Tycoons’ kiss of death

SCMP-90pcEven if you would really, really, deep down prefer to support the quasi-democracy being offered to Hong Kong – even if you are the most cheery and optimistic person ever born and see only the good side to everything – the government’s reform package gets harder to like by the day. The clincher for any remaining waverers must surely be the buffoonish-looking leaders of chambers of commerce, including the Real Estate Developers Association, advising us that the proposal is wonderful…

Stan-BusinessesCome

Stan-BusinessStanleyThis is a recommendation? If these guys like it – most reasonable and fair people will naturally and instantly assume – it must stink.

This comes a few days after Beijing officials repeated the old line about protecting business interests as a reason not to change the corporate voting system that allows some company owners multiple votes in small-circle functional constituencies. This particular electoral mechanism is just one of various convoluted ways Beijing controls the results in ‘election’ or ‘nomination’ charades. But coming now, the reminder about corporate votes strengthens the impression that the political reform proposal is essentially this:

Before: Beijing chooses a person who then runs Hong Kong in the interests of the property tycoons.

After: Beijing lets the whole electorate choose a person who then runs Hong Kong in the interests of the property tycoons.

I declare the long weekend open with the question: surreal, parody or sick joke? Or is someone in officialdom secretly working for the Occupy-Umbrella movement? They LauMingWahappoint the son of a property tycoon as head of a thing called the Youth Commission (succeeding our old friend Bunny Chan). This billionaire’s heir then proceeds to give young people ‘advice’ on being able to afford the overpriced little boxes with which he and the rest of cartel turn homebuyers into mortgage-slaves. Just when you thought they must have run out of ways to be idiotically provocative…

 

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8 Responses to Tycoons’ kiss of death

  1. Cassowary says:

    If Beijing wanted to use reverse psychology on the pan-dems, they’s tell the tycoons to make muffled noises about how an elected CE might be bad for their business interests.

    But tell the tycoons to grin and sell it like a cartoon chicken mascot on a bucket of fried chicken, and anyone with a brain will assume it’s a trap. Unless Beijing wants the reforms to fail and they already are using reverse psychology.

    As for the financial “advice” of Moneybags Jr. there, this is clearly someone who’s grown up with so much money he has no idea what anything costs. He probably just opens his wallet and shoves random fistfuls of cash at taxi drivers because he can’t distinguish the denominations. But only on days when his driver’s on leave, of course. My advice to him: Hire better PR people. Ones who can coach you how not to sound like a fool.

  2. NIMBY says:

    No, no, no, no… After: Beijing lets the whole electorate choose a person by default pick the only half-idiot among the lot nominated who then continues toruin Hong Kong in the interests of the property tycoons, so that the electorate will share the guilt of letting the corrupt half-idiot into Government House in the first place.

  3. Incredulous says:

    I think the WHO should be informed of the rapidly spreading “foot-in-mouth” epidemic that is sweeping through Hong Kong’s elites. They need to be rounded up and put into isolation centres!

  4. gweiloeye says:

    and off topic. the picture in the print version of SCMC of that ‘poor’ person looking at a HOS unit. why are there bars on the nonopening part of the window and the top hard to get to opening window? hong kong ‘architecture’ at its best?

  5. Monkey Reborn says:

    My word … talk about lowering the bar, even for the second rate school that is King’s College London. The only tycoons kids I know who went to KCL were so appallingly dim that even after a top-rate public school education (and endless tutoring), Daddy’s money and connections couldn’t get them into Oxbridge/LSE/Imperial.

    Not only does he appear to not understand the reality of what he is pitching – i.e. 60 years of indentured debt serfdom to his family’s company to purchase that 500 sq. ft flat – he also fails dismally to communicate any sense of empathy with his potential serfs, has no sense of irony, and the humour of a thick wooden board.

    On the other hand, when the old school family patriarchs are history, and/or the CCP, or China as a whole undergoes some kind of systematic transformation (forced by social upheaval or voluntary dispersion of state authority by the CCP), these dudes are going to be eaten alive by hungry young entrepreneurs in newly open and competitive markets… and once again show us (hello Timothy “Syphillis” Fok and Horseface Tang) why the greatest disservice you can do your children is to share great wealth with them, because it eliminates opportunities for the personal struggle and striving necessary to overcome challenges, and impedes the development of perseverance, tenacity and let us call them “street smarts” (a tremendous deficiency in children of elites almost everywhere, in my experience).

    An alternative hypothesis is that the conspiracy theories are true, and the new world government has been engaged in the secret genetic engineering and modification of human embryos, hybridising them with (in his case) underachieving and naive molluscs.

  6. Knownot says:

    For the long weekend:

    On First Looking at the Great Commemorative Painting of the Handover

    Much have I travelled in fair Cathay
    To many provinces and cities been.
    Many senior cadres have I seen
    Who serve the nation well in every way.
    But never did I know true pride of place
    Till in this work of art I saw my face.

    Then felt I like some watcher of the seas
    Launch a new missile on the Taiwan Strait.
    Or like a peasant, whom the Party frees
    – Removing the landlord, gaining his estate –
    See the Great Helmsman, wisest of Chinese,
    All-commanding on the Heavenly Gate.
    Or like a Red Guard felt I, in the great square raging;
    Exultant, in the heart of Beijing.

    (with acknowledgement to John Keats ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’)

  7. Chopped Onions says:

    “up against the wall”

  8. Knownot says:

    Our blogger doesn’t respond directly to comments, but I really hope that one day I will read his opinion of Monkey Reborn’s persuasive hypothesis (April 27) that the Central Government wants the proposed political reforms to be passed, so that similar elections can be held in due course on the Mainland.

    ” Political reform in HKG is strategically important to the CCP because of *mainland* political reform. Daddy Xi and his ilk must … recognise the unsustainability … of current Mainland political institutions and, concomitantly, their own authority in China. … Perhaps, the master plan is to trumpet HKG as a model in “Chinese democracy” … because all those peasants in the hinterlands know how sophisticated HKGers are, and if we accept the authority of the CCP in shaping our democratic institutions, so should they.”

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