. He is the late founder of S-Meg Holdings, who built the conglomerate up from humble origins, before bequeathing it to his number-one son. This morning, I fancy, the old man has a slight sneer as he looks down upon his heir.

The Big Boss has just returned from Beijing, where he attended the annual National People’s Congress/Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference fancy dress party, followed by a mildly discreet visit to his fat Mainland mistress to recover from the ordeal. Even in a good year, the NPC/CPPCC session is a chore Hong Kong tycoons hate; they are dragged away from vital work to sit around in a hotel waiting for mainland delegates to finish their naps, so long, turgid meetings can begin, day after day. The only relief comes from the Hong Kong press corps, who, in exchange for quotes about state leaders’ Delphic remarks, provide fresh gossip from the Big Lychee. And the word from back home this year was nerve-racking.

“I really, really wish I hadn’t given Henry my nomination,” the Big Boss mumbles. He looks at the backlog of junk mail – Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary weeds nothing out – strewn around on the shiny, triangular, good-feng-shui rosewood table. “Joseph Yam and David Li, they just kept calling me. Calling at night, at day, when I was in Singapore, when I was in Los Angeles. I just… couldn’t say no.”

I nod sympathetically. This is a sort of rehearsal of what he will say to CY Leung on March 28 or 29, or whenever the victorious Shandong-Transylvanian finally deigns to receive congratulatory tribute from those who so smugly and brazenly backed Beijing’s hand-picked Henry Tang. If it finally works out that way. If a grinning CY Leung makes the call to the establishment top dogs who hate him, and who were destined and entitled to have Hong Kong run by one of their own, before a last-minute illegal basement full of infidelities and bastard children came flying out of nowhere and turned the world upside down.

The messages are mixed. After 10 years of locking up Nobel-winning essayists, trendy artists and people who complain about poisoned milk, kindly Uncle Wen Jiabao says China needs democracy, freedom and apple pie. His comments on Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive are similarly uncertain. He could mean the most popular candidate will become Chief Executive; but he could be saying that the person who becomes Chief Executive will be the most popular – or we will run you over with a tank. I try to reassure the Big Boss with this cheering thought, but he is not convinced. It seems tantalizingly possible that the 7 million people of Hong Kong will get the casting vote.

The awful truth is that the dynamic, networking, string-pulling, access-enjoying leader of S-Meg Holdings may be in a state of having shoe-shined the wrong guy. It has never happened before, and it is the ultimate nightmare – a trap with no way out. Like waking up and finding yourself in a buried coffin. As he sifts aimlessly through the glossy newsletters and tacky invitations, he wonders aloud how he can avoid whatever vengeance CY as Chief Executive would wreak on him.

“I need to reach out. What about that factory in Indonesia we bought from those Chiu Chow people – the one that makes durian-flavoured cigarettes for children. Surely CY has a nephew who’d like it for a very good price, as a token of my esteem. It’s got the whole market sewn up.”

I try not to look skeptical. “The problem is… CY doesn’t, um…”

“No,” the Big Boss admits. “If he did, we’d know by now.”

CY doesn’t do tokens of esteem. The future looks hellish. Just as Hong Kong’s leading conglomerates wouldn’t last five minutes on a level playing field, so their owners’ status and influence will evaporate if just a hint of inclusion and meritocracy intrude on the existing system of insiders, favouritism and cronyism.

“How will things work?” the tycoon wails. “How will anyone get anything done?”

The strange thing is that S-Meg, and S-Meg’s employees, and S-Meg’s clients would probably be better off in a Hong Kong where we could all spend less on overpriced real estate and other cartelized goods and services, and more on other, even fun, stuff – be it durian-flavoured snacks, health care or whatever. But we have had this conversation before. It’s not about economics. Not even that much about power. It’s about preserving the elite’s self-image as the elite. What are they without that?

The Big Boss takes a sudden interest in a shiny brochure advertising Versailles-style beachfront property in Hainan. His father surveys the scene, as if to say, “I always told you to keep away from politics.”