Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Not a good end to the week for Hong Kong’s veteran icon of democracy Martin Lee, self-styled icon Anson Chan, the Independent Commission Against Corruption and the Immigration Department.

The Martin-bashing in the South China Morning Post and the Anson-handbagging in China Daily don’t say anything new. After more than two decades, Lee’s complaints about Beijing denying Hong Kong universal suffrage have become stale, while Chan’s constant founding of grandiose committees of old buddies to ponder political reform is presumptuous. Both of them see the debate over the 2017 election as their last chance to make a difference, sadly oblivious to the possibility that the days when they might have had some clout are long past.

Martin, after wobbling a bit on what sort of nomination committee might be acceptable, is demanding everything now from a Beijing that stopped listening years back. Anson wants to reach out discreetly to the business community in the hope of producing some sort of election package satisfactory to the movers and shakers – all very 1990s.

Meanwhile, it is less fun than ever being in the ICAC. Opposition politicians claim that the independent investigation into ex-boss Timothy Tong’s expenses will be a whitewash. This is stating the obvious: the little group of poodles tasked with the job is almost a parody of a Hong Kong government inquiry with a predetermined outcome. Tong let his puffed-up rank go to his head, disgracing himself and humiliating his old colleagues who now can’t go anywhere without everyone cheekily demanding luxury cookies. The blame belongs to a system that, over decades, has smothered mediocre municipal employees in chauffeur-driven limos, bloated housing allowances and Gold Bauhinia Stars, and forced them to think they are rulers of empires.

Just when you thought ICAC mooncake-gate was bad… A judge grapples with Immigration Department discretionary decision-making at its finest. A Filipino woman was told she could stay in Hong Kong if her daughter – who has right of abode here – supported her. The snag? The daughter was four years old. I can imagine civil servants making this decision as a sort of prank, perhaps in honour of Joseph Heller, to relieve the monotony of checking identities and stamping passports. But they are devoted pen-pushers working at taxpayers’ expense, and they were serious. They are, right now, looking at each other in stunned shock, asking themselves what sort of drugs that crazy judge is on.

I know it’s not nice, but God, I wish this dog has been run over in Mongkok.

We can declare the weekend open on a bright note: it has been a good few days for Victoria Harbour, catching the attention of the world’s press not once but twice for looking – how can we describe it – unusual… 

The South China Morning Post has some sort of quota system that requires it to run a front-page story every couple of weeks to maintain the never-ending saga of evil Western victimization of the up-to-now weak and innocent Middle Kingdom. Recent examples include a report on a study showing that Hong Kong immigrants to the UK in the 1960s suffered racial discrimination (as if no-one else did) and the presence in the Mainland of a pedophile expatriate teacher or two (in a country that seems full of teachers raping students or making them work in fireworks factories).

Today’s scoop seems exceptionally desperate: a ‘racist’ General Motors TV commercial. (Not many other outlets bother with the story, but the trashy New York Daily News carries it.) To lend a 1930s air, the ad featured a period song called Oriental Swing and mentioning Fu Manchu. The lyrics would nowadays be considered childish and tasteless – though hardly likely to drive the listener to sign up to the Ku Klux Klan. (You might start tapping your feet; you can risk it here. For what it’s worth, the American performer was what would at the time have been termed a Negress and thus subject to all sorts of legal racism herself.) Basically, it is a business story about the perils of running up against political correctness in (yawn) Canada.

By putting it on the front page, the SCMP inevitably diverts something else to a less prominent position. Maybe it was the story about the Chinese Red Cross misappropriating funds. At a stretch, it could have been the item about how Hong Kong’s pro-democrats will soon publish their proposed blueprint for the Chief Executive election in 2017.

The pan-dems’ decades-long fight for universal suffrage has become almost as wearisome as Mainland propaganda chiefs’ self-pitying moaning about vicious foreign oppression of poor helpless China. The story is interesting, however, because the proposal will serve as a benchmark for whatever formula Beijing comes up with.

