Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Macabre Sense of Humour of the Week Award goes to the Hong Kong government for creating a severe shortage of affordable housing, then having a photo-op of an official handing out fire extinguishers to tenants in tiny and dangerous subdivided apartments. In a Korean dystopia-flic, the next scene would be the guy’s entrails slithering down the grimy stairwell. 

A United Front zombie casts doubt on whether the Democratic Party will be allowed to run in the new fake-election system, saying it…

…must review its platform, respect the Communist Party-led state system, not act against national security to meet the minimum requirements of the principle of ‘patriots ruling Hong Kong’. This is the only way it could hope to be reborn.

Beijing’s overseers would probably like a token ultra-moderate to take part for the sake of appearances. Watch the DP agonize over this.

Another United Front drone says the Buy-One-Get-Two No Extra Charge locally-enacted Article 23 NatSec Law will – heard this before? – affect only a small group of people. ‘Who’, he goes on, ‘have been told repeatedly to stop’. Who wrote Tam’s lines for him? Do I detect the same spin-doctor who thought up the fire extinguisher PR stunt?

Similar you-won’t-feel-a-thing cheer from Financial Secretary Paul Chan, who says the Evergrande problem will have only a very minimal impact on Hong Kong – as our stock market hits a 52-week low, and the China-only index a five-plus years one. While over the border…

local authorities … are resorting to various measures to protect the interest of their communities [ie, to stop Evergrande from using local assets to pay off out-of-area obligations], as they are anxious to ensure stability and a protest-free period during the ruling Communist Party’s centenary [or any time].

To put it in context: these stats say salaries in Shenzhen are around a quarter of what they are in New York City, yet property prices are maybe a fifth higher. (Not sure of the source, or whether it includes migrant workers, etc, but it sounds about right – an affordability ratio of 30 or 40.)

Paul Chan’s confidence may be well-grounded: Beijing’s policymakers will surely blink at some point and do whatever it takes to stop the Mainland’s property bubble from bursting. Assuming, of course, they can. What happens if, for example, thousands of Mainland owners rush to sell their Hong Kong apartments? Contagion can be surprising sometimes.  

On cultural matters… Fascinating clip (in Canto) about how film-makers brought the streets of 1980s Hong Kong back to life for a movie about Anita Mui. Especially interesting for bores like me for whom anachronisms (hairstyles, dress, billboard ads’ typefaces) jump out and ruin recent-modern period dramas. Watch out for the venerable old Lee Theatre at 0.38. I remember watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet there – had to go to a nearby bar and order a double whisky afterwards.

A Stand News explainer on the ongoing second NatSec Law trial, of Ma Chun-man…

Unlike the city’s first national security trial, which ended in July, Ma is not accused of committing violence and is charged solely on the basis of what he said.

Lingnan University fires academics Hui Bo-keung and Lo Wing-sang critical of the NatSec regime. Better news for the boss at HKU, however.

The Confederation of Trade Unions formally disbands.

Nice Try of the Week Award goes to the HK Police for issuing special social-media quasi-memes marking Mahatma Gandhi and International Non-Violence Day. Security Secretary PK Tang can’t understand why many Hong Kong people dislike the cops. Also on Twitter, a selection of the HK Police’s greatest hits.

An ongoing rectification of Jiang Zemin-faction/Zeng Qinghong-linked Public Security and other officials in China deals with Sun Lijun and gets going on Fu Zhenghua. Asia Sentinel does a bit of digging and finds an intriguing, if not very specific, Hong Kong angle. (For more, see the original 2020 IRIS think-tank report – at least do a search on ‘Hong Kong’ to see the now-Security Secretary getting a mention. So far as anyone on planet Earth can tell, elite CCP factional power-struggles are going Xi Jinping’s way.) 

References of Hong Kong in many Mainland TV shows have been replaced with ‘大灣區’ – ‘Greater Bay Area’. Watch for RTHK and others to follow suit – for example ‘hugely popular Greater Bay Area movie star Jackie Chan’. Former CE CY Leung called for this new identity three years ago.

