Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Over the weekend, I searched for, eventually located, tortuously downloaded, and – after scrabbling around for and fathoming out how to use the appropriate software – unzipped the entire series of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, the late Vivian Stanshall’s work of dramatic genius which appeared on the John Peel radio show in the UK many, many years ago.  It was a constructive and socially useful endeavour, at least by the standards of Hong Kong politicians and activists who spent the time forging Lightbulbgate into a weapon with which to beat luckless Chief Executive Donald Tsang.

The premise is that in drafting last week’s policy address, Sir Bow-Tie deliberately included a measure to subsidize citizens’ purchases of energy-efficient lightbulbs in order to boost business for his son’s father-in-law, who is the local Philips Lighting distributor.  Not even his most cynical, distrustful and malicious critics believe that Donald would stoop to such laughably desperate depths.  (Not to mention the embarrassment he must feel now the world has learned that his boy married into trade.)  So the charge is that he erred in not declaring an interest – or at least an offspring’s spouse’s parent’s.  Essentially, Donald has handed his detractors an opportunity on a plate to give him a good kicking and throw accusations around of collusion with big business (though noble companies like Li Ka-shing’s Hongkong Electric are hardly going to benefit if we all switch from incandescent to fluorescent bulbs).

Or that’s what it seems.  But could it be that Donald is in fact displaying Machiavellian powers of deviousness here?  Could it be that he inserted this bit of quasi-nepotism into his speech in order to distract his opponents’ easily amused attentions away from the wide range of far more dismal proposals in the policy agenda?

The only parts of the policy address that weren’t junk were the plans to conserve some older buildings in over-developed Central and to ease up a bit on the restrictions that prevent people from using underutilized space in old factory buildings.  And these aren’t Donald’s ideas.  In fact, despite the touching memories of gamboling barefoot, Huck Finn-like, along Hollywood Road as a young lad, he hates them.  As a colonial-trained bureaucrat, he firmly believes old public buildings are for knocking down, so the government can sell the land and add to its bulging reserves; and he is no fan of opening up private space for a wider range of economic uses without the government taking a big cut up-front.  These ideas were pushed by development secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, and he reluctantly agreed only because otherwise he would have had nothing of any substance to announce last Wednesday.

The rest was overspending on ludicrous infrastructure projects, misguided attempts at picking economic winners and the usual tired old blather about kids, old folk, the glorious motherland and bunny rabbits.  So much to criticize – but so easy for simplistic opponents to overlook when you dangle a non-scandal about environmentally friendly electrical fixtures in front of them.

Sir Henry:  I don’t give a toss what you’ve done with me when I’ve shrugged off m’ mortal coil… Shove a bit of flex up m’ back passage, stick a lightbulb in m’ mouth and stand me in the hall. (Sniff)  Mind you, if you’re using electricity you’ll have to dry me out first.

Next time, Hubert comes back to earth and realizes that Donald could, sadly, never be so subtle or wily.

No record-breaking price for an apartment today!  Not so far, anyway – we still have the afternoon ahead.  Yesterday, Henderson Land announced that it had sold a five-bedroom duplex in Conduit Road for HK$71,280 a square foot: apparently the highest ever in the world.  A few weeks ago, Sun Hung Kai announced that it would be selling a pair of smaller penthouses in its West Kowloon development, the Cullinan, for around HK$75,000 a square foot.  That followed the sale of a one-bedroom, slightly generous shoe-box type of flat in Tsim Sha Tsui for over HK$41,000 a square foot.

What’s going on?

One explanation is that the property developers behind these claims are lying.  Legally, they are entitled to describe a 500-square-foot apartment as being 670-square-foot.  Subject to self-regulatory oversight of a most understanding sort, they can produce artists’ impressions of forest-hugged developments with ocean views, when in reality the sites overlook rancid sewage facilities.  Exaggerating sales prices, say through a rebate to the purchaser, is an old trick to lure other suckers into paying over the odds.

Won’t God punish the property tycoons with eternal damnation in Hell, as per the 10 Commandments?  Fortunately for them, no.  Those members of the Big Lychee’s real estate cartel who are believers subscribe to Evangelical Christianity, according to which the Almighty rewards you, right here on Earth, with no-questions-asked material bounty provided you accept the stories about the creation and Noah’s Ark as total truth.

Another reason: “Six years ago, there were no Chinese billionaires. Three years ago, there were 15. And now [there might be] double the known 130.”  And for every billionaire, there are hundreds of mainlanders in the market for properties costing tens rather than hundreds of Hong Kong dollars.  Although the US$56 million condo just a few streets up the hill from my own slum dwelling catches the world’s headlines, many lower-profile luxury units are going for smaller-but-still-ridiculous sums.

