Big Lychee, Various Sectors

If the air seems significantly cleaner and healthier today, it’s because the new law against idling engines has come into effect, and the amount of pollution clogging up our streets and lungs has plummeted. Except, of course, it doesn’t.

The law was a cop-out from the start. The way to clean the air is to pretty much ban all cars and trucks from the urban areas from 8am to 8pm so Central, Causeway Bay, TST etc are 90% pedestrianized during daytime. But this is Hong Kong, a constitutional dictatorship where nothing can happen without a near-total consensus. The government came up with an elaborate bit of legislation carefully crafted to make virtually no noticeable difference – and then allowed it to be watered down until it ended up like a homeopathic medicine, with no measureable number of molecules of the original active ingredient remaining.

Originally, the plan was to require all parked vehicles to switch their engines off. It wouldn’t have had any effect because no-one would either obey or enforce the law. Drivers would keep their air-conditioning switched on, and our educationally subnormal traffic wardens would drift unseen in their own little parallel universe, with their eyes closed and mouths agape, as ever.

Still, vested interests had to object on principle. School busses with precious little kiddies in them were exempted. People parking for less than three minutes were exempted. Over-65s were exempted. Taxi drivers with a note from their doctor were exempted. People with family names starting from A to G and M to T were exempted on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And so on, up to the point where only eight drivers are actually subject to the law.

On a brighter note, the Hang Seng Index will hit 25,000 next year, according to a headline in the South China Morning Post. This could solve the quandary faced by many small investors at the moment. Do you get out of the market on the grounds that the next couple of years could be a re-run of the early 1930s, even though valuations look low? Or do you stay fully invested and ride out the next couple of years because valuations are so low? Most people are half-in, half-out. The Euro might implode and China’s debt-driven, investment-in-tofu-projects orgy might end in collapse. Or, on the other hand, they might not. The SCMP forecast comes from China Construction Bank. For all I know, they might be very wonderful and perceptive people. But then again, on the other hand, they might not.

At least we can be sure of one thing: legislator and former Security Secretary Regina Ip will not be taking part in the coming make-believe election for Chief Executive. Approximately 6,999,999 people knew this already, of course, but yesterday she drew the same conclusion and finally added herself to their number. On the radio this morning she lamented that she wouldn’t have had anything like enough support from the tycoons and sycophants in a position to nominate her. But in 2017, she said, they might think otherwise because, knowing that we would all be voting in the subsequent election, they would want to nominate someone we would all like. Something like that. It cheered me up, anyway.

I declare the two-day rehearsal for the 24-28 December holiday open.

The primary purpose of a farce, it says here, is to entertain the audience by means of “unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations … deliberate absurdity and nonsense”. Which brings us to page 12 of today’s Standard, where we are presented with two stories on Hong Kong’s Chief Executive mock-election candidates Henry Tang and CY Leung.

One story reports that ex-Chief Secretary Tang was hobnobbing with movie folk yesterday – the sort of predictable photo-opportunity he needs to do more of. He met Kung Fu star Donnie Yen and a producer we will hear more of in a moment called Stephen Shiu. Shiu’s main contribution to Hong Kong culture, or at least exports, is a 3D soft-porn film called Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (extreme tedium, more like it). Straight from central casting he comes, with black T-shirt and podgy, pervy, camera-in-bag-on-floor-in-MTR demeanour.

Henry spouted the usual sort of drivel that the Big Lychee’s politicians come up with on such occasions, promising to ‘help’ the local film industry through investment funds, the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement and all the usual hogwash. So far, so normal.

The second story is a bit of British Murdoch tabloid-style dirt aimed at Henry’s rival. A former neighbour of the Leungs in Stanley questions whether CY is the right person to lead Hong Kong. His family was bullied, it seems, after CY’s wife put an antenna on his roof and – screaming, no less – refused to remove it. (Coded short-wave messages from Beijing? We will never know.) So rabidly did Mrs CY freak out that the poor police got dragged into it. Conclusion: “…if you cannot even manage your own family, how can you manage a city?”

The long-suffering former neighbour? Skin-flick merchant Stephen Shiu, who hastens after the Standard reporter to add how much he agrees with her media group’s disputed analysis of CY’s business and financial embarrassments, and adds, “I am a little bit scared. I would rather have a chief executive who is willing to discuss matters.”