The SCMP reports a government Covid advisor as saying that opening Hong Kong’s border with the Mainland will take ‘at least four to five months of negotiations’. So that could be six, seven or eight months. Why can’t negotiations take four or five days – or hours, even? Or does the word ‘negotiations’ really mean ‘an excuse to continue sealing Hong Kong off from the rest of the world’?

In case you haven’t heard: the first batch of the CCP’s spiritual pedigree (you know – the one forged during the Party’s century-old endeavor) was officially released on Wednesday. It says so here.

Today’s local sub-batch of spiritual pedigree…

Hong Kong NatSec police charge a 16-year-old girl, and six others, with ‘conspiracy to incite the commission by other persons of the offence of subversion’. Assuming you can’t incite yourself, I guess we can strip this down to ‘conspiracy to incite subversion’. Or is the ‘by other persons’ part there to make clear the seven were not conspiring to incite one another? (Or can you incite yourself?)

Meanwhile, a 19-year-old is in jail and denied bail, accused of ‘inciting other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in overthrowing or undermining the basic system of the People’s Republic of China’.

I hope these two young women one day make it to a free society and put these charges right at the top of their resumes. If ‘Aged 16: charged with conspiracy to incite subversion’ doesn’t get you an interview, what will?

The trial begins of Captain America 2.0 – Ma Chun-man – for shouting and displaying slogans in public places with intent to incite secession on 20 occasions last year.

RTHK issues new editorial guidelines – full of NatSec blah blah blah, must cultivate national identity, uphold constitution, blah blah, but steer clear of involvement with foreign organizations or inciting hatred against the government, and much else. Guideline-compliant story here. Some extracts from the (apparently 100-page) rules here – how to deny Taiwan’s relations with other countries and when to pull material from online archives.

By a startling coincidence – or is someone obsessed with these things? – involvement with foreign organizations and inciting hatred will also crop up in the Article 23 NatSec legislation, which will fill gaps left (carelessly? in haste? deliberately?) by Beijing’s own NatSec Law. The hang-up about ‘inciting hatred of the Hong Kong government’ seems specifically driven by cops who get upset every time someone mocks them.

Lawmakers in the all-patriot Legislative Council take turns – the line goes on and on – to demand more respect and protection for the national flag.

Ten district council members are disqualified for not sounding sufficiently deep and meaningful when reciting their oaths. They include some from the Democratic Party, which is still debating whether to participate in the forthcoming LegCo quasi-elections. It’s hard to believe they will be so self-absorbed and obtuse as to participate now. Actually, it isn’t.

Some reading for the long weekend…

Columbia Journalism Review on what’s left of a free press in Hong Kong, and how they plan to keep going.

CNN on China’s new quarantine mega-facility, reflecting the zero-Covid approach to which Hong Kong must defer, even though the rest of the world is opening up again.

David Webb finds that, as a percentage of government annual revenue, the value of the land occupied by the Hong Kong Club is the same today (2.42%) as it was when the Club bought the plot in 1894. Who says markets are not perfect? 

Stand News (In Chinese) interviews a Hongkonger who works as a truck driver in the UK, and can’t handle all the enquiries he’s getting from goods vehicle licence holders back in his hometown.

The offshore 8964 Museum website is reportedly being blocked. And you can try for yourself here. There are degrees of Internet censorship, and experts say this example (government asking ISPs to block a site) is the least creepy and easy to circumvent, if that’s any consolation.

Never mind – you’ve still got RTHK, provided you don’t mind Xinhua propaganda presented without mention of its provenance.

Also in online NatSec news, heavy handed and apparently selective anti-doxxing action.

In the interests of sanity-preservation, just some links…

HKFP on Hong Kong prison authorities’ problems with political prisoners and M&Ms. 

A site called Naked Capitalism on why HSBC is – possibly – screwed.

Scholars Stage on Xi Jinping’s ’pivot to the state’…

What do K-pop fan groups, after school tutoring companies, Meituan delivery men, online algorithms, plastic surgeons, overheated housing markets, celebrity ranking lists, and tech monopolies have in common?

…Each [crackdown] targets an industry that seems to strip people of their agency and rob them of their dignity. Each seems to hijack healthy behavior with a set of short term incentives whose end results are self destructive and degrading.