The key issue is the nominating committee, which the Basic Law requires to produce a list of candidates for voters to choose from. Beijing’s ideal form of election is one where it decides the winner in advance. At the very least, the Communist Party will have to satisfy itself that a candidate secretly working for evil foreign forces planning to undermine China’s rise to glory and greatness will not be able to take office. And it will want to avoid having to veto an election winner by exercising its power to refuse to appoint him, since, of course, that would look bad.

In the quasi-elections we have had since 1997, pro-democrats have been able to get onto the ballot. But because the ‘voters’ in such farces have mostly been hand-picked to obey Beijing’s directions, it hasn’t mattered. In 2017, 3 million people will have the right to vote.

The pro-dems will apparently propose a virtual nomination committee: one that is itself elected by universal suffrage and therefore might as well not be there. As with the current rigged Election Committee, it would have 1,200 members. (Would we get 1,200 votes each? Or would members represent geographical areas? Whatever.) The unwieldy number arises because of an obsession the pro-dems have about size; they think having fewer than 1,200 members would somehow be a step back. CE hopefuls would need the endorsement of one eighth of committee members to get on the ballot.

This proposal negates Beijing’s whole purpose in having a nomination committee, namely to be able to either pick a winner in advance, or pick a couple of potential winners, or at least specify who cannot win. The Basic Law says the committee must be ‘broadly representative’, which in Leninist tradition means composed largely of shoe-shiners and useful idiots from official organizations of workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals. If the names on the ultimate ballot are too unappealing, however, there is a danger that most of us will boycott the 2017 election, which would leave the resulting CE with even less credibility than at present.

The obvious solution, and one that many moderate pro-Beijing figures in Hong Kong are happy with, is not to bother screening pan-dems out of the election, and simply to trust the majority of the Big Lychee’s good people not to vote for someone who might oppose the Central People’s Government, let alone engage in a CIA/MI6/KMT plot to overthrow it. This is the sort of pragmatic, optimistic and liberal way of thinking that makes Hong Kong different from the rest of China. It would, of course, work. But the idea of controlling by not-controlling is alien to the paranoid Communist mind. It will be an interesting test of Beijing officials’ ingenuity and ability to utilize a bit of subtlety – not always their strong point – to come up with a counter-proposal.

(This just in: was GM taking revenge?)

In a world where 28,000 Chinese rivers have gone missing and women get surgery to have arms like Michelle Obama’s, it’s reassuring to hear some plain, simple truth. John Greenwood, inventor of Hong Kong’s currency peg, points out that a communist one-party state cannot accommodate a freely convertible currency. The multitudes of bores who never cease blathering away about China’s Yuan ‘taking over’ from the dollar and becoming the world’s main reserve currency and medium of international exchange should now fall silent. But probably won’t.

A communist dictatorship can, on the other hand, accept the celebration of May Day tomorrow. According to the old saying, the workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. However, Hong Kong’s striking dockers possibly don’t see it that way. Although they claim that Hongkong International Terminals is suffering, there is little evidence that the port action is seriously affecting trade. Their jobs and livelihoods could be at stake. Not surprisingly, their leadership seems to be showing signs of flexibility, which suggests that a magnanimous gesture from the employers – following arm-twisting by the government – could get the dispute resolved before long. Alternatively, the employers could play hardball and crush the strikers into submission or plain joblessness.

The political dynamics of this industrial action are complex. On the one hand, pro-Beijing left-wingers detest the dockers’ pro-democrat organizer Lee Cheuk-yan so much that they would love to see him fail. In other words, they would dance with joy at the prospect of the strikers’ wives and kids starving on the streets. That’s right: they are in practice siding with tycoon Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man and owner of HIT. Such are the perversities of United Front enforcement of Communist Party rule.

Meanwhile, where are the Big Lychee’s tycoon and sub-tycoon caste? Li’s own Hutchison running dogs complain loudly about the strikers’ use of ‘cultural revolution’ tactics of demonizing the great man and gathering outside his home. But the rest of the local business community are, mostly, curiously silent – almost as if they are closet supporters of the proletariat.

