Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Which is more than we can say about Hong Kong’s whizz-bang space-age high-tech quarantine wristband app thing. Did this system come from:

1) A local university-Cyberport joint research project led by a pro-government professor using a grant from the Innovation and Technology Bureau’s Super Smart City Info-Hub Venture Fund Scheme

2) An obscure Shenzhen company with links to Huawei that also makes facial-recognition surveillance drones in a huge high-security compound in Xinjiang

3) The same civil servants who designed the Inland Revenue Department’s interactive website

Not fair! How come lots of people I know get to be forced to stay indoors for two weeks, and I don’t? Sounds like my idea of paradise.

I declare the weekend (or, if applicable, quarantine) open with some absorbing reading matter…

An SCMP review of City on Fire, Antony Dapiran’s new book on the Hong Kong uprising.

The ultimate in timelines: the Hong Kong protests and the Wuhan Virus outbreak and cover-up.

Atlantic is impressed with Hong Kong’s pluck and resourcefulness in the face of the Xi Virus.

Ma Jian in the Guardian on the CCP/Xi’s own less-than-stunning performance. In HK Free Press, a proposal to call it the CCP virus.

In the interests of rubbing it in, more on how Xi’s China brought COVID-19 to the world, from The Hill.

Someone’s going to sue. Good luck!

SupChina on China’s crummy urban planning, sprawl and a raw deal for the folk from the countryside. (Reminds me of a pro-establishment guy at a social gathering several years ago. When some overseas visitors announced that they were heading on to Beijing, he looked at them in solemn wonder and said ‘It’s a beautiful city’.)

Bloomberg tries to unravel the mysteries of China’s budget.

Coda on the CCP’s rewriting of history on Islam and Uighurs.

For people who prefer video to words, Fox News before and after.

And a London 1665-Hong Kong 2020 mashup…

China’s de-facto expulsion of NYT, WaPo and WSJ correspondents creates a new headache for the Hong Kong government. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs order that the US citizens hand in their press passes also barred them from pursuing their work in Hong Kong and Macau.

Where the affected journalists are not Hong Kong residents, this suggests that Beijing is openly infringing Hong Kong’s supposed autonomy in granting work visas (as opposed to intervening behind the scenes, as – presumably – in the FT’s Victor Mallet case).

Since it’s possible that some of the journos have Hong Kong residency, it also implies that Beijing feels it can forbid someone with the right to live and work here from working in the media (or perhaps any other profession or trade). This is absurd, not to say in contravention of the Basic Law. (More here.)

Of course, the CCP is not accustomed to legal or other curbs on its power in China’s sovereign territory. This puts the Hong Kong government in an impossible position. Its response to questions on the issue is embarrassingly vacuous, reciting stock phrases on local policy and quoting chunks of the MoFA announcement. No mention at all of what Beijing’s announcement means in practice. In this instance, the drafters of the press release had no choice.

Pray that one of the expellees does have a permanent Hong Kong ID and moves back here to carry on working.

Meanwhile, the High Court orders the MTR to release CCTV footage to a student who is suing the police for assault at Prince Edward Station on August 31. The materials can only be used as evidence for his case rather than released to the public, but at least something might now come to light.

Back to the ‘no legal curbs on its power’ CCP. Any Beijing officials watching this will see more reasons why Hong Kong needs to fix this troublesome ‘rule of law’ thing. They will probably be particularly unimpressed by the plaintiff’s use of a weird-sounding and clearly foreign legal device to get the videos – a Norwich Pharmacal Order.

None of that nonsense with the Mainland way of doing things. A Reuters report suggests that People’s Armed Police are observing the protests in Hong Kong. The PAP is the CCP’s version of a gendarmerie – paramilitary police tasked with internal order. Their presence suggests that someone in China’s paranoid hierarchy is absolutely serious about evil foreign forces being poised to use Hong Kong as a way to undermine the Party and topple the regime. The local fuzz, in their usual persuasive manner, ‘regret such an unfounded report’.

For light relief, lawmaker Regina Ip’s New (by which we mean ‘tired and faded’) People’s Party is tearing itself apart. Its other member – one Eunice Yung – is storming out in protest at being (she reckons) replaced as a candidate by a certain ex-Liberal called Dominic Lee, who (in all fairness to Eunice) sounds even more tedious. We eagerly await further developments. Zzzzzzzz….

