Why people in Hong Kong don’t let the government know of their positive Covid test results. (Basically, they’re not stupid.)
You couldn’t have thought, as 2022 began, that Carrie Lam’s administration still had much more credibility to lose – but oh boy did they find ways to do it. In the last few days I’ve gone from being skeptical that a serious or semi-serious lockdown will happen, to less sure, and now back to cautious doubt that it’ll happen (give or take some light symbolic theatrics).
Latest indication: the Mainland health expert seconded to Hong Kong sounds humble (that is, no mouth-frothing rants demanding lockdowns). Government mouthpiece RTHK reports skepticism from local medics. Sciencereports signs that Chinese officials are looking beyond zero-Covid.
(Loads of useful HKFP Covid coverage, including info on transport arrangements, here.)
Some weekend reading…
Latest on Hong Kong as tech-hub – a Mainland tech-game company with a Mongkok address operates one of the world’s biggest Bible apps…
Many user actions on the KJV bible app, including pressing the “Amen” button, will lead to pop-up video ads.
Wish I’d thought of it!
Good discussion of Beijing’s future strategy following Ukraine invasion…
China is likely also shocked to watch Western countries butcher 🇷🇺’s economy & isolate 🇷🇺 government. It probably swears never to allow this happen on itself.
Russian chess king (therefore gifted strategist?) and longtime Putin-dissenter Gary Kasparov on what the West should do in Ukraine.
For some light relief, check out Noah Verrier – an artist who does still lifes of such items as hamburgers and jelly beans.
And a three-minute dummy’s guide to the evolutionary, historic and economic theories for male supremacy…
I have condensed the entire literature on the origins of patriarchy into 10 hypotheses.
’No full lockdown’ and other glimmers of common sense – until further notice, hurry while stocks last – from the CE as Covid cases go past 50,000 a day. (Background on how officials compile the data.)
Breaking through the Covid gloom, a few rays of NatSec… Human rights lawyer Paul Harris leaves Hong Kong. And criminalization of speech continues with a NatSec judge’s conviction of Tam Tak-chi for sedition. Some depressing details and analysis of the judgement here and here. A round-up of the round-ups.
Some recommended reading for the mid-late week…
A thread linking the declines in Covid-era Hong Kong’s governance and in political and human rights…
…over the course of two years of Beijing eroding the city’s democracy and local politics, Hong Kong’s ruling class has been completely severed from the people, and chained ever-more tightly to performative acts to signal fealty to China, rather than its own residents.
…The panic-buying and hysteria in Hong Kong is a natural outcome of the confused public messaging that comes from a govt that no longer truly has the autonomy to craft, tweak and shift policy on its own…
[The Hong Kong government] lacks strategic ability; it operates in excessively siloed ways; it is almost innumerate; it privileges performance over substance and seems oblivious to actual human behaviour; it is often callous in the extreme; its communications are appalling.
Where are political talents like Eddie Chu Hoi-dik, Gwyneth Ho and all those energetic community-minded Legislative and District Council members again?
More international coverage of Hong Kong’s descent, this time from AFP. CNBC marks the 100,000th BNO Hongkonger applying to emigrate to the UK.
DW on the documentary Revolution Of Our Timesshowing in Taiwan – the article omits the title of the film.
If you’re getting bored reading how China will come out of the Ukraine crisis a big winner, some alternative – and probably more realistic – views. In HKFP, academic Paul G Harris examines the damage to China’s reputation…
What was Beijing thinking when it embraced an autocrat who had already annexed a huge chunk of a neighbouring country’s territory – the Crimean Peninsula – and deployed his war machine and mercenaries to other parts of Ukraine as well as to Georgia, Libya, Syria and beyond? At the very least, Chinese officials seem to have displayed poor understanding of Russian history and the psychology of Putin.
As Ukraine and Zelensky have shown, aggressors face even stronger sanctions from global opinion when they launch attempts to take over democratic underdogs. And China, in this regard, seems even less prepared than Russia to deal with the toxic fallout.
A Forbes op-ed looks at the economic price Beijing might have to pay for aligning itself with Russia.
…wrote a letter to Lam and said there have been so many conflicting messages over the past few weeks in Hong Kong about the virus from experts which left the public being very confused and nervous, citing the recent panic buying.
…”We need clarity on what’s the way forward. If the experts do feel like it would peak at mid-March then let the government say it loudly and send the message so that people can relax.”
He also said that the public need words of encouragement from authorities because they are scared about their livelihood and future and feel they are getting punished for being infected.
In the last 24 hours we have gone from ‘Lockdown in mid-March or no?’ to ‘definite lockdown from March 17’ to ‘lockdown at end March 26-April 3 (rumoured)’. God knows what it will be by lunchtime today. With this sort of leadership, panic-buying at supermarkets is quite rational.
We are told that keeping everyone at home is necessary to ‘facilitate testing’. But why is this so? Perhaps the real reason is that those uppity Hong Kong civil servants still wedded to Western thinking had deviated from Beijing’s correct path by saying a lockdown would not work for Hong Kong. Maybe Mainland officials are now intent on forcing millions of people to stay for days stuck in tiny homes just to prove that the local bureaucrats were wrong.
HKU’s Gabriel Leung says that, if used, compulsory universal PCR testing …
…should be deployed mid- to late-April when case numbers will already be at very low levels in order to truly achieve elimination, or “zero covid”…
Doing so earlier, especially when case numbers will still be too high to properly and appropriately isolate and care for, paying particular attention to population mental and emotional wellbeing in HK’s unique context, would not be recommended.
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. HK01looks 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, HKFPhere) 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.”
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’?
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 Timescontrasts 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…
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.
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″…
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.
Tracing, testing, treatment and quarantine resources still target every infection instead of prioritising high-risk groups, such as the elderly, causing widespread frustration.
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.
