Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Click to hear ‘Donald Tsang Please Die’ by My Little Airport!

Hong Kong’s hearts have been gushing with pride as that time of the year comes around again and Chief Executive Donald Tsang proudly gets his pat on the head from the Heritage Foundation for running the world’s freest economy. The important thing is that we all smile and pretend this is a different Heritage Foundation from the American hegemonist one that rants about the Beijing Communists’ evil global designs in ways guaranteed to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.

Part of the annual ritual is a stern reminder from the Foundation that Hong Kong could lose its number-one spot if it doesn’t watch out. In the past the the think-tank has warned that a minimum wage or a competition law might threaten our ideological purity. This year, their spokesman on the radio said on Friday, the danger is Hong Kong’s inclusion in China’s Five Year Plan.

You can see his point. What greater harm could come to a laissez-faire economy than to be subjected to Stalinist-style targets for tractor or wheat production? But that’s not really what it’s about. The Big Lychee is mentioned in the Five Year Plan in order to send us a heavy-handed subliminal message that we are both dependent on and a beneficiary of Beijing’s generosity – which can of course be withdrawn if we don’t shut up and behave.

Still, it is good to see someone call attention to the idiocy of it. Maybe the Heritage Foundation could question some of the things Sir Bow-Tie says on the subject. When Donald says that Hong Kong’s inclusion in the Five Year Plan shows that the city’s role as a financial centre is not threatened by Shanghai, the Foundation could laugh and point out that Shanghai has no free movement of capital, no serious legal, accounting or regulatory systems, no free flow of information, and there are state-owned or –linked corporations as far as you can see, plus corrupt administrators. The only sort of person who could suggest it rivals Hong Kong is either stupid or trying to undermine Hongkongers’ confidence by suggesting otherwise. And what sort of person would do that? Why, the sort of shoe-shiner who knows how to get a pat on the head from Beijing as well.

Comments will be cleared eventually…

That Chief Executive election race that glimmered briefly for a few days before Christmas recently sparked back into life. There is something rather contrived about the spat between candidates Henry Tang and CY Leung. CY has called for upgrading the hospital authority (chaired by Henry-supporter Anthony Wu) and for a new financial authority (to supplement the existing Monetary one, formerly run by Henry supporter Joseph Yam). In response, Henry has criticized the work of the Urban Renewal Authority (run by CY supporter Barry Cheung).

An excellent choice on Henry’s part for mud-slinging electioneering, I must say: it hits a popular nerve, it isn’t entirely fair and, coming from an ex-Chief Secretary, it’s hypocritical. On the face of it, the URA deserves to be stomped on for its strategy of tearing down old neighbourhoods in league with for-profit developers and replacing them with oversized unaffordable luxury towers. However, although the authority at times seems to have gone about this with undue relish, the whole approach has been 100% directed by government policy, which seems to be to reduce the amount of affordable housing. The Development Bureau rushes to defend its offshoot, as well it might. They will have to report to Henry in a few months, and this is upsetting to them.

What is amusing about this little outbreak of negative campaigning is its setting: a stage-managed process, culminating in a make-believe election in March at which 1,200 mostly obedient make-believe voters will do what Beijing tells them and ritually elect Henry Tang as CE. What is different (and unexpected) about the charade this time is that Beijing still hasn’t made its preference known, so it remains technically possible for CY Leung to get enough nominations to get onto the ballot.

It seems that this pseudo-election is being used as a dry run for 2017, where the whole electorate will – assuming the Central People’s Government keeps its word – be able to vote. What will probably happen is that two candidates broadly acceptable to the Communist Party will get onto the ballot, and we will be allowed to choose between them. Beijing seems to be testing how easily it can guide two competing candidates, how tempted they might be to resort to populism and negative campaigning, and troubleshooting other potential problems with this scarily uncontrollable (well, managed) democracy thing.

Indeed, what are the chances that when universal suffrage with Chinese characteristics comes to Hong Kong in 2017, it will take the form of a ballot offering Henry Tang, hoping for a second term, and CY Leung, drooling at the prospect of his first?

Spot (ha ha) the difference (from recent editions of the SCMP). Top: a vendor at the Canton Trade Fair selling worthless junk made by someone else; bottom: decorative and functional avant-garde art…

Click to hear ‘The Gallery’ by Joni Mitchell!

