Big Lychee, Various Sectors

HK And Macau Affairs Office boss Xia Baolong issues fierce-sounding warnings against ‘anti-China forces’ and anyone who ‘dares challenge the bottom-line of One Country, Two Systems’. Pro-Beijing figures Tam Yiu-chung and Regina Ip clarify that this doesn’t apply to all democrats, but just those who collude with foreign forces. But…

“The central government has emphasized time and time again that patriots must rule Hong Kong. If the Democratic Party wishes to reenter the legislature and be involved in governance, they must be able to adhere to this gold standard. The central government does not have an obligation to accommodate differences in opinion,” [Ip] said.

(Love that perhaps-unintentionally candid last sentence.)

This overlooks a couple of details. First is that most of the once-elected pan-dem politicians are in jail. Second is that, under a one-party system, genuine involvement in ‘governance’ or ‘politics’ is off-limits to all but a small group of self-selected power-holders behind closed doors in Beijing. Even the local Hong Kong officials they appoint are kept on a tight rein, and others allowed into the Legislative and Executive Councils perform only a ceremonial role.

Some mid-week links… 

Good thread on Xi Jinping’s recently renewed claim that Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are all part of one ‘Chinese’ bloodline. How does this idea deal with the fact that huge numbers of people outside the PRC’s borders have cultures, languages and even genetics that match those of ‘Chinese’ Uighurs, Kazakhs, Mongolians, Koreans, etc? Or don’t we want to know?

From the Guardian, Jackie Chan’s latest ‘best possible taste’ (yet another ‘wolf warrior’) movie, using a war-devastated Syrian city as a location. Hey – you want a realistic set, right?

The BBC with more on MI5’s naming of Christine Lee as a Chinese agent…

Gardiner’s friend was about to be accused not of being a spy but something more hazy – an agent of influence carrying out “political interference activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party”.

From CNN, an interesting personal and nostalgic account of the decline of Taiwan’s waishengren. 

The prosecution aren’t exactly holding back in likening sedition to treason in the speech therapists’ cartoon sheep book trial…

The defendants … were said to have “indoctrinated” readers with separatism, incited “anti-Chinese sentiment,” “degraded” lawful arrests and prosecution and “intensified” Hong Kong-China conflicts.

It would be interesting to see some evidence. Did the books’ authors ‘incite’ anti-Chinese sentiment or merely reflect it? Did they actually ‘intensify’ Hong Kong-China conflict? How is ‘degrading’ arrests a crime? And so on.  (And this, and this.)

Also not pulling any punches, Ben Cowling says quarantine for inbound travellers – whether in a hotel or at home – is pointless and should just be scrapped…

Noting that the justifications for home quarantine are the same as those given for hotel quarantine – namely to reduce the burden on Hong Kong’s healthcare system and stop new sub-variants from arriving in the city – Professor Cowling said merely changing the type of quarantine would be “illogical”.

“The sub-variants are already here,” he said. “Switching to home quarantine makes no sense to me. If the reason for home quarantine were the same as hotel quarantine, it would be illogical.”

(Compare such forthrightness with the inane and insipid blather of the SCMP’s editorial on the subject.)

Seditious sheep and compulsory quarantine are both examples of Beijing’s political dogma overriding reason. Rational people assume that, at some point, this must stop. They look for signs that common sense will return.

Some commentator somewhere recently floated the idea that China might allow BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine into the country ‘after Xi Jinping gets appointed to his third term as core leader at the CCP Congress’. Why is there this widespread assumption that Beijing will relax its zero-Covid policy after the gathering around October-November?

The accepted wisdom is that after the Congress, Xi will be emboldened and strengthened, and thus able to do something – adopt a science-based public-health strategy – that he currently cannot. But so far as we can see, Xi is more powerful than any Chinese leader since Mao at his height. He rules over a system that airbrushes away disasters, scandals and inconvenient history and replaces them with new narratives. With his ability to create a reality of his choosing through official media and propaganda, suppressing evidence of a personally humiliating U-turn would be far easier than suppressing a virus. 

He can change policy while blankly maintaining publicly that it is not changing – who would dare contradict him? He can place blame on other leaders for devising and sticking with the original approach. He can claim credit for a miraculous breakthrough that enables a new direction. 