As if Hong Kong’s bureaucrats are not miserable enough, the Heritage Foundation relegates the city from first to second place in its oh-so important list of Freest Economies in the Solar System.

Apart from the bureaucrats and the dogmatic fetishists of the Heritage Foundation itself, few took the ranking seriously. Anyone who understood the benefits of free markets wondered why the top spot kept going to a place where the state owns all the land and official policy distorts the whole domestic economy to benefit four or five families who operate a property development cartel.

Presumably, the logic was that ‘freedom’ = allowing tycoons to force Hong Kong middle-class home-buyers into semi-serfdom. The Heritage Foundation adored Hong Kong’s economy for how it worked in theory, rather than in practice. Perhaps Singapore’s leaders will be less enthralled with the think-tank’s attentions.

While the inevitable sulky HK government statement ensues, the Chinese authorities make clear their opinion of freedom by kicking out all US citizens working for the NY Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

The pretext is retaliation, though there is an obvious underlying desire to silence these outlets’ highly effective and embarrassing reporting on (in particular) Xinjiang concentration camps and the CCP’s disastrous handling of the Wuhan Virus. Most of all, it’s a Panda-tantrum – Beijing throwing all its toys on the floor in frustration at a world that won’t buy the CCP’s perverse fantasy of how and where the disease broke out.

Beijing is also apparently forbidding the expelled journalists from working in Hong Kong (where some might have residency, and would not require PRC Foreign Ministry press passes). As HK Free Press points out, this would seem to run counter to press freedom, and specifically Basic Law Article 33 guaranteeing residents freedom of choice of occupation. At least, when Hong Kong officials try to squirm out of explaining it, they won’t have to worry whether it means losing the precious Freest Economy tag.

If my social-media timeline reflects reality – which it does, inerrantly – Hong Kong’s gwailo population is either despicable for not taking Wuhan Virus seriously enough, or pitiful for overreacting and descending into hypochondriac paranoia.

There are the Westerners who come up with reasons you must wear a mask with the zeal of the most desperate blockchain fanatics. And there are the expats whose idea of fun is joining hundreds of others crammed into a side-street bar area that looks like the descent into Hell even without a pandemic.

But maybe it’s not so clear-cut. The expats congregating in Lan Kwai Fong like Korean Pentecostalist super-spreaders are, from my observation, the same nervous ninnies who buy multiple gallon bottles of distilled water from the supermarket every week because they are too precious to drink the stuff that comes out of the tap. And now the stereotyping has surely jumped the shark – with Apple Daily doing an expose on plague-ridden sai yan roaming at will in our midst.

Perhaps, you may conclude, if you average it all out, white people are not really much different from everyone else. Except, of course, you would be wrong. You have forgotten about Discovery Bay – a land where time and space as we know them have no meaning.

Over in the enclave for Occidentals who find Singapore too messy, exotic and zany, they are taking WuFlu especially seriously. Vigilantes are now threatening to shoot quarantine-breakers on sight…

That’s a message from a joint called Hemingways. Aptly named for a place promising instant justice to carriers of pestilence, no? Rugged, manly and using short no-frills sentences. (So I look it up. ‘A range of tasty meat substitutes’, it says. Maybe not.)   

Lau Siu-kai, a gruff semi-official oracle who translates CCP-speak into human language, confirms what most assume – that Beijing is going to more formally end the grip of Hong Kong’s bureaucrat-tycoon ‘elites’ on the city’s power structure.

(The SCMP is quoting an article in a HK & Macau Affairs Office-sponsored journal, not apparently online yet.)

While he cuts through the CCP’s impermeable rhetoric, he leaves Leninist mendacity intact. He maintains that the post-1997 administrations that continued seeing ‘One Country, Two Systems’ in 1980s and 90s terms (insulating Hong Kong politically from the Mainland) ‘failed to implement’ (ie adapt to the redefining of) the formula. Civil servants who have adhered to their traditional impartiality have in fact deviated from it. Loyalty to Hong Kong is ‘disloyalty’, and officials persisting in this are ‘dissidents’.

The most pressing sins of the elites of course concern the Extradition Bill controversy that blew up into a popular uprising. Lau blames the officials for heeding public pressure and failing to act severely enough against the protests.