A summary of People’s Daily article ‘Why we can succeed’. The answer, of course, is the CCP – without which Chinese would be starving and enslaved by evil foreigners. Speaking of whom: ’the British are bastards’, and other CCP views of the world.

On a literally brighter note: Hong Kong’s most beautiful and glamorous expat community, yellow-crested cockatoos – a common sight from my own apartment. 

Consistent sentencing guidelines were never the Hong Kong judiciary’s strong point. And then came the NatSec era. Now you get three months in prison for stabbing Long Hair, but nine years for stabbing Junius Ho. Simple explanation: in majority pro-democracy Hong Kong, pro-Beijing people are relatively scarce and have ‘endangered species’ protected status.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam voices embarrassingly fulsome approval for Beijing’s whiny fact sheet on ‘US Interference in Hong Kong Affairs and Support for Anti-China, Destabilizing Forces’. Among examples of dastardly American intrusion into domestic matters: putting electric candles in the consulate’s windows.

Which brings us to Security Secretary PK Tang, who says that commemorating the Tiananmen massacre may or may not be legal, depending on factors. The interesting thing here is the wording (from RTHK)…

…authorities would take into consideration a number of factors when judging whether it is legal for people to commemorate the ending of the student-led protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, but stressed that they could not attempt to overturn the government.

‘Ending of the student-led protests’ is a new euphemism – to be used by those who find ‘clearing the square’ too icky. (And how exactly do people holding vigils ‘attempt to overturn the government’?)

Tang was speaking after the Hong Kong Alliance formally disbanded. Stand News presents a list of 49 civil society organizations – mainly unions and protest groups – that have ceased to exist in the last nine months.

Chris PK Tang also says December’s Legislative Council elections pose a higher risk of violence, mayhem, carnage, terrorism, etc than the recent Election Committee polls, because there will be more voters. It took 5,000 valiant cops to ensure a peaceful election for the 4,380 voters in the EC ‘election’. If we scale that up, we will need maybe a million cops in December (plus three years to count all the ballots). However, that assumes people bother turning out to vote in rigged and pointless pseudo-polls. December is a nice time to go hiking and picnicking. It may be the authorities will need just one van of cops, plus 10 minutes to do the counting.

On the subject of counting ballots (if any) in December: the civil servants who oversee the process will have to undergo political screening to ensure ‘absolute loyalty’. To whom? Why – to the winners, of course!

Meng Wanzhou’s (personal) deferred prosecution agreement with the US Justice Dept suggests that the (Trump-era) case against her was not as strong as it could be. To Beijing, of course, she is royalty. The kidnapping of the two Michaels, and their subsequent freeing upon Meng’s release, are a one-off event.

The ‘US caved’ critics say that Beijing has now ‘learned that taking hostages works’. But the world has learned more vividly than ever that China really will arrest innocent foreign citizens for extortion purposes. Will the threat of hostage-taking make Western countries more likely to defer to the CCP’s wishes in future? If anything, it simply increases the Chinese regime’s reputation as thuggish and lawless (and confirms Huawei’s untrustworthy, quasi-government status).

The sudden resolution of this affair involved a classic example of the CCP prioritizing its domestic audience over its international reputation. The state media contrived a rapturous homecoming for Meng as a moment of great national pride, while not even mentioning her plea deal or the simultaneous release of the two Michaels (later saying they have been given ‘medical parole’). The CCP pumps up patriotic hubris among its subjects like it inflated expectations of ever-rising apartment prices. In the long run, Beijing’s ‘victory’ is likely to prove a pyrrhic one.

Will Beijing really feel emboldened enough to pull a comparable retaliatory/blackmail stunt again? It would be a sign of delusion rather than strength. With perfect timing: a Foreign Policy piece explaining the real problem – China is a declining power.

This week’s Not Creepy At All Award goes to Security Secretary PK Tang, who says he knows what you are thinking in your heart and (if it’s a forbidden thought) will arrest you for it. 

The weird – well, one weird – part is that he is afraid you might celebrate the Double Tenth, the anniversary on October 10 of the beginning of the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty. That movement was led by Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese national hero for whom a museum, park, heritage trail and vaccination-cum-sports centre are named here in Hong Kong. It sounds like patriots should be encouraged to mark it, but it is (or was) the national day of the Kuomintang-run Republic of China, which was defeated by the CCP in 1949. So long as a remnant of the rival RoC state remains in Taiwan to declare it the national holiday, the CCP will consider the event glorious but refuse to acknowledge the actual date.

