Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The original bland, all-purpose, bureaucrat-produced ads pushing the Hong Kong government’s proposed political non-reforms for 2012 were, if noticed at all, greeted with shrugs and yawns. They then gave way to something visibly more professional – the exciting ‘complete the word’ concept and the TV commercials with the dancers and dresses. Now, just a few weeks later, a third campaign hits the Big Lychee’s TV screens and billboards. Weigh Anchor! Let’s Act! (Is the maritime nature of the Chinese slogan designed to be an allusion to the harbour for which the city is named? Everyone I ask says it was the last thing that would have occurred to them.)

To launch this sudden re-branding exercise, top officials sporting unbecoming T-shirts made an unannounced, hence protestor-free, open-topped bus tour, waving to nonplussed onlookers. Press and other people who didn’t make it will be delighted to learn that they can collect and keep a set of 17 commemorative photographs, showing just about every minister in Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s cabinet handing out leaflets to housewives, children and playful puppy dogs.

The new TV commercial features non-executive cabinet members jollying us along to support the reform-lite package. Maybe the sight of former Equal Opportunities Commissioner Anna Wu sitting rather forlornly on her sturdy sofa will provoke a pang of sympathy within the more soft-hearted among us, but an appeal from Ronald Arculli – the administration’s ultimate parrot-poodle-puppet – is hardly likely to sway the masses.

This new push reverts a bit in tone to the first round of the campaign: the traditional, formulaic and condescending publicity crafted by civil servants. This suggests that it was ordered at short notice by an increasingly desperate Sir Bow-Tie petrified that his package will fail to get through the Legislative Council next month.

This communication style has its roots in government propaganda back in the 1950s, when newly arrived, illiterate refugees fresh out of the paddy fields had to be instructed on the extreme basics of hygiene, road safety and the rest of city life. Today’s bureaucrats seem to cling to it because the colonial/Confucian tone of official pronouncements confirms, in their own minds, their rank and role over the populace. And perhaps there is a medium-is-the-message aspect to it: you can’t tell people they’re too infantile to vote if you’re addressing them as adults.

Still, Donald’s growing despair can be detected in occasional flashes of straight talk in the Letter to Hong Kong he delivered on RTHK Radio 3 yesterday. Although he insists that the package has public support, he admits that it is “a far cry from full democracy.” It comprises “interim arrangements” (a new phrase for it) and “effectively prevents any future increase in the number of conventional FC seats representing specific sectors or interest groups” (which I don’t recall being explicitly stated before).

There is a sense of frustration here in the form of a veiled accusation: someone else screwed up in proposing the first package devoid of reform in 2005 for 2008 and in resurrecting it this time around. As he puts it: “This is the most democratic form of indirect election we can design within the confines of the 2007 decision of the Central Government.” (Technically it was the decision of the rubber-stamp Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, though Donald is correct in saying who was really responsible.)

Essentially, what seems to have happened is this. After the popular uprising in 2003 and the eventual, consequent removal of Tung Chee-hwa in 2005, Beijing decided to teach Hong Kong a lesson by tightly re-defining the limits of forthcoming political reform. The rejection of the 2008 package in 2005 strengthened the resolve of hardliners to discipline the wayward city. But now, after warnings from Donald and others about declining governability, the Chinese leaders are having second thoughts. To save face, they need to get this minimalist package through, because they can’t admit they were wrong. Then next time we can have, as Donald would say, “a more democratic form of indirect election.”

The pro-democrats, meanwhile, are on a different planet, seeking full, genuine suffrage and thus the right to elect a potential challenger to Communist Party power. And the civil servants at the Information Services Department, presumably working on a fourth new-look, new-theme, new-slogan ad campaign to be squeezed into the second week of June, are off in another universe.

May 26

Can it really be over 20 years ago that I last set foot in the City of Five Goats (and, at that time, several million bicycles?) It was Christmas 1989, and I sat in my room and watched President Ceausescu of Romania getting shot on CNN. That was at the up-market hotel; on previous visits I had stayed at the Dongfang, the Stalinesque structure nearby with faded photographs in the foyer celebrating half-forgotten Sinophile guests like Edward Heath, Julius Nyerere and, indeed, Nicolae Ceausescu. (It was just 10 years earlier, as a stray teen, that I had made my way through the benighted Balkan dictatorship. Main memory: a dead horse in a roadside ditch, with bloated legs reaching for the sky.)

