1. We reel in horror at the suggestion that Macau casino mogul Dr Stanley Ho GBS OBE might be associated in some way with triads. This follows New Jersey’s decision to bar his daughter Pansy from running a gaming business in the state on account of the family connection. “You would have to be living under a rock not to know about Stanley Ho,” said former MGM Mirage chairman Terry Lanni, “and what the perception of Stanley Ho is.” What on earth can this disgraceful man be thinking?

Perhaps now the Hong Kong government will finally come to its senses and give the ailing Dr Ho the Grand Bauhinia Medal that every high net worth patriot in the Big Lychee receives as of right. The administration’s decision to leave him languishing with a mere Gold Bauhinia Star – which they give to anybody, along with all the riffraff Bronze and petit bourgeois arriviste Silver ones – has always struck me as a glaring insult, indeed a calculated humiliation, though fortunately not many people seem to have picked up on it.

2. We are appalled at the sight of Financial Secretary John Tsang wasting his time and our money in Kuala Lumpur uttering inane blather about how Hong Kong is to somehow guide its banks into making the city a major platform for Islamic finance – a cynical fad aimed at exploiting gullible religious believers, of which Malaysia has become the regional hub. Whatever next? Chief Secretary Henry Tang going to Shenzhen and signing vacuous agreements on partnership and cooperation with a bunch of corrupt thug-cadres who hate us?

3. We are struck dumb on hearing that Hong Kong officials have made a decision that will benefit the property tycoons at the expense of the rest of the population. The idea that they would even consider allowing the last few gaps in the hillside and on the roads of the Mid Levels to be filled in with monstrous high-rises and more traffic beggars belief.

4. We freak out at the news that among Hong Kong’s world-class, knowledge-economy, service-sector, high value-added exports is a movie called Womb Ghosts featuring the spirits of aborted fetuses and a scene – even in the trailer on YouTube – in which an egg cracked into a frying pan contains a small, bloody human embryo-baby of some sort. The idea that our local film industry would stoop to such depths of depravity, bad taste and crap scriptwriting to make a few bucks out of excitable and unsavoury American teenagers is little short of sickening. Have these production houses and cinematic arts professionals no shame?

5. We are struck dumb on hearing that Hong Kong officials have made a decision that will benefit the property tycoons at the expense of the rest of the population. Again. The idea that they would even consider tilting the playing field even more steeply in the developers’ favour by enabling compulsory sales of old buildings with 80% of owners’ approval leaves us flabbergasted. As for the sight of the corporate functional constituency representatives – and the Democratic Alliance for the Blah Blah of Hong Kong – combining to ram the measure through in the Legislative Council… What can I say? Who would have thought they would ever live to see the day when such a thing happened?

Such weirdness… I think I have to go and lie down. Thank God this lunatic string of aberrations is over and next week everything will be back to normal.

First, the Tiberius approach. The Roman emperor tried to ban silk in the AD30s because its importation was depleting the empire’s reserves of wealth; the Han Dynasty in China required payment in the form of gold – which it hoarded – and refused to accept other goods in exchange.

Tiberius didn’t know anything about the Seres, or silk people; he didn’t even know where China was. Indeed, Romans thought silk was the wool of a sea-dwelling sheep. And it is unlikely that the Chinese noticed the Romans’ limp attempt at economic sanctions.  Result: nothing happened, and the Chinese carried on, oblivious to foreigners’ concerns.

Second, there is what we might call the Palmerston approach. In the early 19th Century, Indian-based British merchants buying silk, tea and chinaware for export to the UK faced a similar problem. The Chinese authorities banned importation of most foreign goods and demanded that barbarian traders pay for Chinese products in silver. Again, the metal was simply hoarded. It started to grow scarce, so the merchants found another commodity that was as valuable and easy to transport: opium. The Chinese government objected, and tried to stamp the traffic out by confiscating the merchants’ supplies.

Britain’s response to this infringement of her subjects’ property rights was unambiguous: declare war; win; demand reparations, land and free trade; repeat as necessary.

