Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Hong Kong government announces a gradual but nonetheless unmistakable retreat from zero-Covid. Flight suspensions are…

…“no longer timely,” as the pandemic situation in the listed countries [is] often “no worse than Hong Kong.”

Social distancing will be relaxed, schools will go back to normal, and the mass-testing idea looks deader than ever. The authorities are also (separately) putting more effort into getting the elderly vaccinated.

The introduction of common sense will be dragged out in phases over months so it looks like an orderly plan enabled by the astounding success of existing policy, rather than an embarrassing admission that the latter was a disaster. Of course, in theory officials could always do another U-turn. But it looks serious this time (spin-doctors even had the gumption to manage expectations over the last few days). And it is surely not a coincidence that there are more signs of a cautious, tentative, maybe-sort of rethink about zero-Covid in the Mainland.

Every silver lining has a cloud. The parasite lobby looks forward to cramming Hong Kong with millions of tourists by year-end. After the last face-mask has been dumped in the trash, the last children’s playground reopened and the coffin supply restored, Hong Kong will still be left with fumbling government-by-patriots and a NatSec regime obsessed with sedition, fake news and terrorism. 

If Beijing can extricate itself from zero-Covid – a trap created by the leadership’s need to craft a narrative of CCP infallibility – could it also back away from siding with Vladimir Putin? Some mid-week links (I’m ironing the cat tomorrow)…

George Magnus on how Ukraine, Covid and reliance on the private sector could undermine Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity’ vision. 

From GMF, the consequences for Beijing of backing Putin…

Walking away from Putin now is unlikely to gain China much credit and would only leave it more exposed. It has stuck by far less useful partners in the past. 

The Daily Beast on the possibility of a Putin assassination…

…poisoning Putin wouldn’t be an easy task. According to a source who works in the upper echelons of a Russian ministry, Putin in February allegedly sacked the some 1,000 people—from cooks to launderers to secretaries to bodyguards—who catered to his daily personal and professional needs, and replaced them with a new group of attendants.

A lengthy Octavian Report interview on what goes on in Putin’s mind.

An LRB review of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War by Nicholas Mulder.

Everyone is waiting to know how much Chief Executive Carrie Lam intends to relax Hong Kong’s Covid restrictions on travel and social gathering. She announces the plans today – though they still won’t take effect for another four weeks.

Realistically, the best we can expect is a reduction in quarantine periods for inbound passengers as a sop to the increasingly angry international business community – and little more. The government seems systematically incapable of not dashing public hopes at every turn. And, after all, there are still some public spaces that haven’t been wrapped up in miles of barrier tape, and isolation camps to build. Better news would be other-worldly. 

At best, it seems the government might abandon U-turns and flip-flopping, and instead embrace determined stopping-and-starting, moving slightly forward and then lurching into reverse. Maybe it will make the populace furious in a different way. Worth a try.

Carrie tells state media that Hong Kong’s experience fighting Covid is an example of the success of ‘One Country, Two Systems’. Who are we to disagree?

The Hong Kong government’s latest flip-flopping U-turn offers a glimmer of hope. Chief Executive Carrie Lam ponders the possibility of loosening some of the city’s most absurd and detested anti-Covid measures, including flight bans, lengthy quarantines, face-to-face school classes, and social distancing. 

Although described as a ‘mid-wave’ review, the re-think comes two weeks after the current wave peaked. But let’s not quibble. We should drop to our knees in thanks that this administration can grasp the concept that, if you’re in a hole, the first step is to stop digging. Even if, to save face, the initial plan is to dig less frantically. 

It would be nice to think this means top officials are finally listening to exasperated public opinion – and/or are willing to nag their overseers in Beijing to let Hong Kong use some science and pragmatism in policymaking for a change. More likely, the tipping point has come as a result of a subtle shift towards reality by some Mainland experts, plus discreet but angry complaints from a small number of high-powered financial-sector bosses.