Abandoning zero-Covid could consolidate Xi’s image and position, and give the Chinese economy a badly needed boost. If he wanted to do it, he would have. It will be no easier after the Congress. 

We can only guess why Xi clings to zero-Covid. But the idea that a party Congress will make a massive difference sounds like wishful thinking.

Following recent overseas criticism about the decline of rule of law in Hong Kong (and angry government response), the Court of Final Appeal surprises many with its ‘zip-ties’ decision…

…If the wider interpretation applied, it would mean that “almost all articles or instruments can be considered as fit for some unlawful purposes,” the top court ruled.

“In other words, under this construction, section 17 is in reality a thought crime, depending on what a defendant’s intent was at the material time (subject to proof). There is simply no warrant to suggest that this was the legislative intent,” the judgement read.

The ruling clearly favours the protection of citizens against abuses of state power. However, Samuel Bickett is not too impressed…

DOJ’s use of this law was so clearly wrong that it was nearly impossible for the CFA to rule otherwise. This seems to be the CFA’s pattern in political cases: hear political cases & rule in favor of Hongkongers only when lower court practice is so absurd as to be indisputable.

Having been told that Hong Kong does not have separation of powers, the courts will usually refrain from exercising independence in order to forestall measures that overtly and forcefully bring them into line.

An SCMP story suggests that even a relatively gutsy CFA will be unable to withstand the imminent local Article 23 NatSec Law. This will, in effect, absorb colonial-era sedition, ‘incitement of hatred’ and other offenses into the NatSec framework of guilt-presuming pre-trial treatment and harsh post-trial penalties…

[Justice Secretary Paul] Lam also defended the recent sentencing of veteran activist Koo Sze-yiu to nine months in jail on a sedition charge, saying no one had been punished solely for hurling abuses against the government.

“You can’t take things out of context. Criticism is absolutely not problematic, as the law clearly states that it is not seditious if the intention is to point out defects in hope for improvements and remedy,” he said. “The recently convicted cases did involve seditious intentions to overthrow the regime.”

What if, like Koo, you believe the one-party system is a defect and call for it to end as a remedy?

Some useful Covid threads. Ben Cowling on why Hong Kong’s latest policy shift – home isolation with electronic tags for positive cases – could be more trouble than it’s worth. And Siddharth Sridhar on how policy – rather than actual disease – could swamp hospitals and damage overall community health. (Couldn’t those huge isolation camps be used to house patients for observation? Even import some more valiant Mainland nurses to monitor the inmates.)

A Ming Pao report (in Chinese) says that the CCP Party Congress (probably October or November) will formally give Xi Jinping the title ‘People’s Leader’ and the authorities will establish official standards for portraits of him. 

National Review looks at economist and China apologist Jeffrey Sachs.

CNN explains why Hollywood is defying Chinese sensitivities. It’s Mainland money – or the lack of it.

And a reminder of why democracy leads to chaos. The Ulster County, New York elections board is holding an ‘I voted’ sticker design contest among local high school students ahead of the November polls. Of the six finalists, two or three are mawkish, and one or two pretty decent, and one stands out as a clear winner, with 97% of online votes. You too can take part in the poll. Here. 

Samuel Bickett introduces his testimony to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China…

With the majority of foreign attention focused on the National Security Law, my number one priority was to draw attention to abuses taking place outside of NSL cases due to rampant, open misconduct in court by judges, magistrates, prosecutors and police officers. After all, the vast majority of political prisoners in Hong Kong are charged under common law crimes like unlawful assembly, riot, and “weapons” possession (usually laser pointers)—not the NSL. Since these laws were not designed to be used in this way, it has required a great deal of manipulation and outright misconduct by civil servants to ensure convictions…

The agenda of the hearings links to testimony from other witnesses – Patrick Poon, Fermi Wong and Ching Cheong, and to a video of the session.

The Commission’s research note names Justice Dept personnel and outlines possible sanctions against them.

The Hong Kong government’s response is predictably over-sensitive and over-wrought, saying the US…

…once again, manifests its hegemonism by disseminating slanders and attempting to intimidate the prosecutors of the HKSAR Government.

