Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Regina Ip reminds us (in case we’d forgotten) that the Hong Kong government’s PR and messaging is crap. She dwells mainly on the fact that the civil servants put in charge of the Information Services Dept lack the skills for a serious communication job. And her examples support this: dismal over-detailed/-technical press releases on Covid, and the hilariously clunky ‘rejoinders’ top officials issue every time foreign politicians or press have the audacity to comment negatively on Hong Kong affairs. 

But even a talented PR guru would find it impossible to craft publicity, speeches and press releases that convince audiences that Hong Kong’s government is doing a good job and the community is in excellent shape. 

If you round up dozens of democratically elected politicians and jail them for over a year with no bail and no trial, all because they held a primary election, your reputation will be damaged – however you frame it. If you use the word ‘improved’ to describe a supposed election with only one candidate and just a handful of selected voters, people will mock you. These things sap your credibility and image of integrity. You can’t reverse that by ‘explaining’ better. You can’t sell shit by calling it sugar.

It was Beijing that imposed the policies that have ruined Hong Kong’s global image. But it seems that the communication itself is also being influenced by Mainland officials. Anyone reading Hong Kong government press statements in the last few years will have noticed the rapid Mainlandization of the language – those rejoinders shrieking about overseas commenters ‘interfering in Hong Kong affairs’ and the insistence that barring popular candidates equals an ‘improved’ election system are in CCP house style. So warm-and-fuzzy wording of press releases isn’t an option anyway. (Today’s guest BS at the top.)

Hong Kong officials worried about the city’s PR might be wondering how Taiwan or Ukraine do it so well, for example on social media. Put simply, they are on the right side of history and have good stories to tell.

Covid – and related quarantine and social distancing rules – has left hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong working people on reduced incomes. Yet the ‘pay trend survey’ gives civil servants pay rises of up to 7.26%. The Standard’s editorial delivers a suitable rant.

But in fact it’s much worse than it seems. By focussing on (selectively measured) private-sector annual salary hikes, the government diverts attention from the longstanding massive gap between the private and public sectors’ base pay levels. The last survey on this – by PWC back in the 2000s if memory serves – found that civil service salary levels were over double those in Hong Kong companies. That survey was swiftly buried and forgotten. The percentage increase is a sideshow.

China Daily reports a Bauhinia Institute (who?) survey showing that 80% of Hong Kong people find the CE ‘election’ satisfactory, 69.4% think the housing shortage will be relieved in five years, and 73.9% believe John Lee ‘can help the city begin a new chapter, from chaos to order and prosperity’. (Story by one Shadow Li.)

Back in the real world, the week’s NatSec horrors start to stack up. Jimmy Lai and six others are committed to trial for conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign forces (maximum penalty: life) and conspiracy to print seditious publications. Ta Kung Pao picks its next target: taxi drivers displaying ‘yellow’ symbols in their cabs. The ‘Privacy’ (anti-political doxxing) Commissioner might ban the Telegram app. And a Hong Kong court has ruled that…

…prosecutors could label organisers of the city’s annual Tiananmen vigil “foreign agents” without having to reveal who the group is accused of working for.

Good luck defending yourselves.

If you worry that this sort of thing might harm the reputation of Hong Kong’s legal system – relax. Incoming Chief Executive John Lee will create a new Deputy Secretary for Justice post, saying…

“I want the secretary for justice and the deputy to go out to explain in full the legal system in Hong Kong, and the rule of law, and the independent judiciary in Hong Kong, so as to let people know the true picture of Hong Kong, particularly when we have been badmouthed by some politicians for political reasons, criticising unfairly the system that is being practised in Hong Kong.”

(Standard story here.)

The reshuffling of the bureaucracy (set in train by Carrie Lam) will involve the creation of 13 additional political appointees and 57 more civil service posts – costing a mere HK$95 million in salary per year. The deputy bureau chiefs will get HK$360,000 a month.

The bloat extends to bureaus’ titles. Home Affairs (where we put the token DAB dimwit) becomes Home and Youth Affairs, Environment becomes Environment and Ecology, and Innovation and Technology becomes Innovation, Technology and Industry (raising the possibility that the bureau might actually now have something to do).

In fairness – if someone can convince the world that Hong Kong rule of law is in perfect shape, HK$360,000 a month sounds like a bargain.

