Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Chinese state media warn Hong Kong against abandoning ‘zero-Covid’ and living with the disease…

[Xinhua] said achieving “dynamic zero” remains the most useful strategy for the city as its vaccination coverage of just 80 percent receiving at least one shot is insufficient and giving up measures to achieve zero infections will lead to “unbearable consequences” for the economy and public health.

“It is too early to adopt the ‘live with the virus’ approach, which is not supported by science and will only heavily shock Hong Kong’s medical system, not to mention [delay] quarantine-free cross-border travel with the mainland,”

Just when it seemed Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her administration might start to ease off, Beijing expects her to go full King Cnut on the virus. 

What’s the purpose? Presumably, Hong Kong cannot be allowed to prove Beijing wrong. The CCP must save face and maintain the line that it is saving China from the calamitous barbarism of other countries that are opening up and adjusting to Omicron as endemic. (And from evil foreign vaccines. Or – if paranoid conspiracy theories seem more rational in these times – because the NatSec-Covid regimes are killing Hong Kong nicely in preparation for the city’s absorption into the Greater Bay Area hub-zone.) 

As the virus spreads regardless, some cross-border truck drivers are inevitably going to test positive. Panic-buying of fresh vegetables means there are virtually no greens in the supermarkets. People must now resort to eating hamsters. Oh no wait, they can’t because the government has shot them all. But hey – at least we have patriots-only running Hong Kong.

Which brings us to this… Not sure why the Foreign Correspondents Club saw fit to host supposed CE ‘election candidate’ Checkley Sin, but the Q&As proved to be quite entertaining and indeed illuminating about how loyalists think. OK, ‘think’. Watch here to see him refuse with a disturbing, almost petrified, grin to answer any questions about his platform or government policy on the grounds that it’s ‘quite dangerous’. More here.

Government broadcaster RTHK announces an exciting new show designed to inspire young people through interviews between former official Fred Ma and the elderly mega-rich…

In the first episode that aired on Saturday night, Ma interviewed gambling tycoon Lui Che-woo, founder of Galaxy Entertainment Group and K. Wah International Holdings, who encouraged Hong Kong people to remain resilient amid hardship.

The twin themes are ‘shut up and listen’ and ‘you can’t make this stuff up’…

Asked if the show would be able to connect with youngsters – among the city’s most disgruntled residents following the protests – Ma said his plan was for them to learn from their successful predecessors.

…this is not about them sharing their stories as we have listened to quite a lot of their voices elsewhere,” he said.

The SCMP helpfully provides some background…

[Ma] said he had spotted a societal trend since the anti-government protests in 2019 and the start of the pandemic in 2020.

“There has been a lot of negativity. Society has been through a lot,” he said. “Our show has a lot of positive energy.”

…He quit the private sector in 2002 to become a government official but resigned in 2008 due to a brain condition. 

David Webb on the arithmetic of Covid spread and time-lags. On the day 350 cases are reported, another 1,000 people are infected. On the day those 1,000 are detected (five days later), another 3,000 are infected. Cue hundreds of transmission chains. The real positivity is in sewage samples.

With the Hong Kong government finally starting to admit failure in its ‘dynamic’ zero-Covid policy, Regina Ip makes one last desperate attempt to offer herself as worthy Chief Executive material. (Trigger alert: contains extreme toadying that may distress some readers.)

Beijing officials do a last-minute ‘consultation’ on ‘candidates’ for the CE ‘election’. Loyalists claim the absence of pan-dems accounts for the CCP’s insouciance.

Your weekend NatSec stuff…

A thread on moderate pan-dem Fernando Cheung, just jailed for three weeks for protesting – as a serving lawmaker – in LegCo… 

At sentencing on Friday, magistrate Peter Law said Cheung had “seriously disrupted” the LegCo meeting and created a “negative impression that civilisation has regressed.”

The same judge has denied Chow Hang-tung the right to make bail review applications in person.

Police arrest activist Koo Sze-yiu before he can protest the Olympics – which is apparently now sedition.

And the HK Journalists Association continues trying to fight government attempts to shut it down.