The massed ranks of S-Meg Holdings’ dynamic management team are assembled here in a small conference centre for the signing ceremony of our exciting new partnership with Shiti Enterprises. This win-win mutually beneficial joint venture is all about nylon mesh: high-strength safety netting, of which Foxconn alone is ordering 1.5 million square metres. S-Meg Holdings and the mainlanders – the latter with their access to thousands of nimble peasant fingers and a desirable manufacturing site on conveniently vacated farmland – see strong growth ahead in this sector, with demand from schools, shopping malls and anywhere else hope runs out on high floors.

After hostesses pin gargantuan flowers to our lapels, we smile for photographers, dispense business cards to our gruff new friends, try to make small talk, clap politely after tedious speeches… and the more lateral-thinking among us organize an escape committee.

After a break in the proceedings, three of us strangle our mainland minders with our puce, lime-green and brown-striped company ties, dump the bodies in a toilet and shimmy down a drainpipe to find ourselves in the middle of Shamian Island, the place where Western merchants were confined during visits from Macau back in the days before Hong Kong was taken.

It is half-unchanged from 20 years ago. The tree-lined cobbled streets are still there, with their low-rise colonial buildings housing the gloomy and dusty headquarters of obscure state cultural and commercial bodies. But it is being Macau-ized with a vengeance. The old houses are being painted in lurid colour schemes, and more and more space is being occupied by incongruously pristine flower beds, ugly trendy statues and the inevitable chain stores.

The area also seems to be the base for what is perhaps a form of revenge on Westerners for the opium trade – the Chinese baby-adoption industry. At least a dozen self-conscious American couples stroll around tentatively pushing their fresh-out-of-the-package little acquisitions in buggies.

Fearful of the Shiti Enterprises henchmen undoubtedly hot on our trail, we make our way over the small bridge and into the city. It is full of cars these days, plus Africans buying stuffed teddy bears by the gross, plus teenage girls in lace-trimmed micro-dresses and shorts teetering on high heels, plus endless multinational fast-food joints.

But the side streets have been left behind, with crumbling concrete buildings held together by green mould and telephone wire, and figures silently squatting down at the far end of dark corridors eating from enamel bowls. And, eventually, we find a place to sit down, with RMB5 dumplings – that’s per basket of 10 – while we try to phone our driver.

Physician, heal thyself: a billboard advertising plastic surgery

The Civic Party

Not surprisingly, the CP can’t resist mishandling the extremely generous present it has been given – a live, one-on-one TV debate with Chief Executive Donald Tsang on political reform. Examining this gift horse minutely in the mouth, they might have noticed that its jaws had ‘victory’ written on them and a presence between them of something called ‘defeat’, which they would be well advised not to touch. But no, they have to toy with it, demanding that the debate be held in a university, with a live audience and with a particular host. Incredibly, they do not even seem to be averse to opening the event up to other parties. Only Sir Bow-Tie’s bizarre fixation with putting CP leader and by-election/referendum troublemaker Audrey Eu on a pedestal can save the idiots.

Surely, the correct CP response to the invitation would be simply to agree to whatever Donald suggests. You’ve just been offered a free, half-hour, prime-time TV commercial: shut up and don’t argue. You prime Audrey with facts and figures about developers’ profit margins, the affordability of homes, hospital waiting lists, wasteful capital expenditure and specific examples of collusion and favours, and you make sure she can link it all up with the functional constituencies and the rest of the political structure. Then, as Donald presents his dazzling oratory on step-by-step progress and consensus and win-win situations, she can give it to him right between the eyes: this is a corrupt system – why won’t you change it? Make people angry.

Just as Donald seems to have a death wish in putting himself in a position where this might happen, so the CP seem to be trying to give him room to escape. (All that real-estate-linked legal work the glamorous barristers get probably concentrates the mind a bit.)