The reason seems to be KS’s son Victor, who is running the HIT show. Unlike his father, who by all accounts has sufficient humanity to understand that it is probably counterproductive to exploit monopoly power to the full, the scion has an almost robotic determination to squeeze the last penny out of everything, everywhere, always. He apparently thinks this is how he can in due course prove himself to be superior to the founder of the family empire. “He will destroy his father’s company,” one minor-league tycoon recently told me. With a deeply satisfied smile.

Some holiday viewing for those who haven’t seen it: the 3.5 minute-long So Long, My Hong Kong by Gregory Kane. Yes, it’s a bit mawkish; it’s a bit ‘what the Tourism Board would do if they had the brains’; it’s a bit sanitized (no haze or overcrowded streets?); and the music doesn’t quite belong. But it’s still stunning to watch, cleverly edited (spot the visual puns) and deserves more of an audience than the camera geeks at Vimeo.

The May 1st public holiday comes early to today’s South China Morning Post, where page 1 is full of Ferran Adria, and page 3 (‘Leading The News’) replete with Annabelle Bond. These individuals (pictured below right) have two things in common.

The first is that we have never heard of them. A quick glance reveals that Ferran is a ‘top chef’, while Annabelle is a ‘socialite’. An unnamed Asian has stumped up a lot of money to have a meal with the forgettable-looking Ferran. The visually scary Annabelle, meanwhile, is in a situation where her ex-lover is suing her current one for child support, or vice-versa, or something along those lines. Which brings us to the second thing they have in common: we have no interest in them whatever.

Over at the Standard, we are invited to believe at least two impossible things before breakfast. First, that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung and other top officials have been prompted to visit Beijing by some comment of Politburo member Zhang Dejiang about how the Big Lychee will be swept downstream if it doesn’t go upstream, or some such meaningless inanity. Second, that Hong Kong’s ‘development needs will [or can] be met if the city joins in preparatory work for the 13th Five-Year Plan’.

Hong Kong’s problems of a downstream-sweeping sort would be: a cartelized domestic economy; artificially inflated rents and property prices; bad air; an unmanageable influx of shoppers from overseas; too few schools of the sort people want; and so on. All of them are the result of government policy. The government is chosen and appointed by Beijing. Back to you, Mr Zhang. (And “…expect a lot more people asking for a 20% pay rise, just so they can afford to keep living in” their own city.)

Back at the SCMP: a profile of Chan Ching-sum, convenor of Caring Hong Kong Power – the most prominent of several pro-government groups to have sprung up in recent years. As the RTHK clip shows, she is an excitable little bundle of venom, and her organization takes what might be called an interesting slant on things, supporting National Education, cheerleading CY for a pastime, denouncing pro-democrats for everything and proclaiming love for China.

CHKP looks and sounds like a classic case of political astroturfing – a fake grassroots movement set up in this case by Beijing’s locally based officials to somehow counteract Hong Kong’s multitude of opposition groups. The presence of paid attendees at a pro-CY demonstration organized by the Voice of Loving Hong Kong and some superficial design similarities in CHKP and (anti-Falun Gong) Hong Kong Youth Care Association publicity materials might support this impression. And, as RTHK points out, where else do you get pro-government marches except in places like Russia and Iran, where they are obviously managed by the local regimes.

These organizations may be accepting some funds from leftist business interests, and may have United Front links (as the HKYCA obviously has) and some Mainland-born members. But it doesn’t follow that they are all fake.

Chan Ching-sum and the rest mostly seem so stupid and obnoxious that they must encourage the average fair-minded person to sympathize with the pro-democrats. (Maybe the CIA/MI6/KMT plot to grab Hong Kong is funding them?) And – a few paid protestors notwithstanding – these people seem all too sincere in their hatred of the pro-dems. They appear less convincing when it comes to professing heartfelt and ardent love for the administration, which suggests that it is spite for pan-dems that drives them.