A property agent gets an eight-month sentence for sedition for putting up posters saying ‘corrupt Hong Kong communist officials buried their conscience, their families must die’, and possessing more in digital form describing the HK Police as a criminal organization and Chief Executive Carrie Lam as a ‘wicked woman’. 

You may wonder whether these are particularly misleading statements, especially for a property agent. I couldn’t possibly comment.

It is the first prison sentence for sedition since the 1967 riots. Another person was given 13 months (thread on judge’s reasoning here). The Article 23 NatSec law will no doubt attach heavier sentences to this crime. 

A must-read: Samuel Bickett not pulling any punches about his experience with Hong Kong’s courts: ‘Magistrate Lam lied – repeatedly…’.

It is not possible that Magistrate Lam believed his characterizations of the facts were accurate. He was not simply mistaken – he was lying. He was committing serious, criminal misconduct from the bench. He betrayed his oath to the law. And he sent me, an innocent person, to prison.

An HKFP op-ed asks whether Hong Kong still has an independent judiciary.

An American legal scholar who had previously worked for Human Rights Watch was offered a post at HKU, but has been refused a visa. Perhaps the real story is that he thought the government might grant him one.

Provoke Media on Consulum’s apparently hasty exit from its Relaunch HK job. The office has closed, the staff have moved onto other careers, and the government contract hasn’t been renewed. In the NatSec/Covid-era, a PR campaign now looks naive.

From Transit Jam, transport psychopath-bureaucrats convert a West Kowloon lawn popular with picnickers into a car park for Culture Hub-Zone visitors who presumably don’t plan on having picnics.

Al Jazeera on Hong Kong’s gloomy new year holidays…

For ordinary citizens, Beijing’s demands of zero COVID have turned what was one of the world’s most dazzling, cosmopolitan, and eclectic cities into an isolated, anxious island of pique.

Weekend reading…

A UK Daily Telegraph story on Hong Kong immigrants. Other than misusing the ‘grassroots’ label, it paints a positive picture of the newcomers as hard-working, wealthy, educated, church-going, child-rearing, property-buying potential Conservative voters, deserving of help in operating central heating…

For many, the lifestyle here is a pleasant surprise. “It’s less crowded, less of a headache, less claustrophobic both physically and mentally, less materialistic. You spend more time with [your] family…”

(A reminder of how Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demographic overlaps with the less wealth- and status-obsessed parts of the population.)

Could stories like this change the minds of those Brits who have been in Hong Kong for decades and laugh/cry at the idea of ever returning to a place they remember as a grimy hellhole with bad food and horrible weather? (Asking for a friend.)

More on the Hong Kong emigres in Britain from Nikkei Asia. Politico looks at those who are former protesters keeping the flame alive in exile.

SCMP reports that 96% won’t be coming back to Hong Kong. (For those with kids, in particular, the massive improvement in living space and housing affordability surely makes a move to the UK virtually irreversible.) 

And more on that ever-popular subject: people leaving Hong Kong hiring private jets for their pets.

The Spectator lists British universities that have given honorary degrees and awards to the CCP’s useful Hong Kong idiots.

Benedict Rogers on the CCP’s looming clampdown on religion in Hong Kong.

Louisa Lim’s new book.

HKFP op-ed on the Hong Kong government’s hang-up about kids playing.

In Dissent – Peng Shuai as a victim of China’s ‘violent power structure’.

Chinafile looks at China’s New Era Civilization Centres – day care, evening classes and community voluntarism, all wrapped up in Xi Jinping Thought. And at the disappearance of verdicts from the courts’ website.

From the Conversation – what could happen if Xi Jinping does not appoint a successor.

In case you’ve been away the last five years or so, a quick intro to China’s declining international image from Council on Foreign Relations.

Bob Davis in Politico on how the US’s Asia trade policies hamper efforts to counter China.

Geremie Barme in a quick aside on Beijing’s Winter Olympics…

…the second time that Xi Jinping has demonstrated an unrivalled talent for overseeing China’s security state in its stage-management of an international event at which patria is the tenebrous doppelgänger of individual excellence. Collective displays and martial precision of the kind vaunted by the Beijing games of 2008 and 2022 remind us of Clive James’s caution about ‘that feeling of having one’s identity strengthened by being absorbed into a mass’. This, James observes is what lies ‘at the heart of fascism’s appeal in all of its varieties.’