Everyone I know has an iPad, and with a long and not entirely pleasant trip ahead, it looks like the ideal companion for flights and airports: books, magazines and films, all with email and web-browsing. But first I must prepare myself for the mental torture of entering a shop and buying something, so I Google for advice on how to set up one of the devices.

The first thing I learn is that I can relax: you control the contraption in the same way as an iPhone. Fine, except I have never touched an iPhone. Anyway, you get it home and out of the box, it seems, and plug it into your computer. It then starts to do something to (or from) iTunes, though I neither have nor want anything to do with iTunes. I assume that the gizmo will play the MP3s I have gathered over the years rummaging around in the dustier and perhaps less law-abiding recesses of the Internet, though the emphasis seems to be Apple proprietory this and Apple proprietory that, with all ‘Apps’ of course, Apple-approved. Does the user own the product or vice-versa?

Plus, some idiot decided it would be really cool not to have a USB port. God forbid you besmirch the machine’s beauty by making it usable.

So I look through recommendations for alternatives, perhaps made by technology companies rather than a designer-label fashion house that wants to separate you from the life you keep on a 32GB thumb drive.

There’s a thing called the Samsung Galaxy, and another called the HP Touchpad, both of which seem pretty much the same. Still no proper USB port, though you can get adaptors. (This really does seem to be for aesthetic purposes. There was a demented soul on the old IceRed message board who planned to be circumcised because he thought it would look nice; it seems he’s now in tech design.)

I happen to go past a branch of Fortress, so I drop in and look around. There is a Samsung Galaxy thingy, clamped to a display base and encased in a bullet-proof glass cabinet. As I peer at it, one of Li Ka-shing’s socially inept, acne-ridden salespersons approaches me nervously. Go away. I hate shops. Hutchison retail outlets, packed to maximize revenue per square foot, give me claustrophobia and drive the staff who work in them into jittery wrecks like battery-chickens. The sales guy wants to say something but doesn’t know how to start. Clearly, one of us is going to have a panic attack and flee – it’s a question of who breaks first. As it happens, it’s me, and I find instant relief breathing in the fresh Des Voeux Road air in a soothing sea of 10,000 Mainland tourists.

I can probably get a cheap better-than-the-authentic ripoff iPad up at Shamshuipo. Do I need anything that badly? Or I could just admit defeat and enter the clean and spacious Apple palace at IFC and beg forgiveness for all those things I said and start being a trendy contributor to Steve Jobs’ estate.

Then again… This is about something to read on the plane. The latest Economist will be on the newsstands in a few hours. What was I thinking? (Though things may be quiet around here until Dragon Year.)

Yesterday’s puzzle: why is Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department so keen to use dirty and old-fashioned incinerator technology to solve our garbage woes when clean and fruitful Plasma arc molecule separation and gasification appears so obviously better? A comment-writer says…

It has taken over 10 years to get the proposal this far and the technology was not that old when EPD started the process … In 2009 the nice Japanese old technology suppliers took an awful lot of EPD bureaucrats, local Lantau pollies and the Heung Yee Kuk (of course) to Japan for an all-expenses paid incinerator and karaoke tour.

This sets off a few synapses. Much rummaging around fails to uncover it, but I do recall seeing an official document containing lovely photos of pristine Northeast Asian incinerators. They were so gaily coloured that they doubled up as tourist attractions, and the reader was in no doubt that communities must have been squabbling over the right to host the things. And the document did have a curious sort of karaoke-style, relaxed and cheerful mood to it.

Speedily weighing things up yesterday, I pondered the possibility that the Plasma arc warp-factor antimatter technology looks a bit too good to be true, and the pragmatic civil servants therefore may have sound reasons for wanting to spend billions on building a giant smoky ash factory on Shek Kwu Chau. Now it looks a little more as if this would be a good subject for some incisive ‘Incinerator-gate’ investigative reporting. What a pity no such thing exists in Hong Kong.