Essentially, our top officials have tried too hard to balance Hong Kong’s interests and those of the Central Government.

He also accuses officials of protecting their personal interests and says opportunists and even dissidents are among local ‘patriotic forces’. Sadly, he doesn’t name names. But at the very least he must be referring to (supposedly) pro-Beijing tycoons who have kept their heads down or tried to sound even-handed as the public rebelled against the CCP-appointed leadership. This is probably also a warning to any members of the harder-core pro-Beijing political groups who might be tempted to pander to public opinion.

Obviously, Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her sorry rabble are toast. But Lau’s channeled message does not necessarily indicate a full-scale purge of the establishment (which would at least offer some amusement). Beijing’s local power base is too thin for that. But it does suggest a rectification campaign: a classic United Front squeeze of the co-opted useful idiots as the CCP consolidates its control over a reluctant territory.

It will not be enough for moderate pro-establishment types to merely avoid saying anything nice about the opposition; they will have to actively join in blood-curdling denunciations, and visibly display their total loyalty to the CCP. Some of the more genteel bureaucrats will probably back out – but expect the property barons’ kids to start bleating about Xi Jinping Thought.

Lau’s analysis of course disregards the possibility that the CCP might have any responsibility for Hong Kong’s predicament. It is the Hong Kong population who are wrong in failing to have ‘national identity’. Their lack of respect and obedience towards the CCP are due to foreign forces and insufficient patriotic education for the young.

If you want to carry on being Beijing’s friend, you will loudly agree and take part in putting that right.

If Chief Executive Carrie Lam had an ounce of political sense, or just basic people skills, she would now start drafting a speech to deliver in maybe a month or so. In it, she would praise the Hong Kong people for their effort and spirit in the face of WuFlu. She would admit that her administration perhaps wasn’t always as quick to respond as it could have been – but the city’s people had the initiative and resourcefulness to take their own precautions regardless, and helped by dedicated health-care, cleansing and other staff, the community had come through largely safe. She would express her respect and thanks.

Obviously, this is the last thing she’ll do. But with the virus sweeping the rest of the world, Hong Kong can (fingers crossed) give itself a pat on the back. Here’s a good description of how Hongkongers…

…convinced our government was failing at a time of crisis, as it had since June 2019 … acted as if the virus was already here and raging undetected.

…and went back into SARS mode. The article says that the twin assumptions that the threat was real and the government useless created a version of herd immunity – other viral infections also fell this winter.

Asia’s other (former) ‘little dragons’ did it their own way. While Hong Kong was avid about masks, school-closures and social distance, Taiwan ended traffic from China early and rationed protective supplies, and Singapore nagged about hand-washing and threatened quarantine-breakers with extreme punishments. No-one knows how well each precaution on its own worked. But the lesson is clear: act fast and just do the whole lot.

Another lesson is that, if possible, you should be a small centralized city-state or modest-sized island nation, rather than have a sprawling patchwork of municipal health departments and hospital systems.

Lastly, there’s an element of luck. In South Korea, just one person at a church meeting led to hundreds of infections. As Trey Menefee points out, the actions of Mainland authorities in Shenzhen and Guangdong fortunately helped insulate Hong Kong. Then again, if Mainland authorities elsewhere hadn’t screwed everything up, we would never have had a problem in the first place.

I declare the weekend open with a little selection of related items. Unmitigated Audacity of the Week Award goes to China’s foreign ministry spokesman for suggesting that the WuFlu virus came from the US. One of China’s top doctors has been fired for rejecting CCP-promoted ancient voodoo treatments. And Mainlanders are using imaginative ways to spread WuFlu information online without getting censored – including putting sdrawkcab stxet eritne and using Hebrew, Morse code, Braille, emoji (good luck with that) and something called ‘Elf language’ (with a beautiful script).

From Vox, an in-depth mauling of Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s hapless Chief Executive/Beijing puppet.

This is like shooting fish in a barrel – though the author tries hard to be fair, considering the subject is the haughty, disaster-wreaking bureaucrat ‘who accidentally sparked an uprising’. And as the profile mentions, Carrie pretty much admitted in leaked comments last year that she is not really in charge of Hong Kong. The last 10 months’ catastrophic campaign to force the city’s people to kowtow and obey is a Leninist obsession. To Beijing, her main role now is as a scapegoat who at some point will likely be paraded around town in chains before being ritually defenestrated.