Now it gets really confusing. PK Tang sees celebration of the RoC national day as tantamount to supporting Taiwan ‘secession’ or independence. But to true Taiwanese, the overthrow of the Qing dynasty is something that happened in a foreign country which later colonized their island, transplanting KMT symbols like Sun Yat-sen that remain as vestiges today. October 10, like the CKS memorial, is not theirs – it’s a Chinese anniversary. If you support Taiwan independence, ignore the Double Tenth. If Tang’s cops arrest anyone, it will probably be supporters of the KMT, who are the nearest thing Beijing has to pro-unification friends in Taiwan.

Another thing about Taiwan – if you run in a primary election there, you get on TV. In Hong Kong, they put you in jail without bail. And they adjourn your case so you stay there another two months at least.

RTHK’s English-language Twitter account, the station’s last bastion of hilariously sub-subversive headlines and snark, has ceased to update. 

A mish-mash of weekend reading and viewing,,,

From HKFP: how Hong Kong’s leaders have changed their tune on Tiananmen. (Part of a series on the rewriting of the past in Hong Kong.) 

The ‘improved’ election system – and Beijing’s deep concern for Hong Kong people – mean that the city’s housing problems will soon end, right? But not before Sun Hung Kai release their new project in Sai Kung, including a couple of units that are 88 square feet, or about the same as two king-size beds. A couple of hundred of the other apartments are more generous – roughly the size of a parking space.

Toll-booths of the HK-Zhuhai-Macao bridge in HK, seen from space (a similarly empty place). How many Sun Hung Kai micro-flats could fit here?

Brian Hioe live-tweeted a 10-hour conference held by various tankies (Qiao Collective, Code Pink, People’s Forum) on why the US and capitalism are to blame for everything and – most of all – China is wonderful. Not sure why. But if deranged nonentities are your thing, there’s lots to read…

She’s actually claiming that traditional Chinese medicine has a 90% effective rate in treating COVID, claims this can combat the “colonization of medical knowledge” … She claims that the US “annexed the island of Formosa”…  

CCP infiltration of British universities.

The Evergrande consensus forecast seems to be that Beijing will relax mortgage restrictions in order to encourage people to borrow money to buy overpriced apartments that they will leave empty. More on this, for those who like it: George Magnus on the tip of an iceberg; NPR interviews property buyers; and Anne Stevenson-Yang’s video comments from a couple of days ago in the form of quick-to-digest written words.

On out-of-area matters…

Over at Reddit there’s a Herman Cain Award for Trumpist hicks who publicly reject vaccines as the work of freedom-hating Satanic libtards – and then die of Covid. Officially, this is all in very bad taste. Unofficially…

…they have made their ICU beds. Now they can lie in them, and sadly, die in them.

British comedy actor Bernard Cribbins in amusing whodunit Dangerous Davies – The Last Detective, from 1981.

Rick Astley and a band called the Blossoms performing the Smiths’ tribute to Hong Kong’s Security Secretary, This Charming Man.

On one of my occasional inspection visits to Marks & Spencer, I find the US and UK are building on their new subs-for-Oz relationship by expanding cooperation – unwisely – into cuisine…

Bloomberg spots a recent shift in official wording of Hong Kong’s NatSec red lines: beforehand, you could be in trouble for doing things that ‘endanger national security’; now you’re in it for doing anything ‘contrary to the interests of national security’. The new phrasing first appeared in proposed changes to the film-censorship law, and then in charities tax guidelines.

Authorities may want to avoid arguing a specific film endangers national security, Kellogg said, as there’s a lower bar to censor movies that “merely run contrary” to its interests. That concept could also be applied to education, the arts and internet regulation, he said.

‘National security’ sounds rather abstract. Let’s say ‘Alice’. People were once forbidden to do anything that endangers Alice; now they can be jailed for doing anything contrary to the interests of Alice. That’s ‘lowering the bar’ enough to best keep out of her way.

