Big Lychee, Various Sectors

I work hard to avoid being caught up in the Hong Kong population’s occasional herd-like behaviour. I know better than to visit Lamma on a public holiday, go to the waterfront to watch fireworks, fly out of town at Christmas, or try to get a MacDonald’s hamburger when a Free Hello Kitty Doll Promotion is in full swing. But yesterday was the coldest day in the city in living memory, and I did find myself swept along with the madness of crowds.

I was not among the curious but stupid who needed rescuing after going up mountains to experience the sub-zero conditions. One of my earliest childhood memories is using my little fingernails to scrape ice off the inside of my bedroom window on frozen mornings, so I can live without frost. But I did succumb to the need for hotpot. After surviving a five-minute walk to the supermarket, I was Not Impressed to find other people with the same idea all clustering around the meatball/tofu/fishcake section, apparently unable to make their minds up. After elbowing them aside, I found myself agonizing for ages over the surprising range on offer before finally choosing a suitable selection, and also getting mushrooms, greens and sliced pork.

This all ended up in a Korean/Japanese dashi and miso soup, with garlic, green onion, sesame and radish, plus a soy/fish-sauce/chili dip. On this occasion, the mindless masses are right – this is the reason Hong Kong apartments do not have heating…

The tale of the five abducted Hong Kong booksellers continues to unfold in its depressingly predictable way. Lee Po’s wife is allowed to visit him and returns with a clearly dictated letter asking Hong Kong police to cease wasting resources on investigating his plight.

Hong Kong government and police enquiries have prompted a vague official acknowledgment from Guangdong authorities that they know the whereabouts of Lee, who was taken illegally out of Hong Kong. Gui Minhai, who was taken illegally from Thailand, has been forced to make a lame-sounding ‘confession’ on CCTV. There is no word of the three who vanished while visiting the Mainland.

Presumably, the Hong Kong government is in contact with Beijing on all this, but it has nothing to tell the public and is looking helpless and almost irrelevant. The latest letter from Lee won’t help. Ghost-written by Chinese officials, it requests that our police refrain from investigating such apparent crimes on this side of the border as a kidnapping and illegal exit. The cops can’t be seen to acquiesce without making a travesty of rule of law. But by officially continuing an investigation (however perfunctory) they in practice defy Mainland authorities.

Rumours and theories of what is happening abound. One idea is that forbidden books are being used by Beijing factions trying to undermine the Xi Jinping regime. This seems plausible enough. Another is that the seemingly chaotic and desperate devices like phony letters and TV confessions are in fact sophisticated psychological weapons employed by Beijing to confuse and numb the outside world into accepting or ignoring what is really happening. (By ‘what is happening’ we perhaps mean the planned ‘extermination’ of dissident materials overseas reported in the London Sunday Times.) This may be reading too much into the Communist Party’s coolness and self-control – interpreting new extremes of ruthlessness as calculated and smart.

In the context of suppression of labour movements, clampdowns on NGOs, spying on lecturers, joke economic data, and all the other panicky freaking-out in Beijing, we are witnessing a regime that sincerely believes it is under serious threat. And the poor little Hong Kong government is hooked up to it, wondering what happens next.

Collapsing markets, forced confessions on CCTV, blizzards and subzero temperatures expected from Washington DC to Shatin, mass-deaths among entertainment stars – and a mysterious huge invisible ninth planet suddenly appears on the edge of the solar system. We desperately need to end the week with some Positive Energy.

We can start with the delectable news that Hong Kong’s tourism industry is facing at least a relatively hard time ahead…

Clearly when arrivals have dropped and yet are 59.3 million, you still have a long way to go. But there are reasons for optimism. Economic problems in the Mainland and the strong Hong Kong Dollar look set to continue. We can also rely on the self-centred, short-term gimme-gimme-money-now philosophy of our tourism/landlord lobby (the Tourism Board is headed by the boss of developer Lai Sun, who is also trying to cadge cheap cinemas from us).

A more enlightened, long-term tourism strategy would rest on a first-do-no-harm policy towards the rest of the economy and population. It would calculate that the nicer Hong Kong is to live in, the more it will be attractive to visitors. Instead of evicting local residents to make space for herds of overseas moron-gawker-shoppers, they would focus on making the city pleasant for everyone, and let it keep its character rather than bury it under endless malls.