And that gives us a good pointer as to who they are. There is an older generation in Hong Kong of unworldly, uneducated, mainly poor folk who view the modern world generally with suspicion and dislike trendy opposition activists in particular. Some fought the colonial regime back in the 60s and were blacklisted and despised for decades after.

Chan Ching-sum and her comrades seem to represent the next generation of local Chinese nativism and know-nothingism. They are basically working class, lacking college degrees and engaged in non-professional trades. They resent and despise a particular sort of fellow Hongkonger, like the overseas-educated lawyer who hangs out with foreigners and knows how to use a knife and fork; what better way to get your own back than to support the things he hates and hate the things he supports, whatever they might be? In short, Chan and Co are losers.

In the West, they would outrage the liberal intellectual elite by joining a white-supremacist punk band, a homophobic church or some armed wacko fringe of the Tea Party. In Hong Kong, they rebel by professing support for the system that allows the property tycoons to screw them. It is an amusing but ultimately sorry sight.  They deserve pity, and even a hug.

“The pressure … has been growing steadily, with the media exposing more dinners than previously recorded.”

Thus Hong Kong’s latest mega-scandal is born. Dinnergate.

The story in a nutshell: former Independent Commission Against Corruption boss Timothy Tong allegedly misused public funds by treating himself, various contacts – notably Mainland officials – and a few friends to meals and various gifts. He also spent a good three or four times more on overseas trips than his predecessor and successor.

The beneficiaries were more or less the sort of people you would expect the anti-graft chief to see, and the gifts themselves were borderline insulting. For example, the Procurator-General of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate got a crappy digital photo frame. So the dinners are what we’re really getting worked up about.

His girlfriend and former colleague Helen Chan, who some may consider looks hot in uniform, was at some of the meals (and says Tong paid for them himself). There’s lots of stuff about how he turned up to the office late and, when he wasn’t brewing herbal medicine, snoozed in the afternoons. Mainly, though it’s about wining, dining and flattering – with such items as grotesquely expensive cookies – Mainland officials and institutions. The Democratic Party’s Emily Lau is getting onto the case, and even the pro-establishment Standard’s editorial declares that “she should be pardoned for screaming her head off” over the affair.

The reason for all this is the suspicion that Tong was buttering up these people to get himself appointed to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which he did indeed join after leaving the ICAC last year. High-minded persons would see something not a million miles from bribery in such a quid pro quo. Skeptics and cynics, on the other hand, may think anyone lobbying to get into the pointless and powerless group of retired shoe-shiners is not so much corrupt as deeply pathetic.

I would love to believe that this is all an image-raising PR stunt by the fusty old CPPCC to make us think the advisory body is so cool that people will offer backhanders to get in. Alternatively, and perhaps a tad more probably, this is part of the ongoing feuding between different parts of the Hong Kong establishment. Most likely, however, the leaks to the press are not much more than spiteful revenge by one or more of career civil servant Tong’s former underlings or peers. I myself recently received some tittle-tattle about ex-bureaucrat CK Mak of Housing-Allowance-Gate fame, which naturally I will keep to myself. (Well, OK, since it’s a Friday. Would you believe he got a minion to sneak round his department and snitch on people who came into the office late? I wouldn’t. Not a word of it.)

We might look at the Hong Kong civil service and think: “Wow, what a well-oiled, smooth-running, hyper-professional and flawless team of selfless, gifted administrators, all dedicated to serving the community.” But actually, it’s a seething nest of jealous, empire-building, backstabbing and venomous invertebrates who develop such a sense of entitlement that they use our tax dollars to buy digital picture frames. And some of them have long, festering memories about real or imagined past slights in the office.

So that’s it. I declare the weekend open with Hong Kong’s latest outbreak of high crimes and misdemeanors in public office. It’s not Bo Xilai, but it’s the best we can do.

Hong Kong lawmakers oppose quake aid; Hongkongers reject sending aid; Sichuan relief efforts provoke Hong Kong skeptics. The Big Lychee’s response to the Lushan earthquake does not leave the city looking like a shining beacon of generosity.

