Big Lychee, Various Sectors

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.

From China Law Translate, some commentary on China’s Ethnic Unity Law. Includes links to general background…

…the impact of these … principles is to reduce minority cultures and religion in scope and longevity. The state encourages religious leaders to find the parts of their faiths that affirm mainstream Core Socialist Values and downplay the rest. Religion exists as a temporary nuisance that should exist in a controlled state.

…What is troubling here is not the extraterritorial reach, but the conduct being penalized. As Prof. Clarke points out, the relevant criminal offenses have been stretched to include a wide range of conduct, including speech and religious practice. Countries that place great importance on protecting speech and religious expression are right to be concerned that China might punish individuals for conduct that occurred within their borders. 

Remember Gwadar – the Pakistani port that was supposed to link Western China with the Persian Gulf in true Belt-and-Road fashion? Lowy Interpreter catches up…

Once hailed as China’s ultimate maritime shortcut to bypass the treacherous Malacca Strait, the deep-sea port is rapidly transforming from a geopolitical asset into a financial and security liability as Beijing’s risk appetite diminishes under domestic economic strain. 

…Goods moving from Xinjiang to Gwadar must cross the Karakoram highway, navigating altitudes of over 4,600 metres. The area is plagued by frequent landslides, avalanches, and extreme weather, rendering it structurally incapable of handling the high-volume container traffic required to replace maritime shipping.

Once past the mountains, the route cuts through Gilgit-Baltistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan. Convoys must pass through territories marked by intense sectarian violence, Taliban activity, and deep-seated local insurgencies.

Preparing to move and clearing out refrigerator. Not a stickler for sell-by dates – but eewwww. Will spare details.

HKFP reports…

Peggy Wong has stepped down from the Tai Po District Council for health reasons, a government statement published on Saturday stated. 

The local politician was a consultant for the committee that approved the renovation project that Wang Fuk Court was undergoing when the deadly blaze broke out last November. 

…During the inquiry hearings, residents testified that Wong, a member of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), had amassed proxy votes from residents and interfered with meetings about renovation matters. 

Last month, media reported that Wong’s team had collected proxy votes in the name of deceased residents. 

…A veteran politician, Wong served on the Tai Po District Council from 2000 to 2019, when she lost her seat amid a pro-democracy landslide victory during the elections that year.

She was re-elected in 2023 during the first district council elections held after authorities overhauled the electoral system to ensure only those deemed “patriotic” could run for office.

What’s wrong with ‘to spend more time with her family’?

A total of 168 people died at Wang Fuk Court. An enquiry is underway, and has heard plentiful evidence that the firms awarded the renovation contract cut corners on safety to maximise profits, while officials failed to spot anything wrong or respond adequately to residents’ complaints. Peggy Wong, a patriot who lost in the previous open election, used her office to help the winning parties get the contract. Draw what conclusions you will.

Data spotted by Numberwang: barely half – 51.7% – of the inmates in Hong Kong detention facilities have been convicted. Another 3.6% are immigration cases. That leaves over 44.7% who are on remand and thus yet to be found guilty of anything.

In absolute terms, the number of people on remand in Hong Kong has risen from around 1,500 at end-2019 to just under 5,000 today. The number of convicted prisoners has remained pretty steady.

Looks like a serious backlog in the courts. It can’t all be because of arrested booksellers, folk suspected of seditious intent to be seditious and other NatSec cases denied bail. And there are no signs of a massive crimewave. So perhaps there’s a shortage of judges? 

When taking a bus, I try to pick a seat that avoids the sun. On east-west trips, sit on the north side; on northbound routes, sit on the left in the morning and the right in the afternoon – and vice-versa for southbound. I barely think about it. But apparently some people need to be told, or want to be sure to take zig-zags in the route into account. A public-spirited geek called Jacob Shing has put an app together. 

For someone who asked: if you want all your junk taken away, these people look good.

Outgoing Hong Kong NatSec police head Andrew Kan appears to see discussion of the lack of a list of banned books as you-know-what…

“Saying there is no list of banned books or that the red lines are unclear – I think that is a form of soft resistance,” Kan said.

He also suggests that if they are unsure, booksellers shouldn’t sell books…

…“We’ve taken it one step further than bookstore owners and their staff – we actually read the books,” Kan said in the interview.