But the industry can think only of cramming more and more shoppers into our streets. Thus it thinks up ridiculous ideas that should fail gloriously. One of their target markets will be ‘salarymen on short breaks’, which sounds like buses of horny Japanese guys on a Pearl River Delta brothels tour. If it’s Wednesday this must be Dongguan. And they hope to lure families from India and Southeast Asia with a ‘Wine and Dine’ festival and a ‘Cyclothon’. It all sounds laughably dire.

I have a related idea, by the way. I have noticed that the packs of Koreans who wander around my devoid-of-any-interest neighbourhood tend to cluster around these nasty pink signposts…

They are obviously drawn to them, like ants to sugar. Remove the signposts, and the problem may well disappear.

More good news arrives in my email inbox. I get quite a few press releases from hitherto unheard-of enterprises desperate for publicity, but I have never had one that is interesting – until now.

It starts…

Hong Kong’s only laser tattoo removal clinic is holding HK’s first ever tattoo removal competition in 2016. Throughout this year-long event, contestants will vie for the titles of Best Tattoo Removal Progress, Best Transformation, and People’s Choice.

It goes on to explain that…

Unwanted tattoos can lower self-esteem, limit professional aspirations, and harm relationships. “There is a general perception that tattoos are permanent,” [Certified Laser Specialist ] Ms. Winter said. “When people discover the options available to them, it opens doors and affects lives in a positive way. It’s extraordinary to be a part of that.”

On the other hand, tattoo removal does require time and commitment. “We strive to help our clients stay focused and complete this life-changing experience,” Ms. Winter commented. The Ink Out Challenge is designed to continue the motivation and excitement of New Year’s resolutions and goals throughout the year.

Tattoo removal sounds like self-cleaning ovens or weight-loss with no dietary changes or exercise – something that’s impossible, but desperate fools will pay for it anyway. The tone of the press release is interesting for its sympathetic treatment of people who have consciously decided to make themselves look permanently grotesque and then changed their minds.

Maybe removing a little butterfly from a buttock is do-able. But I doubt even the most talented Certified Laser Specialist could erase the huge zig-zag/stripy/pointy (Maori?) patterns that half the white male 25-35 age group have had implanted onto their arms and legs, presumably as a way to express their unique identities. The important thing is that Hong Kong is on course to be Asia’s Tattoo Removal Hub.

I declare the weekend open with a special treat for fans of the One Belt, One Road initiative. From our friends and fellow residents of the Greater China Co-Prosperity Zone in beautiful Kazakhstan, I bring you Dos-Mukasan…

This is a classic example of how you should not judge a book by its cover. It is the 1970s. It is the height of the Cold War. The USSR is tentatively tweaking the extent to which it oppresses its population. In order to counteract the underground market in smuggled Western decadent blue-jeans and Beatles records, the Communist authorities order a little more tolerance for home-grown hip-n-groovy popular culture. But creativity remains suspect. So avant-garde musicians must portray themselves as safe and even ludicrously corny. Whether you like the music or not, you have to admit they did a great job in misrepresenting themselves, and even getting the state-owned Melodya label to bring out the album. Behind the matching red satin suits and horrid hairstyles is some distinctly un-Soviet psychedelic folk-jazz – Kazakh-style…

Who needs a life, when you have YouTube?

Holden Chow, deputy boss of Hong Kong’s local Chinese Communist Party front, the DAB, refuses to say whether he thinks CY Leung should have a second term as the city’s Chief Executive. His reason is that CY himself hasn’t announced his own intention – which is irrelevant, or indeed all the more reason to answer the question. What he means is that he hasn’t yet been told what the official line is. The pseudo ‘election’ (outcome predetermined in Beijing) by a rigged body of 1,200 is still over a year away. Expect the DAB, FTU and other United Front appendages to be ‘still to make our minds up’ for a while.

For now, Chow is running in a real competitive race: the Hong Kong Legislative Council by-election that takes place late next month in the New Territories East constituency. The seat became vacant when pro-democracy Civic Party member Ronny Tong resigned as a grand melodramatic gesture to mark the establishment of his new Path of Democracy grouping, aiming to occupy some mythical middle ground between the pro-Beijing and pro-democracy camps.

