Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The SCMP reports…

Hong Kong tourism authorities have pledged to review the roll-out of a lighting project along a trail on The Peak after mounting complaints that flowers and trees were chopped down to make way for the installations.

But the Tourism Board defended the project, saying it had consulted local residents and sought advice from tree experts to minimise the impact on the surrounding environment.

In a statement on Sunday, the board said it valued residents’ views and would now “conduct broader consultation to review the overall arrangements of the project” to “refine its details, with a view to achieving a balance between tourism development, environmental protection and residents’ needs”.

A pic of an alleged lighting enhancement – looks like an anti-aircraft missile emplacement. Another of an ex-tree.

According to this way of thinking, you can’t ‘develop’ tourism unless you damage the environment and/or pay less regard to residents’ needs. In which case: maybe stop trying to attract visitors?  Why do we need a ‘balance’ between degrading natural and living environments and not degrading them? 

The HK Tourism Board has also decided to promote ‘industrial brands, miniature art, religious culture, and local characteristics’ it says here. This includes… 

…organised tours of Kowloon Motor Bus depots … QR code display boards at temples [and] a dedicated tourist map [of Yuen Long].

This isn’t desperation to boost visitor numbers (which are already overloading many parts of the city). It’s desperation to appear to be doing it. Will the HKTB people ever work out that tourists want to see places that haven’t been messed up to ‘attract’ them?

Samuel Bickett on the appointment of 79-year old New Zealander Sir Terence Arnold to Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal…

I have been through his record, and what it shows is a lawyer and judge who, when the state’s security or public-order claims have collided with someone’s liberty, has usually sided with the state. As New Zealand’s chief government litigator, he fought to deny bail to a recognized refugee who had spent two years in detention without charge, and to keep a television crew from interviewing him. He prosecuted an opposition MP and two broadcasters for contempt of court while declining to pursue a senior judge accused of discussing details of a Family Court case himself. As an appellate judge, he wrote a judgment upholding a peace activist’s conviction for burning a flag at an Anzac Day dawn service [and in retirement] … in the case that should worry Hongkongers most, voted to clear the way for a man’s extradition to China on the strength of Beijing’s promise not to torture him.

New Zealand’s higher courts overturned his rulings on the bail, the interview, and the flag. In Hong Kong, nobody will. That, presumably, is the point.

In Englesberg Ideas, Jeffrey Wasserstrom compares Joshua Wong to Thai and Polish activists.

Henry Tang’s wine collection has been auctioned by Christie’s. Chateaux Lafitte Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, etc. HK$50 million worth. 

Christian groups (of the fundamentalist-wacko type) criticize the Hong Kong tourism authorities for promoting the city as a Halloween destination. If they were arguing that it’s a waste of public money, contributing to overcrowding, or other policy grounds, this would perhaps count as ‘soft resistance’. But their complaint is that the contrived and tedious quasi-festival is pagan and death-cultish (and ‘foreign’). So that’s OK, I guess.

The SCMP reports…

Hong Kong suffered a record net loss of 40 kindergartens this year amid a shrinking student population and as the median age of women giving birth to their first child rose to its highest yet, according to official figures.

In its overview of preschools released on Thursday, the Education Bureau revealed that 930 kindergartens were currently operating in Hong Kong, down from roughly 970 in the previous school year.

While some new kindergartens were launched, the net decrease stood at 40, the highest on record. Each of the past four academic years witnessed a net decrease of about 20 preschools.

From 970 to 930 is a 4% drop. But the article suggests a net 120 of 1,050 kindergartens closed over five years – an 11% decline. A population shrivelling before our eyes. It’s almost as if expecting people to raise a family in a 350 sq ft apartment is unrealistic.

A video proving that the ‘AI slop’ aesthetic can work – the secret is that most of the effort involves the sort of creativity and wit that only humans can manage.

HKFP reports on the case of Wong Kwok-ngon (aka Wong On-yin and Ang Bo), a writer and YouTube commentator. He was taken in for questioning by NatSec police on December 6 last year shortly before participating in a planned press conference…

…to discuss topics including building renovations and unscrupulous tendering procedures for construction projects – matters which came to light in the wake of the [Wang Fuk Court] blaze.  