George Soros on CNN takes note of China’s property market woes. Any contrarians willing to bet that the aging investor-sage’s attention indicates an imminent rebound in the market? 

An inspiration to any ‘man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks’ – American guy takes North Korea off the Internet from his living room.

And if you missed it – Knownot does William Blake right down to the annoying/archaic non-rhyme in the first verse…

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the festive New Year night,

What redeeming hand or eye

Can re-awake autonomy?

The latest time-waster: Dordle – two Wordles side by side. Judging by my first attempt, not too demanding once both your brain cells kick in…

(Wordle apparently has its uses.)

Music by pro-democracy artists including Denise Ho, Tat Ming Pair, Dear Jane and Charmaine Fong is now apparently barred from RTHK’s programming. 

And after 33 years, the June 4 slogan on HKU’s Swire Bridge gets the Pillar of Shame treatment. Thread on the removal work here.

On a brighter note, the government confirms that it will not imprison you for debating the effectiveness of the ‘Zero Covid’ policy:

In response to media enquiries about whether discussions on the effectiveness of the “zero infection” target in the fight against the epidemic would violate the Hong Kong National Security Law, a spokesman for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government said today (January 30) that making general remarks and discussion is not illegal…

Well gee, thanks! This follows an outburst from DAB lawmaker Junius Ho, who seemed to think he was patriotically defending national policy, and a tentative shift in the Hong Kong government’s stance in the form of pushing ‘dynamic’ Zero Covid.

In another slap in the face for the DAB, Home Affairs Secretary Casper Tsui looks set to be ‘let go’ for his Party-gate embarrassment. The regime is also cleaning up its dim-witted loyalist trash.

A damning must-read essay by Jerome Cohen in Academia Sinica Law Journal on ‘Hong Kong’s Transformed Criminal Justice System: Instrument of Fear’…

The CCP, the NSL agents it sent from the mainland, and its minions in the SAR government promptly demonstrated that the power to arbitrarily deprive people of their personal liberty, as well as their freedoms of expression, is the power to silence a dissatisfied community by destroying the careers, families and civic support systems of the targeted resisters.

It particularly covers the depressing impact of the NatSec regime on the judiciary. 

A lovingly curated selection of regional and international reading, viewing and listening to usher in Tiger Year…

Human Rights Watch hails the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Chinese state media whine about Taiwan classifying Taiwanese/Hoklo as an indigenous language. (Some background here.) Note the underlying fear of what the CCP sees as de-Sinicization.

The Top 10 Rumours about China’s demographics. 

Some extracts from a 1973 trade meeting between Mao Zedong and Henry Kissinger, in which the Great Helmsman becomes obsessed with the possibility of exporting thousands of Chinese women to the US.

A long interview with Michelle Garnaut on the closure of M at the Bund, where I dined around 20 years ago alongside Shanghai’s ‘most lovely and terrific people’, apparently. As with her previous M at the Fringe in Hong Kong, a more-memorable-than-average restaurant thanks to the founder’s personality. Contrast with today’s cookie-cutter dining ‘concepts’.

A long and prurient fascinating look at the comings and goings of Thailand’s (now King) Vajiralongorn, who has for years spent far more time in Germany than in his home kingdom (where family and harem are ‘cooped up in the same palace’). Everything you could possibly want – from German quack clinics to uniform fetishes to assassination plots to chinaware-splurges. 

David Corn on that Tennessee school board’s banning of Maus – it’s ‘dumber than you think’.

On other neolithic peoples – thoughts on the Beaker Culture’s arrival in Britain…

It’s possible that Stonehenge was a crisis led cultural response to this demographic disaster. Isotopic and other evidence shows that animals were brought from all over the British Isles for the communal construction.

Slightly less ancient history – memories of interoffice mail (like email, but on paper, with the inbox and outbox made of wood and sitting on your desk).

