Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Welcome to Hong Kong, where – in a barely surprising plot twist – 15 of 47 people who haven’t done anything illegal are given bail but stay in jail anyway. Who wrote this show trial script? It’s corny and predictable. Or as Jerome Cohen puts it, an ‘unthinkable travesty of justice, apparently about to get worse’. Some pics.

Nor exactly coincidentally, Hong Kong is ejected from the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, on the grounds that the city no longer enjoys autonomy and is run directly by Beijing. (Taiwan ranks at number 7.)

I remember back in my Company Gwailo days, representing the Big Boss – who had more important things to do with his lithesome masseuse in a Mid-Levels penthouse – at one of these occasions. Must have been late 90s. The mutual fawning was unpleasant to behold and there was much surreptitious use of air-motion sickness receptacles. Who needs an anal swab when you’ve got Hong Kong’s top bureaucrats’ tongues in such close proximity to Heritage Foundation bulky-white-guys’ rear ends? 

The Foundation labelled Hong Kong the world’s ‘freest economy’ even though the Hong Kong government owned all the land, accommodated cartels, systematically excluded public opinion from policymaking, and squeezed genuine entrepreneurs and innovators with red tape and cronyism. Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s Beijing-appointed leaders overlooked the think-tank’s papers calling for tougher US military preparedness against the PRC – long before it was fashionable.

So now it’s whiny hurt-feelings time. Everyone hates us. Not fair. Complete with a panty-wetting press release that goes on and on.

From the Reuters report – those anal swab tests take Barbarian-trolling to a new level. They are…

…performed with a sterile [well, gee, thanks] cotton swab, which looks like a very long ear bud, that is inserted [a rather breathtaking] 3 cm to 5 cm (1.2 inches to 2 inches) into the anus before being gently [we hope] rotated out.

And in case you were wondering.

Next Big Thing: the improvements to the HK electoral system. By ‘improvements’, we mean ‘more zombie-like puppets if we can find them, since even we thought we were scraping the bottom of the barrel with Elizabeth Quat and Holden Chow’. With LegCo elections postponed until 2022, or thereabouts, there’s still time to dredge them up.

Happy hundredth to the NatSec Law!

An on-the-spot report of the bail proceedings for the pan-dem 47, giving a taste of the idiocy of it all. It prompts the question: why is Beijing going to such bizarre – and probably counterproductive – lengths to quell disquiet in Hong Kong? Even allowing for the CCP’s usual paranoia? Why have they decided to cut through all that 1 country 2 Systems/Basic Law stuff and just seize direct control?

Joseph Lian in the (maybe paywalled) NYT thinks it’s because Xi is angling to remain in power beyond the usual two terms. He needs some Big Victories to justify it, and yet he is surrounded by problems – from Belt-and-Road, to Taiwan, to rivalry with the US. A decisive crushing of Hong Kong’s ‘threat to national security’ opposition movement fits the bill perfectly.

This would account for the timing of the charges against the 47 pan-dems (the proceedings look rushed as well as rigged), just ahead of the two meetings in Beijing. The idea would be to make it look like Xi has faced down a mortal threat, and is emerging triumphant. Give the guy a third term!

Carl Minzner on the Xi personality cult being nurtured in official publications…

In these articles, Xi is the focus. He is the one that is making things happen. It isn’t about the Party.  It isn’t about institutions. It isn’t about other leaders. It’s about him.

The fate of Hong Kong now can only be permanent, tighter CCP control. Mainland think-tank guy Tian Feilong on Beijing’s plans to reshape – indeed, replace – its Hong Kong ruling class. Less space for hangers-on and ‘rubber stamps and loyal garbage’. Those who live by the shoe-shine die by the shoe-shine. But watch them grovel and beg for another kick in the teeth as the CCP shoves them to one side.

From Hong Kong Watch, a big and well-researched report ‘Red Capital’ on how Beijing has been gradually expanding its influence in Hong Kong’s economy. Just read it.

…for those exhausted after following the bail hearings for the 47 ‘with multiple defendants nodding off’…

The HK Dept of Justice seems more than usually thin-skinned about criticism that the charges against the 47 are a farce.

The HK and Macau Affairs Office boss declares Jimmy Lai, Joshua Wong and Benny Tai guilty before they’ve even been tried, adding that all dentists, plumbers and 7-Eleven managers must henceforth be patriots.

An unflattering review of Hong Kong’s quarantine camp out near Disneyland (the bureaucrats devising rules on things like food delivery seriously seem to believe their job is to punish).

A China Daily piece on the HK Bar Association from Tony Kwok Man-wai, former deputy boss of the ICAC.

From David Webb – more analysis tearing the Budget apart.