Wong then talked about his meeting with the police in two live-streamed YouTube videos, and was arrested days later.

He has been in jail since last December, and is now in court.

Under the Article 23 NatSec law, it is illegal to ‘divulge information related to a national security investigation’ – even if it’s your own case. (If a guy is taken in for questioning, where does he tell his wife he has been all day? Maybe: “I cannot answer that question on grounds of national security”.)

Wong said [police sergeant] Li only told him he could not reveal details of the meeting, but did not say that he could not even mention that a meeting had occurred.

He also said he told Li at the time that news of the National Security Department summoning him for a meeting had already been reported widely in local media.

And overseas. A CPJ statement at the time.

Wong is also being charged with expressing the wrong views…

…Prosecutors pointed to “seditious content” including Wong’s [YouTube] comments that Hongkongers lived in a “prison-like environment”…

With no sense of irony.

In the (probably paywalled) Spectator, Benedict Rogers marks Joshua Wong’s 30th birthday…

Since 2020, Wong has served multiple sentences for participating in or “inciting” unauthorised assemblies, including a peaceful vigil to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre. In 2024, he was sentenced to four years and eight months, charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the draconian National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing. A year later, he was hit with a second charge under the National Security Law, of collusion with foreign forces – an offence which could carry a life sentence. Last month, he pled guilty to this charge in court, and is awaiting sentencing.

The truth is, Wong should never have spent a day in jail. He never advocated violence, did not promote secession, and never committed what any free or open society would regard as any crime…

Civicus Lens does a Q&A with Frances Hui (click on the questions to see the answer)…

What is the government trying to achieve with this case?

It has never been clearer that the government aims to keep a symbol of my generation’s democracy movement out of public life. It also wants to wear down his spirit through years of isolation. That’s why prosecutors waited nearly five years to bring this charge, until Joshua had almost finished his sentence.

The case also shows the government using the law even more aggressively against people it can still physically reach, to punish ties with those it cannot reach. Prosecutors linked Joshua to Nathan Law, an exiled activist with a bounty on his head. They treated their years of shared international advocacy, including meeting foreign lawmakers, giving media interviews and calling for international pressure, as a continuing criminal conspiracy.

This turns years of lawful political advocacy into a crime…

From the Jamestown Foundation, a George Magnus piece on how AI will ‘deepen the divide between China’s two economies’…

The 15th Five-Year Plan places AI in pole position of the “modern industrial eco-system,” comprising all manner of manufacturing, technology, infrastructure, and control over global supply chains.

The very policies that are powering the industrial side of the PRC economy are exacerbating structural weaknesses and flaws in the much larger part of the economy where excessive debt, low productivity, high unemployment, and fiscal and financial failing are becoming more deeply entrenched.

A quick thought… How are tankies dealing with Trump’s new diesel-fueled pro-Putin/anti-Ukraine pivot? After years of insisting that the CIA forced Ukraine to provoke Russia and leave poor Mr Putin with no choice but to invade, they now find the US aligning with them. According to their usual automatic anti-West triangulation doctrine, they should start siding with evil America’s apparent foe, Ukraine. Or are they welcoming the president of capitalist imperialist USA as someone who has seen the light?

After decades living up the hill from Central – near the office – I’ve come down in the world, topographically speaking. The new neighbourhood in Wanchai has a far wider range of stores within a few minutes’ walk, from a municipal wet market to a 759 to a fancy high-end supermarket. And some seriously good restaurants – tried Nepalese and Guizhou already.

Did you know that Wanchai-Causeway Bay has the highest median household income of all Hong Kong’s districts? I guess the Sheung Wan-Kennedy Town area drags Central and Western down.

When signing paperwork, I perused the list of the apartment’s owners through the years. One was a certain Nigel de Boinville, whose name rings a slight bell. 

The place comes with a dishwasher. Never had one before. Don’t even know how to use it. Maybe if you have a large family, these things are great. But if you typically have two dirty bowls, two cooking utensils, and four pieces of cutlery, it seems simpler just to roll your sleeves up and do them in the sink. Too lazy to use a dishwasher.

Far more useful: a thing on the kitchen wall with hooks for ladles/spatulas and a magnetic strip for knives. And yes, that is a tamagoyaki pan on the drying rack. Made in… France!