Let’s start the day with a dose of vindictiveness and spite, laced with generous helpings of ethno-nationalism! CY Leung’s open (not to say unsolicited) response to remarks made by Jimmy Lai’s son Sebastian when receiving his father’s honorary doctorate from Catholic U in Washington DC. Meanwhile, the persecution of Lai senior continues with one of his former colleagues turning queen’s or state’s or whoever’s evidence.

(I thought the deal was that even if you take foreign citizenship, you’re still a Son of the Yellow Emperor. To see how xenophobic mouth-frothing is done properly, try the wit and wisdom of Prof Chen Xianyi – scourge of foreigner-worshiping, self-hating, race traitors. Amateur psychologists will have fun guessing what’s going on here.)

What do Han supremacists think of Hong Kong’s slavish devotion to the peg, and thus to evil foreign US monetary policy? Perhaps they accept – as most serious economists do – that the arrangement will continue if only for lack of any practical alternative. 

Thus, AFP reports, the city faces rising interest rates. While it is fine to overturn freedom of speech and rule of law, one core value remains sacrosanct: keeping property prices as high as possible. We can expect tighter land supply, relaxed mortgage restrictions and similar measures if the housing market falls more than, say, 10-15%. Some things cannot change.

The weekend links, better late than never…

The prolific Benedict Rogers in the Catholic Herald and The Tablet…

It seems rather odd to call yourself a Catholic and then arrest your Cardinal. 

And Catholic Culture on the Vatican’s lame response to the arrest of Cardinal Zen. (Would anyone expect otherwise? Like Western big banks, luxury brands and universities, the Catholic church has invested too much in the Chinese dream to admit they’ve been co-opted and are being used.)

A HKFP guide to Hong Kong’s micro-media – small-scale Chinese-language journalistic outlets. 

An example for the Vatican? WHO boss Tedros upsets his old buddies in Beijing after criticizing their zero-Covid policy (CNN story), highlighting China’s love-hate relationship with foreigners’ opinions. China Media Project says…

On the one hand, the foreign voice is the truly authoritative voice, giving credibility to the claims of those in power … Behind this odd complex is the unfortunate fact that China has few truly credible voices – for the simple reason that its journalists and intellectuals cannot speak their minds. Propaganda reports brim with cherry-picked quotes from opposition politicians in Europe, “foreign scholars” and self-proclaimed experts of such dubious origin that their ideas can only be found in China Daily or on CGTN … whose odd remark can be plucked out of context like a bright piece of pro-China confetti.

Also from CMP, all you ever wanted to know about the vintage CCP phrase ‘persistence is victory’.

The Chinese embassy in Prague tries to get the Czechs to cancel an exhibition by dissident artist Badiucao.

Today’s video of weird disinfectant spraying. AFP on politically-driven sanitization of surfaces and objects. And testing a cabbage. (Kohlrabi?)

Bullet-point summary of a lecture by Michael Pettis on the ‘only five paths’ China’s economy can take. (Based on this paper.)

…domestic financial conditions are such that China is still unlikely to have a financial crisis or a sharp economic contraction. It is much more likely, in my opinion, that the country will face a very long, Japan-style, period of low growth.

SupChina interview with Anne Stevenson-Yang. A lot of skepticism, but here’s a relatively brighter point for investors…

In the U.S., you can, not to mention any names, but let’s say have a best-selling electric car, and basically be somebody who doesn’t have any idea about how to do business. But in China, you can’t run a cigarette stand without being a genius, because everything is so hard. So the companies that have developed distribution channels and good brand equity, you really have to think those are solid companies that should be invested in and rewarded.

Quartz looks at how expansion of maternity leave in China looks like a way to get women out of the workplace into full-time child-producing.

Manuel L Quezon III in Asia Sentinel on the return of a Marcos to power in the Philippines. 

For a few months around 1985-86, I shared an apartment in Sau Kei Wan with a couple of Filipino activists who had fled the Marcos regime. She was very pregnant and their Hong Kong visas had run out, so they were panicking. Then came the EDSA Revolution. They went to the Immigration Dept and got a week’s grace to go back home. A few weeks later, I went to see them in a cozy little Pasay City slum. A friend of theirs had helped take over Malacanang Palace after the Marcoses fled, and we went for a tour – Imelda’s shoes, horrendous boudoir, water-cooler-style bottle of Chanel perfume, etc.

Of course, Filipinos cheerfully and enthusiastically vote for crooks at most elections – but it’s still absurd that they would pick another Marcos. Quezon mentions…

…the skillful deployment of propaganda geared not at changing the minds of the generations that had ousted [the Marcos clan], but instead, focusing on younger generations.

