The Standard treats its readers to an entire page of shoe-shining…
It reports one wanton act of obsequiousness as a straight story: tycoon Li Ka-shing’s son Richard publicly endorses Beijing’s choice Carrie Lam as next Chief Executive of Hong Kong.
It then takes putrid groveling onto a higher dimension with a report purely designed to shoe-shine a shoe-shiner who is shoe-shining. Make that two reports! The newspaper writes that its owner Charles Ho denies that Mainland billionaire Xiao Jianhua was kidnapped by Chinese agents at the Four Seasons in January. And it covers Ho’s blasting of pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai for ‘messing up’ Hong Kong democracy (in an exquisite touch, he calls Lai ‘shameless’).
The occasion was the Leader of the Year Awards, which seems to be Ho’s annual mutual-creepy-crawling orgy for Hong Kong’s elite of inherited wealth and bumptious bureaucrats – as perfectly illustrated in this charming picture from last year’s ceremony.
We need collective nouns for shoe-shiners and their oily works – ‘a cringe of kowtowers’, perhaps, or ‘a vomit of sycophancy’.
I declare the weekend open with a bit of light reading. The Alex team once came up with a witty pun about how China’s capital is peaking. Well, now it is. A Marketwatch column summarizes the situation neatly. There’s some more here. We have reached Peak Panda. Whether the ‘miracle’ (actually a recovery from extreme mayhem and policy incompetence) ends smoothly or more chaotically, it will wipe the odious, gooey smarm off the faces of our local Communist Party toadies.
http://alexcartoon.com/index.cfm?cartoons_id=2237
I believe only Filipino maids and you read the Hong Kong Sub-Standard. Desist lad, desist.
For several years I wrote a page every week for them about classical music. I sent the manuscript by fax, three pages. One week they printed page three before page two before page one. In perfect reverse order, in other words.. No one noticed. I suggest nothing in the Standard is worth remarking on, Move on lad.
A whore of tycoons?
The Orwellian wording is now reaching creepy levels with its endless hammering to the point one just accepts it as truth: CE “hopeful”, Hong Kong “election”…
A shower of bastards?
A swarm of smarmy, semi-human, saggy-butt-lickers…
A torrent of capitalist-roader toadies…
A pack of puffed-up, patronising, profiteering, pseudo-‘patriots’…
My contributions to the lexicon.
A blether of buffoons
A bunch of cunts
A slather of arselickers?
Marketwatch: “China’s economic miracle is over”
There you were powerful
The promise of riches was written on your land
You led me on with untrue figures
You held me captive in your iron hand
I bought the shares and met the boss
And then the company made a loss.
Oh just a year ago your wealth was here
All of a sudden it seemed to disappear
Success was statistical camouflage
The hope I saw in you was just a mirage
You made me believe your economics
All I saw was glitter and dirty tricks.
We used to meet in five-star hotels
And eat shark’s fin with every meal
Now all that’s left are unpaid bills
And the profits that were never real
Some checks are dud and some post-dated
The dragon has evaporated.
Oh just a year ago …
[with acknowledgement to ‘The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage’ by Marvin Tarplin & Smokey Robinson, recorded by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles and The Jackson 5]
Vomit-licking vipers
The picture to which you link is indeed charming, but it is not from last year’s ceremony. Seems to be from 2006. Interesting how many of those pictured are now in prison…
Maybe George Osborne could be called on to provide (very well) paid advice
How about: “the political floorer and fawner of Hong Kong”?
Acording to Charlie Ho (by name as well as by nature), that Xiao johnny spawned fifty-six sprogs.
If true (and one never knows with Charlie), then quite apart from this feat driving a coach and horses through the Glorious Motherland’s one child policy, it really makes one wonder how an ugly dog like Xiao could have pulled it off, as it were.
Possibly, his impregnatees had been rendered insensible by huge doses of “China White” and/or top notch mao tai. Alternatively, they might have been drawn from the ranks of those red coated bimbos who pour hot water for the geriatrics at the NPC/CPPCPCCPPCCP bore fest.
Whatever the case, it never ceases to amaze me how these high ranking commies and their lickspittles, creatures who make the Spanish Hapsburgs look like Brangelina, manage to reproduce their species at all.