The government’s initial decision to send Sichuan Province HK$100 million for disaster relief was, on the face of it, unexceptional. The city sent HK$9 billion after the much bigger 2008 earthquake and has donated funds following other calamities in China and in Southeast Asia. But there was something a little bit pat, a little bit presumptuous, and a little bit insincere about senior officials’ blather about love and care for compatriots. It was almost as if this wasn’t about helping villagers who had lost everything, and not even about exploiting a tragedy to show Beijing how loyal and generous we are; it seemed uncomfortably like the cynical grabbing of an opportunity to send a message to the locust-suffering Hong Kong people: we are all happy smiling Mainlanders now, or at least let’s pretend we are, and then we will learn how to be for real, and it’ll feel great. (Something like that.)

The pro-Beijing members of the Legislative Council’s Finance Committee yesterday supported the proposal for the usual reasons: blind obedience for the hardcore pro-Communist loyalists, and shoe-shining self-preservation for the fake patriots of the business community.

The pan-democrats who opposed the measure proclaimed themselves to care deeply about the victims in the rubble in Ya’an. But, they insisted, the money shouldn’t go to Mainland officials, who will probably steal it; instead, it should go to non-government organizations. It all sounds perfectly sensible. But it’s hard not to get the feeling that, here too, there is more opportunism than principle. They could have come up with more detailed alternatives to a straight cash transfer to the Provincial government. But no – as a chance to highlight the rottenness and inhumanity of the one-party state, it’s too good to pass up.

Then we get to the real story: the public mood. Last time around, there were heart-wrenching photos of kids’ bodies covered in dust and we sent money to rebuild a collapsed school for ethnic minorities and then the new building was knocked down to make way for some luxury development. Now they want more? (Actually, no-one up there has asked; the Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ editorial cheekily suggests that Sichuan’s Party Secretary phone up CY and ask him not to bother sending anything as it’s too much hassle.)

Hongkongers are not in the mood to give. And it seems it’s not just hostility to Mainland officials who skim off funds to spend on Chow Tai Fook gold necklaces. We could donate via trustworthy local charities, but no we’re not going to. We’re really sorry about that baby found under her mother’s corpse in a collapsed house now being breast-fed by a neighbour until help arrives, but, um…

What about our unaffordable apartment prices and all the tourists?

The cost of housing and the influx of tourists have made us so pissed off – pissed off with Mainland-this, Mainland-that – that we just don’t care. A hundred thousand bereaved and hungry survivors huddled shivering under trees? To hell with them. Serves them right for buying up all that baby milk powder.

Such callousness is hard to believe. The Global Times reports the South China Morning Post’s poll (92% against the government’s planned donation) without quoting some academic demanding that all Hongkongers be sent off to reeducation camps. Instead, they lament the graft in the Mainland. The Global Times agrees with us.

This is simply Hong Kong’s legendary pragmatism at work (plus a chance to irritate compatriot-hugging local leaders). After all, no-one seriously withholds aid for earthquake victims to protest against overcrowding on the MTR. Corrupt Mainland officials killed thousands in 2008 by building shoddy schools. They will kill more this time by diverting our funds from the injured and hungry. Let’s just cut out the middle man.

Why are dockworkers striking and, in particular, protesting outside tycoon Li Ka-shing’s home? You thought it was because of pay and conditions, property hegemony and cartelization? China Daily corrects you…

…the opposition camp and the foreign powers supporting it are preparing to seize Hong Kong’s governing power by fanning populism and anarchism, with an eye on winning the Chief Executive Election in 2017 by universal suffrage.

And why would they want to do that?

The only logical explanation for the increased activities of foreign forces – mainly US and British intelligence agents – is that the city, being a free port and the southern gateway of China, is being used as a bridgehead to contain the rise of the nation.