The by-election will be more interesting than it sounds, for several reasons.

First, it will be a manly, straightforward, first-past-the-post, single-seat election. Legco geographical constituencies have multiple seats fought over by party lists of candidates under a complex system of proportional representation. The system was originally designed to dilute pro-dem candidates’ success, but if anything aids fringe oddballs on the ballot and confuses everyone.  So the February 28 poll offers the prospect of a plain, simple goody-versus-baddy fight in which only one person can win.

Second, as we saw in last November’s district elections, there is a youthful/middle-class backlash underway against Hong Kong’s dismal governance and malevolent interference in local affairs by Beijing’s officials. On top of Beijing’s rejected fake-democracy package, unaffordable housing, the tourist plague, attacks on university autonomy, lead in water, etc, etc, we have the case of the five missing book publishers to attract protest voters (not to mention local reasons to be miffed). Centred on Shatin, New Territories East voted over 57% pro-dem in 2012, returning only two United Front candidates, plus ‘maverick’ James Tien of the Liberals, with the other six seats won by various pro-dem figures. So it should be a pro-dem walkover to humiliate and anger all the right people.

Third, Beijing’s local agents – who take elections far more seriously than anyone else in town – will probably go to great lengths to try to micromanage a victory for Holden Chow. All other pro-Beijing groups have obediently kept off the ballot, to give the DAB a clean sweep of non-dem votes. We can expect the usual desperate measures, like dragging centenarians from their beds, to maximize the DAB’s turnout.

The very broad pro-dem camp is inevitably more splintered. The mainstream pro-dems have agreed on a candidate, namely the Civic Party’s Alvin Yeung, a smart and presentable counterpoint to the Communist running dog Holden – or as I hereby re-name him, Be-Holden. But two other pro-dems couldn’t resist getting onto the ballot, a ‘Third Side’ fantasist and a localist from Hong Kong Indigenous. The United Front forces would not be above finding ways to boost these two to reduce Alvin’s vote.

And three more candidates are running. There’s independent Christine Fong, prominent in local affairs and possibly able to lure a few votes from both camps – and she allegedly assaulted DAB member ‘Dr’ Elizabeth Quat, which is cool interesting. There’s some businessman bozo who claims to support a second term for CY. And there’s a barrister protesting his profession’s opposition to his other career in ‘body figuring’, which seems to be some sort of chiropractic-with-extra-added-voodoo baloney with Chinese characteristics, of course. Or maybe it’s the Body Figuring Association who are censuring him in disgust at his whoring as a lawyer. This is what they do to people they like…

Those of us outside NT East will just have to sit and watch.

Snatching one Swedish national and forcing a phony-sounding confession out of him doesn’t look great; doing it to two looks plain nasty. Not content with abducting Hong Kong publisher Gui Minhai and parading him on TV, Chinese authorities have arrested NGO activist Peter Dahlin and wrung an ‘apology’ out of him for helping people ‘called “lawyers”’. Officials in Stockholm are politely asking China about their two citizens, and apparently hoping for the best. The UK is taking the same tepid approach to Beijing over another kidnapped Hong Kong publisher, British national Lee Bo.

Some 15 to 20 years ago, mildly observant and averagely prescient Hong Kong people noted the huge and growing surge of investment into and exports out of Mainland China as the country’s economy bounced back with a vengeance after the lost Maoist decades up to the late 1970s. The risk-to-reward ratios were once-in-a-lifetime. We put our savings into amazingly underpriced Chinese companies being listed on the local stock market and saw returns of 500% or 1,000% in five-to-10-year spans.

It was a one-off historic opportunity for those of us lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. By the mid-2000s or so, China’s dramatic return to economic normality had run its course. Now, 10 years further on, the country is in trouble. The Communist regime faces a stark choice: relax its grip to let the economy grow, or tighten its grip to keep itself in power. The place is too big to fail, so we all vaguely assume they will find some middle way and wing it – though damned if we can see how, exactly. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is re-establishing a dictatorship, as Swedes and others are finding out.