On to gullible fools in the First World – David Gerard in FP on the latest crypto crash. Monopoly money ‘backed’ by more Monopoly money. It’s fascinating from a sociological/psychological point of view to see so many people suckered into taking this ideological/quack-economics fad seriously. Simple rule: for ‘cryptocurrency’/’bitcoin’/’tether’/etc read ‘dog turds’, and for ‘blockchain’ read ‘almost certainly bullshit’. You won’t go wrong…

…the cryptocurrency bubble has been so full of irrational exuberance that a token created yesterday can claim to be worth something just for existing, and you can pay people in your made-up token.

Looks like the NatSec Police might also be coming for lawyers who were paid by the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund to help protesters. Will the cops also start hunting down people – of whom there must be thousands – who donated money to the fund?

Samuel Bickett links to the HK Bar’s statement… 

The “new and improved” leadership of the Hong Kong Bar Association had nothing to say today about the political arrest of one of their most esteemed members, Margaret Ng, but they found time to release a statement condemning sanctions that don’t exist.

More on the choreographed mouth-frothing here and here. The authorities have a curiously acute hang-up about the possibility of sanctions on judges and prosecutors.

From Catholic News Agency, a roundup of international reaction to the arrest of Cardinal Zen. (Or as the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong calls it, the Cardinal Zen ‘incident’. And from the Catholic Herald…

Arresting a 90 year-old Cardinal marks a new low for a Chinese Communist Party regime that had already sunk to shocking levels of inhumanity, barbarity, cruelty and mendacity. 

Beijing steps up measures to prevent citizens leaving the country. Apparently an anti-Covid measure, or possibly a way to keep the public from learning about the situation overseas – or just a way to shut China off in general. (Or ‘all of the above’.)

A few days after academic Hui Po-keung’s arrest at the airport, NatSec police come for lawyer Margaret Ng (age 74), singer Denise Ho (happy birthday) and Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen (age 90) on suspicion of ‘collusion with foreign forces’. (Apparently this.) They have now been released on bail. Also, ex-lawmaker Cyd Ho (67) – already in jail. All were trustees of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which helped people arrested during the 2019 protests. 

Brief background to the Fund here, and more here. (One suggestion is that the trustees ran it so carefully that the NatSec cops can’t find a way to charge them with money-laundering – the usual lawfare method to crush fundraising/crowdfunding.)

Pre-2019/20, such fund-raising was normal and of little interest to the authorities because it was perfectly legal. But the new regime is too paranoid to handle it.

These are hardly criminals. They are widely admired in and beyond their respective fields. Hui – with marked leftist leanings – is described as ‘a conscientious intellectual and a staunch critic of capitalism and western hegemony’. Ng, in a democratic system, could have been in government. Ho’s commitment to tolerance and inclusion extends to following me on Twitter. The greatest international attention will be on Zen/Chan. Catholic newsletter Pillar offers plenty more on him, plus a comment under the story…

The Church might wish to declare Cardinal Zen, and those like him in Hong Kong, Living Martyrs and formally excommunicate any Catholics who take part in any action deemed to substantially restrict his ability to exercise the Church’s mission.

Or the Vatican will remain fixated on kowtowing to the CCP.

Not a great day for another SCMP op-ed on how John Lee can fix housing and be kind to puppy dogs. EUObserver’s piece on the new CE seems closer to the reality of a…

…fanatical obsession with security – or rather, eradicating any remaining vestiges of dissent…

Perusing international press to see how they describe Sunday’s Chief Executive ‘election’. More than in the past, they tend to acknowledge that there is something shady about the process. Probably something to do with a poll where the sole candidate wins 99.2% of the vote after heading a committee that screened the ‘voters’.

Still, many lazily/naively imply in their reports that 1,461 ‘elites’ made some sort of active decision – when a box of dung beetles would have performed the task just as well.

Among better stories, Politico introduces Beijing’s ‘new enforcer’ in Hong Kong, and in Vice academic Steve Tsang says…

“Beijing clearly does not bother to pretend that this is an election in any sense of the word.”

Academic John Burns has some interesting comments about how not having political skills seems to be a requirement for Hong Kong CE.

