Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Hong Kong’s Health Secretary says a full lockdown might still take place, despite previous denials. Thus panic-buying. That said, even a ‘full’ lockdown would not be a really ‘full’ one – with the stock exchange staying open, for example. And private and international schools (known to officials as ‘the ones our kids go to’) are exempted from the early summer vacation. 

One of Beijing’s top health people arrives to great fanfare, and Chief Executive Carrie Lam delivers a not-very-reassuring speech stressing the importance of and need for Mainland support… 

The CE said Hong Kong is not able to handle the Omicron outbreak on its own and that’s why in early February she asked the central government for help.

“The central government is highly concerned about Hong Kong’s epidemic situation and it cares about Hong Kong people’s wellbeing. It has been coordinating everything Hong Kong needs and has been responding to us immediately and actively,” she said.

…“With the strong support from the central government, the SAR government will firmly follow the instruction of President Xi Jinping, and will bear the main responsibility and make it its top priority to contain the outbreak,” she said.

“The epidemic is ruthless and the situation is critical. But with the full support of the central government, Hong Kong will be able to come out safely from danger.”

There is a gap between Carrie’s patriotic alarmism and her leading officials’ actions (or lack of them). Reading between the lines, it looks like local officials are trying, in their inept way, to adapt to the realities of Omicron – but are being pulled in the opposite direction by Beijing’s determination to prove it must and can suppress the outbreak. It’s hard to tell incompetence not just from malice, but from resistance.

The semi-‘full lockdown’ that may or may not happen is still another two weeks away – by which time the exercise will be more futile than ever. (Tests for 7.5 million every three days?) Yet Beijing has put a lot of effort into convincing everyone that it’s the only way. HK01 looks inside grim-looking Mainland-built isolation and treatment facilities (English summary here), which Xinhua hails as magnificent feats of ultra-quick construction.

Some interesting charts on Hong Kong’s Covid situation here.

To add to the mood of despair – births in Hong Kong hit a 56-year low.

Announcements and reports (dense press releases here and here, lighter RTHK reads here and here, HKFP here) confirm that Hong Kong authorities are relaxing certain anti-Covid measures. Examples include handing out rapid test kits rather than using slower compulsory testing, and discharging double-vaccinated patients who test negative after one week. Given the mismatch between the rising numbers of cases and testing/isolation capacity, officials simply have no choice but to allow isolation at home and earlier release from quarantine, while insisting it’s still ‘dynamic zero’.

Maybe this is a bit premature – but what’s the chance that the planned city-wide triple mass-testing is abandoned, and everyone simply given self-testing kits and self-isolation instructions?

At the very least, could it be that infections are so numerous by the time the mega-testing starts that we will have an option of reporting a positive self-test result on-line, rather than booking three tests and turning up to them all?

Or has Beijing committed to so many high-profile projects (building isolation facilities, sending medics, etc) that we have go through with it in order to make the CCP look and feel useful? In which case, will they revert to the previous tighter rules when case numbers fall? Just how bad is Beijing prepared to look in its efforts to appear good?

(Under ‘emergency decree’, a thousand Mainland care workers are coming into Hong Kong, and environmental rules are swept aside to build isolation facilities. One new facility is luring staff from regular hospitals with HK$50,000 salaries.)

More international coverage – and unfortunate comparisons with Singapore – of Hong Kong from France 24, AP (Reg not amused) and the (paywalled) FT…

The territory’s commitment to a controversial zero-Covid strategy has made it clear that Beijing’s policy priorities are paramount and will be enforced even if they are not in Hong Kong’s best interests as an international financial centre.

…While it would be much easier to reserve hospital beds for severe Covid cases and let mild and asymptomatic ones isolate at home, that would … represent the first major failure of Xi’s zero-Covid policy.

…“The mistake [Lam] made was not making vaccinations mandatory,” said one person close to the chief executive. “It came down to the president finally blowing his top and reading the riot act to [Hong Kong’s] government. Suddenly everyone is scrambling around.”

Some thoughts from Dr Owen…

Narrative matters

We had a choice between a planned or forced pivot

We chose King Canute and Nero rather than science

Dynamic zero chance of that being the best strategy for population health

It’s a bit late, but in case you haven’t – get that third dose, and make it BioNTech…

…after receiving a booster, the effectiveness of three doses of the BioNTech vaccine may be as high as 89 per cent, declining to 86 per cent after three months and 77 per cent after six months, whereas three doses of Sinovac may only be 36 per cent effective, falling drastically to 19 per cent after three months, and standing at a mere 8 per cent after six months.