But news travels slowly. In Europe, they have only just heard of this thing called the Great Chinese Miracle Stratospheric Rise Story. To the UK, Sweden and the rest of the West, it is still the 1990s and the big boom is just starting to take off. So besotted are they with the mythical riches bound to flow from China that they feel a need to indulge in the most cringe-making pre-emptive kowtows.

Western policymakers probably see Beijing’s rogue behaviour – like kidnapping their own citizens – as an unfortunate but soon-to-pass phase that China is going through in its dazzling emergence as World’s Number-One Economic Power. They don’t realize that the clampdown on human rights (and media/academia/civil society/etc) is the direct result of, and response to, the end of the economic ‘miracle’. This is a corrupt regime fighting to survive. You don’t need to grovel to it. (At least with the Saudis you get some oil.)

As China does as it pleases with Swedish and British passport-holders, democratic Taiwan overwhelmingly votes for a Western-educated, reformist, progressive and pluralist leader. The West’s response? Implicitly criticize the Taiwanese for inconveniencing Beijing. Tut-tut at them for disrupting the Communists’ plan to absorb and crush their free society. Warn them, as the obvious troublemakers in all this, not to provoke China into ramping up the military threat.

Maybe in 10 years or so, the news will reach the West: the Big Wonderful Taking-Over-the-World Exploding Chinese Inevitable thing is over.

Not sure where this diagram originally comes from, but it turned up in my morning deluge of Tweets (with cuddly furry friend embellishment of mine)…

How does the Deputy Assistant Vice-Secretary of the Propaganda and Thought Work Leading Group cram his phone number on his business card? And how do they conduct ‘thought work’? Do they all sit silently around a table staring down intensely? Even more mystifying are the Spiritual Civilization Offices (in the plural – just one isn’t enough). This takes creepiness onto a whole new Orwell-meets-Vatican level.

The ‘organogram’ describes the domestic propaganda system. The offshore equivalent might include the following…

And, instead of the Central Party School, it would include an institution in Beijing (whose name I forget – possibly something to do with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that hosts Hong Kong civil servants and other innocent victims on short familiarization-with-the-motherland courses.

Someone I know who spent a week at this place a year or so ago was told in one class that Taiwan’s now-president-elect Tsai Ing-wen was above all else a spinster, and by implication a worthless and laughable waste of space of no consequence to anyone. In another class, the Hongkongers were informed by a straight-faced, matter-of-fact lecturer that, as a result of demographic and other trends, Russia’s Far East would become part of China one day. The attendees got the impression that this was self-evident (only clueless Hongkongers had to have it spelled out to them) and the day was due within an in-our-lifetimes time span.

The scariest scenario, which explains the occasional tantrums and other-worldliness of the official line: the leaders at the very top of the ‘correct thinking’ hierarchy actually believe the stuff themselves.

One of modern life’s greatest pleasures is watching a bunch of unlovable and despicable rogues run themselves into an increasingly, utterly horrible PR mess. (The classic hilarious example from years ago: McDonalds suing a couple of ragged vegetarians.) Typically, a combination of in-house incompetence and uncontrollable external events combine to expose the Official Truth as self-delusion and/or plain lies, and – to onlookers’ glee – panicky damage-control backfires to compound the disaster.

China’s Communist party-state seems to be starting 2016 in such a sorry situation – wading deeper and deeper into reputational problems as it struggles to reconcile its internal fictional message with internationally recognized facts.

The most pressing image-management ‘contradictions’ obviously involve the economy. With official data on GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and debt falsified or obscured, no-one really knows what is going on. But some things are observable. We see clumsy stock/currency market mismanagement, suggesting incompetence and panic – which themselves sound like cause and effect of bigger problems buried under the official stats. And there are all the clear direct or indirect signs of over-capacity, capital flight, labour problems and other trouble.

Perversely, the Chinese authorities stick with the clear lie that growth remains at 7% (or 6.9876% or whatever). Such a high growth rate at the same time as the capital flight/labour protests/etc would indicate an economy so grotesquely imbalanced that it is sure to explode. If they were honest and admitted to (say) 2% growth, the problems would be more understandable, and the picture would actually be more reassuring. As it is, most observers are being realistic/charitable and politely ignoring the 7%-growth fiction. But the blatant refusal to admit the obvious does make Beijing’s officials look infantile.

