Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Can films endanger the security of a nation? In the case of China, it seems they can. Hong Kong plugs the loophole with a censorship law that imposes heavy punishments on anyone showing past, present or future cinematic works that imperil the motherland. Films that were released in the past – and did not appear to threaten civilization at the time – have now become a particular problem…

Permits issued in the past do not have an expiry date, meaning that a movie can be screened again after its first screening…

What a scary thought! There are countless thousands of possibly dangerous films that the authorities recklessly approved over the decades for public viewing, though the government does not have a list yet. For example, have you noticed how The Sound of Music omits any mention at all of ‘Belt and Road opportunities’?

Hong Kong will now be able to impose a HK$1 million fine, or sentence offenders to up to three years in prison for the screening of movies that suddenly now imperil the country – perhaps, say, for airing any film from Taiwan that mentions ‘Taiwan’.

On the other hand, the Nicole Kidman smash hit Expats should be acceptable, thanks to the production’s tireless efforts to present authentic Han culture and its strong underlying message against collusion with foreign forces.

In today’s warm-and-cuddly NatSec regime ‘hearts and minds’ successes: an activist is arrested for unauthorized assembly at a 2019 protest against the Yuen Long attack; and Esther Toh of Hong Kong’s oh-so independent judiciary denies bail to Roy Tam, jailed since April for participating in a primary election.

Trouble on the way for the legal sector, especially if the Law Society doesn’t vote the way the CCP wants today.

More depressing points about the Mainland-style trial of Andy Li, co-option of the courts and retroactivity of the NatSec Law in our own comments section, if you haven’t read them.

Time to listen to some music.

Beijing-owned newspaper Wen Wei Po is working on living up to its motto ‘You read it here first’. Following warnings by Chief Executive Carrie Lam to the Law Society about being ‘politicized’, the paper attacked member Jonathan Ross – who subsequently received some sort of threats against his family, and now pulls out of the Society’s council elections. 

The paper is also following (or writing the screenplay for?) the Andy Li NatSec trial. Although Li is a defendant, the prosecution’s case seems to be focused on Jimmy Lai – crafting a version of events in which the crowdfunding of ads calling for sanctions becomes an international conspiracy masterminded by the publisher. Li, who was held in Shenzhen for months and has mysteriously acquired a pro-Beijing lawyer, is agreeing with this narrative in court. Description of the overblown plot here. A response from an overseas activist named by Wen Wei Po here.

Will Wen Wei Po be targeting psychologists and counsellors next? (I would have thought they’re further down the list, but who knows?)

Occasionally, Beijing runs up against reality in Hong Kong. The anti-sanctions law was due to be rushed through – then suddenly turns into something taking far longer to implement. The U-turn is not officially a U-turn. Chinese retaliation against US sanctions cannot be symmetrical: the US can kill Chinese banks by cutting them off from its financial system, while foreign institutions have no access to, or need for, equivalent RMB processes in the Mainland. And it’s nothing to do with Hong Kong’s interests: China’s CCP-guided economy needs access to the dollar system.

Something I have in common with the Hong Kong government: not realizing that Nicole Kidman is so famous that a citizen’s complaint about her car parking illegally on Queens Road Central is front-page news around the world.

We have to squeeze in another NatSec horror for Friday – a court hearing with a distinct smell of Mainland about it. Months in a Shenzhen jail, a defendant apologizing, weird charges about conspiring in an elaborate plot with Jimmy Lai and others in colluding with foreign forces (crowdfunding ads in overseas media), no bail, trial to take place next year. 

On lighter matters, there are two subscription-TV productions in the pipeline about Hong Kong expats and their luxurious brain-dead lifestyles of yachts and Peak dinner parties. The projects have provoked extreme gnashing of teeth, especially among Westerners who call the city home and proudly consider themselves long-term Hongkongers (relatively sober examples here, here and here).