CNBC quotes lawmaker Michael Tien as admitting that Hong Kong now has a Mainland-style voting format, and David Dodwell (author of incessant dull SCMP business columns) as saying it’s ‘a big stretch to describe Hong Kong’s vote as a genuine election’. A roundup from HKFP.

Or you could try a wackier offering from the SCMP…

As Lee marks the third devout Catholic out of five Hong Kong leaders since 1997 … the pious could almost be forgiven for believing that everything that has happened in our city in the past 25 years was designed by God to test the will, endurance and faith of Hongkongers.

Unpatriotic Hongkongers who do not wish to be part of China’s new Hong Kong are embarking on an exodus. The mass arrests of 53 pro-democracy activists in January 2021 for subversion, after they held a primary election in July 2020 – two weeks after China’s imposition of a national security law on Hong Kong – were a sign of God’s wrath.

(I assume this is clever satire. Right?)

Back to business as usual…

HKFP op-ed on the amount of time prosecutors are taking in political cases.

The Court of Final Appeal registrar denies Samuel Bickett an appeal hearing.

And in the Mainland, a journalist gets seven months [link fixed] in prison for pointing out that a fantasy-propaganda movie about China’s soldiers in the Korean War was stupid.

Christmas comes once every 365 days – but Hong Kong Chief Executive ‘elections’ happen just every four years. Hapless tools are today pretending to vote for someone pretending to run as the sole ‘candidate’. Along with the 7,000 police racking up a huge overtime bill today, we should cherish the strangeness of the moment like leap-year babies having a February 29 birthday. And let’s keep a special eye out for news media reporting the ‘result’ of the HK$228 million charade as if something real happened, other than the close of the final chapter of ‘One Country, Two Systems’. 

HKFP compares John Lee’s social media campaign with those of his predecessors…

Even Lee’s most popular Facebook post – a response to Google’s termination of his YouTube channel in accordance with US sanctions – garnered only around 7,000 reactions, nearly half of which were “haha.”

People are puzzling over Lee’s ‘election rally’ English slogan ‘We and Us’. The two words are of course subject and object forms of the pronoun. The meaning, I surmise, is ‘You are all objects, and you are all subjects’. 

(Interesting fact: in some languages, there are three words for ‘we/us’. One means ‘you and me and no-one else’. One means ‘all of us together here’. And one means ‘me and some other people but not you’.)

The Chinese version says ‘Me and Us’ – perhaps meaning ‘CE and subjects are all objects together (except yellow objects, which don’t count)’. Maybe. Or could the English ‘We’ simply be a mistranslation/typo of the Chinese ‘Me’? Or vice-versa? Having been sent off unenthusiastically by the Big Boss to briefly work on a past CE ‘election campaign’, I can confirm that the consultant and PR floozies involved are purely driven by the quick whatever-the-client-will-sign-off-on easy money donated by tycoons.

China Daily interviews shoe-shining useful barbarian idiots who are quoted as spouting meaningless inanities, like…

The electoral system had to change because it had been infiltrated by foreign forces seeking a Whitehall or US Congress system of governance. But every place is different, and one form does not fit all. 

Did these poor schmucks realize that rather obviously scripted replies would be attributed to them? Would it be more pitiful if the answer to that question is ‘yes’ or ‘no’?

Some reading for the next day or two…

Stuck in hotel quarantine, David Webb is searching enforcement and regulatory bodies’ websites for reports of transgressions by members of the financial services sector. One lesson: you’d be better off buying shares in AIA than paying premiums for their life products.

Oz ABC on ‘the movie that cannot be named in Hong Kong’, including an interview with director Kiwi Chow – amazingly still in town. And Variety on Blue Island. Will that be banned, too?

China Media Project on the unwaveringly persistent Politburo Standing Committee’s reiteration of the need to comprehensively, resoundingly, indefatigably, resolutely double down on the latter-day ‘eliminate sparrows’ campaign. It seems ‘dynamic zero’ has become a loyalty/obedience test. The continuing re-locking-down in parts of Shanghai suggests that it is incentivizing local officials to care only about preventing outbreaks, and nothing about public welfare or the economy. 

From China Digital Times, a transcript of a posted-then-censored phone call from an irate locked-down Shanghai resident…

Male resident: …My family can’t keep going like this, either. You’ve closed down all the shops, forcing us to buy from these so-called “licensed suppliers.” Then you blame the delivery workers for spreading the virus … What a load of nonsense. You’re just looking for excuses, looking for scapegoats. You lock down the whole city, and yet we’re still having an endless stream of new cases. Don’t you find that strange?