One difference is that China today is far more integrated into the world economy. The whole country depends on imports of raw materials, energy, technology and plain everyday food, mostly from places other than the US. They pay for it not by selling pleasant, smooth, highly desirable silk, but by exporting cheap, indeed often worthless and unnecessary, manufactured junk, notably to the US. To help the process, they force their low-paid factory staff to subsidize fat Western consumers – the net effect of a weak, pegged currency reducing a population’s purchasing power. Now the Americans are basically demanding a competitive devaluation of the dollar, to make their own people poorer. A stronger Renminbi equals higher demand for imports among Chinese consumers, equals US$5-a-gallon gas in the US.

The Renminbi will rise in its own good time; it seems such a safe bet that many of us in Hong Kong take advantage of our privileged access to 20,000 Yuan a day to accumulate RMB savings as a sort of fingers-crossed, probably-high-yield time deposit. But in the short term, Obama will follow a route closer to Tiberius than Palmerston, whatever labour unions, xenophobes, Nobel prize-winning economists and congressmen might want. A big trade fight might teach [insert name of whoever you don’t like] a lesson, but the world simply isn’t that exciting. Look at Greece – I’ve given up waiting for that country to drop out of the Eurozone, let alone for the common currency to blow apart. They’re going to find a disappointingly dull way to muddle through. I just know it. Euro-Armageddon would be great, but life’s just not that interesting.

Except maybe this, in today’s South China Morning Post:

How is this supposed to influence a consumer’s behaviour?  The small print says: “Jamie Bochert photographed by Juergen Teller.” Never heard of either of them. The ad is for a certain Marc Jacobs. Never heard of him/it. I have no clue what this is an ad for. All I can be sure of is that I don’t want one.

Oh, and that it’s made in China.

Click on the picture to hear kids playing at 62dB, courtesy of Amadou & Mariam!

LIS now has another distinction.  It seems it has become the first school in the whole of Hong Kong to be served with a noise abatement notice by the Environmental Protection Department on account of the sound of its kids.

This happened soon after the growing school finally opened new premises in a renovated, derelict hotel at Pui O last month.  That project – you can see this coming a mile off – faced peevish opposition on the part of certain sons of the local soil.* EPD inspectors turned up and positioned their microphone right outside. Apparently, they waited for some time before recording any noise, but sure enough, lunchtime came around, the children came out and the valiant EPD officials registered 62 decibels.

Which surely makes LIS students the quietest kids in the Big Lychee. However, the EPD take their job seriously – why else do you think Hong Kong is such a calm, almost silent place? – and slapped the school with the abatement notice for exceeding the 60dB limit in ‘village type development’ (the same level that applies to country parks). A public primary school 200 metres away was not measured; no doubt the children there are studying quietly for their exams rather than running around uncontrolled to no purpose.

Like much noticeable EDP activity, noise abatement notices are rare; perhaps it helps if a New Territories village chief makes the complaint. The usual fine for failure to comply tends to be roughly in the HK$15,000-20,000 range. That’s a lot when you’re nine.

* I have only heard one side of the story. It could be that this latest outbreak of strife in the ethnic-cleansing, inter-tribal mayhem that is local politics in southern Lantau is the result of an unpardonable crime by evil, exploitative, grasping, mainly Western settlers against innocent, downtrodden, disadvantaged indigenous residents, with whom a noble and righteous Environmental Protection Department has gallantly sided.  Could be.

This device tells you the time, the temperature and the humidity; it has a camera so you can spy on the Filipino elves while you are in the office; it can be carried into the kitchen to read out recipes in four languages; you can plug a thumbdrive in to run photos, video and music; it carries lead stories from Apple Daily and RTHK; you can use it to book tickets, check food and stock prices, watch Chinese opera, teach kids English and Putonghua, get horse-racing and astrological advice and “sing along with Disney friends.”  Having had one for two days, I can confirm that – despite the absence of a handset or keypad – you can even make and receive calls on it.