The whites understandably want to distance themselves from the Discovery Bay stereotype who can’t count to ten in Cantonese and barely noticed the protests and CCP backlash since 2014 except as an incomprehensible nuisance. The overseas-born Chinese seem, if anything, even more vitriolic about the new movies, perhaps because one was written by one of their own – plus, being conscious of their ancestry, some might feel a responsibility to complain that the productions exclude the less glamorous lives of the other 99.9% of the population. 

With the greatest respect to these groups: if you were a genuinely authentic Hongkonger, you wouldn’t care less about how some US streaming TV series portrays the place. 

Your time is precious. Don’t let this crap annoy you.

Still, since we’re here… One of these productions is actually called Expats and stars Nicole Kidman, and the other is called something else and probably stars someone else. (Had to Google her. She’s this one. I’ve never seen any of her films except the excellent Paddington, but I don’t recall her part – maybe she was in the bear costume.) Everyone is irate that Kidman was exempted from quarantine on arrival for shooting (though rest assured she will not approach you). Quartz comes to the rescue with everything on the subject. Exciting Times!

The deeper anger on Twitter and elsewhere is aimed at the perceived callousness of the movies’ focus on a wealthy and privileged elite at a time when the city is being ground down around us by Beijing. But Hollywood sells fantasy. The backdrop could have been somewhere else (see Dubai below).

So: is it a coincidence that there are two shows in the works showing Hong Kong as a vibrant, dynamic, cosmopolitan blah-blah hub, or has someone encouraged the productions as an image-boost? Maybe PR agency Consulum worked harder for their US$5.7 million than we think. I’ve no idea. The boring explanation would be that the protest movement vaguely raised US public awareness that Hong Kong exists, and the entertainment moguls are jumping on the bandwagon. Nowhere else has a skyline like this, right? For what it’s worth, Amazon – which would love to sell video on demand in China – is behind both series.

If only Graham Greene had done a ‘Hong Kong expat’ novel for Amazon to work with. Or at least Tom Sharpe – I can recommend The Ghost of Neil Diamond by David Milnes. 

Other weekend reading…

Professional Commons find nearly 2,000 hectares of land suitable for housing.

Which member of Canto-boyband Mirror starred in a haemorrhoid-treatment ad? (Clue: it wasn’t one of the ones that look seven years old.) All you wanted to know about them here.

A concise thread rebutting George Soros’ amateur-psychology analysis of Xi Jinping being anti-Deng.

On out-of-area-matters…

All you need to know about Dubai (plus a bit about Romania).

And that wonderfully vicious review of the rooftop Polo Lounge at London’s Dorchester – ‘chicken breast with the texture of value-range cotton wool’. 

Today’s Can’t Make This Up Award winner: HKU students are arrested for ‘advocating terrorism’ by mourning the guy who stabbed a cop and then killed himself. Was that tragedy terrorism, or the act of a mentally disturbed person? Is mourning advocating? Can any judge convict someone for this with a straight face? (If I were the defendants, I would consider claiming devout personal Christian convictions. Or at least quote John Donne.) Is the students’ real crime not respecting the police force’s apparently inflated sense of victimhood? Could the police leadership at least find better uses of taxpayers’ money? 

Runner-up in the Can’t Make This Up Award: former Chief Executive CY Leung bemoans the ‘radicalization’ of youth to which his own policies surely contributed. Oblivious to Beijing’s recent exclusion of opponents, democrats and non-CCP-worshipers from elections, his think tank suggests…

…platforms must be broadened for young people to participate in politics and public affairs.

And in today’s purge of civil society, the 612 Humanitarian Fund – which helps prisoners and arrestees – is to cease operations. Will the NatSec regime scramble to freeze assets/arrest organizers before the group winds up?

At least the latest departure from the West Kowloon Cultural Hub-Zone is probably nothing to do with political rectification. Some other sort of embarrassing bureaucratic screw-up, maybe, but not that. Maybe.