Translation of a poem on the Covid outbreak in Wuhan – the author got a prison sentence.

A worthwhile HK anime indie song.

So we are now entering the Arresting Defendants’ Lawyers Outside Courts stage of becoming a banana republic. 

An interesting list of the 47 pan-dems’ desperate (and perhaps demeaning) attempts to obtain bail, knowing that under the NatSec Law there is a presumption against it (encased within an implicit presumption of guilt, namely that the defendant might ‘continue’ to endanger national security).

Speaking of ‘desperate’, the full charges.

Who or what is behind the Hong Kong Patriotism Education Centre up near Sha Tau Kok? So far, it’s just a nameplate, a fence and a patch of concrete. My theory: some New Territories landowner/scumbag is selflessly and nobly trying to get the site rezoned to help the Glorious Motherland, and thanks to the inevitable loophole in the paperwork, he will also gain the right to build a 40-floor luxury apartment block there. But I’m so naive.

In the last few days’ horrors…  Local CCP media blast a senior civil servant at the Unpatriotic Mural Removal Dept for supposedly turning a blind eye to Lennon Walls, causing divided loyalties for laboriously patriotic Regina Ip, who (correctly) sees a Cultural Revolution smear. Reuters finds that two NGOs – the New School for Democracy and Global Innovation Hub – have left Hong Kong for Taiwan, fearing safety of personnel and bank accounts. HK Baptist U cancels a photo exhibition; Chinese U disestablishes its student union; and a nursing school dismisses its principal. 

The latter case is linked to the really big one: police charge 47 pan-dems with ‘conspiracy to commit subversion’ – or participating in a primary election. (The aim being to maximize pro-democracy seats in the Legislative Council – election since postponed – to gain some political influence over the executive branch through legitimate means recognized in the Basic Law. The NatSec regime sees this as ‘linked to a plot to overthrow the government’.) Since these are NatSec offences dealt with by specially picked judges, we can assume they will be jailed with no bail for ages, and finally given at least three-year (and in many cases harsher) sentences. (More background from Xinqi Su. Comment from Hong Kong Watch.)

Most of the pan-dems are here: Eddie Chu Hoi-dick, biggest vote-winner in any Hong Kong election; Benny Tai, academic and theorist/strategist for Occupy and the primary elections; former airline pilot/lawmaker Jeremy Tam; journalist ex-lawmaker Claudia Mo; Long Hair; Joshua Wong (already in prison); Ray ‘Slowbeat’ Chan (one of my esteemed Twitter followers, making it slightly more personal); young aspiring politicians; and on and on. (More here, and farewell messages here.)

Curiously, a handful were not charged yesterday (they must await further decisions). Could it be the authorities thought jailing non-ethnic Chinese and healthcare workers on such idiotic charges would look bad?

Meanwhile, we have Martin Lee, Margaret Ng, Jimmy Lai, Albert Ho, Cyd Ho and others, including Long Hair, again, awaiting trial for other charges. Basically, anyone who enjoys support from the majority in Hong Kong is now in jail, unless they are in exile.

The sheer overkill in all this is bewildering. It’s not enough to twist laws to bar critics from elected bodies and public life – you have to arrest them and imprison them, often multiple times. Erick Tang will only need to work harder on his ‘love the CCP’ theory. 

The usual explanation is that the wanton cruelty and injustice is the point: we can do this to anyone so shut up and kowtow. Worked in Russia in the 1920s or China in the 1950s. But a large number of Hongkongers have met at least one or two of these figures in person, and millions have voted for them. Jailing them all on trumped-up BS charges might momentarily stun onlookers in the midst of pandemic. But in the long run, all the CCP is achieving here is an increasingly bitterly angry populace feeling under occupation – many probably pondering how to resist or avenge.

Just a handful of links after a wearying week in Mainlandization. William Pesek puzzles over the Hong Kong government’s efforts to maximize inequality as the city struggles with pandemic and underlying political divisions. Everyone Thinks Budget Was Garbage Shock Horror. And some thoughts from hotel quarantine, including comparison of Hong Kong and Australia.

Also, amid all the pessimism, Don Don Donki announces its faith in Hong Kong’s future. 

If you’ve yet to discover these magnificently garish emporia of J-crap, they are going to fix that. There will be no escape. A brief idea of what to expect… 

Imagine what Yata or Aeon would be like if they were crammed into a third of their usual space, redesigned by the people who do the CCTV’s Spring Gala sets, and you were visiting while on psychedelic drugs. A labyrinthine floorplan that sucks you in, deeper and deeper, through narrow canyons of instant noodles, 1.5-litre boxes of cheap sake, refrigerator deodorizers, more instant noodles, pervy kids’ costumes, five hundred varieties of trashy matcha-flavoured snacks, ladies’ elbow-lotion, socks, plastic things that stick (allegedly) to bathroom walls, 10-packs of frozen udon. A malevolent non-stop jingle that makes Wellcome’s ‘Yuu’ song sound like Mozart. Staff on quaaludes (surely). Denser crowding than Admiralty MTR at rush hour – because obviously Hongkongers just can’t resist the place. 