Which brings us to another puzzle a watchdog press would sniff around: Why is the government so desperately eager to push us into building a third airport runway (at a mere HK$132bn)? Even by the standards of the Big Lychee’s conniving and arrogant officialdom, the public opinion poll showing the population begging to have the thing built without further ado was a contrived and laughable bit of propaganda. P.A. Crush, the South China Morning Post letters page’s voice of reason from Shatin, explains…

Air traffic fell in Wuhan after high-speed rail arrived, he adds, and Hong Kong’s own air cargo throughput is peaking.

This sounds all too believable. Dare I take the logic a step further and pose the question: Why did the government/MTR planners ram the HK$80bn high-speed rail link proposal through with such urgency? Answer: To beat the airport bureaucracy’s third runway to it.

Another bit of civil service skullduggery a hypothetical investigative journalist might tackle is the Government Hill controversy.

Not everyone appreciates the architectural wondrousness of the old Central Government Offices on Lower Albert Road – the soaring flying buttresses, the gleaming Corinthian columns and the mist flowing through the willows and ponds in the surrounding gardens. But many sensible folk have a soft spot for the site’s historic significance, and just about everyone apart from an evil alliance of bureaucrats and developers are united in opposing plans to build an office tower/car parks/Dolce & Gabanna-type temple to tackiness and landlords. 

The government portrays a translucent tower barely visible among lush greenery – hanging gardens, no less – spilling down from a park-like forested hill, and creeping like untamed jungle along overhead walkways and westwards right along the side of Queens Road away from the Ice House Street junction. Why, you can hear the hissing of the pythons dangling from the branches…

Opponents say it is all a load of BS, and even places like Battery Path face despoiling in some way or other, not least because of higher traffic levels. At the bottom of it all, however, is the question of why the place needs redevelopment of any sort at all. Short of possession of bureaucrats’ souls by mysterious demonic powers, no-one has a satisfactory answer.

The Hong Kong government asks whether we think charging households for the waste they produce is an option. The nervous phrasing of the question becomes understandable when we see the Standard’s headline, Talking Rubbish. Getting people to pay for something they consider free by right, or already paid for via property management fees or taxes, will be a challenge.

Inevitably, the consultation document offers the public a choice of three stupid options and the one the bureaucrats have already picked.

Non-starter 1 would charge us in proportion to our water bills, which would incentivize us to cut water use while still producing tons of garbage.

Non-starter 2 would ignore private households but charge companies by volume of waste, which would incentivize smaller firms, at least, to make their staff take the trash home. And yes, they would.

Non-starter 3 would charge everyone in the neighbourhood the same, which would at least enable a progressive system (assuming the rich chuck more away than the poor) but otherwise offer no incentive to cut waste.

Which leaves us with what I would insensitively term the Confucian Garbage System, the method that induces Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese to create well under half the rubbish Hongkongers do. By law, residents must use special, relatively expensive plastic bags for their trash (it might help if the bags are pink, play tunes like birthday cards when opened and have Hello Kitty on them). The amount of garbage plummets. However, it relies on people resolutely obeying and enforcing rules in the cause of the common good – not one of the Big Lychee’s strong points when it comes to day-to-day civic life.

So, given the Environmental Protection Department’s success in forcing stationary vehicles to switch their engines off, we can safely assume that Hong Kong will continue churning out 19,000 metric tons of junk per day. Meanwhile, our landfills will be overflowing by 2018 or so. With no-one left in this city manly enough to suggest the quick and simple option of dumping the crap in the Mainland, we need to consider incinerators.

The bureaucrats decided to build one on Shek Kwu Chau. It’s one of those islands you’ve never heard of (near Lingding – the Zhuhai-run vice hub of years back) that turns out to be extremely charming, pristine and home to such endangered species as the lesser three-eared pumpkin toad. Click here to see Mr Julia’s glossy travelogue-style video on what the project would do to Lantau, and here for the Living Islands Movement’s thoughts, including a discrete but plaintive appeal they thought I’d miss concerning the impact on property prices in South Lantau.

While the civil servants are shredding the public submissions on the Shek Kwu Chau proposal – to test the thing’s furnace – some citizens are politely suggesting we should be using plasma arc molecule separation and gasification and “not the caveman-technology bonfires” the civil servants want.