It’s called ‘hot money’ – ‘hot’, perhaps like the water in a washing machine turned up high, to eradicate even the most stubborn stains.  No-one asks how these people managed to transfer this cash from behind China’s not-so-Great Foreign Exchange Wall, if that’s where it came from, or how they got hold of it in the first place.  For the mainstream mainland buyers, a luxury flat in the Big Lychee offers a Hong Kong ID card, complete with residency rights, permission to have more than one child, and access to our wonderful (apparently) schools and hospitals.

For the big boys splashing out nine-figure sums on top-floor suites, there is, we are told, another incentive: the trophy that is the most expensive home in the city.  Some 10 or 15 years ago, I was sitting in an aircraft near a group of early mainland tourists returning home from a package trip to Southeast Asia.  One of the men produced a gaudily coloured polo-style T-shirt and announced to his friends that he had paid US$50 for it in Singapore.  Another beat him with a similar article that had cost US$70.  A third, with a triumphant grin, whipped out a 100-buck item, flaunting the price tag.  Pure cotton, presumably.  These people have come a long way since then, and they are back, assuring each other: “private lift lobby for each apartment a showcase of status.”

So this is Hong Kong’s latest dynamic industry.  A member of the property cartel – whoever’s turn it is this time – gets a choice piece of land in Hong Kong’s urban area (in some cases, with assistance from the government’s own Urban Renewal Authority, which did Highland clearances in a past life and kicks out all the old neighbourhood’s residents).  They build a huge tower between the harbour and the hills.  They sell the units to mainlanders wielding rather odd-smelling cash for extremely high prices, with a profit margin those of us in less favour with God can only dream of.  Essentially, they are prostituting a city: privatizing the view and selling it to outsiders.

Speaking on a radio phone-in yesterday, Chief Executive Donald Tsang advised local people to “look for smaller and cheaper units away from the city centre.”

It is unlikely that any political party will object to the moves towards greater economic planning, via six supposedly key industries, announced by Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen in today’s Policy Address.  The pro-Beijing DAB are too obedient, the pro-democrats too economically illiterate, and the Liberals too busy drooling over the prospect of corporate welfare.

Although Hong Kong was never run along purely laissez-faire lines, its government did not traditionally allocate resources to specific industries in an attempt to pick winners.  It didn’t nurture favoured conglomerates like South Korea, it didn’t own key companies like Taiwan’s Kuomintang, it didn’t let bureaucrats divert people’s savings into money-losing sectors like Singapore, and obviously it didn’t throw taxpayers’ cash down the toilet on white elephants like the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic aircraft.  Its colonial rulers assumed that the private sector was the best judge of where to put capital, and the evidence supported this.  Hong Kong’s savings in the 1960s-80s were half Singapore’s, yet economic growth was the same; in other words, the Big Lychee got double the return on investment.

Since the handover in 1997, our officials have increasingly adopted a more dirigiste approach.  They played with slogans: ‘laissez-faire’ went in favour of ‘small government, big market’, which has at times been complemented with ‘market leads, government facilitates’.  They arbitrarily declared the local economy to be supported by four pillars (finance, trade, tourism and logistics, or sometimes services).  They diverted substantial public wealth to very lucky companies in order to boost specific sectors, notably with Disneyland and Cyberport.

There are several possible reasons for this.  The population was traumatized by the severe economic jolts that followed the Asian financial crisis in 1998 up to 2003.  For the government of the tragic Tung Chee-hwa, ignoring calls for plans and action was not an option.  At the same time, certain academics and businessmen, possibly with chips on their shoulders from colonial times, were asserting that laissez-faire was British laziness or negligence, and official guidance (by clever Chinese, who understand and love the place, etc, etc) could yield better results.

On top of that, some tycoons and industrialists started to sniff the possibility of free lunches disguised as tax breaks or handouts of land to ‘create jobs’.  (Conspiracy theorists would go further and argue that Beijing has secretly required Hong Kong to provide such advantages to the families that run the property cartel; it sounds far-fetched until you consider the underlying transfer of assets – and the complete absence of any community benefit – that is Cyberport.  Does any explanation make better sense?)

Then there is the mainland/motherland angle.  The Hong Kong leadership insists that the nebulous process known as integration is a matter of great urgency.  It seems to mean cooperating with local officials on the other side of the border who still think in terms of sector-specific planning.  More recently, it has led the Big Lychee’s government to promote the city’s involvement in China’s five-year plans.  This is basically about symbolism; it sends a subliminal message to the Hong Kong people about their once-proud city’s helplessness and dependence on the beneficence of Beijing, and it conditions people to see interventionism as normal.