It is impossible to say how much these writers genuinely believe what they are saying; most likely, they are trying to please distant superiors – or at least avoid being accused of deviant thinking. If Western powers were indeed working to pull off a coup in the Big Lychee to prevent China’s rise, Beijing would be arresting spies and breaking off diplomatic relations at the very least. (On the subject of logical explanations, it could be that the state propaganda machine has told Hong Kong’s Communist-backed media to try to divert popular hostility away from the tycoons at the top of our feudal economic pyramid, and demented paranoia is the best they can do.)

Similarly, we can’t be totally sure whether pro-Beijing legislator Chan Kam-lam is serious in warning that the HK$28 trillion West Kowloon Arts, Culture and Xiqu Mega-Hub Zone District must stick to ‘real’ art and not exhibit obscene or insulting or, to get to the point, political works. Chan is a member of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and no doubt a lot of other organizations that desperately need shorter names. Does he feel deeply about art, beauty and taste? (He doesn’t look the type, but – hey – don’t judge by appearances.) Or does he hope to get a big pat on the head and extra dog biscuits next time he attends some official gathering of patriots on the Mainland?

(It would be intriguing to learn Chan’s views on, say Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People or Picasso’s anti-fascist Guernica, compared to, say, socialist realist portrayals of happy smiling workers and peasants and, maybe, port crane operators.)

He is alarmed because Swiss diplomat/collector Uli Sigg has donated much of his huge collection to the West Kowloon M+ contemporary arts museum, including over two dozen pieces by dissident/activist/artist Ai Weiwei, plus Wang Guangyi and others. Sigg specifically said he gave the collection to Hong Kong because so much of it couldn’t be shown in Mainland museums; Chinese patriots have since accused Sigg of seeking to make money from the deal and/or fobbing us off with a load of crap.

(Ai Weiwei was of course acceptable to Beijing until he started counting the kids who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a result of corruption. And, by coincidence, patriots and pro-dems right now are debating the wisdom of feeding that very corruption as a gesture of sympathy and goodwill in the wake of last week’s quake at Lushan. Start up a new museum, have an earthquake – you can’t do anything without this war breaking out.)

So we have an amusing contradiction brewing here for when M+ opens in 2093. The museum’s (mainly Western) curators can use Hong Kong taxpayers’ money to display a collection of subversive and obscene trash as part of a CIA/dockworkers effort to use Kowloon as a stepping stone to conquering the whole of China – and face the wrath of local and more distant patriots. Or they can keep all the controversial political stuff locked away, or on permanent loan to the Timbuktu National Gallery, and suffer the taunts of pro-dems and art-lovers for censorship.

Funniest part of it all: Chan is hardly alone in questioning whether much of Ai Weiwei’s work is remotely worthwhile as art.

When bureaucracies are not using it to crucify harmless nonentities to justify their existence, the criminal justice system is a reliable source of entertainment. Hong Kong today settles down into its easy chair to watch two juicy cases unfold: the trial of feng-shui master/born-again Christian/Nina Wang toyboy Tony/Peter Chan for forging a will, and the proceedings against civil servants Mak Chai-kwong and Tsang King-man, who are charged with defrauding the government of housing allowances.

The former production is a fantasy in full Technicolor and stereo, while the latter is more of a morality tale, strictly monochrome with no special effects. In both cases, viewers will be licking their lips in anticipation of the final outcomes: punishments – preferably severe and devoid of any shred of mercy. The harsher, the better. It’s not anything as high-minded as blind retribution; we just want to see them suffer for the pure pleasure of it. Life just hasn’t been the same since they abolished public executions.

Not long ago, Tony Chan was a cheeky ex-bartender who had apparently inveigled his way into the heart and bank account of a flamboyant but dying billionaire widow. He backed up the unconvincing will he said she wrote in his favour with stories of massaging the lady, leading her through quaint-sounding voodoo rituals and otherwise servicing her. The lurid multiplicity of audacities, breaking taboos especially of socio-economic caste, were described with a gleaming grin that just screamed Wipe Me Off This Face.  