Parallels between Ukraine and (potentially) Taiwan are inexact, but several come to mind. First, obviously, an irredentist dictatorship is invading a free democratic country. Second, assuming they conquer the place, what will the Russians do with it and its largely hostile population? Has the aggressor thought this through? Which brings us to a third: does the dictator concerned simply have a surprising ‘risk appetite’ – or is he paranoid, surrounded by yes-men and deluded and ‘living in his own world’?

Carnegie on Beijing’s impossibly conflicting aims over Ukraine…

Beijing cannot reconcile [its] three competing objectives. And since it cannot have all three, it will have to jettison one or another, or else uncomfortably shift its position from day to day under the glare of international scrutiny. China’s almost certain choice will be to abandon its principles while prioritizing power politics and practical considerations.

Back home, former Hospital Authority head PY Leung predicts a million Covid cases in Hong Kong by late April…

…he said Hong Kong is way past the best time to execute mandatory testing and full-scale lockdown, given the severe lack of quarantine facilities, making it impossible to control the spread of Covid.

…The case numbers are expected to decline after reaching the peak, he said, adding that the priorities now for the government are to boost the vaccination rate, cure patients in critical condition, and support patients undergoing home isolation. 

HKU’s Gabriel Leung meanwhile calls on the government to lift flight bans and let Hongkongers stranded overseas back into the city.

Hopefully, neither expert will be penalized for their implicit criticism. NatSec Police arrest bubble-tea vendors opposing anti-Covid measures for sedition.

More on rule-by-law… The Hong Kong government uses emergency powers to allow Mainland medics to work here. This is essentially a means to rule by decree. More on use of the Emergency Regulations Ordinance from David Webb.

Also via Webb, a government minister tries to explain the weird announcement in the Budget barring landlords from evicting small and medium businesses.

More coverage of Covid policies: Asia Times contrasts Hong Kong’s approach with those of other countries. And, as you would expect, the Diplomat puts ‘massively pissed off’ more politely…

Hong Kong residents are becoming increasingly annoyed with the administration’s insistence on sticking to China’s “zero-COVID” strategy…

Cue a protest at Penny’s Bay.

Some 40,000 people left Hong Kong in the last couple of weeks. This will partly reflect barriers against arrivals leaving people unable to fly in, and partly Mainlanders moving back over the border. But a significant proportion – over half? – must be people quitting for good. On which, the UK extends its BNO rights to over-18s born since 1997. If they’re quick they might be able to catch the forthcoming Hong Kong film festival there.

University World News on the rectification of Hong Kong’s educators…

Beijing sees the city’s education system as being behind attitudes that brought millions of people, including school children, onto the streets in 2019. Hong Kong teachers are being pressured to show open loyalty to Beijing.

Slavery and torture for Chinese migrant workers in Sihanoukville.

Possible repercussions for Russia’s economy.

The only best – very funny – novel on a Ukrainian theme I’ve ever read.

For the serious hardcore food-porn fans – how to debone a pig’s head,

Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan delivers his Budget. Among the exciting highlights… At the first sign of a slight weakening in housing prices, mortgage-cap relaxation to help prop up the market. Money-down-the-toilet subsidies for InnoLife healthtech hub-zones and companies hoping to seize Greater Bay Area ‘opportunities’. Funds to prepare for a resumption – as if life’s not depressing enough – of tourism. And to shut you all up, another HK$10,000 in consumption vouchers for everyone.

Do we see evidence that Beijing officials are starting to micromanage local revenue and spending policy? There’s a massive increase in the police vehicle and equipment budget to HK$500 million, for flying anti-sedition surveillance robots or whatever. Some of the tech subsidies will go to Mainland institutions. And of course the HK$100 billion for ‘Northern Metropolis’ infrastructure. (Given the extra housing the region will provide, this is arguably sensible – certainly better value than a bridge to Zhuhai or the deranged Lantau reclamation.) But mostly, the Budget is the usual predictable display of Hong Kong bureaucrats’ vision and imagination.

Back in the Covid here-and-now… Some interesting comments from yesterday on the feasibility and/or pointlessness of mass-testing. And more today from a health expert who ponders the possibility of a full citywide lockdown but doubts that the authorities can deliver food to everyone for 14 days. The story also quotes lawmaker and businessman Michael Tien, who was initially skeptical but now proposes a ‘strictly enforced’ nine-day lockdown with one person per household allowed out for an hour a day to buy food…

…he changed his mind after “looking at [his] retail numbers [which] dropped 70 percent from the weeks before,” Tien said.