The PR problems get nastier as they get more localized. The big story of the weekend was the victory of Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP in the Taiwan elections. The polling started with news that a Taiwanese K-pop star had been forced to make a groveling filmed ‘confession’ to the PRC after waving an ROC flag in a video. The main villains are the Korean entertainment company (which reaps big bucks from stars’ Mainland commercial deals) and an aging Mainland-domiciled Taiwan star who likes to expose unpatriotic rivals. But the message is clear: Beijing expects and requires humiliation of 16-year-olds for the slightest transgression of its ‘Taiwan doesn’t exist’ fantasy. If you wanted to alienate people whose loyalty you crave, I couldn’t think of a better way.

But wait! I could…

As we all know, in accordance with the regime’s obsession with image-manipulation, Beijing’s security apparatus has been abducting Hong Kong book publishers. After a fifth was grabbed in late December off the streets of Hong Kong itself, this became a big scandal. The Chinese authorities are now looking for a way out. Behold – they are busy making the PR screw-up even bigger.

Following presumably faked communications from Lee Bo, we now get a televised ‘confession’ from Gui Minhai, who disappeared from Thailand. It is standard Stalin-showtrial-with-Chinese-characteristics stuff. But the apparently uninspired spin-doctors still have another three (four, with Lee) accounts of the disappearances and ‘guilt’ to concoct and disseminate. Such contrived stories for all five victims will inevitably come across as a joke. Hong Kong’s officials and Beijing loyalists will be forced to make themselves part of the joke if their masters order them to publicly embrace this crap as the truth. And even then, one day, the five will have to be freed to tell their stories.

This mess started off as an attempt to protect the regime’s image at home, and it has now become one more blight on the country’s international reputation. To the audience in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the world as a whole, China self-mutilates rather than saves face. Yet again.

I could go into the way China’s censors banned ‘Tsai Ing-wen’ from Internet searches for a while on Saturday, then changed their minds. But we could go on and on.

Are we going to have a whole year of this? It will be the most gruesomely entertaining ever.

The overall impression the world gets from Beijing’s frantic attempts to impose the Communist Party’s fiction everywhere is that China’s leaders and political system are simultaneously both child-like and evil. It is a combination (The Exorcist/The Omen/Stephen King/etc) that manages to be creepier than any other type of sinister. Bang goes the cuddly panda bear.

The week comes to an end with another wild pig rampaging through downtown Hong Kong – this time in the park near Citibank Tower. A few days earlier, a fellow member of the sounder frolicked outside the Conrad Hotel. As the Wednesday report noted, during hot weather, the creatures sometimes come into the urban areas and launch themselves gracefully into swimming pools or stroll nonchalantly around shopping malls to keep cool. But at this chilly time of the year, there must be another explanation.

A logical one comes quickly to mind: they are looking for somewhere to warm up.  On reflection, such tough and wiry beasts probably don’t feel the cold, or at least wouldn’t admit it. For a clue, we should look at the South China Morning Post links and see that the paper files these stories under ‘Education and Community’. Far from being dumb animals, the boars wish to improve themselves and be among us and involved. Perhaps they have come to complain about one of the SCMP’s earlier items – ‘Wild pigs threaten farmland’ – and ask for the right of reply to put their side of the story.

The last time I encountered the species was up at Leaping Dragon Walk above Chai Wan. They were lazily hanging out and watching the humans…

That was a couple of months back. Something has since shaken them out of their lethargy. Whatever it is, it took place just a few days ago. The only thing I can think of is the Big Subject that burst into prominence on Wednesday and is on everyone’s minds constantly.

I declare the weekend open with the news that word of the astounding opportunities has reached the hogs, and they are eager to apply for scholarships and get themselves appointed to the Steering Committee. They are the ‘Belt and Road’ Boars, joining hands with Regina Ip to make her Maritime Silk Road Society ‘more Boaring than ever’, and dedicated to the tireless promotion of ‘Super-Connector’ Boar-dom.