Lest anyone still detects a Higgs Boson-size speck of subtlety, the Standard gives this story top billing.

Both candidates have been spotted visiting the Central People’s Government Liaison Office, prompting much muttering about whether the cadres saw them together or apart, gave advice or instructions on how the quasi-election campaign is to proceed, or offered tips on installing antennae on neighbours’ roofs. But that place is a black box. Sing Tao/Standard proprietor Charles Ho’s persecution of CY, by contrast, is a little ray of sunlight.

Click to hear the Who’s ‘My Wife’!

I can’t remember the last time I got the knowing but strained look and the barely audible whisper, ‘NOOUD!’ ‘Not one of us, dear’ (or ‘darling’, depending on the company). But there it is, pretty much, in the Standard’s irresistibly nasty Mary Ma column’s comment that poor old former Executive Council convenor CY Leung “has failed to fit into the higher echelons of society.”

The Hong Kong media are reporting the outcome of the 2011 Election Committee Subsector Elections as news, maybe even big news – maybe a shock. Known or suspected supporters of CY Leung for Chief Executive won fewer seats in the electoral college than pro-democrats, let alone those who back former ex-Chief Secretary Henry Tang. And the silent, spineless and obedient undeclared majority are simply waiting to learn for sure who Beijing has decided will win the quasi-election next March, so they can cast their make-believe vote accordingly. In other words, barring a miracle, CY can’t even get enough nominations to be on the ballot.

But it’s not really news: it’s all part of the script. Presumably, headline writers have to join in the pretense that it’s not all rigged from start to finish and a one-party state might leave something to chance.

Scripts can of course be tossed away at short notice. Folks with long memories will recall a day in March 2005 when it became known that Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa was standing down and would be replaced, after a CE ‘election’ of course, by none other than Chief Secretary Donald Tsang, fresh from his belittling but triumphant urban hygiene project Team Clean. The pro-Beijing loyalists were reduced to tears (literally, in at least one case) to see their beloved Communist Party elevating a running dog of the British colonialists over their heads. But the most morose face that day, when Sir Bow-Tie was seen strolling into the office smirking and whistling the Chinese national anthem, was Henry’s.

The chances of seeing that twice in a lifetime are tragically slim. (Henry is like the Euro: common sense tells you it is a disaster and will inevitably fail; cynicism and experience tell you the people making the decisions regard the alternative as unthinkable, and so common sense must and will be denied, whatever the cost.)

Sunday’s strange little election – with its low turnout, partly non-human electorate and curiously concentrated blocs of votes seemingly orchestrated by a hidden hand – leaves CY Leung with few alternatives. He will carry on for a while, perhaps angling for broad public approval in the face of a growing number of tycoons, stars and fading bureaucrats coming out as Henry supporters. Maybe even come up with a platform (now there’s an idea).

Maybe he will go down fighting like a man, failing to get enough nominations but occupying the moral high ground in the public ratings. Or perhaps, encouraged by a tap on the shoulder, he will save face and side with Henry for the sake of harmony in a time of economic uncertainty, maybe even accepting a position in the new administration. Scripts can be flexible. You can even have a happy ending where the cheeky but loveable underdog ends up being accepted into the higher echelons of society. 

Click to hear ‘Farewell, Farewell’ by Fairport Convention!

I bumped into a long-lost former colleague en route to the office this morning, and he suggested we have a quick coffee in the nearest convenient place: the Starbucks in the ground floor foyer of Jardine House. It was around 8.15. We ordered and paid quickly enough but then found that some eight or so people were already milling around the far end of the counter waiting for their drinks. We joined the throng and watched the harassed serving wench darting back and forth, squirting steaming liquid into cups, putting lids on them and setting them on the counter with bilingual announcements of their contents.

Coffees came, and coffees went. The line of customers coming in to order lengthened, and the group waiting to get what they had paid for grew bigger. Some busy inhabitant of this building of investment bankers apparently gave up hope at some stage, leaving a single cappuccino unclaimed. It was five minutes after we had ordered our double espressos, and I was tempted to grab it instead – but self-consciousness got the better of me: wasn’t everyone thinking the same thing, and wouldn’t they all look at me as the impatient delinquent who took someone else’s drink? So we waited some more.