“The situation now is that business has dropped to a point where it doesn’t make a difference whether you’re open or not,” he said. “Nine days is very short.”

So come on, people opposing lockdown – stop being so selfish, and think of the G2000 clothing chain.

Covid cases in Hong Kong have reached 7,000 a day and are probably doubling every three days. Despite this, flights from the US, UK, the Philippines, India and other places remain banned to keep out a possible handful of infected passengers. But that’s the least of the weirdness.

Everyone will have to attend three Covid tests during March, and the government will attempt to build enough new isolation facilities to handle all the infections that are discovered. Everything is being done ‘with Central Government support’. But even the promised new isolation and treatment facilities (Lok Ma Chau Loop, land loans from developers, etc) will be full within days at expected infection-growth rates. 

An expert doubts whether the authorities can manage to isolate people fast enough (within 24 hours) to dent the disease’s spread. And he’s reckoning on mass-testing revealing 20,000-30,000 cases a day, when forecasts show the real figure could reach maybe 10 times that. 

Officials must first organize the logistics of a million tests a day. By the time they begin, Covid will probably have already infected so many Hongkongers that it’ll be irrelevant.

For extra added weirdness, schools’ summer vacation will take place in March-April to free up premises for tests, vaccinations and isolation. (The Easter break will be in… August?)

One expert (last Standard link) foresees outbreaks being contained within three months. The whole wave of Omicron will sweep through the population in that time anyway.

It looks as if Beijing is demanding massive stage-management of a ‘dynamic zero whatever’ policy in order for the CCP to claim – after nature takes its course – that it valiantly drove the virus out of Hong Kong. The official line is that this will protect the elderly, even though prioritizing suppression over mitigation will quite possibly have the opposite effect. Everyone must pretend that this makes sense.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam wants lawmakers to ask fewer questions on the government’s annual Budget so officials can focus on Covid. She also feels the ‘war’ on Covid should not be hindered by law.

The next few months will challenge not just our physical but mental health.

There are forces of nature. There is the power of science. But nothing can override Leninist target-setting. Loyalists declare that Beijing is giving Hong Kong two months to get the Covid outbreak under control.

While Hong Kong officials and media grovel in gratitude for a shipment of voodoo quack TCM, Singapore authorities dismiss the stuff…

Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen is not approved for the treatment of COVID-19 symptoms, said the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) on Wednesday (Nov 17), adding that such claims are disallowed.

…”We strongly advise members of the public not to fall prey to unsubstantiated claims or spread unfounded rumours that herbal products can be used to prevent or treat COVID-19″…

More unflattering info on Lianhua Qingwen here.

Some mid-week reading…

Good Atlantic piece on Hong Kong Journalists Association chair Ronson Chan and the decline of press freedom in the city.

Al Jazeera looks at the quasi-Great Firewall coming down over the Hong Kong Internet.

From France 24, whispered threats and mysterious phone calls – the murky figures who scare Hong Kong activists and media into silence. 

And from HKFP, a nice basic intro to Cold War II from HKEdU’s Michael G Harris…

Another flaw in China’s strategy is that it relies on unreliable partners. Some of the world’s most dastardly regimes and autocrats, many of them with precarious holds on power and precious little public support, form the edifice of China’s alternative, authoritarian world order. As the United States learned many times during the Cold War, supporting autocratic and unpopular regimes can create more problems than it solves.

Reuters on how Hong Kong’s Covid cure is worse than the disease…

Tracing, testing, treatment and quarantine resources still target every infection instead of prioritising high-risk groups, such as the elderly, causing widespread frustration. 

(Not to mention arbitrary and cruel punitive enforcement.) Oh and…

The government did not respond to a request for comment on whether its zero-covid policy had contributed to the current problem.

Instead, top officials must now perform Beijing’s ancient ‘Several Somethings’ Ritual, and broadcast it through press releases. During a recent cross-border Covid cooperation teleconference…

[Chief Secretary John] Lee expressed gratitude towards President Xi Jinping for his important instruction on anti-epidemic work of the HKSAR. He added that the HKSAR Government would assume the main responsibility in accordance with the instruction, make every effort with staunch determination to achieve the target of “dynamic zero infection”, and fulfill the three “all-s” and two “guarantees” as instructed by President Xi.

(Editor’s note: CCP house style is ‘the “Three Alls” and the “Two Guarantees”’.)

Public health as political performance. Top officials know (presumably) they cannot successfully implement Xi’s orders because suppressing the spread of the virus in Hong Kong is no longer practically feasible. Yet they must overtly praise his wisdom and proclaim their eagerness to obey – with ‘staunch determination’.