Cosmic or what? Today’s Standard has a story about dishwashers.

The HKFP reports that the Po Leung Kuk is designating 16 staff members to promote national security. The Kuk was founded nearly 150 years ago to rescue and shelter abandoned, sold or trafficked girls and today runs orphanages and schools…

[Kuk manager] May Cheung said the team will not “force-feed” concepts of national security, but will instead spread awareness through celebrations like the Mid-Autumn Festival.

(A harvest festival, lest we forget – devoid of any obvious military or other national-security relevance.)

She added that many other national security initiatives are already underway at the charity. For example, she and colleagues in child care services will design picture books embedded with national security themes that will be distributed to more than 100 schools and educational institutions run by the Kuk throughout Hong Kong.

…In June this year, Ming Pao reported that the Social Welfare Department sent letters to around 200 subsidised non-governmental social service organisations, inviting them to nominate managerial-level staff to undergo training to become national security instructors.

According to the government letter obtained by Ming Pao, each instructor is required to promote national security information to at least 30 people annually.

The Standard last week reported on this broader NatSec push going high-tech…

The “NSmarties AI Interactive Platform,” jointly developed by the Hong Kong Police Force and Hong Kong Qianfan Technology, has officially rolled out across schools for the new academic year. The platform, designed to align with the 20 major fields of the “Holistic Approach to National Security,” leverages real-time generative AI to create an immersive national security learning environment for students.

Students can use the platform to independently craft personalized storybooks and short videos, as well as test their knowledge through interactive quizzes. To make national security education more engaging, the platform features voice narration from Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung and Commissioner of Police Joe Chow Yat-ming, who simplify complex legal and security concepts for young learners.

…The initiative received full support from the Education Bureau and the Sisters of the Precious Blood.

You could interpret all this as something sinister, or cynical, or just desperate. There is certainly something weird about orphanages, nuns and officials trying so hard to appear to be doing something so vague. Do charities and schools have other things to do?

For Taiwan geeks – a brief guide on Twitter to the three strands of the KMT.

HKFP reports on the forthcoming election for Hong Kong’s Election Committee, which it describes as…

…the powerful electoral body that chooses both Hong Kong’s top leader and almost half of the territory’s lawmakers. 

The nomination period for 982 seats on the 1,500-member Election Committee opened on Wednesday and will run until October 20. 

If the number of approved nominees exceeds 982, a poll will be held on November 22, according to the government’s Electoral Affairs Commission.

The elected members will join hundreds of other appointed and ex officio members to make up the body. The body consists of five sectors, under which there are a total of 40 subsectors.

Is the body really ‘powerful’? Many of its members will be wealthy and/or well-connected and so obviously have some clout as individuals. And in theory, the committee is entrusted with the job of electing Hong Kong’s CE. But the supreme authority here is the CCP up in Beijing. It makes no secret of its Leninist tradition of top-down control and can hardly let 1,500 people – even pre-screened, etc – in Hong Kong choose whoever they want to occupy an important political role.

It has also never been a secret – by the time the Election Committee goes through the voting ritual – who the next CE will be. Indeed, in 2022 John Lee was the sole candidate.

Since no successor has been discussed in pro-government media by now – and the next CE will be ‘elected’ in the first half of 2027 – we can guess that John Lee will get a second term, barring a last-minute rug pull. The only time that happened was in 2012 when Henry Tang was tossed aside and CY Leung inserted just as Xi Jinping was taking over in Beijing. It could happen again (so far, no-one has ever served two full terms). But it won’t be decided by anyone in Hong Kong.

HKFP adds…

…the total cost of the [November Election Committee] election will be around HK$260 million.

Joel Chan calculates that 9,342 voters can take part (so that’s nearly HK$28,000 spent for each one). The majority are corporate rather than individual human voters. 

A pro-Beijing Twitter account says…

Marking another vital practice of Hong Kong’s improved electoral regime, the election has witnessed enthusiastic participation across all sectors from the first day of nominations. Candidates come fully prepared, shifting from empty slogans to pragmatic policy platforms and in-depth governance insights, kicking off a benign and high-quality electoral competition centred on concrete proposals and actionable solutions.