RTHK3 host Hugh Chiverton disappears from the airwaves. An AP report on how Hong Kong’s new film censorship regime is cutting scenes from documentaries. And the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group becomes the latest civil society organization to disband before the cops come and round them up.

If you think Hong Kong’s NatSec clampdown has already become excessive, you’ll be interested to hear that there’s more to come: laws against ‘fake news’ and doxxing, plus the local National Security legislation required by Article 23 – which is apparently still needed to supplement the NatSec Law imposed by Beijing on July 1 2020. Get used to hearing the phrase ‘plugging loopholes’ a lot more in the coming months.

Bear in mind that Beijing’s local Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the HK Police NatSec Dept, plus other NatSec functions add up to a huge bureaucracy with thousands of staff and a budget of billions. They will need to continue finding new threats and arresting more subversives, if only to justify their own existence. To the extent that the plan is to impose genuine CCP-friendly Leninist-style governance, this must go on until Hong Kong becomes Mainland-without-the-capital-controls.

The Hong Kong Democracy Council announces its leadership line-up, including Alex Chow, Brian Leung and Nathan Law – sounding like a well-educated government in exile. It also has advisors, one of which is Stanford professor Larry Diamond, who supervised Regina Ip’s postgrad work. She’s quite proud of her Stanford connection, though I’m not sure the feeling is mutual.

Michael Pettis – one of the best observers on the subject – on what the Evergrande crisis means for China…

Moral hazard, in other words, underpinned the entire credit market.

That is why Chinese regulators have decided to have a showdown with creditors over Evergrande. By convincing lenders that they will no longer stand behind large Chinese borrowers, they are trying to transform the country’s financial system by making Chinese lenders more reluctant to fund nonproductive investment projects. 

Also worth reading/listening to, Anne Stevenson-Yang – a video (skip over the slightly annoying interviewer) on her early days in China and, eventually, Evergrande. Her views on contemporary events start around 21.30. (Among her thoughts: the Chinese middle class see falls in property prices as an unacceptable and unjust outrage; and asset price inflation has been so great in China that the only way out ultimately is RMB devaluation.)

From a discussion on ‘China experts’ at Sinocism… 

Basically, most people with a decent moral sense, solid intelligence, experience in China, and no monetary or status interest (i.e. not an ongoing businessperson, or else an academic with a prior reputation wedded to engagement or some postdoc theory of IR to uphold) tend to come down on the negative side of things, because any specific interaction with the current Xi regime leaves everyone with the same bad taste, and specific interactions can’t be papered over with the stupid Tu Zhuxi arguments about how Westerners just don’t understand Confucius.

Riveting live action from Sunday’s improved Election Committee ‘election’, with a whole 4,000-odd voters. Some of them had to wait more than an hour to cast their vote, and counting the ballots somehow took 13 hours. An HKFP op-ed on Hong Kong’s new political era (‘non-political’ might be a better term).

Most media continue to say ‘the oh-so powerful EC will elect/choose 40 LegCo members and the next Chief Executive’. At the very least, shouldn’t they say this is ‘the official definition of its function’ – or just use the trusted phrase ‘rubber-stamp’? Why do editors present the official fiction as fact?

The latest NatSec police round-up is of Student Politicism members on suspicion of ‘conspiracy to incite subversion’. The cops carry off big boxes of M&M chocolate, wet wipes and panty liners (prisons-compliant supplies for inmates) as evidence.

The CTU, being smeared by Beijing-run press as an agent of foreign forces, begins to disband. Hong Kong local officials suddenly find the body plays a role in employee training and must now hurry to make alternative arrangements. Several minor unions are also dissolving themselves before the NatSec police come to round them up. Hong Kong Journalists Association next.

Holmes Chan at Vice reports on the ‘surreal trial’ of Tong Ying-kit, complete with scoop-of-the-month quotes from a judge…

[Tong] didn’t do much of anything—he didn’t commit murder or arson,” the judge said wryly. “He is the most benevolent terrorist in the world.”

…the judge said that, before Tong, they had never heard of jury-less criminal trials at the High Court. It was standard to have a jury even in cases involving triad bosses or violent sociopaths. If the government wanted to protect jurors, the judge said, “There must be some other way apart from abolishing the whole system.”