As the name suggests, Plasma arc etc involves such stellar temperatures that atoms separate and form new compounds, as explained in a quick Discovery Channel video and the manufacturer’s blurb. Forget perpetual motion, nuclear fusion or creating gold from base metals – this promises to take Hong Kong’s tons of daily junk and convert it into: a) an inert glass-like slag perfect for construction and b) combustible gas ideal for generating electricity. And you should see what it does to virus-laden bird carcasses.

If it’s so wonderful, why are the bureaucrats of the Environmental Protection Department determined to go with the outdated burning-up-in-smoke-and-dumping-ash-somewhere approach?

As a non-scientist, I can only guess at three possible explanations.

One is that the Discovery Channel, Westinghouse and Hong Kong activists with all their PhDs and beards are wrong and EPD civil servants are right. (For example, the space-age arc Plasma stuff would cost the equivalent of 20 Zhuhai bridges.)

Another is that EPD officials are driving their mammoth 8-seater Alp Hards through town seething with rage that a bunch of outsiders living in buffalo-infested villages have come up with a better idea, and they are now going to dig their heels in and cover Shek Kwu Chau with satanic Victorian-era incinerators to defend the honour and face of the world’s most superior civil service.

A third is that one or both of these camps would get a kickback from the suppliers of their favoured technology. But looking at them all – trendy busybodies holding fund-raising barbecues on their villa roofs and pompously professional public servants filling in their air-conditioning allowance claims – it doesn’t wash.

I will remain agnostic, though I must say I have my hunches.

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Hong Kong’s rarely seen Justice Secretary praises the city’s Court of Final Appeal for “…faithfully apply[ing] the common law in an unprecedented constitutional setting.”  By which he means swallowing the repellent truth that we are part of a Communist one-party state whose leadership can alter the meaning of a law, regardless of its wording, on a whim out of political expediency. The euphemism is ‘interpretation’.

Weird juxtapositions and connections are an inevitable part of such an environment, and today’s come courtesy of the wide overseas reporting of the protest against the Dolce & Gabanna photo-racism outrage, and the arrival of colonial-era officials like former Health Secretary Libby Wong to help the lobby fighting plans to demolish the old Central Government Offices in Central…

The Save Government Hill movement has even, the South China Morning Post reports, unearthed the architect: one Michael Wright, aged 99, of London. Former Chief Secretary Sir David Akers-Jones chimes in, saying: “People are regretting they cared about [conservation] too late. We have given Central away. The time has come to stop.”

The weird juxtaposition manifests itself physically through the appearance of a flag bearing the British Hong Kong arms among the witty props protestors brought to oppose ‘luxury hegemony’ outside Dolce & Gabanna on Sunday. Whoever carried the pre-1997 banner – not unprecedented at anti-establishment gatherings – is probably too young to recall Libby and her penchant for the occasional menthol cigarette, or the all-purpose colonial-era patrician manner of Akers-Jones.

The anti-D&G demo has jarred the overseas press, who perhaps can’t make sense of rich, status-symbol Hong Kong chanting “Death to the designer label!” and claiming to be racial victims of their peasant-compatriots across the border. Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times writers are bemused, but suspect that the up-market mega-stores serving Mainlanders are part of the problem. These are the same stores, of course, that Hong Kong planners wish to accommodate in the proposed Government Hill redevelopment’s shopping mall.

The deluge of Mainland tourists and money, and higher rents, and the subsequent crushing of independent retailers serving local inhabitants has been going on for a good 10 years, and it is if anything getting worse. Mainland mothers giving birth here and stripping supermarket shelves of non-adulterated baby formula add to the alienation. And then all these Mainland investors buy up local apartments to leave empty, while Hongkongers can’t afford to live or start a business in their own city. The property interests evict, knock-down and rebuild to rake in yet more money, while the rest of the Big Lychee gets swept aside as an irrelevance. It’s enough to make young people resort to waving colonial symbols – a largely misplaced piece of imagery, though also possibly more vivid than they realize, being an expression of anti-Chinese sedition. And it’s enough to get these old fogeys who ran the place in the 70s and 80s out of their retirement homes to do something equally unthinkable: oppose the bureaucracy they bequeathed us.