Various giant lattes were delivered and scooped up, the crowds at either end of the production line grew even bigger, and any chance of getting a member of staff’s attention was lost. My watch was approaching 8.26, and I turned to my friend and said I had to be somewhere at 8.30. He did too. So we retreated with no coffee to show for our money and time. “We must, um, do this again sometime,” were my parting words. The amazing thing is that so many of the people in that Starbucks seemed to regard this half-anarchic half-Stalinist retail experience as a perfectly normal and even enjoyable start to the day.

How different it would have been as one of the 66,500 of 237,000 voters eligible to take part in the absurdity yesterday  known as the 2011 Election Committee Subsector Elections, with heavily staffed polling stations handling – by my calculation – an average of one customer every two minutes. In some constituencies, like the shoeshiners’ parade known as the CPPCC, the results have an almost North Korean feel about them.

I suggested a few days ago that electors in the Commercial (First) Subsector might like to vote for a trio – Messrs Cautherley, Shaw and Wong – who had pointedly endorsed the principle of government for Hong Kong as a whole rather than for vested interests. Three of the 21 candidates failed to be returned; can you guess which three?

Click to hear ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ by Calexico/Roger McGuinn!

With a public opinion poll lead of 52% to 26% over rival Henry Tang, CY Leung would be a shoe-in as Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive – if the public could vote. Instead, the winner will be chosen by Beijing and ‘elected’ in a sham poll with 1,200 mostly obedient voters. But if it is to have the slightest shred of credibility, the result cannot flatly contradict the popular mood. And, as the South China Morning Post says today, this leaves the Central People’s Government in a quandary.

Dreamers, naïfs and eternal optimists would love to believe that the Chinese leaders are happy to take orders from the people of Hong Kong and will at this stage drop Henry as their undeclared but laboriously-groomed preference. This could happen, but it would take riots, or at least a 2003-style jasmine uprising. Assuming the masses do not take to the streets (give it a couple of years), and with establishment bigwigs like Bank of East Asia boss David Li having nailed their colours to Henry’s mast, there is no going back: Henry’s opinion poll ratings must be improved.

His performance thus far has been little short of disgraceful when contrasted with that of CY, and his PR manager should ask him some tough questions. Being born into a rich family, you know everything will be handed to you on a plate, but do you have to be so obvious about it? Sure, having already been earmarked for the job, you’d prefer not to go through a stupid pseudo-campaign, but can’t you at least pretend to make an effort? With CY mingling with the poor and dispossessed and wowing students, what are doing collecting endorsements from people like landlord Allen Zeman? Most of all, why do you come across as such a total and utter dork?

He needs to be seen and photographed out and about more, doing the Hong Kong equivalent of Vladimir Putin’s bear-wrestling or bare-torso parachuting. That’ll be worth five percentage points. He needs to come up with an aggressively populist platform: HK$6,000-a-year handouts forever, tons more public housing and inane allowances and free lunches all over the place. Another five points. When the Imperial Handshake finally comes and people realize it will be Henry whether they like it or not, that‘ll be worth yet another five points in the polls – a sort of resigned, no-point-in-not-supporting-him phenomenon we’ve seen before.

One or two well-publicized flashes of what appears to be articulacy, a bit of underhand ‘come clean’ anti-Leung sniping in sympathetic media, trust that the pro-democrats – last heard of subverting the constitution, apparently – leech a bit of CY’s ratings, and touch wood not too many embarrassing photos of bastard offspring turn up. He should just about scrape by. (And then the fun really starts.)

We celebrate the opening of the weekend with an authentic quote from one of Henry’s limited number of fans: he “says the right things according to what other more intelligent people tell him to say”. With supporters like that…

Click to hear Count Five’s ‘Revelation in Slow Motion’!

China Daily reports that members of two Hong Kong political parties are complaining to the authorities about suspicious registrations of multiple voters at single residential addresses. Both individuals lost in recent District Council elections, and the insinuation is that opposing forces cheated. This story has been running for several days now; following complaints by pro-democrats, there have even been arrests. The twist here is that in the China Daily story the implicit victims of the apparent vote-rigging are from the two main pro-Beijing groups, the Federation of Trade Unions and the Democratic Alliance for the Blah Blah of HK.