So Hong Kong must pretend to embark on a futile attempt to suppress the pandemic through mass-testing and hospitalizing/quarantining barely symptomatic cases. Maybe this would/does work in the Mainland, where a city can go through this while the other 99% of the country absorbs the extra demand for personnel and overall economic shock. This won’t be the case in far more self-contained Hong Kong, give or take some token medics.

And there’s public acceptance. Thanks to official propaganda, Mainlanders believe that the rest of the world is in pre-vax Delta-era chaos, suffering millions of deaths (even Mainlanders in Hong Kong are susceptible – hence recent reports that some are fleeing illegally across the border). The CCP reinforces this narrative through high-profile but pointless measures like examining imports of frozen food. 

Most Hongkongers, on the other hand, are aware that other countries are opening up and increasingly ‘living with Covid’. They will know, when they are forced to stand in line in the cold for weekly tests, that the whole thing is a charade. Or, to the extent it has a purpose, it’s a pretext for a longer-term tightening of social controls. 

And preparation for further rectification of local elites and strengthening of rule by patriots. From the Economist (paywalled)…

With overt opposition crushed, attention is turning to “soft resistance” among Hong Kong’s administrators. Civil servants stand accused of nostalgia for British rule, and of secretly envying Western countries that choose to live with covid in the name of individual freedoms…

…Ren Yi, a Beijing-based blogger read by many of China’s media and political elites, thinks that pro-establishment Hong Kong politicians are reluctant to tell national leaders that they cannot enforce full, mainland-style controls. Mr Ren, whose pen-name is Chairman Rabbit, does not welcome this reality. But he felt a duty to write a much-cited recent post about the power of Hong Kong’s “deep state”, in order to “try to lower Beijing’s expectations”.

…Mainland scholars urge Hong Kong to accept pandemic help from the central government to boost national pride. They charge those seeking access to the outside world with elitism: opening to the mainland, they say, is what the masses want. China’s top official in Hong Kong, Luo Huining, last month warned the city against “self-pity” over its role as an adjunct to China’s overall development. Behind debates about public health, arguments about loyalty lurk.

William Nee in the Diplomat sees possible parallels between Beijing’s imposition of Zero-Covid on Hong Kong and repression in Xinjiang…

For powerful figures in Beijing it is not the infectious nature of the variant, but rather the corrupt Western sympathies of the Hong Kong elite.

…whatever the scientific and policy merits, it will be harder for the Chinese government to back down from a zero COVID policy now that it has been given a strong ideological dimension. 

…Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing elite may find that they are next on the chopping block.

And now on your knees to worship the ‘Chinese traditional medicine’ shipments.

Hong Kong authorities consider city-wide Covid testing. How can they roll this out with just one or two weeks’ notice? Do 7.5 million people have to line up for hours? In the streets? In bad weather? (Apparently, it would be done by ID Card number.) Actually – 22 million people…

Up to a million people would be tested every day, and everyone would have to go through three tests within three weeks.

All 177,000 civil servants will be on standby, with their boss mentioning Xi Jinping’s instructions to battle the outbreak.

What will the authorities do with the 100,000, 200,000 or whatever cases they detect? Why not put the same effort into vaccinating the elderly? 

Strange to think that after National Education, fake universal suffrage, the extradition law amendment, the National Security Law, elimination of a semi-representative legislature, the shutting of Apple Daily and arrests of pan-dem figures, Beijing’s ultimate alienation of Hong Kong would result from imposing bad, PR-driven public-health policy.

Meanwhile, hospitals and staff are exhausted, stressed and buckling. More pictures here.

Advice from OT&P…

In our opinion the majority of people in Hong Kong are likely to be infected over the next 2-3 months. A recent review in the Lancet suggests that up to 90% of these cases will have no symptoms^[1]. For the majority of the rest, especially the vaccinated, it will be somewhere between a mild cold and a bad flu.

CMP looks at how Xi Jinping’s ‘important instructions’ on Covid to Hong Kong have not been reported in the Mainland…

Given the preeminent status of Xi Jinping within official CCP discourse, we would generally expect anything bearing the label “important instructions” to have pride of place on the front page of the official People’s Daily as well as top provincial CCP papers. But this is not what happened with the directive on Hong Kong. Instead, it has been entirely absent from the mainland media.

Some weekend reading…

George Magnus’s forecast for China…

Common prosperity is supposed to build a superior socialist society in which innovation and productivity define a confident and modern China. It might. Yet it is more likely to be a governance own-goal in which the contradiction between the political control the party craves, and the incentives for innovation and productivity it needs cannot be resolved under current political settings.