(Prediction: the authorities will not re-open beaches, barbecue sites and children’s playgrounds until the very very end of this process. Say mid-2023 or something – not until the regime finds some replacement post-Covid ways to needlessly hassle and torment the populace, to emphasize the joys of all-patriots government.)

With luck, the local administration can perhaps look forward to seeing less damning coverage in the international press, like the summary by Timothy McClaughlin in Atlantic summarizing Hong Kong’s Covid mistakes in excruciating detail…

…In sum, decision makers ignored public-health expertise, driven instead by politics and overly enthusiastic efforts to show fealty to Beijing. The result has been an embarrassingly shambolic effort that has created a preventable public-health disaster, yet another glaring failure of governance from an administration whose defining characteristic is catastrophic ineptitude.

And, ouch…

The endless, unrestrained flattery [of Beijing by Hong Kong officials] seems akin to the celebration of an arsonist who lights his house on fire, cuts the water hose, and then cheers as the fire brigade arrives to extinguish the flames

A couple of things for the weekend…

Hollywood weans itself off kowtowing to the CCP, and the movies get better.

To put Hong Kong officials’ communication skills in perspective – Arnie addresses the Russian people.

Following panic-buying of facemasks, toilet paper, instant noodles, Panadol, fresh vegetables and frozen meat, Hong Kong experiences its latest shortage – coffins. But at least we have a healthy supply of patriots-only government.

Property tycoon Ronnie Chan becomes the latest shoe-shiner-turned-backstabber with an SCMP op-ed criticizing the Hong Kong administration for its Covid failures. As always with these sudden displays of condemnation, the angle is that local leaders failed to follow Beijing’s instructions – which you may or may not feel is duplicitous crap, though I couldn’t possibly comment. Ronnie (or his ghostwriter) also laboriously pedals the line that we must cut ourselves off from the whole world because we are so reliant on the Mainland – which you may or may not feel is illogical garbage, and it is.

Officials tell Hongkongers they should be grateful that Mainland medical staff have arrived here. Despite being offered HK$30,000 a month – a multiple of a Mainland doctor’s usual salary – the low number of cross-border medics has disappointed officials. A Standard editorial asks…

Could it be due to personal concern because of the risky job nature? Or could it be because the recruits may not actually pocket that much if their hiring is carried out via recruitment or other agencies that charge the workers fees deductible from their earnings?

The editorial also suggests deputizing foreign domestic helpers as quarantine facility carers. Whether it’s a brilliant or dreadful idea, it’s the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that would make our bureaucrats’ brains explode. 

Part 3 of the riveting Shanghai Quarantine Diaries. In today’s episode: a young nurse who pushes the nasal swab too far finds the test kits also measure patients’ IQs; Miss Fang in Unit 64J dies of hiccups after eating the mysterious brown lumpy thing in her lunchbox; owing to confusing instructions, medical staff accidentally perform lobotomies on 20 new arrivals; Aunty May of Unit 71B wins the all-Medical Detention Facility cockroach-stomping competition for the fourth week in a row; and as a special treat, inmates receive Volume 7 of Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China in Romanian. Now read on.

(With apologies to the late great Viv Stanshall.)

Hong Kong enters the ‘Dynamic zero half-the-population’ phase, as HKU experts estimate that 48% of residents have already been infected with Covid. Meanwhile, the government is still banning flights from various countries and locking down individual apartment blocks, in an effort to nip the outbreak in the bud.

A thread from the FT’s stats specialist on the severity of Hong Kong’s Covid situation, including extremely unflattering comparisons with New Zealand. We are currently seeing more deaths per million than pre-vaccine 2020-21 Italy, UK and US. 

Following online complaints from whiny brainwashed losers in Shenzhen, the Hong Kong authorities close beaches. That way, bitter Mainlanders will feel better about their lockdowns – and that’s the most important thing, isn’t it? 

