Big Lychee, Various Sectors

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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Emerging blinking in the daylight after Phase One of Hong Kong’s Winter Hibernations, the still-adjusting eyes glance hazily around the front page of the Standard. The strange thing about tabloids is that you absorb the stories without even trying. Obviously this is deliberate, given that the papers are aimed at readers with limited attention spans. The Shenzhen bus accident is a tragic page-turner, propelled to the front more by the lack of any other news rather than because three Hong Kong residents died. Yet within a second or two all the basic details have leapt into my consciousness, along with an adjoining picture of some sort of berries or seeds encased in translucent dark red pulp and some sort of pinkish fatty cold meat.

Flicking through the following pages, I find myself pondering the inanity of the story on the Y Elites survey of how women post photos on the Internet to win approval from others (or something). Y Elites is a United Front group of the vaguely young, vaguely not-really-elite, which strives to ignite Hong Kong young people’s passion and love for the motherland. On a more zippy, alert and enthusiastic sort of day I would wonder why such an obscure pro-Beijing organization is raising its head at this particular time. But instead, my mind drifts back to the ad photo on the front page. It was pomegranate, clearly, and some sort of salami.

Pomegranates seem to be in season right now. There is even one in my kitchen (they make amazing juice). I remember they were a treat when we were kids. We would eat the juicy flesh and fire the pips straight from our mouths with peashooters without even pausing to think what a miracle of convenience nature had wrought just for sweet-toothed, lightly armed little boys. As for the salami – well, it’s just salami. Actually, the front-page picture next to the bus crash looked a bit more like the little slices of sausage-plastic hybrid you get in a cellophane pack with tonkatsu instant ramen.

The women interviewed by Y Elites in shopping districts are utter bimbos; that seems to be the story. Far more interesting, it is starting to dawn on me, is what a weird juxtaposition that is: pomegranate and sort-of-salami. Curiosity gets the better of me, and I turn back to the Standard’s front cover. It’s ‘fine jewellery’, apparently.

Meanwhile, RTHK reports that National Development and Reform Commission boss Zhang Ping has expressed the hope of closer cooperation between Hong Kong and the Mainland. The Standard has it that Zhang Ping praised Chief Executive Donald Tsang for promoting closer cooperation between Hong Kong and the Mainland. The government sees things a bit differently, maintaining that Zhang will facilitate cooperation between Hong Kong and the Mainland.

When stuck for words in the presence of a vast flower arrangement, tacky Great Wall tapestry and the press, ramp up the cooperation, or at least declarations thereof. This must be the eleven thousandth time senior officials from both sides have struck upon the idea. The first time it seemed dazzlingly original and potentially world-changing, but it has faded over the years and decades.

For a while, we heard a lot about ‘cooperating’ over the Lok Ma Chau Loop, a patch of polluted mud on the Hong Kong side of the border but owned by Shenzhen interests. Reading between the lines, it looked like they wanted some sort of cross-border money-laundering zone, though everyone was too polite to say so. Since Shenzhen’s then-mayor fell from grace, we have heard less of it.

Now it is the turn of Qianhai, mentioned in the Hong Kong government press release to assure counterparts across the border that we are oh-so-keen to ‘cooperate’ over the plan to develop an enclave with Hong Kong financial freedoms under Shenzhen officials’ control. Beijing seems to have vetoed the original plans to develop a RMB offshore centre and turn the place into South China’s Manhattan, complete with Hong Kong laws (Hong Kong’s main industry would thenceforth be making pork dumplings). Now, it will be some sort of bonded port – or the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone, if you prefer.

Perhaps we should start with something more modest, like some hints on emergency services response. The Shenzhen paramedics took 30 minutes to get to the bus crash, right in the city’s ground transport hub.

Here

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Yesterday felt like a Friday; today seems like an absolute impertinence. So I am minded (as people who like to ‘concur’ would put it) to issue a Fatwa declaring the weekend open here and now. Disregarding December 28-30 and the little matter of January 3-6, 9-13 and 16-20, we are now facing non-stop holidays running through Christmas and Gregorian and Lunar New Years right up to January 26, which, being a Thursday, is pretty much the start of another weekend – and, bingo, it’s February. The bad news is that Easter this year isn’t until August or something.

While we are twiddling our thumbs waiting for our last few hours of office toil to give way to resplendent Yuletide leisure, I have been flicking through AsiaSentinel. It is a well-intentioned, indeed worthy, on-line publication, give or take the occasional mind-numbing in-depth report on Australian wine. It is sort of a retirement home for seasoned old-school journalists of the sort that used to inhabit the Far Eastern Economic Review in its 80s heyday.

In what I fear may be an act of touching naivety – which can happen when the elderly get into modern technology – the site is now attempting to charge readers for access. The deal is that you can read several stories a month for free, and then have to pay. It may well be a perfectly good deal, but of course that’s not the point. Eke out your ration of free content among your home PC and your office one, and borrow the amah’s laptop for a few more, and you can read everything you would want to, gratis. They add only one item or so a day.