The HK government

While we watch this battle of incompetents both trying to lose first, it is worth recalling that all this weirdness is driven by the Hong Kong government’s extraordinary determination to get the 2012 political non-reform package through. The more cynical you are about Beijing’s interference, the more obvious it must be that this is because the Central People’s Government wants it implemented.

Some commentators like to say that Beijing would not be too upset if the package failed, as it would be an excuse to delay further ‘gradual and orderly’ progress towards whatever rigged quasi-democracy the national authorities have in mind for us one day. Yet the Liaison Office’s moves to woo the supposedly moderate pro-democrats – and the hyperactive efforts of the ever-obedient local administration – suggest this is not the case. And here, if Donald wants to be truly devious, is an opportunity for him to get that vote after all. He needs to spread a rumour, or a notion, or whatever people want to call it.

According to this rumour/notion, Mainland officials have become aware of the dysfunctional state of the current political structure here and are secretly regretting that they insisted on minimal change for 2012. Perhaps the increasingly obvious ineptitude of the pro-democrats encouraged them to see the issue less in terms of a theoretical challenge to CPG power and more as a practical problem of the perceived weak legitimacy and thus effectiveness of their appointed local administration.

Since the Communist Party is infallible, Beijing cannot reverse its previously stated position that the 2012 reforms must be as limited as they are. Yet Beijing is even more boxed in than that. It would also find it difficult to respond to a veto of this package by the pro-democrats with a more meaningful proposal for the 2016-17 elections, because that would implicitly admit that this current one was a mistake and the emperor must now produce what could be interpreted as a bigger concession to the will of the people.

Seen this way, China’s officials are actually quite desperate for the package to get through. They can then, while still seen as being in full control, arrange for a more serious move towards guided democracy for the following elections to give the city’s administration broader support as it tackles the ‘deep-rooted contradictions’ that even Premier Wen Jiabao seems to find such a concern. This means there might actually be some substance there if you read between the lines of the thoughts of the NPC Standing Committee’s Qiao Xiaoyang about ‘throwing open the door to universal suffrage’ – or even in the monotonous ramblings of mustelid Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Secretary Stephen Lam about ‘moving forward’.

Such a rumour/notion is what the Big Lychee’s leaders should get their oily go-betweens to spread among the pro-democrats to convince them to vote for, or abstain, next month. It might work, because it could even be true.

The Big Lychee’s chattering classes are struck by bemusement this morning as they try to fathom the latest shenanigans in the never-ending clash between the forces of freedom and despotism.

Beijing’s local officials are seeking to peel the Democratic Party and other moderate, mature, sensible, constructive, decent members of the pro-universal suffrage camp away from the bad, naughty, unreasonable, anarchic hooligans of the Civic Party and League of Social Democrats. The short-term intention is to induce them to vote yes – or at least abstain – when the reform-free political reform package for 2012 goes before the Legislative Council next month. Further ahead, the hope must be that Albert Ho and the rest of the tired and faded DP will be susceptible to a bit of ongoing rehabilitation and eventual acceptance in United Front-land as semi-outsiders whose existence may be acknowledged, as opposed to the hostile, unpatriotic non-persons left naked and shivering in the CP/LSD wilderness.

How are they going about this? Invitations to a PLA open day, permission to join a study tour of the mainland, a pointless chat with a provincial official, and free tickets to the Shanghai Expo have all been dangled as lures. So now it’s time to make the great gesture: a meeting with someone important, namely Deputy Director of the Liaison Office Li Gang.

To call the forthcoming discussion ‘negotiations’ is a joke. Encounters between the imperial court and its subjects are not meetings of equal sides: the former commands and the latter kowtows. The moderate pro-democrats will get tea and a pat on the head. If they had somewhere to put it, there would probably a panda bear in it for them. It is all about symbolism. The question is: will DP members come out of the gathering – say with a little just-for-you snippet of a promise of future reform – so puffed-up and important-feeling that they will be happy to become constructive and cooperative semi-opponents? It doesn’t ring true. Most DP folk would find it impossible to leave their antagonistic comfort zone; pro-Beijing loyalists would also resent even the merest dilution of their status as specially privileged insiders.