Perhaps the biggest reason for this drift to economic planning is simply that we are being run by idiots.  Longstanding policies on land use, competition and other fun areas that contribute to the Fragrant Harbour’s unique character have left the city with an artificially narrow economic base.  The government has distorted the Hong Kong economy and made it too expensive for many commercial activities to be viable.  Rather than fix that, our officials add to the distortions by creating more cross-subsidies and un-level playing fields.

This leads to a possible, brighter explanation.  Donald’s six key industries are, to put it bluntly, lame as hell.  Education and health care are derivative.  Tech is hackneyed.  Creative is vague.  Environmental is desperate.  Certification and testing is amusingly opportunist (checking mainland milk for lethal additives because mainlanders don’t trust each other to do it).  They officially appeared earlier this year as the work of a talking-shop called the Task Force on Economic Challenges, but they have all the hallmarks of being dreamed up by a committee of civil servants under pressure – the Hubs-in-a-Hurry Working Group.  Note the dazzlingly original idea of real estate as state aid: it’s all about letting people use some space without having to go through the property cartel.

It could be that this is just more symbolism, an attempt to appear to be doing something, to take all our minds off whatever dark thoughts we might otherwise have.  It all depends on how serious the handouts are.  Are the parcels of land big enough to accommodate significant operations?  Are any other subsidies meaningful enough to influence big investors’ behaviour?

Think about it – the Donald Tsang administration actually making a bold, momentous decision that results in a major change of direction for Hong Kong.  It doesn’t ring true.  Wherever the road is going, we dawdle.  So we can quite possibly breathe easy.

There was a time in colonial Hong Kong when the opening of the new Legislative Council in early October was a moderately grand ceremonial affair restricted to the great and good.  The highlight would be the governor’s speech outlining the administration’s plans for the year ahead: bold visions of hundreds of thousands of desperately needed new homes, increases in college places or expansion of public transport.  The people weren’t consulted, nor did they expect to be.

Nowadays, it’s almost the other way round.  The show is more inclusive, with officials soliciting input from the public ahead of time, and directly elected lawmakers sitting in the council chamber as the chief executive delivers his widely promoted Policy Address.  Yet the substance has mysteriously evaporated.  Big projects are announced, but they have taken on an unthinking, automatic quality: infrastructure that isn’t needed, loopy new industries that won’t work, year after year.  They are space-fillers – something to occupy the vacuum of ideas.  When Donald Tsang stands at the lectern in Legco tomorrow morning, he will be performing a tired, empty ritual.  If anyone tunes in, it will be to hear what radical legislators shout at him.

The most important question is: what colour will the Policy Address booklet be?  A deep golden yellow, to signify hope for the future; a fetching turquoise, to symbolize confidence in the years ahead; or a bold pinkish chartreuse, to represent the prosperity and success that undoubtedly lie before us?

Then there is the title.  Will Donald go for a drawn-out, hand-wringing study in good intentions like his predecessor Tung Chee-hwa, who gave us Quality People, Quality Home: Positioning Hong Kong for the 21^st Century (1999) and Working Together for Economic Development and Social Harmony (2004)?  Or will he stick with his pithy jokes, like Strong Governance for the People (2005) or A New Direction for Hong Kong (2007)?

As for the content, there will be a prize for the first person to spot a new policy.  Ones announced long ago – from competition laws to health care reform – are piled up in the backroom gathering dust.  Constitutional reform proposals have actually become dust, safely swept under a carpet.  We must focus on the economy.

Handouts to the common citizenry are out, anonymous officials advise, even though subsidizing everyone’s electricity bills was a neat distraction.  This year, we will instead be offering support for six new priority industries in which the Big Lychee has no competitive advantage: education, health care, product testing, creative whatever, and the two we can never remember.  Also known as ‘giving land away to people we like’.  And then of course there will be the same old endless infrastructure, infrastructure and more infrastructure.

The government needs to throw something to all those bores who write into the South China Morning Post complaining about overdevelopment, pollution and all that stuff.  Licking my finger and raising it in the air, I detect a breeze blowing in the direction of… Heritage.  Let’s surprise them with a few vaguely imaginative and cool things to do with old buildings.

For a flavour of what will not appear in the Policy Address, we can always look at the responses officials received after they asked the public for suggestions.  Several groups produce quite detailed alternative agendas; bureaucrats pinch their noses and transfer them quickly by the fingertips to the paper-recycling box.  The Democratic Party was criticized one year for publishing theirs in Chinese only; perhaps this year they will spare a billion potential readers and do it in Manx.  The Professional Commons – the group that has endeared itself so much to our leaders by finding a way to avoid spending HK$1.5 billion a kilometer on a rail line – has produced a paper packed with wit: impertinent questions about how much government expects the six new industries to contribute to GDP, and a humble proposal (p.8-9) to bust the property cartel.