A mean-spirited skeptic crazed by malevolence and mistrust might imagine that this is a slightly lame attempt, cobbled together in a bit of a panic, to give the impression that the vote-rigging is some neutral, across-the-board phenomenon and most definitely not – no way, not ever – orchestrated by pro-Beijing elements. The assumption that local Communist Party proxies have been organizing attempts to sway elections illegally is not helped by the government’s initial reluctance to take pro-democrats’ complaints seriously, and by circumstantial evidence, like the fact that one gaggle of falsely registered voters (who didn’t vote) were all listed as living in a property owned by a member of a Guangdong city’s People’s Political Consultative Conference.

(An above-averagely mean spirited skeptic with a dash of verve and imagination might wonder whether this last case is actually an elaborate pro-democrat sting to make it look like dirty Commie rats are manipulating elections. After all, it wouldn’t be too hard to find the address of an obscure pro-Beijing loyalist’s property, and the whole point of this affair is that the government doesn’t check – you can register under any address you want. Sadly, such monkey business is too much to hope for of the pro-democracy camp.)

It also, of course, doesn’t help that lurking behind the scenes we have Chinese officials and United Front workers with a long tradition of subterfuge. It is easy to string together a list of factors that point to an increasingly aggressive, broad, centrally managed campaign against the pro-democrats – as a breathless Wall Street Journal article does. Is it any surprise that there are a lot of mean-spirited skeptics around?

To save us from sinking deeper into this swamp of conspiracy and paranoia comes Justice Barnabas Fung, voice of sanity and reason, and boss of the Electoral Affairs Commission. “We have to strike the right balance between voting rights and corrupt practices,” he tells the South China Morning Post.

What a wondrous insight. Indeed, isn’t this the truth about everything? We must strike the right balance between clean sidewalks and dog excrement, between affordable housing and developers’ excessive profit margins, between feeding starving Somali children and letting them die, between good and evil. The list goes on and on. Voting rights and corrupt practices can co-exist in happy harmony if we get the proportions right.

Justice Fung is busy. Elsewhere in Electoral Affairs Land, he is trying to strike the right balance between barring foreign non-human bodies from taking part in electing the people who will pretend to elect the next CE, and having registered them. Queensland’s local emissary – Sir Les Patterson, no less – voices shock at the idea that his trade office is listed on the electoral roll as living with 23 other people with different family names in a disused cinema. Or something.

Meanwhile, RTHK finds that Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong Holdings (which presumably excludes Hutchison and much else) and the Kwok Brothers’ Sun Hung Kai control 70 votes in various subsectors. The SCMP count 130 developers’ votes out of 860 in one subsector before collapsing with fatigue. Screwing the cap back on his bottle of Prozac, Justice Fung assures us that such multiple votes are in accordance with the rules. Which indeed they are. So no problem! We have struck the right balance between letting half a dozen families in real estate run the city and letting a few hundred lesser mortals also have a say.

Breaking news: Justice Fung says it is “in principle alright” for overworked and easily confused voters to take a list of indistinguishable bores into the polling booth on Sunday as an aide-memoir provided you are discreet about it. I would guess mnemonics are probably OK too (though don’t quote me).

Click to hear the Remains’ ‘You Got a Hard Time Coming’!

Where in the world do non-humans officially referred to as ‘bodies’ have votes via ‘authorized representatives’, who must be human? Stupid question, of course. As to how a ‘body’ with its ‘authorized representative’ comes to be – well, someone has gone to great lengths to make it laboriously complex.

Sunday will see the exciting 2011 Election Committee Subsector Elections. The 250,000 or so voters for functional constituency seats in the Legislative Council (some humans taking part have multiple votes, so the number of people is a bit lower) will elect the 1,200-strong Election Committee, which will pretend next March to elect the next Chief Executive.