How to categorize China? Communist? State capitalist? Something with Chinese characteristics? Andrew Batson asks… 

[Jude Blanchette remarked] “It’s patently obvious that China is not a state for workers and the proletariat, and has become one of the most deeply unequal societies in the world … your European welfare state will do better than China.”

China today obviously does not look like much like China in the 1960s, or the Soviet Union in the 1950s, or Yugoslavia in the 1970s: all uncontroversial examples of actually existing socialism. 

(His answer is to focus not on the economic system but the governmental/control structures. It’s Leninism.)  

From Geremie Barme, a translation of an essay by an anonymous writer with the pen name of Fang Zhou – an appendix to a larger piece entitled Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, on what Barme describes as Xi’s ‘totalitarian nostalgia’.

Vice asks whether Eileen Gu is a suitable role model for China’s young women. (On my ‘to read if bored enough’ list, so the answer remains a mystery to me.) 

On out-of-area matters for the hardcore curious – a long but engaging YouTube look at NFTs.

How’s this for a dilemma? Local state newspapers again warn Hong Kong – in Xi Jinping’s name – to suppress the Covid outbreak at all costs. And a loyalist advisor says that Beijing above all fears social instability here. Does anyone in Carrie Lam’s administration have the courage to tell their bosses that Mainland-style anti-Covid measures are more likely to provoke public anger (maybe civil disobedience or even protests) than the lack of them?

Lau Siu-kai’s comments on Wednesday came after Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao quoted President Xi Jinping as saying that the SAR government must shoulder the main responsibility of reining in the pandemic.

“If the Covid situation gets out of hand and people’s dissatisfaction accumulates, leading to all sorts of anti-government behaviour… that would not be what the central government wants to see,” he told RTHK.

…He said local authorities may now be under pressure to consider measures less welcomed by society, including real-name contact tracing and getting more people vaccinated “through harsher means”.

Carrie’s (perhaps understandable) tactic is to thank Beijing profusely. Back in Hong Kong bureaucrats’ comfort zone, she asks property tycoons to find hotel rooms for quarantine.  According to the SCMP…

The liaison office said Xi’s message had “injected strong, positive energy” into the city. “Sectors in society are greatly encouraged and expressed one after another that President Xi’s important instructions have made Hong Kong people feel extraordinarily warm,” it said.

Among Beijing’s priorities: to show that the CCP can outperform the West through its PR-driven zero-Covid approach; and to use Covid as a pretext to encourage ‘integration’ and to impose Mainland-style social controls like surveillance apps on Hong Kong. If only it were just a deadly public-health issue!

Oh no – God the Anglican church has entered the picture. If a city-wide mass-testing takes place next week, the authorities will no doubt find tens of thousands of Covid cases. Reverend Koon, in his capacity as a lawmaker, suggests quarantine camps over the border. Another member of the all-patriot legislature proposes a Berlin-style airlift dropping cattle from drones (or something) to ease Hong Kong’s food-supply problem. 

The pandemic rages, and it is clear that Hong Kong’s leaders never bothered to plan for the stage when infections hit over 2,000 a day. But relax – the authorities have everything in place to protect us from a singer with ‘seditious intent’ (performing a song including the words ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times’).

The government’s Covid measures are less robust. But beneath the confusion, it seems to be transitioning to a more pragmatic approach. Not through conviction, but because – without extreme large-scale lockdowns that paralyze the city – there is no choice but to accept that the virus is going to spread. Officials can’t admit this, so the shift is likely to be awkward and tentative (don’t panic!) and presented as fine-tuning rather than abandoning the sacred ‘zero-dynamic whatever’ policy. 

From Dr Owens…

Counterintuitive, but in a pandemic the last thing you want is infectious people in hospital, unless needing treatment. Risk to other patients/HCWs.

‘More pragmatic’ by the way, does not mean ‘humane’.

Some mid-week reading…

From Michael C Davis – Hong Kong: How Beijing Perfected Repression…

Beijing seeks to justify this [NSL] imposition by asserting its inherent sovereign authority to govern Hong Kong as it wishes. To accept that reasoning, however, would be to undermine the very foundation of Hong Kong’s separate system and make nonsense of the many guarantees that the PRC has offered under the “one country, two systems” rubric. Hong Kong’s comprehensive transformation reflects an effort, common to autocratic regimes, “to hollow out from within critical institutions safeguarding fundamental freedoms.”

And in The Diplomat, how foreign judges are complicit in Hong Kong’s crackdown.