Back in the SCMP, we have a column by Peter Kammerer, who suspects the bags Mainland tourists lug around Hong Kong are stuffed with dirty money, which cannot possibly have crossed the border in accordance with Mainland law…

To get a better idea of what is going on, take a visit to Macau. Its casinos’ revenues have boomed almost exponentially, just like Hong Kong’s tacky designer-label palaces and empty real estate. Peter Kammerer laments that no-one is asking how much of this cash is illicit. They just assume it. Of course this is money-laundering (D&G’s objection to photographs supposedly sprang from a guilty Mainlander not wanted to be spotted in the store). It is not new; Hong Kong’s zillions of little banks and Macau’s former gold bullion market were doing it decades back. Nor is it unique to the Pearl River Delta. North Korea has a casino or two. And the guy who wrote that “Singapore’s success came mainly from being the money laundering center for corrupt Indonesian businessmen and government officials” didn’t get fired for writing fiction.

The key thing is that Macau’s casino expansion, and the liberalization of outbound travel by individual Mainlanders to the two Special Administrative Regions, result from policy set in Beijing. If the two ex-colonies are being transformed into money-laundering centres it doesn’t have to be by accident. Indeed, the Chinese government must know what is happening (it has in the past reduced the number of trips people can make to Macau). Maybe the national leadership sees the outflow of corrupt money as a pressure valve, preferable to trying to keep the ill-gotten gains within China. Seen that way, what is going on around us in casinos and luxury goods and property markets is our contribution to the motherland’s harmonious socialist development.

Portugal lost control of Macau decades ago, but Britain kept Hong Kong relatively insulated from Beijing right to the end. Hence the irritating opinion polls on citizens’ identity, and hence the growing refusal to accept D&G-Mainlander imperialism and the developer-Tsang regime conspiracy to smother the city in Mandarin-speaking, simplified character-using shopping malls.

In an unprecedented constitutional setting, it all makes sense.

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Yesterday’s Pan-Democratic primary election was pointless but full of telling contradiction. The intention was to allow the public to freely elect someone to take part in a rigged quasi-election in which they are forbidden to vote and their nominee will be forbidden to win. The turnout of just under 34,000 can be seen as either pitiful, for a city of 7 million, or impressive, compared with the 1,200 allowed to cast a ballot in the fake election for Chief Executive in March.

Albert Ho of the Democratic Party was inevitably going to get the nomination owing to his higher profile than the ADPL’s Frederick Fung. Sexier, brighter, brasher, more inspiring and more statesman-like individuals would not be hard to find, but the futility of the nomination and the petty rivalries within the pro-democracy camp left the field to this uncharismatic pair. (There is also, of course, the big issue of the potential repercussions from alignment with the opposition, which keeps much talent out of political participation. This is echoed in the press; the Standard distances itself with quotation marks around the phrase ‘primary election’, while the South China Morning Post refers to the event as a ‘poll’.)

Once he is officially on the ballot, Ho wants to nail establishment candidates Henry Tang and CY Leung on property, financial and public utilities hegemony. As the underdog chosen by the public, he theoretically has an ideal opportunity to win by losing, gaining the highest public opinion ratings and leaving the next chief executive with a horrible, shriveled-up excuse of a mandate. But it won’t happen. You wouldn’t have thought that you could nominate someone who can look less qualified than Henry, but the pro-dems have managed to do it. Things might be different if a proven leader like ex-Chief Secretary Anson Chan or a brainbox like policy wonk Christine Loh were in Ho’s place. The best we can hope for is an entertaining TV debate between Ho and Henry.

The press in Italy and France meanwhile report a Hong Kong Don’t-Tread-on-Me moment as outraged citizens leap to defend one of the city’s most cherished liberties: the right to keep and bear digital cameras. A thousand mob the Tsimshatsui Dolce and Gabanna store after some spotty security guard decreed that Hongkongers are not allowed to take photos in their own streets.

There are few things more delightful than watching a jumped-up company selling worthless and/or overpriced junk come crashing to Earth through its own arrogance and public relations incompetence. The classic example is the McLibel case, in which McDonalds in London sued a group of nonentities for handing out leaflets listing the junk food giant’s real and imaginary sins. I have a hunch – I’d like to be wrong – that the Beijing officials running the CE quasi-election behind the scenes will not actually allow Henry Tang to engage in a contest of minds with Albert Ho, live and on-camera. If so, at least we will have the amusement of watching the tacky D&G clothing retailer (with its individual-respecting Code of Ethics) put its glamorous reputation back together.