The ritual will continue.  Sir Bow-Tie will appear on radio phone-in shows to hear the public whining about having to pay all their electricity bills themselves.  A few weeks later, Legco will debate a motion of thanks, in which loyal lawmakers voice support for the latest industry officials have decided we must have, and opponents lament the lack of a timetable for universal suffrage.  And in the design section of the government printing office, creative civil servants will start work on the colour scheme for next year.

Good news for aficionados of political pugilism, as Hong Kong’s Liberal Party throws down the gauntlet and announces that the city’s forthcoming minimum wage should be no higher than HK$24 an hour.  Assuming a six-day working week (and the Liberals know of no other sort) and an eight-hour day (they don’t count waiting for the boss to leave the office in the evening), this would yield a monthly salary of just under HK$5,000.

Party boss Miriam Lau Kin-yee rather neatly pre-empts objections that this isn’t enough to live on by declaring at the outset that it isn’t supposed to be. It is, she says, intended only to provide “basic protection” – against, presumably, scurvy and beriberi.  This woman is a Tartar: her ancestors sat in the saddle for days on end supping horse blood straight from the jugular and putting the whole population of continent-sized grasslands to the sword.  One of her finest achievements as legislator representing the transport industry has been to oppose measures that would meaningfully penalize minibus drivers who run red lights.

Ranged against her party will be the Big Lychee’s motley array of labour activists, who are eyeing a minimum wage of HK$35 or so (which they could argue is modest compared with the US/UK levels of HK$56-60).  The usual division of the city into pro-Beijing and pro-democracy camps will largely be irrelevant to this clash; indeed, so unlovable are the Liberals that even the staunchest defenders of free markets will be secretly hoping for as uneconomic a rate as possible just out of malice.

A couple of years ago, a contractor who employed mainland women to collect the garbage (12 hours/six days) at a housing estate learned that his workers were supplementing their HK$4,000 a month with HK$1,000 from recycling material they picked out from the trash.  And so he cut their pay to HK$3,000.  In last year’s election, the radical, indeed inflammatory, League of Social Democrats – ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung et al – increased their numbers in the Legislative Council from one to three.  Even in Macau, with a tame media, loyal civic organizations and docile public, there was a May Day mini-riot a couple of years ago.

To the Hong Kong government, whose policies almost seem to have been designed to enlarge our underclass, this issue is potentially even more explosive than the middle-class dissatisfaction with former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa.  Our leadership’s number-one constituency, the families who run the property cartel, are probably not directly exposed much to a minimum wage; the big conglomerates they operate don’t depend much on dirt-cheap unskilled labour.  But they do depend on screwing everyone else through their price-fixing and other collusion, including the small and medium companies who will be squeezed by the minimum wage, some possibly into insolvency.  In theory, the spotlight could then shift onto the economic burden imposed by the government’s oligarch-pals.  So officials would really rather avoid having to go down this road.  But the prospect of genuine, actual, authentic unrest in the streets, and the wrath of Beijing that would follow, overrides everything.

Plus, our bureaucrats – like all sentient beings – hate the Liberals, too.  So this punch-up could be deliciously one-sided.  Even if Miriam Lau and Co are proposing HK$24 as an opening gambit, with a view to conceding a few bucks more later on, they could be seriously disappointed.  It might be bad economics, it might be a band-aid, it might lose some jobs and it might be just an excuse not to address real problems.  But can anything outweigh the sheer pleasure of seeing the Liberals being stomped on?

Among this morning’s email is a graph from the nice people at McKinsey showing real house prices in selected countries since 1970.  Even after the fall from their recent peaks, when they were 300% up, homes in Belgium, Spain and the UK still cost some 250% more than they did in 1970, adjusted for inflation. At the other end of the scale, German homes are cheaper, and Japanese ones, after rising and then falling in the 80s and 90s, have barely budged.  Homes in the US have doubled in real terms.  These are presumably nationwide averages, thus splitting the differences between, say, Detroit (where homes are probably cheaper today than 40 years ago) and Manhattan.

Aside from the ever-popular excess availability of credit, there are various reasons why property prices can make significant gains over the decades.  A rising population increases competition for the fixed amount of space, so people divert expenditure from savings or less essential items like fancy clothing or travel to bid up the price of accommodation.  Growing prosperity and purchasing power enable people to pay more for somewhere to live even without cutting back on other spending.  A country or region offering residents opportunities for higher earnings (maybe following economic reforms, as in post-70s Thatcher-Blair UK) will both attract more inhabitants and boost their purchasing power.  The trend towards double-income families, where both husband and wife work, means further bidding-up of house prices.