Nikkei Asia presents one of the most acerbic summaries I’ve seen in the last – oh, 48 hours – of Hong Kong’s Covid awfulness…

Even as the health system creaked and supermarket shelves emptied, [Carrie Lam’s] government only urged calm through news releases delivered in the dead of night and a recorded eight-minute video released on Feb. 27, in which the chief had said mandatory testing would be imposed. Otherwise, she was filmed welcoming health officials, food and medical supplies from the mainland and inspecting new isolation facilities built by a Chinese state company.

As a free no-extra-charge bonus, readers get some ideas on how to keep their test results to themselves with a clear conscience…

When Ms. Cheung’s rapid antigen test for COVID-19 turned up positive … [she] could notify the authorities as required, or hunker down at home.

Cheung … chose to self-isolate… She feared that if she came forward, she would be carted off to one of the city’s makeshift isolation facilities…

Memorize this bit in case you need it…

Cheung said she was… “not keen to take away resources from people who had more severe symptoms or had more need for support from the health care system.”

Some news to further encourage such selflessness: inmates at the community isolation facility on the Bridge to Nowhere border control island at the north-east end of the CLK runways are undergoing soothing audio healing – sort of like  vibrational sound therapy at the Oriental Oasis – in the form of fully laden B747 cargo planes taking off and climbing at 800-1,200 feet above them. Around 100 decibels.

(Cue your link to the second installment of the Shanghai quarantine diary.)

Ex-official Fred Ma and other pro-establishment types blast (mildly and politely) the administration for its incompetence. If we had just a trace of a participatory political system, you could interpret this as a ‘dump Carrie’ campaign. But the CCP decides everything: if they want to punish Hong Kong one way, they’ll reappoint Carrie; if they want to punish the city another way, it’ll be John Lee.

Hong Kong threatens activist Benedict Rogers – a UK citizen living in the UK – with NatSec ‘collusion with foreign forces’ charges for involvement with the Hong Kong Watch website. The HK Police demand that the website be shut down. They also warn him not to talk about the whole thing (is that audacity, guilelessness or what?). Full post here – VPN probably needed. Curious logic: can foreigners ‘collude’ with themselves?

With whole cities in the Mainland undergoing lockdowns and mass-testing, you’d have thought Beijing could ease off on the obsessive ‘assistance’ for Hong Kong. Yet they are sending several hundred doctors and nurses. It would be churlish not to hope that they might be useful, but there are doubts as to whether the Mainlanders can, for example, input medical information into local hospitals’ English-language computer systems. And of course Lianhua Qingwen – mind your liver.

A must-read: the experience around a year ago of an American who tested positive for Covid after arriving in Shanghai. Grim details! This is the first of a series – maybe bookmark and save them for when you’re put in the Lok Ma Chau camp.

The whole of Shenzhen – population over double Hong Kong’s – locks down in an attempt to eliminate China’s omicron outbreak of over 3,000 cases. This is what the authorities were planning for Hong Kong, with all non-essential workers sent home, public transport shut down, and the whole population subjected to three rounds of testing. 

Folks over there take the opportunity to hate Hong Kong, apparently for spreading Covid to them. Does that make sense? It seems to have been Mainlanders in Hong Kong who have been sneaking over the border and bringing the disease back home. Who cares? (A constructive response to them here.)

As an SEZ launched in the late 70s, Shenzhen was the testbed for allowing economic sanity from Hong Kong into China. Maybe the Mainland will learn how to abandon zero-Covid and adopt a more pragmatic approach through the same route. Does omicron give even the proudest all-powerful leaders a choice?

Regina Ip continues her not-very-subtle campaign to be seen as Chief Executive material by helping to deflect responsibility for Hong Kong’s recent Covid mess away from Beijing. The pan-democrats are in jail, and she must officially support Carrie Lam’s hapless administration – so she picks on the civil service. 

This is unfair. Without ideological and political interference, the local health and other bureaucracies would almost certainly have pursued a more expert-driven policy on Covid – if only to cover their backsides and reduce their workloads. 