The only two merciful things about it: 1) at least you’re not being eaten alive by rats; and 2) there’s a hot food counter (teriyaki, oden, etc) near the exit.The company is planning to quadruple its Hong Kong stores, adding 18 to the current six. (That could be a typo – maybe it’ll be 180.) As it is, several branches are open 24 hours (should you want to enjoy the song at 4am). Donki fans at Invest HK must be on their knees in gratitude for this expression of confidence in the city. The loudness, brashness, claustrophobia, and general hellishness of the outlets is compelling, and I wonder if the expansion is a last-ditch attempt to keep the younger generation from emigrating – you won’t get this in Manchester.

The Hong Kong government complains bitterly that the pandemic is forcing it to run a deficit, and this is unsustainable, and maybe taxes will have to go up – otherwise how can we afford civil servants’ mega-pensions and the Lantau Vision Giant Sandpit Tomorrow Scheme Plan? And yet, come Budget time, it does what any administration must do if it has zero legitimacy but bulging fiscal reserves: it flings money around like dung flying off a high-speed fan.

Highlights here (and here if you want the whole thing).

The headline-grabbing conscience-salver is a HK$5,000 handout to every resident. They could just send us all the cash, or at least supermarket coupons. But oh no – that would be too easy. The payments will come in monthly HK$1,000 chunks, because why spoil the peasants with a whole five grand in one go? And it will have to be spent via a special but unnanounced space-age e-payment system requiring recipients to provide their own blockchain, download the Leave Home Safe app, and pass Beijing’s NatSec anal swab loyalty test. It’ll probably take until summer to organize. Way to piss off the old grannies, guys.

From there on it all goes downhill.

The answer is ‘HK$500 million’. The questions are ‘how much to chuck at cronies to vandalize country parks in the name of tourism?’ and ‘how much to earmark (it’ll never be used) to attract tech talent to replace everyone fleeing NatSec horrors?’ (Is ‘glamping’ the new ‘food trucks’? Yes. Thank you.)

In addition to the ‘glamping’ stuff (it apparently means panty-wetting inadequates spending a night in a tent), there’s another HK$765 million plus plus plus to ‘revive’ tourism. (By ‘tourism’, we mean retail property landlords’ rental incomes.)

Barely heard of a couple of years ago, National Security now features everywhere, and that includes the Budget. The HK$8 billion non-recurrent appropriation isn’t enough for an aircraft carrier. Maybe it’s going on special How to Spot Subversives fun activity packs for primary schools, or simply funding Beijing’s local NatSec Lubianka Office. And then there’s the rest of it.

Most moronic thing I found after flicking through the Budget stuff for three minutes: subsidies to attract real estate investment trusts to list in Hong Kong. Because they sounded cool a decade ago, I guess. Oh, and the inevitable ‘green bonds’.

Main reaction to the Budget is a sort of nostalgia for the good old days when officials would regurgitate this repetitive tripe year after year, and we all took it semi-seriously because it seemed Hong Kong had a future.

This is all getting confusing. And I don’t just mean Carrie’s genius lateral-thinking breakthrough that Beijing must end ‘One Country, Two Systems’ in order to save it. 

One day Beijing announces the banishment of non-patriots (ie pan-democrats and critics) from Hong Kong elections and public bodies. The next day, the local administration sends the legislature a bill to expand and tighten oath-taking requirements for District Council members (ie to disqualify pan-dems). The former measures would surely cover the latter anyway. It’s hard to tell whether the two moves are badly coordinated or this is some Leninist psycho’s idea of exquisite timing. Perhaps, just as capitalists believe you can never have too much money, Communists believe you can never have too much purging.

Things that will get your District Council member disqualified are listed here. Some are obvious general no-nos under the NatSec regime. Others are very specific, like ‘indiscriminately objecting to the government’s motion’ or ‘making use of an election to organize a “de-facto referendum” to oppose the government’. Both these reflect the CCP’s paranoia about the pan-dems’ primary elections – and planned subsequent drive to dominate LegCo – last year. 