“Chuck a few really idiotic, huge reclamations into the publicity material too, to scare the dolphin lovers and all that lot.” So, presumably, went the instructions to the folk at the Civil Engineering and Development Department who compiled the proposals on land supply released yesterday. Hence today’s Mega Island – six times bigger than Cheung Chau headlines.

The presentations are here (rationale) and here (maps).

This needs to be seen in the context of Hong Kong government infrastructure and planning policies, which essentially revolve around transferring public wealth to construction interests, hence all the several hundred billions worth of pointless road, bridge and rail projects currently underway. To justify these huge giveaways, officials assume that trends like the rise of the Pearl River Delta export manufacturing machine will continue, even though they are clearly peaking.

In this case, we are invited to believe that by 2039 Hong Kong will have 30% more households than today, totaling a population of 8.9 million, and this will require an extra 45 sq km of land, only 43% of which will be for residential use. We are also expected to conclude that much of this land must come from reclamation. After pondering the awfulness of, say, attaching sprawling housing estates and freeways onto cherished patches of Lamma coastline, we are then supposed to look at the smaller-scale reclamation possibilities (on ‘artificial or disturbed shoreline’) and think they are OK.

Population forecasts, especially by Hong Kong officials, are invariably wrong. Chief Executive Donald Tsang, CY Leung and others warn of under-population one minute and floods of Mainland babies and Filipinos the next. One thing the 8.9 million forecast does not seem to factor in is the possibility of outward migration. A few tweaks to welfare and health policies could easily induce hundreds of thousands of elderly to move to cheaper and nicer places on the mainland in the coming decades, just as the elderly move out of London or New York.

The assumption that we will continue to use land the way we have been doing in the last few decades is also questionable. Will an older population need the same proportion of commercial buildings and roads as today? Will the container ports still be in business, and in their existing locations? Will trucks and containers still clog up the New Territories? Will the Transport Bureau still be prioritizing private car use?

The most obvious ways to free up land – rezoning, resumption and redevelopment – are all ruled out because… they involve private owners. What is the problem? That the additional value created will not end up in official hands? That the government will have to transfer funds to people who don’t own huge construction companies? That the government might have to face up to the New Territories mafia? That the confusion of property rights and redevelopment rights, and the artificially inflated price of land, all make it administratively simpler to spend billions filling in the sea, when we have dozens of square miles of usable space zoned for non-residential use or masquerading as country park?

Worst of all, there is no mention of my pet reclamation project: evict Disneyland.

The private sector has no problem with reclamation. The space between the main towers of Exchange Square and the smaller block known as the Forum has always been an oasis in Central – a rare place where passersby have been allowed to sit, and with Elizabeth Frink’s water buffalo for company. Perhaps as a forewarning of a bear market, in recent days the sculptures have been crated up (below, middle right) and the seating area has been sealed off…

A bigger building, yielding more rent for Hong Kong Land, will follow. It will, no doubt, be a plain box, avoiding all the nasty, sunlight-enabling inefficiency of its predecessor’s curves…

Click to hear ‘This Land is Your Land’ by Woody Guthrie!

The Iowa caucuses are underway. Rick Santorum declares that his fellow Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul is ‘disgusting’. Paul is a Libertarian with past links to wacky far-right Christian reconstructionism – the belief that fundamentalists should infiltrate and take over government – and racist newsletters published in his name. Santorum is a cookie-cutter fundamentalist-conservative who has a problem with the idea of evolution and gets so worked up about homosexuals that you have to wonder if he secretly fears he is one – and has tragically if hilariously had his name hijacked for other purposes as a result. Both, in short, are freaks, though by the standards of fellow candidates like Michele Bachman or Herman Cain, they are arguably below-average ones. The nearest thing to a normal human being in the Republican line-up is a Mormon who was Ambassador to Beijing, and he is trailing the field.

Much to the consternation of our local Chinese officials, who get the heebie-jeebies about polls they aren’t rigging, Hong Kong is to see a primary election of its own on Sunday. It promises to be an embarrassing non-event, attracting a few tens of thousands to makeshift polling stations set up around MTR stations to take part in a play-acting exercise to choose a pan-democrat candidate for a similarly play-acting Chief Executive election in March. The irony being, of course, that the former play-acting camp denounce the latter.