Today’s South China Morning Post reports that the system contains a loophole: some of the non-human ‘bodies’ are foreign. This is not because nasty overseas organizations are trying to infiltrate plucky little Hong Kong’s political process; the trade offices and chambers of commerce get votes because they are members of umbrella business groups. The fact is that many of the functional constituencies’ voters are in some ways self-selected. You could probably wangle a vote by starting a chamber of commerce or obtaining individual membership of a professional group in a sector where the voters are human and of a distinctly common-or-garden type, like teachers or IT. Needless to say, the voting clout of the less exclusive constituencies/subsectors is diluted in the overall scheme of things. The whole thing, remember, is a charade: the outcome of the ‘election’ for Chief Executive in March will already have been decided in Beijing. The SCMP’s editorial cartoon by Harry speaks a thousand words…

A full list of subsectors and candidates on Sunday is here. To show what an inclusive exercise this is, you can access information on the candidates in Hindi, Thai or Tagalog.

A well-meaning soul (or ‘body’, I suppose) in Commercial (First) asks how someone with an understandable and indeed healthy disdain for the Liberal Party’s James Tien should cast their vote. Fortunately, of the 21 candidates, three have banded together behind the unique proposition – the total antithesis of this whole Communist/Corporatist ‘sector’ sham – that Hong Kong should be run for the benefit of all of its people, not for particular business and other interest groups. They are George Cautherley, Marcus Shaw and Stephen Wong.

The Medical subsector has an amazing 83 candidates jumping up and down and waving their stethoscopes to attract attention. I can recommend Kwok ka-ki, one of those legislators who was too good to stay in Legco.

Why – if you are one of the 250,000 – go to the polling station on Sunday morning? The Three Musketeers Cautherley, Shaw and Wong in Commercial (First) claim in their brochure that ‘Your vote counts’. ‘Your vote can make James Tien’s percentage of the poll smaller than it would otherwise be’, perhaps. And there is always the possibility that if enough pro-democrats get onto the Election Committee they can nominate one of their own as a mock-candidate for Hong Kong’s top post, who could at least mutilate the presumed winner-to-be Henry Tang in a TV debate for all our amusement.  Think of it as a good deed for the community.

Click to hear ‘Sunday Morning’ by the Five Day Week Straw People!

Mouth-frothing apologist for the Chinese Communist Party Lau Nai-keung declares that the ultimate cause of the Fa Yuen Street fire tragedy is exorbitant property prices. We must “release our society from being hijacked by property interests,” he rails.

Most right-thinking people would, possibly for the first time ever, agree with him. But there’s a slight problem here. Hong Kong’s developers and landlords gorge themselves on what must be one of Asia’s biggest free lunches because the city’s government rigs land policy, the tax system, planning principles and pretty much everything else in their favour. That same government is chosen, appointed and discreetly nudged from time to time by China’s leadership in Beijing (the same national leadership that occasionally hobnobs with our top real estate tycoons).

In short, Hong Kong is hijacked by property interests because Lau’s precious Communist Party has in effect decreed that it should be. So the onus should be on him, as a sometime-member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, to approach the party’s Central Committee and remind the senior cadres that Marx-Lenin-Mao-thought requires them to support the masses against their capitalist oppressors, not the other way round. Or could it be that the CCP is in fact transforming itself into a corporatist, state-capitalist, nationalist, nepotistic hegemony – a la 1950s’ Latin America – focused on self-preservation and lining its elites’ pockets? (Hint: yes it could.) In which case, why is Lau Nai-keung such a sucker as to continue worshiping this false god?

If any single leader of China steered the CCP away from serving the people to serving the tycoons, it may well have been Jiang Zemin, under whose ‘three represents’ idea (or ‘idea’) businessmen were welcomed into the fold. Other than that, he doesn’t seem to have left a huge mark (impressive sidekick Premier Zhu Rongji looked after the economy). If the soon-to-depart duo of Hu and Wen are found to have driven the banking system and bigger economy into a hole and humiliatingly jumped the gun on defining China as the new regional superpower, history might look back at Jiang a bit more fondly.

Meanwhile, there is no obvious reason to venerate him – and therefore, surely, no particular reason to fine a Hong Kong TV station for accidentally and erroneously reporting last July that the old guy had died. I would have thought that the sheer embarrassment of making such a huge mistake in a newscast would be sufficient punishment in itself, but under Hong Kong’s licensing rules the broadcast media can be penalized for screwing up.