But tycoon-scion Richard Li is not satisfied with using this sleep-deprivation marketing method just once. The new owner of an eye2 will be happily fluffing up his pillow, downing his last sip of cocoa and easing his Hello Kitty slippers off his tired feet before retiring when, for the second night in a row, there is a knock on the door.  This time, the PCCW salesmen are pushing NOW TV, the 9,472-channel cable-by-broadband service.  They know you have the connection; they know you are not a subscriber.  What they don’t know, as they shove you aside and stomp into your apartment, is…

“I don’t have a television.” Richard’s henchmen look around for the 60-inch flat screen found in every household in Perpetual Opulence Mansions and find none. After some initial bemusement, they recover their pose.

“Yes you do!” they declare, pointing triumphantly at the eye2. After a few jabs at the screen, we are watching TVB Jade. Unlike its predecessor, which displayed video in a little YouTube-type window, this new contraption gives you the full, high-definition works. They refuse to believe that I do not want TV and become almost violently incredulous when I deny any interest in their special soccer package.

The big selling point, it seems, is a new split-screen option where viewers can watch a soccer game with one eye, while simultaneously keeping the other orb glued on the famous Chewing Gum Guy – the man in a suit whose presence at soccer games, strolling around on the sidelines and masticating furiously, plays such an important role in televised coverage of this sport.

“Or,” salesman Ricky tells me, “you can toggle between the two – watch the game for 10 seconds, then switch over whenever you want to watch Chewing Gum Man.” Essentially, Chewing Gum Guy now has his own dedicated channel. Many people, it seems, find watching him more exciting than following the dim but highly paid men in shorts running up and down on the field chasing the ball and touching each other’s private parts when they think no-one is looking.

I resisted the temptation, and eventually eased Ricky and Co out of my home by telling them that the Chans upstairs stay up until 11, so they could still catch them.

Now, as we glide down the escalator, yawning and struggling to stay awake, I find most of my neighbours broke down and signed up. One has already received a bill after his cat, sniffing around the new gizmo, subscribed to a premium Bollywood Movie Channel.

PCCW is up 2.2% at HK$2.30 when the stock market opened this morning.

Is there any more interesting – as in cheap and easy – way to entertain a visitor to Hong Kong than show them around the neighbourhood?  When I moved into this slum area, it didn’t have a name.  It was a working-class buffer between the fast-sprouting fancy high-rises up the hill and the office blocks of the central business district lower down.  Old folks wandered around in their pajamas, traffic was so light that kids played badminton outside, and people would bring live or at least still-dripping chickens home from the market.  If there were any other non-Chinese in the street, I never saw them (this wasn’t so-called Marco Polo Syndrome on my part, just plain tight-fistedness).  Most of the local businesses were dingy, noisy print shops, dusty ceramics outlets – probably storage for galleries down on Hollywood Road – and mom-and-pop groceries with barrels of rice and shelves of faded soy sauce bottles.

Since then, the place has been gentrified out of all recognition.  After the Mid-Levels Escalator was built, Western-style restaurants started to open up, originally in search of low rents but increasingly in search of high-rent trendiness labeled ‘Soho’.  They took all the old folks and put ‘em in an old folks museum, and charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em.  Actually, many of the original residents were forced out after the government ordered them to remove all the illegal extensions that had made their apartments habitable for decades.  They sold to investors who converted the 400-square-foot places into studios and asked young, single financial types HK$25,000 a month for them. A Krispy Kreme Donuts succumbed to negative feng shui, but 7-Elevens are sprouting on every corner.

Walk a hundred yards west, however, and you step back in time.  This is the bit I show visitors, as I did on Saturday:

Clockwise from top: Museum of Medical Sciences, an art gallery window, a gentrified tung lau in Square Street, carnival time at the old police barracks.