Those traumatized, mind-numbed zombies you see staggering around Hong Kong this morning – they’re the poor wretches who had to sit through yesterday’s Policy Address. Even by the usual standards of these tortuous annual rituals, Chief Executive CY Leung’s speech to the Legislative Council was an ordeal.

The main reason was its big theme: ‘Belt and Road’, also (formerly, at least) known as ‘One Belt, One Road’.

(An interlude for anyone who needs reminding… This is, of course, the Chinese nationalist central planners’ fanciful vision in which Eurasian hell-holes like Bezerkistan pay Beijing tons of money in return for pointless high-speed rail systems and irreversible membership of the Grand Imperial Greater China Co-Prosperity Zone. It’s the ultimate win-win, with China exporting its excess industrial capacity and leapfrogging the evil Americans in the race to rule the planet.)

The more officials insist that ‘Belt and Road’ offers Hong Kong a vast array of bounteous economic opportunities, the more obvious it becomes that the ‘initiative’ is of no relevance to this city at all. The big debate today is over how many times CY mentioned the phrase in his address. You will read numbers ranging from the high 30s to the low 50s. The South China Morning Post counts 48 times. I am delighted to sort out the confusion with the help of the pdf file and ‘Find’ function. While ‘Belt and Road’ appears 44 times, a search for ‘belt’ alone yields 54 results. The answer to this mystery is that CY varied the phrase a bit, to keep his audience gripped with excitement on the edge of their seats, thus…

The Silk Road is a fascinating subject. Did you know that Nestorian Christianity reached Xian by the early 7th Century – during the Tang Dynasty – and penetrated what is now Mongolia and even Korea, via these ancient trading routes?

However, as we all recall, the overland network lost significance around 500 years ago as the Portuguese, then the Dutch and other Western Europeans started going directly to Asia by ship, around Africa and over the Indian Ocean. The once-powerful intermediaries – Bezerkistanis, Muslims and Venetians – were sidelined and went into decline. Nowadays, huge container ships do the job, and no-one seriously sees a new future for spice-laden camel trains linking Urumqi with Byzantium.

Or then again…

(Kenya, as we all know, is part of the historical symbolism thanks to Admiral Zheng He’s Ming Dynasty fleet, and is indeed probably a part of the glorious motherland.)

Who knows what this is really about? Blatant and overweening revanchism runs through the Chinese nationalist psyche, encouraged by fixations with historic ‘victimhood’ and even ethnic superiority. ‘Belt and Road’ may partly be a cynical/arrogant/naïve hope of offloading surplus steel and construction capacity, and partly a clumsy grab for strategic influence driven by paranoia about the West. But it also looks like a sad attempt to take emotional or sentimental comfort in dreams of recreating a long-dead past. That’s usually a sign of wanting to avoid the future, change and reform – which sounds like Communist Party thinking in a nutshell.

Anyway – Hong Kong is officially going to be a One Belt, One Road Super-Connector, whatever that is. (It doesn’t come cheap, with HK$1 billion of taxpayers’ money going on scholarships for ‘Belt and Road’ students, who will be stewing mutton in their yurts on our campuses soon.)

CY’s laborious building-up, veneration and idolatry of the ‘Belt and Road’ nothingness is bizarre and perplexing. He does not need to make such an embarrassing pre-emptive kowtow to persuade Beijing to give him a second term in office. And it doesn’t help him or his masters to bludgeon and alienate Hong Kong’s citizenry. His address followed this extreme overindulgence with predictable inanities about tech and land and then a plethora of sensible but minor measures about HPV vaccinations, ivory smuggling and slippery toilet floors. The overall effect is disorientating. CY has either gone nuts, or is trying to turn the rest of us that way.

Hong Kong lawmaker Emily Lau writes to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, asking him to look into the case of the five abducted book publishers. The chances of a response are zero. Acknowledging the existence of far-away individual mortals is not part of the imperial style. And Emily is not just another of the Zhao family’s 1.3 billion nonentity-serfs but an actual outcast – forbidden (like many of her pro-democracy peers) to enter the Mainland for refusing to kowtow.