Reading between the lines of the official statement, you get the impression that ATV adopted some sort of surly and uncooperative attitude after the error, which stiffened the Broadcasting Authority’s determination to deliver a serious slap on the wrist. The punishment may also have reflected Hong Kong public opinion – or at least that of chattering politicians across the board, who went into righteous indignation mode over the incident. To pro-Beijing types, misreporting the demise of a former president scores highly on the grievousness scale. To those less attached to the nation’s leadership, there is always the presence on the scene of ATV’s major shareholder, Wong Ching. Or ‘Wang Zheng’ in Pinyin, the transliteration system his fellow Mainlanders usually use. Hongkongers are suspicious of him. The Broadcasting Authority may not be through with him.

Wang has close ties to the CCP, and apparently to Jiang Zemin. He is a princeling – a second-generation member of China’s increasingly hereditary ruling caste. The theory is that he took over ATV to mesmerize us all with Communist propaganda, in which case we can safely say he must try harder. The fact is that few people watch ATV, and unless you are interested in ownership tussles involving Taiwanese snack tycoons, it is best ignored. In short, the story has ‘storm in a teacup’ written all over it, but the background dynamics reflect the long-term evolution of China’s one-party rule.

Like Lau Nai-keung, Wang Zheng/Wong Ching has been a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Unlike Lau, he is, um… a property tycoon. We can only wonder what Lau’s take on this comrade is.

Click to hear the Keene Brothers’ ‘Death of a Party’!

Hong Kong’s political and bureaucratic classes are going through one of their occasional collective bouts of autism, becoming totally absorbed by barely relevant details while remaining oblivious to any bigger picture.

One of my favourite examples of this mentality in action followed an incident in 2000 when a deranged residency-seeker squirted a flammable liquid over an Immigration Department official and set fire to him; both died. Obviously, no-one was lateral-thinking enough to ask whether a Kafkaesque entry permit system might have something to do with pushing people over the edge. Presumably, the authorities did look into ways of improving general security in the offices concerned. But the greatest effort seemed to go into prevention of a precise repetition of the unprecedented assault – right down to looking at fire-retardant jackets with built-in extinguishers. As if a future attacker wouldn’t dream of using acid or ammonia, let alone solid weapons like knifes or clubs.

The smothering of hillsides with concrete to prevent landslips as a social evil anywhere and everywhere in this mountainous city was a similar absurdly specific reaction to a much broader difficulty, in this case geology and gravity. In short: forget the problem, just find a nice easy solution.

Thus the Big Lychee’s great and good consider what to do about last Wednesday’s fire in Fa Yuen Street, which killed nine. A few people, including Chief Executive hopeful CY Leung, are wacky enough to see a link between the death toll and the dangerous firetrap-type conditions in the subdivided apartments affected, and therefore the government policies that make homes artificially scarce and expensive. Some others, probably including the police, suspect arson and see the problem in understandable terms of arresting and imprisoning someone who is prepared to kill. Mostly, however, officials and politicians have zeroed in on the source of these particular flames: the containers in which the street market stall owners store their goods at night.

A fire broke out in nearby Ladies Market last year, and it probably is unwise to store flammable materials (both markets mainly sell clothing) in chained-up boxes on the sidewalk. But addressing that does not fix the real problems. It won’t stop scumbags from extorting payoffs from stallholders in return for not damaging their business; they can think of plenty of alternatives to setting fire to the inventory. And it certainly won’t make the ‘cubicle’ apartments that house many of the poorest people any safer, let alone lead to a better supply of affordable and inhabitable homes.

In January 2010, four people died when a similar partitioned slum building collapsed in To Kwa Wan, and four more perished in a fire in another nearby last July. After the latter, Secretary for Development Carrie Lam reiterated the line (expressed by lawmakers but echoing official policy) that “totally banning ‘sub-divided units’ was not a solution that could best meet the practical needs.” In essence: we need ‘cubicle’ housing to put the poor in because we’re sure as hell not going to make homes affordable.

In all fairness, Carrie did promise to send “the double-decker Fire Safety Education Bus … to carry out publicity work … in old built-up areas, …introducing a simulated fire scene for the members of the public to learn how to make appropriate judgments on whether they should escape and how to escape.” Yet another problem solved by the world’s most brilliant civil service!