Meanwhile, as if he is trying to undermine mainland officials’ efforts, Chief Executive Donald Tsang issues an invitation to CP leader Audrey Eu for a televised one-on-one debate on the political reform package. His note to her even includes a not totally disrespectful reference to the ‘five district referendum’ that he is supposed to have rejected as an abhorrence. As the huge grin on Audrey’s face when she proudly showed the invite to the media made clear, this is as good as a reward for forcing the by-elections. After pointedly refusing to let us ignore the polls for the last few months, Donald now seems determined to stop us from forgetting them, or indeed remembering them as a failure.

Presumably he cleared this insane idea with the Beijing officials in the Liaison Office, but then presumably he didn’t because they would never have approved it. Unless, perhaps, the plan is that when Audrey shows up at the studio a mysterious sniper shoots her from a nearby tower block.

The only rational explanation*, enunciated by Liberal Party founder and semi-outcast Allen Lee, is that Donald interprets the 17% turnout at the by-elections as resounding proof that Bow-Tie Thought has gripped and inspired the populace. Visions of himself reducing the famously skilled barrister to rhetorical rubble amid widespread public applause must have been flashing through his excitable mind, and none of his acolytes had the nerve to openly question his judgement. Predictably, all the other political groups are insisting on joining in the debate, and the pro-Beijing people (and the DP, for that matter) are seething at this apparent show of favouritism for the person supposed to be a money-wasting, constitution-challenging public enemy.

Donald is at his embarrassing worst when he forgets he is a dependable, plodding, linear-thinking administrator and plays at being a dastardly original, Machiavellian politician. As with his predecessor Tung Chee-hwa when he tried on occasions to act decisive, you cringe and really want to look away but can’t. This could – unless someone rides to the rescue and arranges a pointless four-way event – get so ugly we almost end up feeling sorry for him. Though not quite.

*Other than the usual ‘power struggle in Zhongnanhai’ explanation for almost anything.

As Bangkok has its Tiananmen-lite and Red Shirts torch the stock exchange and city halls, Hong Kong reels in horror at The Great MTR Octopus Card-Holders Massacre of 2010.

The mass transit system is putting its fares up by an average of 2.05%. This in itself would be enough to provoke squeals of terror among that part of the community that falls between malnourished riders of busses, for whom the train is unaffordable luxury, and the modestly prosperous lower middle class who stoically come to terms with price rises measured in cents without complaining. However, it gets worse: on certain journeys, the price increase will be higher on a stored-value Octopus Card than on an old-fashioned single ticket.

For technical reasons, the high-tech cashless system can work in any sum, while the old single tickets only accommodate increments of 50 cents (perhaps because the vending machines don’t accept smaller coins – who knows or cares?). Note something very important: the MTR is giving users of the old plastic tickets a discount – letting them off a 20- or 30-cent price hike to avoid rounding up by 50 cents. The Octopus Card holders are simply paying the correct new fare.

Few things make some of us more livid than the sight of a fellow human being enjoying some sort of bonus that we did not get – even though it is not in any way at our expense. It is a mean-spirited, irrational and childish emotion, but the resentment at the perceived injustice burns as fiercely as CentralWorld shopping mall on Ratchadamri Road. The Singaporeans are familiar with the feeling as Kiasu, from the Hokkien for ‘afraid to lose’. The classic example is the woman who feels immensely pleased with herself for bullying her Indonesian maid into accepting a HK$2,000 monthly wage, then goes berserk with fury on finding that Mrs Chan in the next block is paying only HK$1,800.

The difference here is that Octopus Card users considering slashing their wrists, throwing their kids out of the window or burning charcoal in their little sealed bedroom at this grotesque unfairness have another option: buy a single ticket and save that precious 20 cents (per day – it adds up). Watch them in the thousands waiting in line for hours at the machines when the fare rise takes effect on 13 June.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong public remains riveted by the government’s hip propaganda urging everyone to support, as best they can, the exciting 2012 political reform package…

Click to hear The Stranglers’ opinion of the government’s new posters. For the mono-literate: in the Chinese versions, the visual adds the character for ‘person’ to create ‘walk’ (happening in real life at bottom left), and the character for ‘mouth’ to create ‘trust’.