Many many years ago, I worked at one of Hong Kong’s esteemed and venerable hongs. Messages (often with attachments) from people in other parts of the company landed on my desk in a reusable string-sealed envelope. Addressees’ name were written consecutively on a grid, so you could see that Mary Wong, Accounts Manager, 6th Floor had previously sent something in the envelope to Fred Chan, Marketing Flunky, 3rd Floor, who had then sent something on to Me, Company Genius, 7th Floor. Sometimes, you would notice that Mary and Fred had sent messages back and forth to each other several times. Endless possibilities for traffic analysis.

Although I was just a young minion, my corporate duties often involved senior management, so I received memos from The Chairman, 8th Floor, The CEO, 8th Floor, The Financial Director, 8th Floor and similar top executives – sometimes in envelopes I had previously sent to them. The grids on these envelopes often showed an earlier succession of memos circulating among these demigods. I reserved these as ‘power envelopes’ and used them when sending polite requests for action or whatever to peers in other departments if I needed to subliminally intimidate them. If the medium (ie envelope) was the message, the message was ‘I work with the Chairman, so don’t mess with me’. Especially useful when dealing with Personnel or IT.

It was a huge relief to move from that colonial hierarchical corporate culture to the more informal feudal atmosphere of the Chinese family-run mega-business, where everyone knew the Company Gwailo worked directly for the Emperor and kowtowed instantly.

And finally, after groveling to the CCP, the WHO gets into Neil Young and Crazy Horse in the documentary A Band A Brotherhood A Barn. Scenes from Colorado and rehearsals (or actual takes – hard to tell with NY) for the new album.

Consulum, the PR agency given US$5.7 million to do a strategic something blah-blah study on relaunching Hong Kong, has handed in its report. A Factwire story reveals that it’s bursting with all the exciting and incisive findings and recommendations you would expect. For example, the Japanese are ‘unreachable’ and find official feel-good blather about Hong Kong particularly unbelievable. And our officials should keep quiet about politics, but pitch this city as great for hiking.

Links to the opinion research summaries are here. Jazzy re-positioning stuff is here, if you can stomach slogans like (I can’t believe this is real) ‘Raise capital. Raise a family. Raise your heartbeat.’

According to Factwire, Regina Ip – previously a skeptic about the PR exercise – has changed her mind after seeing these materials.

When Consulum started its work in mid-2020, the project to restore Hong Kong’s image looked desperate. Eighteen months later, with NatSec and Covid regimes in force, the whole thing seems absurdly irrelevant – almost quaint.

We now have CCP-style PR. Cue the Civil Service College subjecting government employees to ‘In-depth Study of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy for a Brighter Future of Hong Kong’. 

Some weekend reading…

Jerome Cohen on the Chief Justice’s remarks on how Hong Kong still has judicial independence.

From HKFP, an interesting explanation of the business model and economics of food delivery platforms like Deliveroo and Foodpanda, including ‘ghost kitchens’. The platforms clearly offer restaurants access to a bigger market, but also extract rents as rapaciously as landlords. For some restaurants (especially with Covid lockdowns) not playing along isn’t an option.

Samuel Bickett sees selective and protectionist action in the Hong Kong Competition Commission’s investigation into the two main food-delivery services, which are apparently European. (He sees echoes of Mainland discrimination against foreign companies, though this may be reading too much into it. It could just be that the Competition Commission, yet another bloated public-sector bureaucracy, doesn’t have enough work to do.) However, the allegations sound familiar – a bit like past complaints about the two big supermarket chains’ policies toward wholesale suppliers that sell to smaller players that undercut the duopoly.

Samuel Bickett’s appeal comes up on February 8. You can subscribe and donate to him here.

From the Diplomat, signs that Beijing is curbing the more rabid aspects of wolf-warrior diplomacy.

Francesco Sisci on the role of taxation in China’s governance (more interesting than it sounds if you’re into that sort of thing).

More coverage of the dilemma/absurdity that requires Hong Kong’s economy to be wrecked so the CCP can save face and protect the motherland from Covid with a ‘Made in China’ vaccine. 