Still, there are probably worse ways for these writers to spend their twilight years than fighting a rearguard action against the forces of free content and de-professionalization. It doesn’t matter that 99.999% of the amateur journalism swamping the Internet is worse than the ‘real’ material that appears in established publications that cost money. Just a tiny proportion adds up to all you can read. Wrinkled old Rupert Murdoch rails against the idea of good writing being free on-line (by-passing his advertising revenue net, of course). Meanwhile, we browse Slate, the Daily Beast, Marketwatch, not to mention all the micro- on-line efforts of unpaid scribblers on various missions.

As that word ‘unpaid’ sets off alarm bells at AsiaSentinel, I might sneak in through the wide-open back door and read a piece by Cyril Pereira – a venerable old name. Hong Kong and Article 23.

But no…

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In that case, there is nothing for it. I declare the long weekend prematurely open.

It is the run-up to the Winter Solstice and Christmas, and Hong Kong celebrates the season of good cheer with pestilence, barrier tape and bitter feuding over how many inches there should be on each side of a square foot.

A traditional delicacy for the shortest day in the year – barely-plucked, almost-still-breathing chicken – is banned as the government freaks out over the discovery of H5N1 avian flu virus in a sample carcass at a market. It will be chilled poultry or none for the next couple of weeks, which is an outrageous imposition in a culture where only a freshly killed bird has any flavour. (The lateral thinkers’ solution of currying it is out, on the grounds that the resulting dish may have sweetness, sourness or spiciness, which would be a hideous shock to many hypersensitive local palates, not to say deleterious to health.)

Or that’s the theory. But what do we have here, 50 yards from a certain street not far from the central business district? A-Kwok and his buddy the driver and their little white van, delivering half a dozen of the creatures, still-warm and guaranteed to be tasty, succulent and beneficial to feng-shui – probably destined for a classy restaurant with fussy but rich customers. Even during times of government-imposed scarcity, you can have whatever you want provided you pay through the nose for it.

As our property tycoons will confirm. They are undergoing anguish at the moment after the government suggested that they base prices for new apartments on the amount of space within the units, without including bits of hallway, mailbox, swimming pool, elevator shaft and other building features, thus enabling them to offer a nasty 480-square-foot hovel as a sprawling 620-square-foot palace. (Or, more to the point, allowing them to hide the fact that they are charging the buyer 6.2 rather than 4.8 times the property’s probable true value as a real economic asset to the human race).

The government, in an apparent fit of premature senility, is proposing that whoever buys such honestly advertised homes from the developers will be free to revert to the old system and sell it on as larger/cheaper. The Real Estate Developers Association leaps on this illogical idea – there is no difference in substance between first-hand and second-hand flats – and demands that the cutoff point at which the sellers become legally allowed to lie about apartments’ size should be the stage at which the property is completed.

Why can’t we simply require by law that all homes, old and new, are advertised as their real, actual, internal size – for which an official definition exists? Just as a five-kilo bag of rice contains five not four kilos, a big box of eggs contains 12 not 10, and A-Kwok delivers all six of the illicit fresh chickens ordered, not five-plus-one-in-a-swimming-pool?

Among the objections I can think of… It would require the poor overworked real estate agencies to change the flat sizes on all the ads in their windows and on their websites. (But they change the prices every other day.) It would be ‘unfair’ to forbid someone who bought 480 sq ft plus 140 invisible sq ft in the past to sell the invisible bit in the future. (This is a genuine old REDA argument, delivered with a straight face: ‘it will make everyone’s apartments smaller’.) Failing that, it will ‘confuse’ everyone. (To describe 480 sq ft as 480 sq ft – yes, that would leave us all totally perplexed.)

It would be a slur against this Yuletide season of good will to suggest that our officials deliberately put forward an illogical proposal so as to give REDA a chance to shoot it down, find a loophole, or recommend something equally idiotic in return. But it’s either that or they’re plain witless.

To make ourselves feel better, let’s take a stroll around and admire the tasteful barriers and nylon tape erected around this year’s Christmas decorations. The lovely curving symmetry of the semi-shiny metal, and the sensual, colourful tautness of the ribbon stretched out with landlord’s logo on it. All beautifully arranged by special, Ikebana-trained security guards, to keep curious children, maids and the elderly from the dangers of getting too close to the potentially volatile and easily panicked tree.

And from yesterday’s Standard, an only-in-Hong Kong headline…

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No missiles flying yet. In North Korea, an apparently somewhat dull-witted brat, born into a life of luxury and privilege, totally cut off from his fellow citizens, surrounded by sycophants and boosted by a crude propaganda machine, befriends interest groups and weighs potential opponents as he prepares to assume power.