Culture and politics come into it.  Home ownership is officially encouraged in English-speaking countries on the grounds that it is somehow morally uplifting.  People in their early 20s are urged to worry about getting into the market before it’s too late.  Add tax incentives, and it becomes an obsession.  In Germany, on the other hand, people just rent: who wants the hassle of owning a property when you can just pay for it as you go, as with groceries or utilities?  Rents are reasonable, and secure long-term leases are normal.

Restrictions on planning and development add to upward pressure on house prices.  In Hong Kong, where the land is nationalized, it is official policy to keep space for housing in artificially short supply.  In effect this represents a hidden tax, much of it raked off by the developers; it also limits most families to very cramped apartments, which must influence decisions about how many children to have, or whether to live in Hong Kong at all.  It also means some 40% of the population can’t afford a place to live, so they are housed by the state, developing a dependency mentality that is compounded by the effects of reduced labour mobility.  It would be interesting to know the cost in terms of reduced overall economic vibrancy.  Of all the housing patterns in the world, it must be hard to beat that of the Big Lychee for sheer dumbness.  But to policymakers who think HK$1.5 billion-per-kilometre rail track is cool, it is simply not possible to conceive of a different system.

Where would Hong Kong be if it were on the chart?  With real-estate shysters claiming to be selling new Kowloon apartments to suspiciously wealthy mainlanders for HK$30,000-or-whatever a square foot, our high-end property would have gone through the roof.  But averaged out to include Lantau stone huts and Shatin rabbit hutches – many of which are still priced well below the collective-insanity levels of mid-1997 – it would probably be less impressive.

My own apartment was built in 1972, and according to the title deeds it first changed hands at that time for HK$35,000.  A quick look at the government’s exciting ‘Implicit price deflators of GDP’ table suggests we should factor in inflation of around 8.5% a year, which gives us a figure of around HK$900,000 in today’s prices.  The place is in a walk-up slum, but on the lowest floor and near the Mid-Levels Escalator in a trendy – I am told – neighbourhood.

If property agents are to be believed, places like, or indeed nastier than, my abode are worth HK$5 million.  Without being able to precisely quantify the impact of these people’s congenital evilness, hallucinatory drug use and compulsive lying, it is difficult to translate this sum into something realistic.  I would guess a sane but well-meaning and busy person of means might give me HK$2.5 million for my apartment.  (Bought to live in, obviously, in pre-trendy times for HK$1 million – not far off its original 1972 price, adjusted for inflation.  I get my speculative kicks from investments that don’t require me to call plumbers.)  This would put Hong Kong around halfway up the graph, near Canada or Norway.

From which we can conclude that the free content McKinsey send out to people on their emailing list is more interesting than illuminating.

Two things seem to preoccupy Hong Kong’s pro-democracy politicians at the moment.  One is devising and disputing arcane plans for mass resignations from the Legislative Council in order to trigger by-elections that would, in their dreams, serve as a referendum on universal suffrage.  If there were real public outrage at the government’s proposed constitutional reforms, it could be a highly amusing stunt.  But only if executed with great discipline.  So, another embarrassment in the making it is.

The other excitement is the Kam Nai-wai demi-semi-scandal, in which a middle-aged Democratic Party lawmaker has some sort of crush on a pert, youthful assistant and leaves his wife.  Sort of like Bill and Monica Lewinsky, except with a bowl of noodles instead of a cigar.  Or something.  Even the pro-Beijing press, which would normally be expected to keep the sad tale running for weeks, are finding it all a bit too pitiful.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the Professional Commons – the thinking man’s pro-democrats – have come up with a proposal that could save the Hong Kong taxpayer HK$25 billion, by making better use of existing lines instead of building a whole high-speed rail link to the mainland from scratch.

They have gone to great pains to be helpful and sensible.  They agree that linking up with the national high-speed network will enhance the Big Lychee’s strategic position as a gateway; they avoid taking issue with the government’s economically illiterate method of forecasting the payback on the project; they even use the word ‘Boundary’ instead of the politically incorrect ‘border’.  They certainly don’t ask nasty questions like “Into whose pockets will all this money go?” or “Why does this whole thing seem mysteriously to revolve around West Kowloon’s luxury apartment complexes and Elements shopping mall?”

A look at their diagram showing the interchange arrangement between the new line and the adjacent local ones is enough to make anyone feel, like Lin Cheung Road, at-grade and depressed.  Indeed, it’s downright scary.  Hong Kong has been invaded by evil zombie engineers:

Professional Commons treat it all with the utmost respect and keep their implicit criticisms strictly constructive.  But to no avail.  The sound of booklets hitting the bottom of waste paper baskets is resonating across Central from Lower Albert Road this morning.  In a functioning political society, groups like Professional Commons would get a listening from policy makers; they might find their ideas being stolen by wannabe policymakers; they might end up actually being policymakers.  In Hong Kong, however, they are feared by a bureaucracy out of its depth and masking its inadequacy with arrogance and disdain.  Especially for outsiders who might actually know what they are talking about and who are impertinent enough to make suggestions.  An idea from the world beyond the civil service is a leper.