Even a quarter of a century after the handover, we still hear some milder apologists for the government claim that Hong Kong suffers from a shortage of home-grown political talent. Yet many countries with even smaller populations – Iceland, New Zealand, the Baltic states, etc – can devise clever policies on Covid and many other issues. The difference is that these places have open political systems where people with the best ideas can participate in decision-making. In Hong Kong, such individuals are systematically excluded, even jailed.

However, former civil servant Reg is on to something when it comes to the enormous gap in pay and accountability between our public and private sectors, such as…

…a penchant for seeking regular salary scale reviews, in addition to the annual pay level adjustment exercise, as a means of enhancing civil service morale. Civil service unions react strongly if awards are made to any “grade” (that is, a specialized cadre of civil servants) that upset perceived relativity and balance.

These considerations continued to play out in the government’s effort to assemble a sizeable force to undertake emergency duties arising from the pandemic. The government felt obliged to pay volunteers, recruited mostly from retired civil servants, on scales benchmarked to civil service pay. That means the payments are substantial and exorbitant compared to the meager pay most Hong Kong people with midlevel management duties in the private sector get. 

On related subjects…

HKFP on why so few residents in elderly care homes got vaccinated (essentially: isolation of residents from outside contact; a peculiar anti-vax atmosphere – even among staff – within the facilities; and a lack of incentives to get vaccinated).

A Guardian/HKFP report in which hospital staff explain how Hong Kong ended up with corpses piled up in hospitals.

And a New Yorker interview with Stephen Kotkin on ‘the weakness of the despot’…

And so we think, but we don’t know, that he is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.

…The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk.

Last Friday, I doubted that the week to come could possibly be any worse – and so it came to pass. The Hong Kong authorities have now in effect ditched zero-Covid, and the 5th wave seems to be plateauing. 

However, fans of awfulness needn’t worry – there’s still lots of idiocy in store. Pointless quarantines for arrivals, frantic construction of vast and probably superfluous isolation facilities, and an official need to present any and all improvements in the pandemic situation as miraculous gifts from Beijing. 

The SCMP helps out with the face-saving redefinition…

Pursuing a “dynamic zero” strategy in Hong Kong’s coronavirus battle is not about aiming for zero infections, but saving lives first…

To celebrate, some painstakingly curated reading and viewing for the weekend…

World Politics Review not mincing words in its article on Hong Kong’s Covid mess as a ‘cost of pleasing Beijing’.

On the subject of doing harm to satisfy the emperor, the SCMP reports that China’s GDP can grow at 5.5% this year, but…

“The target can certainly be achieved if Beijing insists, but it will come at a cost,” warned Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie Capital.

“It may force the rise of [China’s] macro leverage ratio,” he said, referring to the measurement of an economy’s overall indebtedness.

In other words, they must damage the economy in the longer run (increasing debt, misallocating capital) in order to meet an arbitrary goal. Because not having a target – just living with whatever organic GDP growth comes along – is unacceptable to control-freaks obsessed with proving the superiority of their authoritarian system.

Which brings us to a YouTube video of HKU’s Frank Dikotter on how to be a dictator. “The moment you seize power you become afraid.”

And a CNN op-ed on how Xi Jinping’s unworldly zero-sum outlook keeps China from playing a big-boy role in the Russian war on Ukraine.

A fairly weighty essay in Made in China Journal on Hong Kong as an example of political restructuring in the context of ‘contemporary autocratisation’.

How the film Revolution of Our Times is playing in Vancouver…

All 3,000 tickets for 14 Vancouver screenings in two cinemas, running from February 11 until March 13, were sold out almost immediately, organisers say.

Attendees said emotional scenes on screen were reflected among audiences; some wept throughout, others chanted the protest slogan “Hong Kong, add oil”, and at the end many stood and sang the unofficial protest anthem Glory to Hong Kong.

…Jenny Kwan, a Hong Kong-born member of Canada’s parliament, said that the screening she attended was an “emotional, heartbreaking” experience.