This area was ground zero for Hong Kong’s bubonic plague outbreak in the 1890s, hence the medical facility (where they isolated the bacillus), the nearby Tung Wah hospital and the (still-thriving) coffin shops.  The old police married quarters, where chief executive Donald Tsang was raised, were due to be demolished so property developers could build high-rises full of exclusive-lifestyle rabbit hutches for the young, hip urban elite.  However, development secretary Carrie Lam last year decided to rescue them, along with several other older buildings in Central.  While not everyone likes her plans for these structures, the decision not to let the developers have them is little short of stunning.

Strolling up a bit from the old barracks, we came to Wing Lee Street.  I explained to the visitor that the old row of 1950s tenements recently hit the big time. It has appeared in an award-winning period film called Echoes of the Rainbow, but it is also being consigned to the wrecker by the Urban Renewal Authority – an organization that is about as popular as a government-run eviction agency answering to the property developers would be if such a thing existed.  The dilapidated spot has become a cause.  If we are lucky, I told my guest, we might see some examples of an interesting new phenomenon in the Big Lychee: young people who are into heritage.

I though there would be two or three.  In fact, the crumbling alleyway was full of teenagers and twenty-somethings who had come to photograph and experience the location.  Some of them were also handing out protest leaflets, signing a petition and tying yellow ribbons round railings to protest against the imminent demise of a bit of history they hadn’t known was there.

Could this be the spark that sets off another bout of youthful unrest, like the protests over the old Star Ferry terminal and Queen’s Pier in 2006-07 and the Express Rail Link in January?  This should set alarm bells off for any government official with an ounce of sense. Except, of course, they don’t have any. Do they?

Step forward again, Carrie Lam.  It is unlikely that, as a lifelong Hong Kong bureaucrat, Lam actually sees anything wrong with knocking down old neighbourhoods and letting developers turn them into high-density, airless, polluted, traffic-clogged monstrosities. But she is increasingly tipped as probable chief secretary to chief executive Henry Tang, should such a thing transpire (there are even murmurings about her getting the top job herself, but that’s stretching it). A proven ability to nip adolescent uprisings in the bud could come in handy.  Anyway, quicker than you can say “smart, if opportunistic” she’s in there, saying it might be possible to save all the tenements.

Welcome to Hong Kong, where the government gets pushed around by teenagers with cameras.

Essentially, the book is a history of Hong Kong since the 1920s with an emphasis on the CCP’s role.  This of course covers not just a local apparatus and membership but a national, centralized Leninist entity; apart from during the Cultural Revolution chaos around 1967, the local organization has always ultimately been controlled by the Politburo.  After a helpful summary of the CCP’s organization and the principles of united front work, the book covers specific periods: the party’s early days, through to the Japanese and civil wars, through the disorder of the 1960s, negotiations with the UK, the handover and up to today.

Despite the focus on the party, the story contains little new material, especially for the periods up to the late 1970s.  This is not surprising.  To the extent that the CCP is a secret organization, it is not going to lift the lid and let Christine Loh have an exclusive look (despite her determination to be moderate and constructive in public life, Beijing classifies her along with so many others as being in the ‘hostile’ camp – if only for who she hangs out with).  To the extent that we all know the Central Government Liaison Office in Western is the local CCP HQ, the DAB is today its main local arm, and a whole array of district and labour organizations take orders from it, there is also nothing new to tell. But this is an ideal framework for exploring how the CCP worked to regain control of Hong Kong as 1997 approached and how it has consolidated its grip since and is still doing so.

The party strategy is at best a partial success. The book recounts the CCP’s patient and painstaking cultivation of pro-UK/US/Taiwan business, professional and other targets from the late 1970s onwards. Co-opting the tycoons was a priority: although presumably Marxists, the cadres seemed to feel the rich were the key to Hong Kong’s prosperity. We can now see that this attraction was mutual, and tycoons’ kids are now being absorbed into the ‘insider’ elite. Privileged rural interests, in the form of the Heung Yee Kuk, are also there.