The gods have duly delivered, and the private jet, gwailo bodyguards and sprawling palaces have crumpled to dust. The simple Chan family, moon-faced with bewilderment, face vengeance beyond their capacity to measure, and that’s before we even count Tony/Peter’s astronomical tax bill.

The CK Mak/KM Tsang case is at the other end of the scale. Whereas Tony Chan was an upstart blundering into the loopier fringes of the Big Lychee’s high society, these two guys were born to serve the community by ruling over it, going by the colonial book, not taking any risks or having new ideas, ensuring the smooth and efficient administration of the city in the finest traditions of the world’s most brilliant, infallible and modest civil service.

Their alleged crime is – inevitably – one of paperwork and property. They bought an apartment each and then rented them to each other to qualify for government housing allowances. By way of mitigation, we could plead that the loophole was so glaring it looked almost legit; legions of other public-sector staff apparently did it; this was in the days before civil servants became as grotesquely overpaid as they were by the late 1990s; and by some accounts, more flexible housing arrangements in the private sector induced otherwise decent bureaucrats into a sense of entitlement. Oh, and the whole thing came to light within days of CK Mak’s appointment as Chief Executive CY Leung’s Development Secretary – raising the distinct possibility that the revelation was a time-bomb set off by supporters of the Donald Tsang/Henry Tang/tycoon/bureaucracy establishment.

Looking around, do we see any fellow members of the audience musing over these things, and wondering whether the system should go easy on the perpetrators of this rather lame HK$700,000 mishap?

Nope.

Oh, there are one or two right over there in the corner who seem to be muttering a bit of sympathy: really, be honest – who wouldn’t have done the same thing in their position, know what I mean, right?

Can I be the first to suggest that any serving or former public servants who defend these two on grounds either practical or principled probably took advantage of the scam themselves? I can? Cool.

Vivid comic tragedy and sober parable – a nice balance. Let the entertainment commence.

While we’re on the topic, following some mention of Elsie Tu’s part in a long-ago mystery about a cop who somehow shot himself with five rounds, these two guys… 

…were last seen trying to raise financing for the movie.

In Norway, if you commit 77 murders you get a 21-year (extendable) prison sentence. In Singapore, the penalty for overstaying your visa can be caning as well as jail. But at least they have reputations for being consistent. Hong Kong can’t decide whether it is namby-pamby liberal or viciously cruel. If a white tourist pulls a driver out of his taxi and steals the vehicle, he receives no real punishment; if local people want to cross the street, they get fined (‘Why not target dangerous drivers’).

The Hong Kong system seems to impose quite severe penalties for offences against property and in cases that damage Hong Kong’s reputation (such as an enterprising schoolboy selling pirated software online). Yet punishments are often surprisingly light where an identifiable victim is genuinely harmed (‘Taxi driver who killed three pedestrians’ gets three years and four months in prison).

So we shouldn’t be surprised that, if people commit an offence that has no apparent victim and allows prosecutors to pretty much presume guilt without proving that a crime took place, they will be put behind bars for three times the amount of time a deadly taxi driver gets, or half the time a Norwegian mass-murderer gets. The two cases we have recently seen involved a 22-year-old loser and a 61-year-old public housing tenant. For making multiple deposits of cash over years into bank accounts on behalf of persons unknown and unpunished, they were given 10-year prison sentences for money laundering.

This prompted pointed criticism about ‘a mockery of criminal justice’ and ‘grotesque injustice’. Such comments seem to have hit a raw nerve, since Director of Public Prosecutions Kevin Zervos not only wrote tetchily to the press in response, but is now giving interviews (here and here) proclaiming that he wants to go after criminal masterminds as well… 

But of course he can’t, because the people whose money is being laundered are outside Hong Kong’s jurisdiction. What is happening here is that Mainlanders who have acquired wealth – legally or illegally – are smuggling it out of the country contrary to Mainland, but not Hong Kong, law. Some might be relatives of national or provincial leaders who have amassed fortunes through corruption; others might be mid-ranking officials or businessmen on the take; some could be legitimate entrepreneurs who fear sequestration of assets or just want to emigrate.