With the by-election/referendum out of the way, Hong Kong’s visionary leaders urge us to focus on constitutional development.

This is all very confusing. For well over 10 years now, whenever the good people of the Big Lychee spoke out or even dreamed quiet, fleeting thoughts about political reform, a grim-faced man would swiftly appear out of nowhere, grab them by the ear, shove them under a very cold shower and loudly remind them that We Must Focus On The Economy.

And now Chief Executive Donald Tsang is going on the radio to cry “Woe! A thousand times woe! The future of Hong Kong’s democracy is at stake.”

Such is the desperation of Donald. Stop focusing on the economy! Drop everything. We must all do our bit to get this constitutional reform package passed by the Legislative Council. Our leaders, at their wits’ end, are reaching out directly to us. Little, unimportant, nobody, disfranchised us.

Apparently, the idea is that we pick up the phone, call our favourite pro-democrat and say, “Hey Tania, c’mon, be a babe and vote for that package, huh?” To persuade us, the government’s propaganda machinery would normally flood the city with posters and videos featuring either a grinning cartoon character telling blatant lies, or a group of actors pretending to be a prosperous, happy and clean family skipping hand-in-hand through green meadows. And indeed, they did put together a TV commercial featuring wholesome citizens frolicking in a depopulated, oxygenated cityscape – as seen promoting tooth-brushing, mudslide avoidance, healthy web-surfing, vegetable-washing, kindness to the elderly, and so on – complete with voiceover mumbling gibberish about rolling things forward.

It is a mark of the gravity of the situation, however, that a worried senior official (obviously aware, by the way, of the pointlessness of the Information Services Department’s usual work) has demanded a relatively professional campaign.

Thus we have videos aimed at folk with a mental age of over six who can understand a metaphore, like this…

(which even has a slight whiff of humour about it) and this…

(featuring heart-tugging Hong Kong ad industry clichés #6 and #8). And we get some zippy, minimalist posters…

Yes, the complete-the-word concept is unoriginal to the point of being tired. But it’s a world away from the typical ISD Pyongyang-on-Ecstasy approach of “Let’s all say no to drugs and mosquito breeding for a harmonious Hong Kong now!”

Put simply, they’re so desperate to get this package through, they’re not treating the population like total morons – only like the half-morons who swallow private-sector advertising agencies’ output. It must be serious.

The Small Claims Tribunal orders Relopet, the international dog relocation specialists, to give HK$47,000 to one Claire Buckley.

The story goes back to early April, when the lady’s canine Jay bolted from the cargo area at Hong Kong airport rather than board a flight for London. “Jay escaped,” said the company’s boss, “because Claire asked us to put his favourite toy in the cage. On her instructions we opened the cage and Jay was a very big, very strong dog and he forced his way past two of my employees.”

“After two very emotional and financially difficult weeks for all involved JAY has still not been found,” those of us eagerly following the story subsequently learned. Then, about two weeks ago, came the grievous denouement, the discovery of a corpse in a ditch. (Do not scroll down and read the comments. Do not.) So off to the Tribunal Ms Buckley went.

The award comprised: $28,530 refund (the creature was flying Business Class); $13,486 for costs incurred during the search (not bad since she and volunteers were looking all day every day for weeks); and $5,000 compensation for stress and inconvenience.

The latter relatively trivial amount suggests that the mini-court considered the dog’s life to have no value and saw the case simply as a consumer protection one. However, Ms Buckley is quoted in Tuesday’s SCMP as saying that “Jay was like my child.”

A very big, very strong child that forced its way past two adult people in its determination to flee. Will she and the disturbed expatriate women’s canine-worship cult at Hong Kong Dog Rescue (the Schindler’s Ark for mutts that originally kept Jay from the Agriculture and Fisheries Department’s Treblinka) somehow one day reconcile this contradiction? It’s not “like a child”. It’s not part of a human family. It’s an animal. They bite. They run.

Probably not (yes I scrolled down)…