“You could hear people in the audience quietly sobbing. There was an intensity in the cinema, all around me,” said Kwan, the member for Vancouver East.

… and in Taiwan…

The aftermath of Hong Kong’s protests have been warily watched from across the Taiwan strait, where some Taiwanese saw a warning for their own future. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has vowed to “unify” Taiwan with China, by force if necessary.

“I think with these screenings, the most important thing isn’t to get people to focus on Hong Kong, the most important is that they are focused on Taiwan, their home,” Chow said.

An interesting thread on how commercial and political pressures make China’s social media a haven for ultra-nationalism.

And for econ/history buffs, Andrew Batson on the reversal of roles in the China-Russia economic relationship from the 1950s to the 2020s.

Am I the only person in Hong Kong who didn’t get the Government End Of The World Panic Alert Freak Out thing about Queen Elizabeth Hospital on my phone? It seems not – a small and no doubt select group of us did not receive the emergency message, with the (by all accounts) near-terrifying audio alarm that led some to believe the city was under imminent nuclear attack. We missed out on that little excitement. (I have decided that the only way to stay sane in Hong Kong is to treat the whole time and place as an existentialist endurance-thrill.)

The government officially announces its new Covid policy – prioritizing the saving of lives rather than organizing elaborate and futile lockdowns and mass-testing. There is an unspoken parallel priority, namely presenting whatever happens as a heroic Beijing-dominated victory. Expect continued warfare analogies and endless expressions of gratitude for Mainland contributions of manpower and quack herbal medicines as infections peak and the virus burns out naturally. If mass-testing ever does go ahead, its only purpose will be to save face – presumably without lockdowns. 

And what then? Continued restrictions on travel even as other countries drop quarantine requirements – just so we can be in step with the motherland? ‘Zero dynamic overseas travel’. Or will they find a way to present common sense as a gift from Beijing?

Questions and (rather pointed) answers about how Hong Kong got to this and what happens next…

We are likely already at herd immunity as our wave peaked a few days ago.

…[before we could have] a rational plan of a graduated transition to living with Covid. Under this scenario border controls are already unnecessary and they could certainly be removed by the end of March. There is no reason why our city could not be getting back to relatively normal life within 2 to 3 months.

And a helpful guide to Covid rapid antigen tests.

So the government is indeed scrapping the planned compulsory universal testing farce…

On the internal discussions to delay universal testing, insiders told the Post that carrying out the exercise with so many cases emerging every day would be “useless”, given the city still did not have an adequate number of isolation facilities.

The (still not officially announced) decision is presented as a reprioritization. Anonymous sources say the mass-testing will be postponed to late April (presumably watered-down), and the main aim will now be the rather obvious one all along of ‘saving lives’. To save face, the new approach – more like ‘living with Covid’ – will probably be termed ‘zero dynamic blah blah with Asian characteristics’ or something.

After the confusion-horror-mayhem of the last month or so, the Hong Kong government’s credibility is in even more tatters than anyone had previously thought possible. But it looks like there has been something of a power struggle in the background between Mainland political ideologues and more practical health experts.

HKU’s Gabriel Leung thinks the 5th wave has peaked and will end up with approximately 4.3 million infections and 5,000 deaths. Graphs and link to report here.

Watch Regina Ip suddenly proclaim support for the approach she dismissed up until yesterday.

In an uncharacteristic little fit of common sense, the government will even allow hair salons to open again.

Now Hong Kong can return to normalcy – Tam Tak-chi’s sedition conviction, Ta Kung Pao turning on Cardinal Zen, and Winnie Yu back in jail.

Some mid-week reading… 

The expats-fleeing-HK story du jour – from AFP via HKFP.

A quick Axios summary on Beijing’s internal pro-Russia propaganda. A good thread on what China can and can’t do as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. A Chinese academic goes anti-Semitic on Ukraine. And Vice on China’s (or some Chinese men’s) creepy thing about Ukrainian women.