Officer: I do find it strange, to be honest.

A Harvard Business paper on the Emergence of Mafia-like Business Systems in China. Scroll down to sub-headings ‘Plunder’, Obfuscation’, ‘Mutual Endangerment’ and ‘Manipulation of Financial System’ for some juicy examples.

A mega-thread of Orson Welles talking shit. You would want the guy at a dinner party.

An interactive map of Pangaea (this) showing modern-day borders (or ‘boarders’, as many people like to write these days.) 

Hong Kong experts say the city can further relax Covid travel and social-distancing rules. David Webb pens a letter from a quarantine hotel asking the government to let Hong Kong be part of the world again.

From Bloomberg via the Standard – tiptoeing away from zero-Covid looks like obvious common sense. But it contradicts CCP ideology and/or hurts the feelings of the compatriots on the Mainland. We must pretend we are not doing it, or at least not enjoying it. And be very, very surreptitious about it. Or something…

“A few months ago, the government didn’t want to admit that the strict Covid policy was hurting Hong Kong, but now they appear to be admitting it. It’s very difficult to go back to zero Covid — the public won’t accept it.”

Two AFP pieces. Holmes Chan looks back at the amazing successes of Carrie Lam. Among her many achievements: nearly one in four Hongkongers are living below the city’s not-exactly-generous poverty line. An infographic. And Su Xinqi considers the future under John Lee. That future does not seem to involve solving the problems left by Carrie.

CNN on what John Lee means for feminism and gender rights in Hong Kong…

“In the mainland model, civil society groups that advocate for liberal rights — including gender equality — are seen as conduits of Western influence.”

Lee says he will work to keep Hong Kong international. Will probably legalize cannabis too.

SCMP asks whether Christian churches should be worried by Beijing state media denouncing their prominence in education and other realms of life in Hong Kong, which is of course a rhetorical question… 

“They are actually paving the way to turn schools non-religious.”

Some links for the (another???) long weekend…

Reuters op-ed thinks China’s anti-Americanism is possibly self-defeating…

Infrastructure spending combined with data fudging – artful reweighting of inputs and prices, for example – will prop up China’s stats this year. 

Not everyday that you get Fuck the Popo, Sing Hallelujah to the Lord and Glory to Hong Kong all in the same story – music of the 2019 protests. 

A pithy review of City on the Edge by Hung Fo-hung…

Hung insists that the struggle for the future of Hong Kong has not ended. But his analysis of how Hong Kong arrived at this bleak state is so persuasive that it doesn’t leave the reader with much hope.

On out-of-area affairs: the Vanderbilt ball of 1883.

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Hopefully/possibly reassuring news for contributors to the comments section. All existing IP addresses in the comments archives now read ‘127.0.0.1’, the default IP that every PC calls itself for no doubt fascinating techie reasons. And the system will no longer store new IP addresses. Must dash – someone knocking at door.  

What have Hong Kong Customs been doing over the last couple of years of zero inbound travel, with hardly any arriving passengers with bags to check? Seems they’ve been training to switch completely to ‘Chinese-style’ (ie Prussian) marching at parades…

…in order to express [the department’s] sense of belonging to and patriotic feelings for the country.

The disciplined service said the People’s Liberation Army-style of drills will make performances more attractive, and help officers better integrate with the governance system of the country and enrich the practice of One country, Two systems.

‘Goose-stepping is more attractive than regular plain marching’ and ‘marching like John Cleese helps you integrate with the governance system of the country’. Discuss.

If you think learning to goose-step is a waste of taxpayers’ money – the ICAC is going to ‘work hard’ to bring exiled activist Ted Hui back to Hong Kong to prosecute him for encouraging people not to vote in the last legislative election. They have also been checking online to see if anyone is urging a boycott of the John Lee CE ‘election’, but haven’t found any cases (perhaps because it’s not really an election in the first place). Remember when these guys fought corruption?

Interesting little thread from a former District Council member on the long-awaited opening of the Shatin-Central MTR Link…

…a textbook case of failure of #HongKong public administration. Intertia of the gov, wrong priorities, weak oversight and loose corporate memory.

Apparently, the UK House of Lords has an annual evidence session with the President and VP of the UK Supreme Court, Lords Reed and Hodge. In the latest one, a month ago, the two judges answered questions about why they resigned from the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (scroll down to Q23). As you would expect, their comments are infuriatingly measured.