This just in: the judges have ruled that a late entrant to the Can’t Make This Up Award qualifies for joint winner. The government’s US$6.4 million (later haggled down to 5.7 million) public relations consultation with the Consulum agency yields a bunch of slogans grabbed from a handy thesaurus, featuring ‘innovation’, ‘cosmopolitan lifestyle’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘diverse’, adding up to ‘the best place in Asia to live, work and invest in’.

Stuffing their US$5.7 million into their pockets, the PR folk rush to the airport to join the hundreds of families seeking one-way tickets out. 

(One booming investment opportunity right now in Hong Kong: relocation services for emigres taking pets with them. Really.)

In 2020, the Hong Kong government described Civil Human Rights Front protesters as ‘lawful, peaceful and rational’ and said it would ‘humbly listen’ to their views. Then they suddenly declare the organization all but criminal. For similar reasons, the once-obscure speech therapists’ union is derecognized.

Now Carrie Lam jumps on the People’s Daily warning-to-Law-Society bandwagon, warning that the administration might cut ties…

“Lam said the government has learned in the past 2 years that, without the protection of the NSL, HK could become a bridgehead to harm national security. The government has since realised the true nature of many groups that it was willing to interact with and respected in the past.”

The word ‘learned’ here apparently means ‘we read it in People’s Daily and we have to follow CCP orders, so we must now maintain that this longstanding and respectable professional body is now potentially a threat to the great nation of the PRC’.

Beijing’s press are criticizing one candidate for Law Society elections for an interview she gave with the Norfolk Daily News, while the Secretary for Justice promises ‘Mainland opportunities’ to solicitors if they vote the right way. (Not Norfolk, England; not Norfolk, Virginia; Norfolk Nebraska.)

Despite government assurances that Beijing’s anti-sanctions law could be passed locally and not worry the business community, we ‘learn’ that the measure will be inserted directly into Hong Kong’s Basic Law – so maybe banks are screwed (or the law is purely symbolic).

And the U-turns keep coming. The Hong Kong government issues new Covid/quarantine rules again, causing yet more inconvenience to anyone with the temerity to travel. Here’s a thread on research into the ‘latency’ period for Delta variant of Covid, suggesting that a 14-day quarantine is more than ample.

The government is in a tight spot. It can’t admit that Mainland vaccines are less effective than Western ones (Bell’s palsy, anyone?). It can’t open borders to other countries before the Mainland does, in order to align with Beijing’s zero-infection approach (itself driven by face, such as a patriotic need to prove local vaccines’ worth). Nor can Hong Kong appear different from China these days. It can’t relax social distancing rules as they provide an excuse to ban protests. In any case, the CCP seems inclined to isolate the country from the rest of the world simply to keep evil hostile forces out. Must be agonizing for officials who are traditionally obsessed with cramming the city full of tourists – look on the bright side.

Justice Secretary Teresa Cheng jumps to agree with a People’s Daily op-ed warning that Hong Kong’s legal bodies should not get ‘involved with politics’. 

What does ‘politics’ mean here? The Beijing-backed paper specifically advises the Law Society not to embrace ‘anti-China’ activities or become another ‘street rat’ like the Bar Association. So ‘politics’ essentially means issuing press statements expressing concern at government measures that might infringe human rights or threaten the integrity of the legal system. When a foreign government does it it’s called ‘interference in Hong Kong’s internal affairs’. If a Hong Kong person does it by communicating with an overseas politician, it’s called ‘collusion with foreign forces’. In short: shut up (as the Bar seems to have done).  

Beijing’s ‘improvements’ to Hong Kong’s elections – announced some six months back – remove opposition and indeed most popular representative elements from what was already a rigged and weak system. Among much of the inexplicable overkill is an increase in the number of Legislative Council seats through the addition of 20 (essentially appointed) lawmakers. 

The whole election/assembly will be a charade but it will be interesting to see what sort of shoe-shining/patriotic dregs fill these seats and who or what they will claim to represent. They could even, in theory, be slightly amusing.