It is happening in hundreds of bank branches in Hong Kong every day (why else do we have so many banks all over the place?). If you are a licensed remittance agent or money changer, you can do it with impunity. If you are a real-estate agent accepting a suitcase of cash from a Mainlander buying a Hong Kong property, you will go unpunished. If you own one of the high-rise cash laundries known as casinos in Macau, you will go free and be lauded as a visionary. If you are the bank accepting all these deposits, you are immune. But a couple of harmless dimwits performing a task barely one step up from collecting cardboard go to prison for 10 years. Leaving aside the unfairness, there is the cost of imprisonment to taxpayers of over HK$200,000 per inmate a year. And you have to ask: what else could the Director of Public Prosecutions and his staff have been doing with their time?

It is not only the 99.99% of money-launderers who are have their acts together who have nothing to fear from the Hong Kong authorities. You can run parasitical cartels that suck wealth out of the productive workers and small businesses that power most of the economy, and no-one will touch you. No-one except the magnificently irritating veteran activist Elsie Tu, who starts the countdown to her 100th birthday in June by giving Li Ka-shing a fine tongue-lashing…

One of the Hongkong International Terminals contractors abruptly announces that it is shutting down, leaving hundreds of its striking port workers without an employer. The tactic is clearly designed to scare the strikers into accepting the pay offer currently on the table. The supposedly laid-off dockers say their skills make them irreplaceable. We all like to think we are.

Business seems to be accommodating any delays at the port with few problems, and shipments can always go through Shenzhen’s container terminals, which of course are also partly owned by HIL owner tycoon Li Ka-shing. So the employers clearly have the upper hand. The crane operators and stevedores, on the other hand, can claim to have a good case, and visiting Australian dock workers were shocked at their Hong Kong counterparts’ relatively poor pay and conditions. In an effort to exploit public opinion, strikers and their supporters have set up camp outside Li’s headquarters in Hong Kong’s central business district.

The Chinese Communist Party’s Ta Kung Pao sees this as a test-run for the pro-democracy camp’s Occupy Central campaign for universal suffrage. The pro-Beijing camp is understandably nervous about a potential alliance between labour, activist pro-dems and the usually passive and agnostic broader public, some of whom are happily donating cash to the strikers now conveniently situated at the end of Queens Road. If a few thousand people assembled outside Cheung Kong Center for a continuous National Education-style protest against Li’s property hegemony, it could cause a real shock to the system. Where would it leave the pro-Beijing Voice of Loving HK, now insisting on its credibility as a self-funded movement of common folk who support the status quo? In the same place it would leave Beijing and all its local lieutenants: forced more and more into a position where they side with plutocrats against the other 99%.

Fortunately for them, it almost certainly won’t happen. In a pointed analysis in Ming Pao, HK Polytechnic University’s Professor Pun Ngai complains that the pro-dems themselves will undermine any such alignment. As she puts it, they are into political democracy but not economic democracy; their worldview is so ‘conservative’ that they stay inside their own little bubble while broader civil society grows up in response to inequality, property hegemony and issues like heritage and infrastructure. The CTU labour federation supporting the dock workers is part of the pro-democracy milieu, but the pan-dems as a camp show little interest in grasping the opportunity that Ta Kung Pao sees.

A Marxist interpretation might be that this is simple class loyalties at work: the home-owning professionals of the Democratic and Civic Parties occupy privileged perches in the upper percentiles of our grotesquely distorted distribution of wealth. (The Aussie dockers must be on well over double their Hong Kong counterparts’ take-home pay – and for far fewer hours a month – yet Hong Kong has a higher per-capita GDP.) But if the pro-dems saw it that way, they wouldn’t be in politics; they’d join the Voice of Loving HK, and kick out its clerical-staff and small-trader useful idiots. We can only conclude, not for the first time, that they are in love with being an opposition without a hope.

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