(Well, maybe the proposal’s title, A cheaper, faster and better Express Rail Link, is a tad provocative.)

Careers, as well as vast contracts, are involved here.  Secretary for Transport and Housing Eva Cheng, who tells legislators that Hong Kong will be isolated without her HK$1.5 billion-a-kilometre electric train set, is one example.  She is earmarked to be Chief Secretary when (or, to be optimistic, if) the current holder of the job Henry Tang Ying-yen becomes Chief Executive in 2012.  Tycoon and all-round nice guy Henry, born with silver chopstick in mouth, will ensure that Hong Kong continues to be run in the interests of what is euphemistically called the business community.  Eva, lifelong member of the bureaucracy, will provide the administrative experience and other, shall we say, cranial input.

That’s the plan.  Big Lychee oligarch-bureaucracy rule, version 2.0.  Tung Chee-hwa and Anson Chan, but with a better script and no misunderstandings.  All aboard!

About halfway down the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning, commuters were greeted by the pro-democratic Civic Party’s Tanya Chan and her little helpers handing out leaflets.  Or at least Chinese people were.  Westerners and others of non-Sinic appearance pointedly received neither a ‘good morning’ (with bow of the head) nor a copy of the glossy brochure.  Only the smiling woman handing out the Standard a few streets down eased their disappointment and hurt.

One possible reason is that the well-heeled, cosmopolitan, and in some cases rather anglicized, lawyers of the CP are trying to reach out for the first time to the earthy Cantonese masses in working-class neighbourhoods.  They are easing themselves into the slums by starting with residents of Conduit, Robinson and Caine Roads before plucking up the courage to venture across the harbour to the dark satanic public housing estates, where none of them have ever been before.  But no – the idea of the delicate and bourgeois CP chasing proletarian votes is too fanciful.

Another is that the leaflet was monolingual.  The logic here would be that only people of local ethnicity can vote and/or read Chinese.  However, the CP is far and away the most miscegenistic of Hong Kong’s political parties, with some members married to – or even born – barbarians.  (“I don’t feel Chinese, I feel British,” one once said after her father, a senior colonial-era judge, made an unconvincing conversion to pro-Beijing patriotism.)  They know full well that this district more than any has a multiracial electorate; and that many of its residents of Asiatic appearance are in fact literate only in English while a few of the Westerners can, in a plodding way, read characters.  So it’s obviously not that.

This leaves us with only one explanation, and that is that a renegade faction of the CP, inspired perhaps by the recent 60^th anniversary of the PRC, are recruiting volunteers to take part in a dastardly plot to bludgeon all the gweilos to death in their beds in the early hours of tomorrow morning.  We shall see.

By the standards of the pro-democrats, this would be a reasonably constructive use of time and organizational resources.  For over a decade now, they have been engaged in a fruitless fight for universal suffrage.  This struggle has its roots in colonial times, when Hongkongers lobbied British officials to install representative government before handing the Big Lychee over to China in 1997.  It had some slight success, but even this was reversed, promptly and severely, by the new regime.

Since then, the arguing, pleading, whining, protesting and marching have continued as before, but to ever-decreasing effect.  Although they don’t seem to realize it, the pro-democrats are doing the bidding of those in power.  Central and local government string them along with a tortuous, meandering constitutional-reform process that never gets anywhere, while all the time running Hong Kong to benefit a few vested interests at the expense of the community as a whole.  The fighters for truth and justice get their self-righteous kicks demanding an abstract ideal no communist one-party state will ever give, while bureaucrats and tycoons help themselves to the city’s wealth unopposed.

On the subject of which, nom de plume Mary Ma, the Standard’s editorial, reveals amazing news about one of China’s big infrastructure projects:

The central government is laying a high-speed rail network across the country because it believes the network can increase the national economy by shortening the distance between cities.

That would more than increase the economy: it would overturn the rules of physics, require a drastic re-thinking of Einstein’s theory of relativity and open up the possibility of time travel.  But that’s by the by.  She is really attacking people who complain about the HK$1.5 billion-per-kilometre cost of our section of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong leg of the network.  The fear among proponents of the most expensive bit of rail track on Earth is that people like the pro-democrats might stop ranting to themselves about universal suffrage and start – and continue over and over – publicly asking our leaders loud, clear and embarrassing questions.