Until you find out how much the extra office space will cost taxpayers: HK$1.17 billion…

…the project is expected to get underway in mid-2022 and should be finished by mid-2025. Four storeys will be added to the existing building and a 10-storey-high structure will be built in the garden.

Because, hey – that’s what gardens are for, right?

And let’s not forget the salaries and expenses. According to this, we’re looking at a monthly salary (plus gratuity) of around HK$115,000, plus some HK$3 million a year in office and other expenses – around HK$4.4 million a year per lawmaker. (Much of the office expenses pay staffers and other hangers-on – indeed, I am among the countless thousands of people over the years who have received a monthly cheque from LegCo.)  

So that’s another HK$88 million a year for 20 people (with lots of bright young assistants) with no obvious function, given that the other electoral ‘improvements’ already make LegCo into a rubber stamp anyway. I guess LegCo will also need to hire more ushers, security guards, researchers, interpreters, canteen staff, etc, etc. You would have thought an essentially ceremonial body with no legitimacy or credibility could be more economical.

The Civil Human Rights Front disbands in the face of an ‘unprecedented severe challenge’ – that is, before the police break the doors down, arrest everyone and freeze the bank accounts. As with the Professional Teachers Union, CHRF has for years had cordial relations with the authorities. But that was under One Country, Two Systems. Now, all it takes is an op-ed in a Beijing-backed newspaper, and an organization instantly becomes a ‘threat to national security’.

People’s Daily warns the Law Society to ‘stay professional’, out of politics – that is, start sticking to the party line and nothing else. The Bar Association is apparently keeping silent in the hope that this might persuade the CCP not to crush them. Good luck with that. Both legal bodies have regulatory-type roles, so the NatSec regime can’t just snuff them out of existence overnight. Whatever happens, the regulatory powers will end up under the control of pro-Beijing – presumably Beijing-picked – people.

Wen Wei Po accuses the HK Journalists Association of ‘five evil deeds’ and demands government regulation of the body. (Quiet word of advice to the HKJA: you can be snuffed out overnight.)

A good thread on this purging of Hong Kong’s civil society…

The police, in concert with the Liaison Office, the government, the pro Beijing parties and state-controlled media are all working together to go after one civil organisation after the other, until none of them stand in the way of authority.

With a 97% fall in the number of voters eligible to vote in Election Committee primaries (or whatever you want to call them), it is clear that most candidates for seats on the rubber-stamp body will be returned unopposed. And this is before the vetting procedure screens out any wannabes ‘pretending’ to be patriots. HKFP explains the elaborately rigged process. The Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Stuff urges the public not to focus on ‘competition’ at these polls but on ‘quality democracy’. Does he imagine the public are even paying attention to this farce?

(As ever… Even the best-informed media outlets describe the EC as ‘electing’, ‘deciding’ or ‘choosing’ Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, not to mention many legislators. This is partly because that’s the official definition of its role. In reality, the Politburo does not delegate such a decision to 1,500 Hongkongers, however obsequious they may be. Like any supposedly political process visible to the public under the CCP, the EC is ceremonial.)

Also from HKFP, an op-ed on the equally farcical Tong Ying-kit NatSec trial…

The judges seem to have accepted the official meaning of secession and then defined the crime committed to fit the charge…

The designated judges’ “copy-paste” application of mainland definitions for separatism and terrorism emerged as the trial’s most alarming feature. The accused became a passive witness while academic experts debated the historical context of his slogan and prosecutors sought to adapt his actions for use under mainland law.

Cue another slightly depressing story on emigration, in the Guardian.

Not a new debate: should Hong Kong voters angry at being deprived of worthwhile candidates stay away in December, or should they go to the polls only to deface ballots? While scrawling rude comments on the ballot paper may be gratifying, only a few lowly civil servants will see the spoilt paper – top officials do not sift through them. In an effort to minimize the scale of such protests, the government will possibly categorize ‘spoiled’ ballots as ‘incorrectly completed’ or something. They might even (cue creepy violins) trace the voters responsible and put the names in a special Black Book.