But hey – it’s entertaining…

He [Lee Wing-tat] had never seen her laugh more than five times in 40 years… [and] said she became increasingly arrogant and “supercilious” as she climbed up the bureaucracy … dismissive of other people’s opinions…

…on Valentine’s Day in 2017 [before her quasi-election]… Lam’s husband wrote a public letter that wished her luck in “contributing to the implementation of ‘one country, two systems’”…

The article doesn’t attempt to analyze the tragic woman’s underlying personality issues. (Is she so intensely imbued with her childhood rote-learning ways that she can’t conceive of alternatives to what she is doing?) It would be interesting to know how, as a devout Catholic (let alone native, well-educated, non-plutocrat, one-time student activist Hongkonger) Carrie finds total loyalty to the CCP apparently so effortless. Maybe Civic Party boss Alan Leong was thinking about her this morning when he endorsed a Global Day of Prayer for Hong Kong:

Let us confess we have sinned, humble ourselves by admitting our arrogance and conceitedness and ask for forgiveness and blessings.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam pleads with citizens to sympathize with the police when they pepper-spray reporters and knock people to the ground. The cops are, she suggests, extra-frazzled right now as they believe someone is about to launch bomb attacks against them.

The cops have been finding explosives all over the place, in July, October, December, February and – an enormous cache – last week. Yet despite the high-profile discoveries of lethal munitions and impressive numbers of suspects arrested, the community seems curiously unconcerned. The government is not putting up posters about suspicious objects. No overseas authorities have issued alerts. Her own insensibility and aloofness notwithstanding, Carrie doesn’t give the impression that she thinks it’s a real thing.

And now Socialist Realism comes to town courtesy of a huge banner hanging on what looks like Wanchai police station. The giant illustration shows fearless gallant cops defending civilization – including a stirring scene in which an officer is supporting a fallen comrade who has just been savagely attacked and dismembered by marauding mutant radical schoolgirls in yellow face-masks…

This is a classic example of a PR exercise that is actually aimed at its own subjects. Once admired and respected, the police are feeling misunderstood, under-appreciated and generally sorry for themselves. The portrayal of heart-tugging heroism is supposed to bolster the morale of the cops themselves, not win over the Hong Kong public.

Without (heaven forbid) wishing to sound cynical, the rather frequent uncovering of bomb plots – fleeting ones, no less – has a similar feel. To someone with a nasty and suspicious mind, the cops’ anti-terror swoops do not even seem intended to shock the public into fearing extremist protesters. The point is to convince the police themselves that what they are doing is noble and necessary.

Little wonder that the biggest genuine explosion we’ve heard recently is that of Commissioner Tang’s anger when his force’s façade is pricked by RTHK’s satire.

About a month ago, China’s Emperor-for-Life Xi Jinping handed out promotions to some of his trusted allies. The media focused on the appointment of Ying Yong and Wang Zhonglin as new party chiefs in Hubei and Wuhan – to replace officials who had failed to contain the coronavirus outbreak. In Hong Kong, the big news was the appointment of Xia Baolong as new boss of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, in place of (demoted) Zhang Xiaoming.

While we haven’t heard much from Xia yet, it is interesting to see how his fellow Xi loyalist Wang has done in Wuhan.

Last week he a big bright idea – namely to…

…carry out gratitude education among the citizens of the whole city, so that they thank the General Secretary [Xi Jinping], thank the Chinese Communist Party, heed the Party, walk with the Party, and create strong positive energy.

For reasons that remain unfathomable, the people of Wuhan did not leap with joy at this invitation to venerate the dictatorship that plunged them into weeks of death, disease, quarantine and internment.

In the CCP’s Leninist mindset, the Party guides the population’s thoughts, not the other way round. But this attempt at choreographing an outpouring of thankfulness among the happy campers of Wuhan failed to take off. Indeed, the propaganda masters had to categorize the proposal as a Class 1 Public Opinion Screw-Up on a par with the mishandled death (and re-death) of virus whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang.

The positive-energy morale-boost was withdrawn and airbrushed away – rather like the best-seller-but-pulped book How I Beat the WuFlu and Saved the World Before Breakfast, by Winnie the Xi himself.

We eagerly await Xia Baolong’s debut inspiring hearts-and-minds PR initiative for Hong Kong.