Here’s a new one – a clampdown on ‘yellow economic circle’ marketing for insurance… 

Hong Kong national security police have arrested an insurance agent and a woman for allegedly operating “seditious” social media pages to stoke hatred against authorities and boost policy sales. 

…“The two arrestees include a man who is a licensed insurance agent, and they are suspected of operating various social media pages to publish content stoking hatred against the constitutional order of the city,” according to the Chinese-language statement.

“The arrested man also used this opportunity to sell insurance products for profit,” the statement added.

Did the SCMP help Chinese officials cover up Xi Jinping’s supposed health problems during the recent visit to the US? Domino Theory engages in some speculation.

Some weekend reading…

Desmond Shum on the differences between Western and Chinese analysts’ approaches…

Take China’s EV industry.

A Western analyst may naturally be drawn toward market share, European industrial decline, tariffs, supply-chain dependence and Chinese technological competitiveness.

A Chinese analyst studying exactly the same industry may give more attention to profitability, price wars, employment, supplier finances, government subsidies, excess capacity and whether the industry’s expansion is economically sustainable.

Both may be conducting macro analysis. Both may be looking at the same companies.

But the question determines the evidence sought, and the evidence sought can influence the conclusion reached.

A Chinese industry can therefore look extraordinarily formidable when viewed from the standpoint of its impact on European competitors while looking considerably less sustainable when viewed from the standpoint of returns on capital inside China.

Both can be true at the same time.

Bitter Winter asks: who owns ‘China’?

Calling Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolian homelands “China” does not turn their peoples into Han. Yet when an account of “China” tells only Han history, it makes those peoples strangers in the histories of their own lands. 

China Books Review on how being born and raised in Shanghai influenced the work of J G Ballard.

…over the next few days. 

Everyone debates the financial pros and cons of renting versus buying a home. Another consideration is the hassle of packing everything up every few years. A nightmare. But then again, there’s an upside to it. I estimate that around 20-25% of the total volume of everything in my current apartment – including furniture – is being ditched (recycled or trashed). The sheer amount of space occupied by unwanted/unnecessary junk is incredible. Clothes, linen, old appliances, utensils, cutlery, tote bags, surplus this, unusable that. Huge quantities of it. But then I’m not Marie Kondo.

Also found some interesting souvenirs…

Environmentalists – like anyone out and about in certain parts of Hong Kong on Thursday – encountered unmanageable numbers of Mainland visitors. HKFP reports… 

Crowds caused erosion along the trail, the NGO said, with plants trampled underfoot and rampant littering in the form of plastic bottles, tissues, and food remains. Some tourists were suspected of defecating on the natural beauty site, the group added. 

In my case it was a traffic jam near the Peak Tram and the sight of huge lines at the bus stops outside Admiralty MTR. God help any residents needing to take a Number 6 to or from Stanley that day.

Numberwang digs up the statistical evidence that more and more Mainland tourists are spending less and less… 

One of the great concerns among politicians and citizens is a tourism race to the bottom, in which Hong Kong officials seem to be only concerned with the number of visitors to the city, while paying lip service to the notion that the government needs to develop its tourism profile to attract wealthier tourists who are willing to spend more. Even Hong Kong’s recently published Five-Year Plan calls for attracting “high value-added visitors” through better tourism products.  

A good place to have your photo taken, but bring your own lunch.

Bureaucrats cram more and more tourists into Hong Kong in an effort to boost retail sales, which will also of course keep rents high. Yet the high costs – due especially to rents – dissuade the tourists from spending money here. Would it be ‘soft resistance’ to point out that this doesn’t make sense? Or that ‘high value-added visitors’ choose destinations that have authentic local character and are not crowded with other tourists?

Pure fiction, of course. Nothing to do with this.

The story starts in 1940, with Japanese forces invading southern China. A penniless teenager called Cheng flees his home for the relative safety of Macau, where a jewellery shop owner agrees to let him sleep under the counter in return for doing odd jobs. Over the years, the plucky youngster learns the trade, and marries the goldsmith’s daughter. (Yes, it’s corny.)

After the war, the couple move to Hong Kong to open a new outlet, and start a family. The jewellery business proves lucrative, and by the late 1960s, Cheng is investing in Macau’s casino/tourism industry and expanding into Hong Kong real estate – two emerging gargantuan money-making machines.