Before bookstores consider selling a book, they should read it or seek legal advice, Kan said. Otherwise, they should simply decide not to sell it.

“If we release a list of banned books now, and a new illegal title is released the next day, people will question why arrests were made if it wasn’t on the list,” Kan said in the interview. 

So discussing something that officials themselves confirm to be a fact – the absence of a list – is ‘soft resistance’? And booksellers should ban books themselves. Sounds odd. But remember there is no definition of what ‘soft resistance’ is, or is not. And there is no law that cites ‘soft resistance’ as a crime. So perhaps it makes perfect sense. 

Still, it makes you wonder how Hong Kong managed to survive for decades before the 2020s without banning books or spreading alarm about the horrors of ‘soft’ whatever-it-is.

They don’t worry about ‘soft resistance’ on the Mainland. They used to have ‘capitalist roaders’, and in modern times people who ‘pick quarrels and provoke trouble’. The (paywalled) Economist notes a slight willingness of Beijing to allow citizens to speak out against the government – at least the sort of local officials that make life harder for the central authorities…

“Treating differing voices as floods and terrifying beasts is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of governance,” would be an unsurprising homily from a liberal newspaper in a democracy. From the actual source, Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party’s main theoretical journal, in September, it is positively startling. Other party outlets have been sounding similarly enlightened. “Wherever energy is spent on targeting the commenter and blocking channels of speech, almost without exception the result is an even greater crisis of trust,” said China Youth Daily, run by the Communist Youth League, in July. Some officials “seek only silence in public discourse, not the resolution of problems, and habitually block and delete posts instead of solving issues”, China Comment, a magazine run by the country’s official news agency, Xinhua, also weighed in that month.

…Dare to post a message online that the death toll in last month’s flash flood on the Nepal-China border was higher in China than reported? Seven days in jail for that. A system that brooks no dissent is behaving true to form.

But China’s leaders do sometimes worry that censorship can go too far. Overly tight restrictions on everyday moaning, they suggest, can make it harder to get the feedback they need to improve government behaviour and thereby defuse public grievances before they explode on the streets. 

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Many thanks to those who suggested junk-removal services. Much appreciated.

A big Safeguard Defenders report on how CGTN TV operates. Includes behind-the scenes accounts of staged confessions, and working conditions in the ‘big pants’ building…

Three quarters of the rundown is all Xi Jinping news… 

A paper by Professor William Hurst on China’s ghost cities. He divides them into four categories: actual ghost cities like Ordos; ‘formalist facades’ like the Beichuan post-earthquake reconstruction; speculative resort-type developments; and factory redevelopment in rust-belt regions. The first two are state-driven; the latter two private-sector. Each poses distinct economic and social problems and different prospects for long-term recovery.   

Another academic paper – on how political attitudes of Chinese students are affected by studying in China versus overseas. (Long story short: those studying abroad tend to be more liberal and less nationalistic. Partly they were that way to begin with; partly China’s zero-Covid regime disillusioned them.)

Australian series You Can’t Ask That interviews blind people. They are funnier than most stand-ups.

A request

My landlady isn’t renewing the lease here at Perpetual Opulence Mansions, so I’m moving to a new apartment next month. Does anyone know of someone I can pay to take away all my unwanted things in one go? Items include: large wardrobes/cabinets; smaller furniture; a few appliances (inc. a fridge); tatty old clothes; potted plants; kitchenware; books; unwanted freebies like a teddy bear, other crap that’s too big/heavy/potentially reusable to throw out with the trash. Some are in good shape and could be sold/donated, some could be salvaged/recycled, and some sent to landfill. (There are various green social enterprises that will accept certain types of stuff, but I just want a one-stop operation.)

Any tips in the comments will be welcome.

Former Stand News editor Patrick Lam appears in court to appeal his 2024 sedition conviction. Only one of the articles found to be seditious was published while Lam was editor, and the parts deemed to incite hatred of the government were quotes from anonymous sources expressing ‘subjective feelings’. 

Judge Derek Pang questioned whether a media outlet should depict events using one-sided comments that were “wrong” and “biased,” adding that the report could have included the police’s account before publication.

In response, [lawyer David] Ma argued that there was no right and wrong when it came to the interviewees’ subjective feelings, saying that the report did not seek to lay the blame on the police.

However, High Court Chief Judge Jeremy Poon said the central issue was whether media outlets could publish subjective comments that carried the “objective effect” of being seditious.

