The South China Morning Post never ceases to bewilder…
The story is taken from newswires and names those who died at the hands of the deranged Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara. ‘Some students on Southern Californian campus had Taiwanese parents’. It’s not news. It’s not relevant. It’s arguably in horrendous taste. Is this part of the never-ending Han victimhood saga-legend? The murderer was, after all, half-British and perhaps descended from the perpetrators of the Opium Wars. Then again, he was also half-Chinese. Most odd.
Meanwhile, the paper’s editorial addresses Hong Kong’s disastrous decline in the IMD World Competitiveness Rankings – a story that we may vaguely recall fizzled out last week or so. And it mentions the tiresome and inconsequential filibuster currently slowing down Legislative Council business…
Needless to say, the Swiss compilers of the competitiveness rankings did not consider Long Hair and People Power as factors that either boost or hinder Hong Kong in its epic struggle with Singapore for top place in lists. But who else has used the business school’s survey as a desperate excuse to blame troublesome lawmakers for our supposed woes? That’s right – China Daily, though they did it while the story was still more-or-less fresh.
And now (and it’s not the paper’s fault this time) things really go downhill…
The Commission on Strategic Development has rejected the idea of a 20% cut in visitor numbers as unacceptable. Not, as you might think, on the grounds that it doesn’t even start to address the problem, but because it is too ‘drastic’.
First, who are these people? The CSD dates back to 2005, after Donald Tsang replaced Tung Chee-hwa as Chief Executive. It stood out among tedious hyped-up talking shops for being so huge, with over 150 tycoons, shoe-shiners, bores and a couple of token opposition types, all guaranteed not to agree on anything in four major areas, which we have long since forgotten. Anyone wondering what it achieved only has to look around.
I didn’t know it was still going, but apparently it is, albeit slimmed-down. If you want to be seriously depressed, click here and read just the first name. Other members include: Fang Fang, formerly of JP Morgan and picked up last week by the Independent Commission Against Corruption; lawmaker and busybody Regina Ip; lawmaker-for-developers Abraham Shek; and Peter Woo of Wharf Holdings.
They’re not all directly linked to property interests, but let’s say none of these people needs to rent space for a small business or lives in a subdivided apartment. Their refusal to consider cutting the influx of Mainland shoppers by just a fifth suggests not only plain everyday selfishness, arrogance and greed – which we can live with – but total obliviousness about almost anything remotely connected to life in Hong Kong as 99.9% of residents know it. If they had spent the last 10 years hibernating in a hole 20 feet under Discovery Bay, they would have more awareness of what’s going on. What could be more stupefying than pro-Beijing legislator Ben Chan, who whines that some businesses that rely on Mainland shoppers (ie, the thousands of cosmetics, watch, handbag and other outlets choking the local retail sector to death) may have to close down? The cretin wants them all to stay open?