For example: What will the cost of this be per passenger (or per job created, if that’s going to be dragged in as a justification)?  What are the true economic costs of passengers transferring from traditional Kowloon steam locomotive to space-age high-speed train in Shenzhen or Guangzhou, compared with the financial savings from using the existing track?

Or: Which companies will get the contracts?  Or whose?  Officially, nothing has been signed.  But we can be fairly sure that among the main beneficiaries of this enormous outlay will be big state-owned conglomerates from the mainland.  And we can just as safely predict that a nice slice will go to companies ultimately controlled by the handful of families whose cartels corner Hong Kong’s property, trading, utilities and other markets.  It is the tax the Basic Law says we don’t have to pay to Beijing, plus the usual piece of the action for the ceaselessly and inexplicably favoured plutocracy.

Such transfers of public wealth to politically powerful interests are normal in Hong Kong today, but this one is on a truly audacious scale.  So staggering, perhaps, that someone is actually a bit nervous.  Mary Ma assures us that “other crucial but less pressing projects” like the railway connecting Hong Kong and Shenzhen airports can wait.

Oh yes – that other all-underground cross-border high-speed railway.  According to yesterday’s South China Morning Post, we’re talking HK$50 billion divided by 25 kilometres.  We can leave that in reserve for when we need to break another railway price tag world record.  (It will serve 7,000 passengers a day transferring between Shenzhen’s frequent and cheap domestic air services and Hong Kong airport’s international connections – a link currently provided by ferries.  Of course, Shenzhen airport will offer overseas flights before then anyway, so the trains will be empty.  Perhaps even the bureaucrats thinking up ways to channel taxpayers’ funds into tycoons’ wallets balk at this one.)

Mary Ma points her finger at the Civic Party as the main villain in opposing the high-speed link; the Democratic Party gets a pre-emptive pat on the head for “understanding the merits of integration” between Hong Kong people’s money and the usual interests’ pockets.  Can the CP tear itself away from discussing ways of enlarging the electoral base of the Election Committee?  Can it lower itself to discussing grubby everyday matters like public expenditure priorities?  A daunting thought: the CP could be all that stand between our HK$50 billion and the toilet.

The biggest per-capita consumption of oranges, the highest density of top-range Mercedes on the streets, and the most ever paid at auction for a truffle: Hong Kong’s claims to global greatness go on and on.  And, as the lead headline in Saturday’s South China Morning Post announced, our visionary leaders are now working on a plan that could give the Big Lychee one of the most impressive records imaginable.

While the mainland spent a pathetic US$24.5 million per kilometre on its Beijing-Shanghai high-speed train route, Taiwan a miserly US$44.7 million on the Taipei-Kaohsiung line, and the UK and France a modest US$84 million on the cross-channel tunnel, Hong Kong officials have, after much hard work and ingenuity, found a way to pay a truly breathtaking US$190 million for our section of the planned Kowloon-Guangzhou link.  That’s per kilometre.

In Hong Kong dollars, that’s 1.5 billion a click.  HK$457,000 a foot.  HK$38,000 an inch.  Even reverting to greenbacks – US$4,780 an inch – it sounds impressive.  Only when we cost it per micron*, at HK$1.50 a go, does it look disappointingly humble (though there is talk of the final bill overshooting this estimate, so who knows?)  And this is all without cheating and making the tracks out of diamond-encrusted solid gold.

How did they manage it?  It involved some serious thinking out of the box.  China is building a national high-speed rail network, and Hong Kong obviously wants to be linked to it at its Guangzhou hub.  But our officials faced a major problem: we already have a rail line to old Canton, which has worked fine since 1909.  We don’t need to spend a penny.

So any hope of acquiring the world’s most expensive train service lies in shatters.

Not so fast.  Fortunately, our policymakers have found that if we insist on linking to the national ultra-fast network with a short high-speed service of our own, we will have no choice but to build an entire, brand-new line, as the existing one can’t handle the wider bullet trains.  And the news gets better: if we don’t use the existing terminus, but build a new one where no-one ever goes in West Kowloon, site of the future cultural hub, it will have to go underground, where it costs very, very large amounts of money to do engineering work.  Best of all, the space between West Kowloon and the border is full of mountains, towns, highways and nature reserves, so the track too will have to be buried expensively deep down.

It doesn’t stop there.  The cost of construction materials is rising, so the HK$1.5 billion-per-kilometre figure could increase, which would consolidate Hong Kong’s proud grip on this magnificent global record.  And a massive car park in the subterranean terminal presumably means building yet more roads with money and on land that would otherwise be frittered away on something silly.