The author also describes how a fifth column of at least 80,000 cadres infiltrated Hong Kong from 1983 through the family reunion immigration system – essentially to pad out a possibly disloyal population. (This would account for many of the complaints about the unfairness of the one-way permit system at the time. Could it also have contributed to employers’ and economists’ complaints about the low quality of workers arriving from the mainland?)

The Hong Kong Chinese, Loh notes, have never had anyone to speak for them. The colonial regime did not fully trust them, but the CCP did much to alienate them – which is why so many of them came to the city in the first place.  Bombs in 1967 turned the local patriots into pariahs, with many left unemployable and shunned by the rest of society until being rehabilitated after the handover.  The Beijing massacre in 1989 led a million horrified Hongkongers to take to the streets; even local cadres rebelled, and the CCP saw the city and its people as a potential threat.  In response, the party demanded post-handover laws against sedition and subversion which, in 2003, had the people out on the streets again, demanding that Beijing remove the chief executive.

Loh gives various reasons for what has essentially been a mishandling of the Hong Kong issue by the CCP. One classic example: misleading reports to Beijing in the 80s that Hongkongers were eager for reunification when in fact they were lining up for foreign passports. She points out that the CCP still today seems incapable of connecting with and understanding local people, and unable to see beyond troublemakers and hostile outsiders (or in recent days, citizens’ inability to “understand”) as the cause.

So here we are, trapped in a pattern.  The CCP trusts only a small elite, especially tycoons, and gives them political power through which the party can control Hong Kong.  The business elite uses the power to serve its own interests. This arouses opposition and demands for democracy among the majority of the population, which the CCP interprets as a threat to its power.  The CCP’s strategy for controlling Hong Kong undermines itself.  Loh sees a possible solution in a more open CCP, abandoning the pretence that it is not here and becoming a more normal part of the political scene.

Finishing the book, I found myself fantasizing briefly about showing it to President Hu Jintao or at least Gao Siren, burly boss of the Central Government Liaison Office – Hong Kong’s CCP HQ.  I was telling them: “If you want to make friends and influence people, this is a really complicated way of doing it.  Why don’t you just try being nice?”

But wait!  There’s more!  A Frost Warning, applicable only to New Territories mountain vegetable growers who still haven’t heard that World War II has ended, was up overnight, but has now come down.  And we have a Red Flag Warning alerting us to the possibility that Big Wave Bay wasn’t called that just for fun.  Meanwhile, the roadside Air Pollution Index in Central today is Very High, which means ‘mostly nitrogen oxide, some oxygen’.

The big excitement for government officials whose duty it is to raise alarms is the first-ever Red Outbound Travel Alert, advising Hong Kong people to avoid prolonged exposure to Thailand on account – as it happens – of matching Red Shirts, the supporters of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin, who are planning a major march in Bangkok in the next few days.

The OTA system was introduced in October 2009 in response to widespread public whining after Hong Kong tourists suffered inconvenience when protests, also in Bangkok, shut down airports (Yellow Shirts on that occasion).  It covers the 50 countries Hong Kong people are most likely to visit, which is why the likes of Afghanistan and Somalia do not appear.

Under the easy-to-remember system, an Amber Warning (currently applying to five countries with predominant or large Muslim populations but obviously that’s just a coincidence) means ‘Everything is cool, you can probably relax, but don’t blame the Security Bureau if you get shot or kidnapped because we issued an Amber Warning’.

The Red Warning is a much bigger deal, causing in this instance the cancellation of package tours to the Land of Smiles, and therefore inflicting commercial costs on travel companies and airlines (though only outbound operators – it’s not like it affects our precious mainland tourist trade).  It essentially means ‘We wouldn’t go there ourselves, but then we’re Hong Kong bureaucrats who fall sick after touching handrails and won’t let our kids play on grass, so everything’s probably fine, but you can’t say we didn’t put up a Red Warning’.

The Black Warning will probably rarely or never happen, because it could cost other businesses money.  Some corporate HR departments and travel insurance policies undertake to evacuate people if it is raised.  It means ‘We’re going to freeeeeak out even if you don’t, and why didn’t you listen to us when we issued the Red Warning. And please pass the antibacterial hand gel’.