Prosecutor Derek Lau told the court that subjective feelings must not violate the law’s boundary and that freedom of expression is not absolute.

Maybe the government should set up a Subjective Feelings Hotline, so editors can check whether they are illegal before publishing them.

When it comes to hardcore tortuous language, few can beat the Standard’s editorial-writing AI bot-agent. Today’s unfathomable offering…

Crucially, commercial demand for green technologies is globally synchronized. Driven by stringent carbon disclosure mandates; corporate environmental, social and governance commitments; and mainland China’s national “dual-carbon” targets, market demand for verifiable decarbonization solutions is immense. By anchoring InnoHK around clean tech, Hong Kong positions its research laboratories not as ivory towers, but as dynamic incubators producing technologies with immediate industrial off-takers across the Greater Bay Area and global supply chains.

This translational focus directly reinforces the broader policy architecture unveiled in the 2026 Policy Address and the inaugural Five-Year Plan. 

I should stop reading this stuff. I’ll end up having dreams about immediate industrial off-takers across the Greater Bay Area.

Apparently spurred by a Wen Wei Po story, the government says it will take some sort of action over the film Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, which it just learned has been available on Netflix since 2017. The trailer can be seen by anyone without a subscription (and is in fact also on YouTube)…

The newspaper claimed that the film “distorts the facts to valorise Wong” and “features several anti-China disruptors spreading inciting statements that subvert conventional values.” 

…“The HKSAR Government calls on members of the public to think critically and discerningly, and dissociate themselves from any act or activity that endangers national security,” [a Security Bureau spokesman said]. 

Pro-Beijing media and government officials have used words like ‘valorize’, ‘glamorize’ or ‘glorify’ in the past to dismiss or condemn video footage and other records of the 2019 protests. And not without reason: scenes of massive demonstrations are emotive for the 2 million-plus people who took part, and apparently for the wider overseas audiences who have seen the Joshua Wong documentary and other films, like Revolution of Our Times and Do Not Split. Such portrayals of the events contradict the authorities’ narrative about foreign forces and black hands.

The government presented a video and other materials of its own, which are on this government site titled The Truth About Hong Kong ‘Legislative Amendment Turmoil’. A discomforting mish-mash of Nury Vittachi/tankie stuff and Hong Kong bureaucrat box-ticking. Apparently put together to show someone higher up that it had been put together. A quick sample…

What is a “colour revolution”?

“Colour revolution” refers to the illegal means used by certain countries to plot and subvert the state power of other countries with the ultimate objective to control them. The affected countries will eventually end up suffering from change of government, social unrest, economic collapse, and deterioration in people’s livelihood.

Past “colour revolutions” include the “Velvet Revolution” in Serbia in 2000, the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, etc.

All “colour revolutions” share some common characteristics, including manipulation or support by certain countries behind the scene; local opposition parties coming out to lead in a premeditated and organised way; using the banner of fighting for so-called democracy, freedom and human rights, with subversion of the existing state power as the ultimate aim; using ad-hoc incidents as flashpoints to create scenes of street demonstrations or flash-mob violence; and making use of social conflicts to shape and sway public opinion so as to incite, deceive and hijack the masses to take part in activities, etc.

The Joshua movie aside – the latest NatSec threat, SCMP reports, is AI. But we’re supposed to be an AI hub, with the latest Policy Address mentioning appointment of an AI Commissioner, right?

AI does potentially pose what most countries refer to as national security risks. For example, a Harvard Law paper mentions AI-assisted drone technology that gives ‘weak states and non-state actors access to a type of long-range precision strike capability’. But outgoing HK NatSec Police boss Andrew Kan is also thinking of a more local version of NatSec…

Discussing the new threat, the outgoing police official said he had seen overseas examples of AI agents launching attacks on critical infrastructure and other companies’ computer systems, as well as generating misinformation.

Anti-government forces could also use AI to commit crimes related to national security, he said.

…Kan pointed to AI tools used to help screen social media posts to identify potential “soft resistance” against the government as an example.

“As computers and AI become more powerful, the chances of successfully hiding your criminal intent or criminal acts are actually getting slimmer. So, it’s better not to test the law,” he warned.

It would be interesting to know what AI prompts they use to identify the dreaded ‘soft resistance’ on Facebook.