Then there’s the exquisite icing on the cake: the high-speed choo-choo hub in Guangzhou will actually be in a suburb south of the city, so the new service won’t even take Hongkongers into the centre of the provincial capital.  Those that want to go there – and almost 90% will be headed no farther than that – will have to grab the local mass-transit to complete their journey.  A HK$1.5 billion-a-kilometre, high-speed link that actually adds to the travel time!  Beat that.

Wait!  There’s more!  To cap it all, the tickets will have to be more expensive than the current ones, assuming somebody somewhere wants even a shred of a return on investment.

Inevitably, a small number of naysayers and cynics are mocking the genius of this scheme.  The dark muttering of words like ‘unnecessary’, ‘wasteful’, ‘insane’ and ‘cretinous’ is met by the sound of slamming hatches and rising drawbridges, as our dedicated civil service prepares for battle with public opinion – the enemy that must be defeated at all costs if Hong Kong is to create a glorious new wonder of the transport infrastructure cost-benefit analysis world.

But the doubters are doomed.  For linking to China’s high-speed rail network at the border with an existing, paid-for, slowish track would make the Big Lychee different from the rest of the motherland.  It would set us apart.  We would be left out.  Left behind.  Isolated.  Not integrating.  Implicitly disloyal, splittist and opposing Communist Party rule.  If avoiding such unpatriotic symbolism isn’t worth a mere HK$9,000 per man, woman and child in the city, what is?

And the extra half-hour it will take to get to downtown Guangzhou?  Time to eat another couple of oranges.

Day-long pajama-wearers who feel they were insufficiently indifferent – or patriots who yearn to demonstrate greater excitement – can rest assured that the National Day spirit did not end at midnight.  In fact, Hong Kong began celebrating the PRC’s 60^th anniversary back in June and will continue to do so up to December.  Opportunities to yawn with boredom or squeal with delight abound, thanks to the dozens and dozens of performances, competitions and roving exhibitions still to take place.

Bureaucrats have tried to tie some of them in with the forthcoming East Asian Games, a pitiful, flaccid non-event that becomes more embarrassing with every step officials take to make it a success.  There is no real connection between the two.  National Day is about something real: ideas and actions that for better or worse have changed the world.  The hoopla over the third-tier, regional Olympics is purely contrived.  The aim is to save government face and not admit that the decision to host the games sprang from officials’ desperation and inadequacy.  The pie chart on the games would be 100% indifferent.

To most officers of the Hong Kong government, the duty to develop city-wide love of the motherland-regime is an administrative task, like sewer maintenance, only perhaps more dispiriting.  The top man at the Home Affairs Bureau, Tsang Tak-shing, is a genuine party loyalist, once imprisoned by the British colonial regime and a true card-carrying believer.  But the career functionaries around and below him are at best forced converts who know most of their fellow citizens are not receptive to blaring red-and-yellow calls to salute national greatness, though that won’t stop them – nothing will – from producing posters…

Clockwise from top left, we have: the bunting design competition; the PLA fine arts and calligraphy exhibition; the youth march encouraged by pop stars, photos of whom taken during oral sex have not yet appeared on the Internet; and the large-scale cultural show, featuring massed ranks of men in uniforms with assault rifles.

The correct word for the way the majority of Hongkongers feel about the 60^th anniversary is not ‘indifferent, ‘bored’ or ‘apathetic’.  It is ‘cold’.  Many mainlanders, especially the young, warm to their leadership’s basic proposition: one-party rule in exchange for growing material wealth, economic opportunity, social freedom and a sense of collective achievement bolstered in emergencies by subliminal xenophobia and racial supremacism.  Cars, travel, computer games and a man in space prove CCP rule to be right.

The Big Lychee, often crass and shallow in mainland eyes, is coming from somewhere else.  For each person in Hong Kong who genuinely buys into the pro-Beijing story there are several who are influenced by parents’ bitter memories, abhor the corruption and cheating over the border and have an affinity with some non-Chinese ways.  They appreciate China’s belated success, but they do not connect with the government up there.  Beijing can’t win Hong Kong’s hearts through ra-ra patriotism, but it has nothing else to offer except scowls, as exemplified by Lau Nei-keung in today’s South China Morning Post…

The 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic has just been celebrated but, 12 years after the handover, there are still citizens in Hong Kong who don’t support the regime…

…Western culture and values permeate many facets of our society [HK], and some people tend to use this as the only standard by which to gauge China against the most advanced Western countries, which have a per capita gross domestic product 10 times higher…

…China will develop its own brand of human rights and democracy instead of harping on the Western tune, as this is what 1.3 billion Chinese want.

A small group of Western-oriented dissidents in Hong Kong want to dictate their values to the whole country through minor protests. This is the typical Western spirit; and they can always try.

This is always a problem when 56% of the population are a small group of indifferent dissidents.