“Jeez, those three whatever-they’re-called guys are out there with the leaflets again.”

“Down Syndrome,” I remind him. He nods.

For several days now three young men – teenage boys, really – with the unmistakable features of the chromosomal disorder have been handing out advertising materials to passers-by on the walkways linking the office towers of core Central.  They are among many dozens of people who publicize pedicure, food delivery, tailoring, gym and other services in this way.  But they are doing it wrong.  First, they are out early in the deserted morning before crowds of commuters invade the district.  Second, they bunch themselves together between adjoining footpaths and office lobbies so they end up offering the pamphlets (for herbal medicine, as it happens) to the same person in quick succession, while other human traffic bypasses them just yards away.

“I wonder how much money they make doing that,” Odell says.

“I bet you,” I tell him, “some heartless bastard is paying them in beads or something.”

My ex-Mormon companion picks up a magazine left on the table and looks at the cover.  It shows someone from the other end of the mentally disabled wealth scale: Stanley Ho, Macau’s casino king, who has just been released from hospital after reportedly having a blood clot removed from his cranium.  At least he didn’t die, as some rumours had it. According to the gossip, his medical bill was HK$200 million.

Did they remove the part of his brain responsible for saying extremely stupid and embarrassing things?  Comparing the voluble tycoon at Macau’s chief executive ‘election’ last July with the broken apparent stroke victim wheeled out of the hospital a few days ago, it appears they might have.

On my left shoulder…  No, never mind him.  On my right shoulder, a small, shining winged being with a halo around its golden hair flutters gently up to my ear and whispers, “don’t forget – one must never, ever mock the afflicted.”  After thinking about it for a second, I grab the little angel, hurl it squealing onto the floor, stamp on it a few times and kick the remains under the chair.  But Odell beats me to it.

“Good! Looks like that’s the last crap we’ll have to listen to from that dickhead!”

Indeed. The world of sleazy, casino-monopolizing, polygamist, democrat-baiting, North Korea-linked plutocrats whose opponents’ lawyers mysteriously get beaten up seems set to become a duller place.

As Bloomberg point out, mainland GDP figures are still not especially reliable; local government officials have an interest in exaggerating results and exceeding targets – though some, notably in the south, are rumoured to under-report in order to pay less tax to the centre.

The Shanghai of this story, however accurate, comprises the city with the ugly skyscrapers we all know and love, plus a large rural hinterland.  It adds up to 2,500 square miles in size, versus the Big Lychee’s humble 425, and its population is 19 million to Hong Kong’s 7 million.  So people there are still significantly less productive, creating barely a third the amount of wealth per person than Hongkongers.  It was only two years ago that Shanghai proudly announced to the world that its farmers’ annual disposable income had exceeded the grand sum of US$1,400.

The ‘Shanghai faction’ who graduated from running the municipality to the nation in the 1990s under Jiang Zemin lavished their favourite city with resources.  This led to heavy subsidies for foreign investment, generous land and other aid for favoured local companies and a more state-planned economy than in many other parts of China.  As a result, it is less accomplished than it likes to think in comparison with other regions, with low levels of rural entrepreneurship, self-employment and patent applications, and low average size of private-sector companies.

But it works hard on its image. During a visit in the mid-90s, I saw a checklist of grand vanity projects, described as ‘pearls’ if I remember rightly.  They included the grotesque TV tower, which had just opened (you had to wade through mud to get to it), the impressive museum with galleries named for Hong Kong tycoons, and the yet-to-be-built opera house.  Some schemes, like many of the skyscrapers and the maglev train from the new airport to a suburb, were plain tacky.  Like Singapore, Shanghai seems to believe its own PR.

(Beijing’s decision a year ago that Shanghai will be the PRC’s official, number-one, oh-so-important international financial and (for some reason) shipping hub by 2020 looks like a pat on the head for Jiang’s old clique in retreat. One particularly desperate policy would be to subsidize private equity managers’ salaries if they set up shop in Pudong – why didn’t Lee Kwan Yew think of it first?)