At Hong Kong U, academics say…

…they are more cautious about what they say in class, afraid that their own students could report them to authorities

…rumors circulate among professors and students that a student who got a grade they didn’t like reported their lecturer to the National Security Hotline, set up so the public can inform authorities about breaches of the national security law, according to two lecturers.

Such fears are also affecting primary and secondary schools, though so-called officials deny it…

“The allegation by the so-called departing teachers is totally biased and unfounded on evidence,” the Education Bureau said in a statement to Reuters.

Charles Mok on how the overdue updating of Hong Kong’s privacy laws has morphed into (politically motivated) restrictions on doxxing…

The government may only want to weaponize the privacy law to arm itself with yet another tool against expression of dissent, rather than genuinely protecting people’s privacy…

The chilling effects will be immense, leading to even more self-censorship and further erosion of Hong Kong’s freedom of expression. It will not only be another brick in the territory’s new great firewall of internet censorship, but also leave Hong Kong’s privacy protection regime further behind the rest of the world.

A non-pro-Beijing column sneaks into the SCMP: getting a taste of life under Communism, where everything is about ‘patriotism’…

The more accurate reading is that a patriot is someone who accepts Communist Party rule of Hong Kong and will unquestionably do as they are told. That’s a tall order for people trained as academics or journalists among professions whose job it is to research, analyse, strive for accuracy and point out what’s good and bad.

Juxtaposition of the day: a 2017 quote from Anne Stevenson-Yang about Evergrande – ‘biggest pyramid scheme ever’ and a 2017 quote from Morgan Stanley on why Evergrande’s use of leverage is ‘a positive’. In a similar vein, the Asia’s Best Companies awards picked up by Sinic Holdings earlier this year. That’s the one that fell 87% yesterday.

An essential holiday culinary tip from the SCMP: how you can make mooncakes at home.

Today is the day Hong Kong ‘elects’ an enhanced and supposedly more representative – but also all-patriotic – Election Committee. Some weird stats: 99.92% of adults can’t vote; in other words, there are fewer than 4,900 voters – a larger number of police are dedicated to ‘election’ duties. And of the EC’s 1,500 seats, only 364 are contested.

Why are some 6,000 cops needed? The authorities say it is to ensure protesters don’t disrupt the exercise – though they are flattering themselves to imagine anyone even cares that much.

Keep seeing references to the Election Committee as now ‘super-powerful’, as if its members have some major political influence the rest of us do not. They don’t. The CCP is a Leninist institution and does not share political power. What will make the 1,500 EC members different is that they are happy to go along with a ceremonial charade that makes them look superficially like insiders. Worth bearing this in mind when reports call the EC – or subsets of them like property tycoons – ‘kingmakers’ or some such. The CCP does not delegate serious decisions to local ‘elites’, or anyone. The EC 1,500 will not choose the Chief Executive next year. Even the Legislative Council members they appear to elect this December will no doubt be those on ‘recommended’ lists Beijing officials circulate beforehand.

A quick film review…

Saw Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, starring Tony Leung. It starts off with some quite absorbing mayhem in a bus and dangling off a Macau skyscraper, but then lapses into mostly tedious wushu fight scenes and an exceptionally tiresome bout near the end between two dragons. It has some funny moments, mostly thanks to a hitherto unheard-of actress called Awkwafina. And some impressive special effects, such as the surreal landscapes and animals of a magic village – of which we get only a brief glimpse because we must move on to yet more fight scenes.

Apparently, the film is noteworthy for its authentic representation of Asian-ness in a Marvel Comics Universe genre context (karaoke, a pushy grandmother, etc). Some critics detect an allegory whereby Leung is ‘hegemonic, patriarchal imperial China’, the village is ‘cultural China’, and the young Asian-American hero played by Simu Liu is the Chinese diaspora. A totally different interpretation rests on the (supposed) similarity between Simu Liu and a youthful Xi Jinping. There are doubts that Beijing will let it be shown in the Mainland, though not for either of these reasons.

I would rate it maybe 4 out of 10. It would have been better if the combatants just shot each other with guns, which would free up more time for amazing CGI scenic shots, if not plots or characters. But I guess feeding the teenage boys and incels their whirling-in-circles wushu battles is where the money is.