Charles Mok writes in the Diplomat that ‘Zero COVID Is More Politics Than Science’…

Such is the awkward situation that Hong Kong has found itself in, being an international hub for finance and commerce, yet with no choice but to follow China’s zero COVID obsession. Over the past year, the Hong Kong administration along with the local pro-Beijing politicians – now unopposed after the purging of all opposition from Hong Kong’s political scene – has been adamantly pursuing harsher and harsher domestic measures, purportedly trying to meet Beijing’s requirements for re-opening the border with the mainland. While the re-opening is still denied by Beijing, Hong Kong has instead succeeded in isolating itself from the rest of the world.

According to Bloomberg, a European Chamber draft report foresees Hong Kong being cut off from the world until well into 2024 – with a major exodus of expats in the meantime. 

The Standard puts its story on this next to one in which Beijing official Luo Huining says Hong Kong has ‘regained its luster’ oh yes.

Accidentally-found copy of the EuroCham paper here.

The CCP likes to see itself as pragmatic and effective (‘whole-process democracy’, etc). But its insistence on reinventing mRNA vaccines looks more like narcissism – or paranoia that foreign products will be laced with ingredients that promote alien unpatriotic subversive ideas.

Which brings us to Security Secretary Chris Tang, who wants to see tougher official-secrets laws to counter foreign espionage. Not only does he maintain that Hong Kong is currently awash with foreign spies – he seems to link theft of state secrets to the 2019 protests…

He told lawmakers that certain countries have been attempting to endanger national security or “foment a color revolution” in the SAR, with the 2019 social unrest being a “vivid example.”

Tang said that spies usually engage in activities such as “infiltrating state authorities, probing state secrets, inciting disaffection of public servants, paying and grooming agents with the view of stirring up trouble, intensifying social conflicts, advocating anti-government beliefs and even overthrowing state powers through violence and other means.”

He also said spies have a causal relationship with domestic terrorism as spies will attempt to seize power by violence.

The evidence for all this would be fascinating. Sadly, it seems to be a state secret.

…trying to feel Carrie Lam’s emotions. 

Veteran patriotic politician Tsang Yok-sing says Beijing will have just one name on the Chief Executive quasi-election ballot, rather than contrive a phony race between the prearranged winner and a designated loser. This obviously keeps things simple – no need for the ‘elites’ to pretend to vote. But I’m slightly surprised that the CCP would make the charade even easier to mock. 

If Jasper is right, the most farcical part of the process will be when Beijing tells a few followers to spread word of who it has picked, and all the shoe-shiners and loyalist trash leap swiftly as one to endorse and praise the individual concerned. (Tsang doesn’t speculate on who the chosen one will be – and indeed who cares? It might be Feel-my-emotions Lady, or Psycho-cop Guy, or someone else not called Regina, but it’ll make little difference.) 

Hong Kong is full of smart people with insight and ideas. Sadly, none are in government. One – a doctor – offers intelligent-sounding suggestions on how we can start moving forward on Covid…

Creating an illusion of certainty around zero Covid is disingenuous. People will die of Covid and this should be acknowledged and communicated. The challenge is to balance the damage from the disease and the damage from the public health measures. 

The Chief Justice goes to considerable lengths to explain that judicial independence exists in Hong Kong. HKFP report here. It would be more convincing if he didn’t feel a need to say this in the first place. But perhaps credibility is not the aim here – he also insists that keeping 47 pro-democracy politicians in jail without trial for a year is perfectly fine.

An HKFP op-ed on those incessant official denials that press freedom is in the same wonderful shape as, say, judicial independence…

…knowing that a mere accusation can result in the immediate closure of a media outlet is intimidating for the staff of any organisation in the business, and also perhaps a dangerous temptation to people who disapprove of it.

Another microbiologist says Hong Kong’s zero-Covid mission is futile. And a study shows that Hongkongers find vaccination information more persuasive if it’s in English rather than Chinese. Something about a ‘high status’ language. (While we’re on the subject, William Pesek considers how China’s zero-Covid policy could impact the global economy. Clue: supply chains.)

The SCMP attempts to decode a CCP newspaper’s vague warning that Hong Kong’s failure to fight Covid could endanger national safety. Sample:

The Ta Kung Pao editorial said the government must “assess the situation carefully and brace for the worst while coming up with different proposals for good preparation”.