…The spokesperson rebuked that it is most despicable for the so-called “staff research report” to name the Secretary for Justice, together with 15 prosecutors, of the HKSAR Government with a threat of imposing the so-called “sanction” on them. This is clearly trampling on legal justice and attempting to threaten by way of hegemonism [you’ve said that already] the HKSAR Government officials who have been discharging their due prosecution role dutifully with justice upheld. Such gross interference in Hong Kong matters constitutes a serious violation of fundamental principles of international law.

The spokesperson said, “The attempt of the United States Congressional-Executive Commission on China to repeat a lie numerous times as if it were a truth simply reflects its ill intent and amounts to nothing more than an indecent act”.

Phew. Samuel Bickett points out…

It hits a nerve because of how effectively the sanctions would deter misconduct. They can control fallout w/ senior officials, but not lower ranks.

Not sure if it would deter misconduct so much as deter being a Justice Dept employee. No mention of the even bigger step of putting sanctions on judges.

Justice Secretary Paul Lam defends the ‘incitement of hatred/enmity stuff in a Sing Tao interview…’

As for any confusion arising from terms such as “hatred-triggering,” “dissatisfaction” and “enmity,” Lam said they should not be considered without context and that various factors, from the background of a case to the accused person’s tone of voice, would be taken into account.

By ‘tone of voice’, does he mean the government reserves the right to read your mind and decide what you really meant? 

Meanwhile, a Hong Kong government delegation attended (by video link) a UN human rights committee’s meeting, answering – or not answering – questions on political, labour, academic and other freedoms. Asked if Hong Kong NGOs could be assured that they wouldn’t be persecuted for communicating with the UN, the delegates said – well, guess.

Sadly, all the government’s hard PR work is promptly undermined by more harsh sentences. Koo Sze-yiu goes international, in the BBC and AFP, among others. Soon to be joined by Grandma Wong, age 66, sentenced to eight months for – nothing, really.

The Chow Hang-tung case gets into legal technicalities. An explanation.

On a separate note, this just in from our Wimbledon correspondent: one Victor Gao says tennis player Peng Shuai is ‘too tall to have been sexually assaulted’.

Koo Sze-yiu is convicted of ‘attempted sedition’ – painting slogans on a mock coffin ahead of a planned protest (it never took place) against the Olympics. He gets nine months in prison.

The principle magistrate ruled that the offence Koo committed amounted to endangering national security, saying that the phrases he painted on the prop coffin and fabric were not “pure criticism,” but had an ultimate purpose of changing or even overthrowing China’s constitutional position.

Koo has created such protest props for decades, is a veteran Diaoyu agitator, and is now 76 and has terminal cancer. 

A former district council member is jailed for 15 months for inciting others to take part in an illegal assembly back in 2020 (note how the Standard wedges the Koo story in at the bottom).

And former student union head Owen Au is arrested by the valiant sleuths of the ICAC – theoretically graft-busters – for sharing a Facebook post by Ted Hui calling for the casting of blank votes at last year’s (widely boycotted) LegCo election. 

Then there’s the ongoing trial of speech therapists for producing sheep cartoon books for kids. Which of these cases is the most pitiful? Could you rank them in order of sheer absurdity?

Next week’s headlines to include: ‘Man arrested for teaching parrot to say Heung Gong ga yau’, ‘Nine-year-old released after cartoon sheep book she was suspected of possessing is not found’, ‘Judge jails parrot after ruling it had ultimate purpose of changing or overthrowing China’s constitutional position’.

More weirdness – Chow Hang-tung tries to get a magistrate to lift reporting restrictions on her subversion case committal proceedings. Even a NatSec judge is skeptical about the prosecution’s/magistrate’s stance.

The government gets predictably whiny about the outgoing US consul-general’s comments on Hong Kong’s declining freedoms…

…a government spokesman said democracy in the SAR has taken “a quantum leap forward” since 1997, and the electoral system has been improved to make the Legislative Council and Election Committee more representative. 

The pan-democrats have been jailed or otherwise barred from running, and the assembly now comprises wall-to-wall Beijing supporters after only loyalists were permitted on the ballot and only 30% of voters turned out – and that’s ‘more representative’?