Also, Mainland and Constitutional Affairs Secretary Erick Tsang says you can be disqualified for failing to (eeeww) love the leadership of the Communist Party. Truly, madly, deeply. It’s got to be ‘holistic’, OK? Not sure how the enforcers will check this. Maybe Mainland scientists have devised some sort of medical test (I’m betting an anal swab) that detects hatred of the Politburo.

The CCP wishes to remind us that it is really serious about cleansing Hong Kong’s public space of critics, opponents and people who think for themselves. Even all those District Council members you elected will be methodically ostracized by the administration – excluded from the many consultative and other bodies they have sat on for decades, as well as the rubber-stamp CE Election Committee. (More on Beijing’s planned ‘improvements’ to elections to ensure ‘rule by patriots’ here.)

To repeat from yesterday, Hong Kong has never had a system in which anyone you vote for will have any power if they win an election. All political power lies with officials picked by Beijing – or (nowadays) by those seconded from the central and other Mainland authorities. Fixing alleged loopholes in the largely Potemkin electoral system is about banishing non-kowtowers from even symbolic contact with government or access to official platforms. It will also provide another pretext, as if the NatSec law isn’t enough, to purge undesirables from public positions. 

Note that Xia Baolong includes the judiciary among those who run Hong Kong – which is not new, but you wish they’d stop saying it. Bottom line: if judges wish to keep their ‘independence’, they’d better start doing what they’re told. He also states that anyone who does not accept the CCP cannot qualify as a patriot. What this guarantees – if it’s any consolation – is that those still sitting on councils and committees will be entertainingly stupid.

As if to prove it, the pro-Beijing rump Legislative Council members dutifully welcome not just the plan, but the fact that they will have no say on it. LegCo president Andrew Leung puts on a brave face over his chamber’s irrelevance by declaring that ‘as long as you are patriotic, you can have any views’. 

But wait! It gets stupider! Never one to miss an opportunity to blurt out something both perplexing and dimwitted, Chief Executive Carrie Lam adds that those who ‘forget they are Chinese’ are also excluded. So no race-traitors, please. It would be naive to wonder whether or how the city’s barbarian ethnicities fit in.

Pan-dems who once spent their days sitting on futile committees, running ward offices and campaigning should consider themselves liberated from a charade that has zero remaining legitimacy. Abandoning once feisty forums like LegCo – and the associated ‘elections’ – to Beijing’s embarrassing mediocre sycophants will be a political win.

This has been a long time coming… The Hong Kong government announces plans to transform RTHK from a public service to a state mouthpiece (story here). It begins by identifying ‘problems’ (not listening to complaints, management being ‘weak’) and outlining measures to fix them. The broadcaster’s boss has been replaced by a civil servant with no background in media.

We will now wait and see how quickly, and how much, RTHK’s reports become rehashed government press releases, quoting pro-Beijing views only – as happened with commercial media years ago.

In other news, the only quotable people will soon be patriots.

The CCP is also preparing to reform (the SCMP says ‘ramp up’) Hong Kong’s political system to ensure that ‘only patriots run the city’. But Beijing already has a monopoly of political power here, with the Liaison and NatSec Offices now directly overseeing its appointed local officials (Carrie Lam and her hapless ministers). Partially or wholly elected bodies (the CE Election Committee and Legislative/District Councils) are essentially powerless, mostly gerrymandered and increasingly barred to pro-democrats through loyalty tests. What is the point of rigging elections even more to further reduce pan-dems’ chances of winning seats in impotent organs?

One idea being floated is to split up the current Legislative Council’s multi-member constituencies. (Classic changing the rules: single-member constituencies were merged after 1997 in order to boost pro-Beijing parties’ success rate.) Another may be to narrow functional constituencies’ already-limited electorates. One aim would be to reduce pan-dems’ possible participation in the fake, rubber-stamp ‘elections’ of the Chief Executive. Some pro-Beijing figures are even calling for the quasi-election to be replaced by ‘consultations’.

Since the CE ‘election’ and other representative processes are simply ceremonial, it seems that what Beijing wants to do here is mainly about appearances. But appearances can reflect reality. The most visible problem for Beijing with elections in Hong Kong is that the bulk of the population vote for pan-dems, and this undermines the regime’s claims to legitimacy. It is the perennial problem for communists: they can’t allow pluralism because they will lose any free contest of ideas.

The remedy will be to portray critics as threats to the nation and eliminate them from any part in the make-believe representative system (perhaps a few stooge ‘independent’ figures will be allowed to join in). The CCP assumes that once the pro-democrats disappear from view (from RTHK as well as from ballots), public political discourse will range only from the sloganizing of avid shoe-shiners to the rants of mouth-frothing patriot freaks. We will come to forget that alternative views ever existed, and will cherish our right to vote in charade-elections for the anti-democracy candidate of our choice.