One theory offered by the SCMP‘s ‘pundits’ is that the pandemic detracts from grand projects like the Greater Bay Area. More likely, the aim of the piece is to emphasize that it is Hong Kong that threatens the Mainland’s health, not the other way round – and in any case, links with (or Covid approaches being used by) the rest of the planet do not enter any equation.

We’re all aware that Beijing is insisting that Hong Kong align with Mainland ‘zero-Covid’ policy, despite the resulting idiocies of putting people in quarantine hotels where they catch Covid, locking down entire housing estates, chasing hamsters, etc. But no-one is totally sure why. It depends how paranoid you feel.

Is it symbolism (Hong Kong must not appear or feel ‘different’ from the rest of the country)? Is it a calculated way to diminish Hong Kong’s international role and character (in line with Beijing’s insular tilt)? Is it also an excuse to tighten social controls by barring public assembly and introducing surveillance apps?

Probably all of the above, up to a point. But you have to wonder how much Beijing’s hands are simply tied by the fact that Mainland vaccines are far less effective than foreign ones. The CCP cannot openly admit this. So it has to leave its population effectively unvaccinated – and the nation cut off from the world – until it can find an acceptable face-saving way out.

Maybe the damage being done to Hong Kong is not the primary aim, but more inadvertent (even if, to the Leninist mind, proof that every cloud has a silver lining). To put it another way: if Beijing had had world-class vaccines available a year ago, would Hong Kong (and China as a whole) be far closer to reopening by now? Or would the CCP invent different reasons to keep us sealed off? In which case, wouldn’t it follow that the Hong Kong government/Beijing have an interest in keeping Hong Kong’s elderly semi-unvaccinated? 

Which brings us back to the more sinister explanations. Carrie Lam is reframing ‘zero-Covid’ as ‘not absolute’, and expert KY Yuen says it was supposed to buy time for vaccinations. But the Hong Kong authorities’ main priority seems to be rooting out sedition, rather than pushing the old folks to get their jabs.

Some associated reading…

Comments from Siddarth Sridhar on the problem with ‘zero-Covid’ in Hong Kong.

An accessible update on Omicron and vaccines.

Quartz’s big Hamster Hunt piece. And the Washington Post’s big splash on the Hong Kong Hamster Rebellion.

Samuel Bickett on Hong Kong’s sedition laws…

Sedition under Hong Kong law is an entirely different beast. It’s not enough to simply say the statute is broader than sedition under US law, because there is so little overlap in focus that it is effectively a different crime entirely. 

HKFP on the government’s latest target: signing up the elderly for vaccinations the HKJA.

For all its NatSec laws, media clampdowns and imprisonment without trial, Hong Kong remains defiant. Animal lovers approach people taking hamsters to the government Humane Handling Management Centre Death Camp in Shatin and offer to hurry the pets away to safety. 

A few little things for the weekend…

Stats showing that daily arrivals at HKIA are barely enough to fill one Airport Express train. But then there are the departures, netting out at over 4,000 a week. That rate would work out at well over 150,000 – 2% of the population – for the year.

What do Hong Kong officials do when they’re not strangling hamsters? Here you go.

How Chinese U is going patriotic. (Is this seriously supposed to induce anything but cynicism and contempt among students?)

China Digital Times on Beijing’s warning to Winter Olympics athletes: ‘just shut up and play’. More from the Guardian.

On culinary matters…

I came into possession of a can of ‘Omnituna’, a synthetic vegan version of the indispensable fish. Looks like the real thing (not in chunks but shredded in appearance) but improbably has the same sinews they put in vegan meat to make it look authentic. Smells sweetish, rather like cat food. Texture is mushy rather than chewy. Tastes a bit like Seven-11 pork floss, with a musty/powdery/cardboard tone that lingers.

You would not want this in a sandwich, let alone a salad. I stir-fried it with greens and noodles, and made it more or less OK – thanks no doubt to my adroit (soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, garlic, ginger, chili) use of seasonings and aromatics. Set off a serious bout of hiccups. Why wouldn’t a devout vegan just use tofu? Or is this aimed at the ‘self-punishment’ market segment?