Not surprising that the government also has a credibility problem in trying to convince the public that its new health code will not be used for non-health surveillance or control purposes. The new system is described as a ‘balancing act’, although Singapore – with an identical public-health challenge – dispenses with any ‘balance’. 

In Macau, the ‘balance’ is such that police are now arresting people for jogging and cycling.

More on Hong Kong’s proposed Mainland-style Covid monitoring/control system…

Reporters … questioned why [Health Secretary] Lo thought the health code system would work in Hong Kong when it was unsuccessful in preventing Omicron outbreaks in Macau or Shanghai.

Lo answered that the proposal was based on the city’s existing Covid-19 situation: “By reducing the chance of them getting into the community, we would be able to reduce the transmission from our current level,” he added.

Hey – it sounds better than ‘I have no idea’. Although…

…leading microbiologist Ho Pak-Leung from the University of Hong Kong said in a separate Monday morning programme on Commercial Radio that he expected the effectiveness of the new health code system at preventing Covid-19 infections to be limited given the virus’ transmissibility and the tendency for contact-tracing measures to lag behind the spread.

A Standard editorial says…

Under the new administration, color-coded Covid monitoring will undoubtedly go ahead.

This is despite concerns that the introduction of such a system could accelerate Hongkongers emigrating and discourage foreigners of high-potential from returning here, which would further isolate the city from the rest of the world.

The conspiracy theory – on the verge of becoming mainstream in Hong Kong – is that that’s the whole point. It continues…

But there are also concerns that, unless Hong Kong adopts a color-coded health monitor, the mainland will not agree to reopen the border for normal travel.

Until and unless there’s a major shift in Beijing towards mitigation rather than suppression of Covid, the border will only ever fully reopen if/when Hong Kong is as sealed-off from the outside world as the Mainland itself is.

…Privacy might have been a concern when the previous administration first launched the LeaveHomeSafe app.

But, having used the app day in and day out, people have become used to living in the so-called new normal.

It can be expected that they will also get used to the new color-coded health monitor – unless they are prepared to withdraw from society and live a solitary existence.

The column goes on to ask:

‘If someone is given a yellow or red code, many people around them are likely to be flagged too. How will the decision be made? Will they be able to use public transport?’ 

There are a lot more questions. Won’t the heightened surveillance mechanism further increase people’s incentives to keep quiet if they test positive or show Covid symptoms? Will the new features work when your device is offline (as the current LeaveHomeSafe does)? Will the authorities start demanding universal testing? Why shouldn’t a government that jails people for kids’ books about sheep use the ‘red’ code to place dissidents under semi-house arrest? Will this app ever be scrapped, or will it become a standard ‘public health precaution’ in operation permanently? Will it then be merged with facial-recognition systems? Or extended to control access to bank accounts and other facilities?

Also from the editorial…

When John Lee Ka-chiu was still chief secretary, he reportedly demanded that then-Innovation and Technology Secretary Alfred Sit Wing-hang strengthen the app to include extra functions – but to no avail.

A noticeable recent trend in my email/WhatsApp messages: friends who have just started trips out of Hong Kong raving in disbelief about how amazing life is in the outside world. They had forgotten what normality is like. And indeed it does sound very strange.

Macau goes more or less Shanghai over Covid for a week. Much of the public transport shut down, most people told to stay at home – cops roaming streets – and everyone must take tests (and do a separate test before going to the test site). Even casinos (ie most of the economy) are closed. More here.

A few naive folk out there had this idea that when John Lee became Chief Executive, a less idiotic Covid policy would follow. In reality, someone, somewhere must be looking at Macau’s symbolic Mainland-emulating zero-infections performance and earnestly wanting Hong Kong to do something similar. And of course it goes beyond symbolism – cue proposal for a red/yellow/green code system linked to your real name/address enabling the government to monitor and control your movements. Not creepy or anything. Oh, and more frequent testing.

This week’s At Least It’s Not Covid Award goes to Häagen-Dazs ice cream – being withdrawn by Hong Kong health authorities for containing insecticide. (Strange but true: the product’s name has no meaning, but was invented by American marketing geniuses to sound vaguely exotic/Dutch/Scandinavian.) 