More to the point, everyone casting a blank or spoilt ballot counts as turnout. And it is the headline figure of what percentage of the population entered a polling station that worries Beijing and local officials. The key figure will be the difference in turnout from that of the 2019 District Council elections (a record 71%). The bigger the drop since 2019, the more resounding the public rejection of rigged elections.

Or – you can go along and vote for Holden Chow and Co. The choice, of course, is entirely yours.

More numbers are making the government nervous: an official statement loudly insists emigration accounts for just a small part of the decline in population. It might be right. But it might not be. The data are not sufficiently ‘granular’ to say either way. All we have is anecdotes of leaving parties, lines of families at the British Airways check-in, and a 27% increase in emigration-related MPF withdrawals (even though BNO holders have been barred from claiming theirs). 

Some weekend reading…

Hong Kong to outlaw desecration of the Chinese flag online. How will they enforce this? Will linking to an offending web page count? (Presumably it will.)

Long thread on how Chinese media spread disinformation about origins of Covid-19 (‘US soldiers at Wuhan military games’) overseas, then re-cycled it as quotes from overseas disinformation.

In Forbes, Anne Stevenson-Yang on the Evergrande nightmare…

…as a default would be cataclysmic for China’s financial system, and the optics would be catastrophic for China’s residential property market, it is much more likely that there will be a bailout, perhaps by forcing government-connected entities to overpay for assets that the government would mandate Evergrande sell.  A default, after all, would be an unimaginable sign of weakness, kind of like Xi Jinping crying in public.

Great moments in switching-on-the-charm ‘soft power’: a Globular Times editorial on how Russia and Belarus should join China in bullying Lithuania – interesting for the condescending language about the ‘little’ Baltic state…

This European country has nearly nothing to do with the island of Taiwan…

It may not even know what it has been doing…

China and Russia [should] jointly deal a heavy blow to one or two running dogs of the US to warn other countries…

Lithuania, one of the countries that has gone the farthest in simultaneously provoking China and Russia … needs to be taught a lesson by the two… 

European countries must not think about using the Taiwan question as leverage against China. 

You may feel that ‘must not’ here means ‘really should’. but I couldn’t possibly comment.

The regulation (as in imminent re-licensing) of Macau casinos will be a national security issue. The report dates to August 2. Then…

A day later, Galaxy Entertainment Chairman Lui Che-woo:

“The CCP has successfully guided China on a path of sustainable development, having achieved admirable success that has earned global respect. GEG would like to deliver our congratulations on its 100th anniversary”

That centenary was on July 23rd, and shoe-shiners should have handed their grovelling in several days beforehand, but still – better late than never.

As state media demand more law-enforcement investigation into the disbanded Professional Teachers Union, the Civil Human Rights Front prepares to wind up. It looks like the purge of non-CCP-approved civil society will move on to the pro-democracy Confederation of Trade Unions. 

Then it will be the turn of the HK Journalists Association. Other groups, like the HK Society of Bird Watchers, the Chess Association and the Photography Club can’t be far behind. (Sounds crazy? In the Mainland, all such groups come under state bodies.)

Signs of a few problems the NatSec regime is facing: Mainland thin-tanker Tian Feilong says proposals for election boycotts are equivalent to sabotaging the ‘improved’ elections and creating an impression that Hong Kong does not now have true democracy; and a government circular urges NGO-type institutions including the Jockey Club not to hire Administrative Officers who have quit the civil service. (In Ming Pao, in Chinese, here and here.)

Official fears of an election boycott look well-grounded given that many voters will be offered only candidates they dislike thanks to elaborate measures to bar independents from the ballot (‘…a long-winded way of saying active support of one-party rule is a must’). 

It would be terrible if someone started a rumour that the government will also be checking cast ballots to see how everyone voted: it would strike many citizens as credible, and further decrease the turnout. Let’s hope no-one starts spreading such a scurrilous idea.