Thank God such a thing is unthinkable here in Hong Kong, where Chief Executive candidate Henry Tang launches his ‘campaign’ with hackneyed razzmatazz and the endorsement of the city’s depressing excuse for an establishment elite.

The superficially slick PR, including lame slogan and wedding-style video of the great man’s upbringing, bore all the hallmarks of what corporate communications voodoo practitioners produce to flatter and satisfy an easily impressed client rather than to persuade and convince a bigger and more reluctant audience. The alleged policy platform was predictable and pitiful: more education spending, when the problem is outdated education methods; a bit more housing supply, when the problem is the land system; fill in your favourite.

In fairness, one proposed measure will bring a guaranteed result: a pledge to bolster the middle class – dwindling in the Big Lychee at least as rapidly as elsewhere, as witnessed in our old friend, the disconnection between median household income and per capita GDP. Henry’s solution is to upgrade the definition of ‘middle class’ households from those with monthly incomes of HK$10,000-40,000 to those earning HK$20,000-80,000. Voila! A richer middle class!

The cast of nearly 1,000 supporters was similarly unsurprising and uninspiring – the self-appointed, smug, bureaucrat-tycoon coterie typified by HK General Chamber boss Anthony Wu (the big guy next to Antony Leung), plus various hangers-on yearning for a Bronze Bauhinia Star one day, along with a few people we had forgotten even existed, like former Executive Council member Sir SY Chung and pop star Leon Lai. All that was missing, apart from ordinary people and the pro-Beijing groups awaiting orders on whom to back, were the property tycoons. The public hates the developers as much as the developers loath Henry’s rival CY Leung, so on balance it was best they stayed away.

North Korea’s new leader is ‘sadistic and unpredictable’. We don’t have to worry about that, at least.

It has been a weekend of death. Writer Christopher Hitchens is in Hell today. His finest moment was probably The Missionary Position, which combined contrarianism with extreme belligerence in shredding Mother Teresa of Calcutta – a figure hitherto compulsorily venerated as a humble and beautiful living god surpassing even Saint Di. He skewered religion in general and played a key part in the Internet-driven increase in the acceptability of atheism in the US following 9-11, the Catholic child rape cover-ups and the fundamentalist anti-science phenomenon. Fans who have never heard it might enjoy his radio interview with mouthy Bible freak Todd Friel (parts 1 and 2).

Also passing on was Vaclav Havel, another writer, who helped topple Communist rule in Eastern Europe while listening to Frank Zappa. Plus 650 to over 1,000 Filipinos whose names I don’t have perished during a tropical storm. We’re not certain whether they have ended up in Hell or not.

On a brighter note, we have a birth: Hong Kong’s fifth (sixth? seventh?) pro-democracy political party. Although it is called the Labour Party and could in theory grab some attention by pushing issues the masses care about like the cost of living or standard of housing, its members couldn’t resist launching the group by highlighting predictable and esoteric lost and forgotten causes summed up by the Standard as “a referendum law, a party law, abolition of the so-called legislation [there is none] based on Article 23 of the Basic Law and a vindication of all those involved in the Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations of June 4, 1989.”

Founders include the redoubtable Cyd Ho, union leader Lee Cheuk-yan and academic social worker-type Fernando Cheung. This suggests that the group is positioning itself as the natural home for people who are too free-thinking to be in the Democratic Party, too earthy to fit into the Civic Party, not Trotskyite enough to be in the League of Social Democrats, not alert enough (like me) to instantly recall the names of the DP’s and LSD’s breakaway offshoots, and who have forgotten that the Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood still exists. “The government has to bow to the people’s power if we are united,” says Lee, apparently with no hint of irony. (People Power – that’s one of them.)

For a fine example of unity, we need look no further than the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of Hong Kong. Members have been told not to attend this afternoon’s election rally for ex-Chief Secretary Henry Tang. Chairman Tam Yiu-chung says it is ‘not appropriate at this stage’ to declare support for a Chief Executive candidate; in other words, Beijing has not officially told them who to back. Apparently, they are allowed to choose by themselves what to have for breakfast every day.

The Tang-for-CE event at the Convention and Exhibition Centre is not really aimed at the proletarian Communist front that is the DAB. It’s for the cream of capitalism-with-Hong-Kong-characteristics, with some top financiers plus a few of our ‘elite’ ex-bureaucrats, plus members of the Liberal Party (former member: H Tang) and its even slimier offshoot Economic Synergy. (I think that’s every party in town mentioned.)

Bank of East Asia boss David Li is doing the honours as the director of Henry’s ‘campaign office’. It is a nominal role, needless to say, but to the extent it requires experience, Li has it: he held the same title during the run-up to Donald Tsang’s ‘elections’ in 2005 and 2007. 

Update: minor deity and Dear Leader Kim Jong-il has also departed. Cue mass crying on the streets of Pyongyang.

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