A couple of interesting threads… Activist Michael Mo looks back at the campaign against the third runway (or second, since the old ‘second’ one is now undergoing maintenance). And thoughts from a carpenter’s daughter on the closure of Hong Kong’s last sawmill.

Hong Kong’s pointless flight suspensions policy is scrapped, at least for a while. It’s a new balance: going from one balance between science and stupidity to another. Once the government officials’ kids are safely home from their boarding schools in the UK, maybe they’ll go back to suddenly suspending airlines. As an expert points out, the compulsory hotel quarantines – and the shortage of hotel rooms – are the main barriers to inbound travel. Earliest rooms are available: late August (HK$1,600 a night at the hitherto unheard-of Cordis* in Mongkok).

Authorities strike another new balance – between believing fruit and vegetables can carry Covid and not believing it. The balance seems tilted against Taiwanese produce.

Some weekend reading…

The Christian Science Monitor delivers its 25th anniversary elegy for Hong Kong a bit late – but it’s a fairly good one…

“Hong Kong has gone from being such a free city to such a tightly controlled system,” says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of “Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink” and history professor at University of California, Irvine. “This is part of a larger story of forced assimilation, the energy that’s put particularly on the physical edges of the People’s Republic of China to sort of rein in forms of diversity.”

Signs of things to come: The FTU urges everyone to contrive patriotically anti-Japanese sentiment on the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

Transit Jam on the lack of transparency over Hong Kong’s HK$350 million plans for electric ferries…

Hong Kong’s electric ferry strategy is based entirely on one 2017 consultancy report penned by mystery consultant Transus, a firm which has left no trace of its existence other than the ferry strategy report.

Joint (and brief) speeches by the bosses of MI5 and the FBI on the threat posed by China, starting with the UK service’s Ken McCallum …

The most game-changing challenge we face comes from the Chinese Communist Party. It’s covertly applying pressure across the globe. This might feel abstract.  But it’s real and it’s pressing. We need to talk about it. We need to act.

Pretty blunt – it’s not often Western officials even mention the CCP by name. Guardian report.

Long read for history fans – in Asia Pacific Journal, academic Geoffrey Gunn explains what Ho Chi Minh was doing in Hong Kong’s Victoria Prison in the early 1930s.

VOA report on how impoverished Laos owes China billions in infrastructure loan repayments, and it doesn’t have billions. (Little mention of what might have induced Lao officials to sign contracts for an inappropriate mega-project like high-speed rail in the first place.) 

*Just been reminded that had a staycation there two years ago.

From HKFP, the latest on the trial of the five speech therapists accused of ‘…taking part in a conspiracy to print, publish, distribute or display three children’s picture books between June 4, 2020 and July 22 last year with seditious intention’.

On Wednesday, prosecutors read out a long list of exhibits in the case and handed several items to District Judge Kwok Wai-kin, including three handheld boards found in Yeung’s home which featured the union’s name, social media handles and contact details. They also submitted 18 miniature statues donning protest gear, marked with the union’s name, as well as six pieces of paper which could be arranged to read: “Glory to Hong Kong.”

…The prosecution then played an animated version of the first picture book about “guardians of the sheep village” and an audio recording of the second book about the “12 warriors of the sheep village.”

People in the public gallery giggled as the video and audio were played in the courtroom…

More bad press – and no doubt giggling – overseas for Asia’s world city, the only international financial hub that jails people for kids’ cartoons and pieces of paper that could be arranged.

Mindful of the reputational problem, Hong Kong authorities will launch a campaign to attract international talent in the next couple of years as well as (yet again) tell the city’s story better. But no sooner said than undermined: the government will continue its dynamic semi-zero-Covid approach of striking a balance between minimizing and maximizing inconvenience, or something.

To win local hearts and minds, teachers and social workers are being encouraged to attend Mainland-style sessions to study Xi Jinping’s recent ‘important speech’ on Hong Kong. Federation of Education Workers president Wong Kwan-yu…

…said Xi “risked his life [amid the pandemic] to come to Hong Kong to give a speech – we should pay attention to what he said as his remarks are very important to Hong Kong’s future”.