Meanwhile, pro-Beijing veteran Tsang Yok-sing invites Chinese officials to categorically deny that Mainland security services kidnapped one of the five, Lee Bo, in Hong Kong, and state openly that nothing took place that would infringe the Basic Law or ‘One Country Two Systems’. His phrasing is interesting. We can read it as indulgent, apparently giving Mainland authorities the benefit of the doubt. Or we can see it as a highly loaded question, of the ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ variety. Again, there will be no response: as a loyal follower of the Communist Party, he is supposed to remain silent or repeat the official line, not publicly raise ideas.

Official insistence that Lee Bo is a PRC citizen and Mainland media commentary that the publishers threatened national stability contribute to overwhelming, if technically circumstantial, evidence that China has kidnapped the five and is holding them. Beijing is looking for a face-saving way out. Most people in Hong Kong – even in the loyalist camp – want the Chinese authorities to sweat and feel some humiliation, even pain. The regime overstepped the mark in snatching someone off the street on this side of the border. Such a violation paves the way for the whole one-party Leninist package: jailed lawyers, forced confessions, harassment of families, show trials, asset seizures, Internet censorship, and the end of Hong Kong’s whole reason to exist.

But not so fast! One person, at least, feels sorry for the Chinese government in this moment of embarrassment. South China Morning Post columnist Michael Chugani urges us to ‘allow Beijing breathing space to put things right’. Do not ‘milk it to fan further animosity’ to tyrannical dictators who order kidnappings in our streets, because, you know, they have feelings too.

Thought for the day: there used to be a time when banned Taiwan authors were published in Hong Kong.

Two years ago, the Hong Kong government set up the Lantau Development Advisory Committee. The body represents landlord and construction interests that have been lobbying for some years to smother Hong Kong’s largest island with concrete, nasty attractions and Mainland tourists. It has now submitted its first Work Report, titled Let’s Wreck the Countryside so Our Buddies Can Make a Ton of Money.

The lobby’s premise is that Lantau has a large amount of unused available space, which can be used for tacky tourist theme-concept zone hubs. This is a two-edged sword for the government. On the one hand, officials naturally favour anything to do with concrete-smothering and swamping-by-Mainlanders, especially if it helps find a purpose for such white-elephant projects as the Zhuhai mega-bridge. On the other hand, the ‘spare space’ idea contradicts the Hong Kong government’s official line that we have a dire shortage of land, which of course means we cannot have affordable housing.

A further complication is the obsessive-compulsive nature of the parasitical ‘tourism’ industry. The more Mainland mass-tourism makes Hong Kong uninteresting or unpleasant to visit (let alone live in), the more the tourism lobby screeches for more of the same tawdry crap attractions and facilities in the hope of cramming ever-larger numbers of the bewildered peasant shopper-wretches into the city.

Needless to say, public opinion comes bottom of the list of priorities for decision-makers. It will, of course, be hostile.

The report goes beyond visionary to grandiose and probably absurd. It proposes everything from pitiful and desperate-sounding tourist attractions (spas, for heaven’s sake) to entire new islands to be reclaimed east of Peng Chau. It all comes with lots of ‘connectivity’, ‘nodes’ and ‘corridors’.

Reasons to assume this is not intended to be taken seriously are two-fold. First, the full report is (so far) in Chinese only. This tends to indicate a document designed to appease particular, parochial, audiences – often Mainland officials, but in this case probably local landowners and other small-medium commercial interests. Second, the maps are crammed suspiciously full of arrows and oval-shaped zones. This superficially suggests impressive and intensive strategizing; the PLA’s plans to invade Taiwan aren’t this busy-looking. But on closer inspection the symbols denote vacuous nothings like ‘ecology’ and ‘heritage’. You can imagine a young civil servant drawing more and more of them on an overlay while the grubbier Committee members look on and salivate.

So this is partly aimed at placating the usual New Territories mafia. But there is surely also an element of managing public expectations for the long term. The lobby to exploit the island includes big and international corporate interests (tourism, airport, engineering, retail, etc). They are smart – pitching development of the region as a means to meet local people’s housing needs, claiming to have great concern for the job prospects of the poor ragamuffins of Tung Chung’s public housing estates, and co-opting community groups. The trick will be to bundle things Hong Kong people need like homes with the tourist crap they don’t want.

All of today’s pix are worth clicking on…