Fast-forward to the 1980s-90s, and Cheng is one of Hong Kong’s biggest billionaires. Thinking ahead, he decides to give number-one son Henry the job of managing director. He also becomes Honorary Consul for Bhutan. Viewers may wonder why the scriptwriter put this apparently irrelevant detail in the plot. But could the little side-gig with the ancient and mysterious Himalayan kingdom come with a curse?

Henry initially proves less than dazzling as the prospective heir to the family’s business empire, and Cheng feels a need to retake control for a while. But the aging patriarch cannot hold on forever, and in the mid-2010s, he dies.

By the time he gets the hang of running a major conglomerate, Henry himself needs to think about succession. His first-born son Adrian seems the obvious choice, with all those hereditary  business-acumen intelligence genes. (The second-born male is Brian, the third Christopher. A, B, C – geddit? His only daughter gets shunted to the back of the alphabet with the name Sonia.)

Adrian is a hip and arty guy who (allegedly) can’t tie his own shoe-laces but has launched several projects, including an upscale shopping mall in Kowloon, the air in which is permeated with a scent of his own choosing. 

As he assumes more responsibility for the family business, the young Adrian sees dazzling opportunities in luxury cultural concept lifestyle-type real estate, driven especially by the rise of wealthy Chinese consumers. This prompts a mega-brainwave in 2018: a massive shopping mall out at Hong Kong airport. Rather than go to their hotels, tourists would head straight for the designer-label stores next to the terminal. Or, rather than go straight to the departures lounge after checking in, departing passengers would load up with handbags and watches first. Or they would splurge on luxury goods both upon arrival and before leaving.

The development, on land provided by the airport as a HK$1.8 billion-a-year rental play, totals 3.8 million square feet, which would house 800 stores and restaurants, an entertainment-something, as well as extensive office space. The banks are more than happy to help finance the HK$20 billion project.

No-one stops to consider economist Herbert Stein’s dictum – if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. And the never-ending Mainland-shopper phenomenon shudders to a halt in the early 2020s, after Covid and the bursting of China’s property bubble.

Tragically, 11 Skies turns out to be a wretchedly bad idea. Adrian leaves New World by mid-2025 to focus on public service and philanthropy. In September 2026, lumbered with some HK$120 billion in debt, the company hands the – mostly never-occupied – development to the airport, with over HK$3 billion by way of contract-release, plus an option to buy cut-price shares in the family business. The smaller parts of the conglomerate entrusted to Sonia remain profitable.

In the final episode, the family try to sell their collection of Gold Bauhinia Medals on eBay. 

Hong Kong used to be so much fun. Remember when tycoon Joseph Lau married one of his mistresses as part of a deal whereby her brother donated a kidney to him?

Headline of the Day, from HKFP: ‘China National Day: Hong Kong leader hails Five-Year Plan as astronaut sends greetings’.

The Standard reports ‘Long queues at Tsim Sha Tsui cross-border bus terminus after National Day fireworks’. They don’t mention the Mainland woman interviewed by media who said she had come to see the display with her husband and two kids. Their budget for the day was 200 Yuan. To save money, she had brought bread and milk to Hong Kong.

Japanese news agency Kyodo News says it has found evidence that the Chinese military was prepared to suppress the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong…

Sources familiar with the matter suggested that China did not resort to armed intervention due to concerns over potential international isolation similar to that faced by the country in the wake of the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

China Talk interviews Logan Wright, who estimates that China’s economy is currently experiencing negative growth as investment contracts…

[China’s situation] is the result of distinct policy choices about how the financial system operated.

After the global financial crisis, China saw the largest single-country credit expansion the world has seen in at least the last century, possibly many centuries. China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years. We’ve never seen anything remotely like it.

First, there was a deliberate attempt to provide countercyclical support in response to the global financial crisis. The extension after that was essentially path dependence. Growth was strong, it was dependent on investment, and it became too difficult for authorities to shut down without imperiling the overall economy. That facilitated the growth of the shadow banking system, and credit growth became increasingly disconnected from the real economy. A lot of it went into the property sector and local government infrastructure.

Transcript or podcast on YouTube.