The Shanghai-will-take-over-from-Hong Kong idea took off after the Big Lychee’s handover to China in 1997.  So traumatic was Hong Kong’s shock after the city’s bubble burst – five years’ deflation interspersed with suicides and SARS – that some impressionable local folk saw it as a deliberate policy of Beijing’s.  Jiang Zemin, the theory went, had ordered chief executive Tung Chee-hwa to wreck Hong Kong in order to create the space for their Yangtze Delta homeland to rise in its place. (Maybe a few even pondered Shanghai’s fate after the communists took power in 1949 and downgraded its economic role to cleanse it of capitalist, foreign decadence.)

If there was a plot to undermine the Big Lychee it was opportunistic and aimed at local morale and self-confidence. Official reassurances that Shanghai was a partner and not a rival and talk of the need for integration grew more insistent, as if to sow the seeds of doubt – especially combined with Shanghai’s leering hubris as it became the world’s top container port and won silly prizes like the Expo.  Then came the Great 2006 Marginalization Scare kicked off by chief secretary Rafael Hui and picked up with glee by pro-Beijing ranters eager to frighten disloyal fellow Hongkongers into toeing the line.  Horseshit about how grateful pitiful Hong Kong should be for the mainland’s supposedly generous support is now swallowed without question (as yesterday by the South China Morning Post’s Alice Wu, on the right).

The Big Lychee’s leaders remain patriotically silent about Shanghai’s numerous shortcomings and inadequacies as even a junior international financial hub.  Even when reminding the world that Hong Kong has no capital controls, an independent judiciary and a free press, they will never add “unlike Shanghai, which has corruption, protectionism, covered-up scandals, IP rip-offs, investor rip-offs, not to mention thugs that smash up migrant labourers’ kids’ schools, hospitals that dump the poor in the street to die and a government obsessed with the banning of pajamas in public.”

One last thing: when did anyone last see a Hong Kong hooker in Shanghai?

The confusion arises from Beijing’s hasty and slightly hysterical reaction when the five pro-democracy legislators resigned and thus triggered the five by-elections that they fancifully declared to be a poll on the single proposition of universal suffrage.  Since the Big Lychee’s pro-Beijing camp cannot adopt a public position at odds with that of the central authorities, they have to join in and loudly denounce as unconstitutional referendums that aren’t going to happen, even while our local leaders go about organizing the perfectly legal by-elections that will.

The local leadership of Chief Executive Donald Tsang and his senior officials are the most prominent victims of this illogicality.  Not only must they organize the five by-elections for May while reciting the mantra that the Basic Law doesn’t allow for referendums, they must try to conform with Beijing’s order that loyalists boycott the exercise, which in their case means not voting.  Yet abstaining on polling day presents its own problems.

After encouraging people for years to take part in, and therefore legitimize, our rigged election system, it would look odd for Sir Bow-Tie and his colleagues to implicitly urge us all to stay away.  It would raise concerns that civil servants of all levels, who are sworn to implement government policy, could be pressurized into not voting or penalized if they exercise their right to do so.  Most of all, how many of us will be tempted to go along to the polling station if Donald indicates that he would prefer us not to?

The chances are that they will wriggle out of it by saying it is a matter of individual judgement and of course you can’t vote if you don’t support any of the candidates.  It would be convenient if only the name of the resigned lawmaker appears on each ballot, thus winning by default with no contest, but this won’t happen.  First, the League of Social Democrats have vowed, if necessary, to run against themselves by putting a second candidate forward to ensure that the actual voting – this is on Planet Referendum, remember – takes place.  Beijing does not have a monopoly of irrationality. Second, as in every Legislative Council election, you can be sure that in every constituency some spotty, inadequate  truck driver, socialite, or fanatic will get him or herself nominated as candidates.  Several, probably.

Most likely outcome: everything will backfire against everyone, with the net result that nothing noticeable actually happens.