The two contenders, Albert Ho of the Democratic Party and Frederick Fung of the ‘moderate’ (ie, insipid) Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood, had a debate last night. Neither called the other disgusting. The other main contrast with the Americans is in the charisma department: neither Ho nor Fung has much of the magic ingredient. People have at least heard of Ho before, so he will no doubt be the pro-democrats’ make-believe candidate in the make-believe election – but taking part in the all-too-real and potentially highly amusing TV debate with, barring an act of God beyond Tamar, Henry Tang.

Ho called at one point for a declaration of war on the hegemony of property developers. Many of us, if debating Ho on that point, would dismiss him as a turncoat weakling softy and insist that we should just lynch the bastards now without warning. But the ADLP is the ‘acceptable’ pro-democratic group, acknowledged by Beijing at times when all other pan-dems have been shut out as anti-patriotic Western stooges. Fung disagreed with Ho on the grounds that he preferred not to aggravate hatred in society. We want reasonable moderation and moderate reasonableness, and we want it now.

Mostly, Ho went on about the Holy Cause. Like most of the pro-dems (other than Long-Hair-style radicals who reject participation in the CE quasi-election) his obsession is universal suffrage. Just as the Evangelicals of Iowa want to hear that raped women should be forced to have their babies or schools should teach the Bible rather than biology, so Hongkongers want to hear that the property market is a cartelized pyramid scheme and the electricity companies rip us off. Timetables for phasing out functional constituencies just don’t do it.

With 22% of votes counted, the latest is that Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and the other Mormon, Mitt Romney, are neck-and-neck.

The news on the radio this morning suggested that Iran is modifying its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz. This is obviously a Good Thing, though there is a nasty and sordid voice within me wondering what I could sell oil shares for if it happened, and lamenting a lost chance to see the regime in Tehran getting a good thumping. (Chances are that they can’t do it anyway.) In a similar vein, we all politely hope that Hong Kong’s latest pesky pestilence problem will be just a brief snag, both easy to explain and to fix. Decency and good taste require us not to drool over the tantalizing possibility that it is the tip of a huge scandal.

Legionnaire’s Disease has been found not just in Education Secretary Michael Suen’s washroom at the lavish new Government Headquarters in Tamar; it’s in the East Wing, the West Wing, the Legislative Council building sitting symbolically in the shadow of the giant white elephant, and it’s in the boxy little structure opposite. The HK$5 billion complex is riddled with the deadly disease.

There are probably various humdrum explanations as to how the bug managed to move into, spread around and make itself at home in the barely opened monument to fiscal waste and official vanity. The bacterium is common and could easily gain access to any building floating through the usual water systems. So it was just bad luck that it happened to settle in the Sir Donald Tsang Stately Pleasure Dome. Could have happened anywhere. Government workers are mopping and scrubbing the place as we speak; the bug will be eradicated before long and the whole episode forgotten. That’s the probable outcome.

But what if it is not that simple? What if the microscopic beasties managed to infiltrate the Sir Bowtie Mega-Palace because of an engineering fault in the pipes or storage tanks? What if the architectural pointlessness of the Government Citadel’s form somehow exposes the inhabitants to microbial risk in a way that ordinary oblong buildings do not? What if the lavishness of the design contains elements that are in fact unhygienic and breed germs? What if officials desperately rushing to get the monstrosity open in time cut corners or swept something under the carpet, leaving the way open for an influx of plague? What if the problem can only be fixed by sending half the civil servants back to the old dump at Lower Albert Road for six months, or by spending another half billion dollars on retrofitting accidentally omitted filters or something?

Obviously, it’s all way too much to hope for we all hope it isn’t the case.

Pure bad luck, or human error. There is a third explanation for the visitation of sickness upon Zhongnanhai South: divine intervention. Even being omniscient, God probably doesn’t minutely follow the workings of the Hong Kong government. But He can’t have helped noticing by now how infuriating and irritating Michael Suen is. Personally, I’d have covered the Education Secretary in boils, but that’s just me.

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