Big Lychee, Various Sectors

We are so distracted by the Hong Kong government’s frequent one-off blunders that we overlook the many permanent ongoing screw-ups these clowns inflict on the city. One of the most infuriating never-ending disasters is the entrenched default policy of giving private cars – owned by 13% of households – priority over pedestrians and public transport users.

A human-geography specialist at Hong Kong U once said that Hong Kong does not have a transport department – it has an anti-pedestrian department. At the most mundane level, this means things like sidewalks that are too narrow and often blocked. I encountered this rather eye-catching example on Caine Road a couple of weeks ago…

Following which, I was introduced to this website – Transit Jam (also on Twitter). If you want to be thoroughly depressed and infuriated, this is a must-see. Bridges to nowhere (they’re all over the place). Patchy (as in ‘hardly ever happens’) enforcement of traffic laws. A recreation area where bicycles are banned but cars are allowed. And, on a topical note, how cramming pedestrians into small spaces is even stupider during a virus epidemic. And lots more. Just in case your anger levels aren’t high enough already.

Even after Hong Kong’s somnolent civil servants have plodded back to their desks, it seems there are still some companies (of the delicate- and precious-Westerner orientation) paying employees to sit at home in their pajamas on the sofa all day, and renting high-priced commercial real estate for no purpose. Should we tell them that everyone else in town has long gone back to the office – or just leave them in their apartments quivering in fear at the pestilence raging outside?

To everyone for whom two days at home is a treat, I declare the weekend open with a varied selection of stuff to browse…

Further to the economics-vs-politics debate, William Pesek on why Hong Kong’s latest budget ignores the real (economic) problems.

If you think your HK$10,000 handout is a waste of taxpayer’s money, a link to a Ming Pao piece on that ‘dialogue office’ the Hong Kong government set up. The director got paid HK$1.6mn for a six-month contract, during which the body organized that one (admittedly entertaining) public meeting with Carrie Lam, plus some online events.

HK Free Press on the uselessness of Hong Kong’s police complaints body, and on Amnesty’s report on it. Plus the mysterious apparent absence of contempt laws following the arrest of Jimmy Lai.

Speaking of which, a list of all the Hong Kong pan-dem figures and activists arrested since mid-2019.

Input on open-sourced protest/virus investigative group Osint HK.

Quartz on Chinese netizens archiving coronavirus-related material on GitHub, beyond the CCP’s reach.

A big Reuters report on the last time CCP secrecy and cover-ups led to a major disease outbreak (plus a surge in pork-prices) – African Swine Flu, starting late 2018.

From Axios, a review of a new book on how China’s economic model depends on a migrant-worker underclass.

The academic China Leadership Monitor’s long, dense, heavy, dry but illuminating analysis of the over-concentration of power in China under Emperor-for-Life Xi Jinping.

Lastly – some photos from the Canal Street ‘hitting little people’ villain-whacking curse-fest yesterday. And you’ll never guess whose pictures the aging sorceresses were beating.

Is Hong Kong’s unrest driven by ‘economic’ or ‘political’ discontent in the city? Here’s a good discussion of the arguments.

To the CCP, of course, everything is political. Beijing’s preferred analysis is that the unrest is due to evil foreign forces and an insufficiently patriotic education system. But Mainland officials allow that material inequality plays a role and the government should pay attention to ‘livelihood’ issues. The recent Budget, with a huge boost for the police plus handouts to ordinary citizens, reflects this.

To the local business-bureaucracy establishment, it is comforting to blame factors like low incomes and housing. The government can in theory alleviate these problems without overly disrupting the overall cronyistic system. And tycoons are nervous that if Beijing sees the local power structure as part of the problem, it will further centralize control and sideline them from it.

Many international observers also assume livelihood issues must be a key factor. After all, Hong Kong’s economic distortions, and things like housing unaffordability, are in a league of their own in the developed world. How could this not push the populace to protest?

To pan-dems, it is insulting to suggest that Hong Kong people just want money when the fight is for freedom, rights and universal suffrage (and, they could add, the backbone of the movement is largely middle-class).

Economic policy and politics largely overlap anyway. The real question is whether the Hong Kong public can be bought off with better material conditions, or will only structural reform resolve the reasons for the anger?

For an answer, we can trace the development of Hong Kong’s broad-based discontent over the last couple of decades.

After 1997, Beijing installed local administrations that hugely favoured tycoon interests, hence housing prices and rents, low health-care funding, poor welfare, white-elephant infrastructure projects and an unmanageable influx of Mainland ‘tourists’. This made people increasingly angry, and bolstered support for the pro-dem camp and for democracy.

Beijing interpreted this rising opposition as a challenge to the CCP’s right to rule, and so stepped up the Mainlandization that diminishes rule of law, freedoms and local identity. This goes back to Article 23 in 2003, but gathered pace with National Education and the 2014 political non-reform. All these proposed measures provoked a popular backlash based on values. We are now in a cycle of repression and resistance: the Umbrella Movement, disqualification of pan-dem politicians, the extradition bill, the 2019 Uprising, and now a semi-police-state type of clampdown, with intimidation, the arrest of Jimmy Lai, mass arrests, and the coming chop for RTHK.

To put it simply: what started as the Hong Kong public’s discontent with a crony-serving local government has now become an open conflict between Hong Kong and the CCP. If Beijing had ordered its appointed mediocrities to fix housing and welfare 15 or 20 years ago, things might have been different. But it’s too late now.

As a favour to an old colleague, I agreed to proofread a start-up proposal to be aimed at venture-capital types. I knew it had something to do with blockchain. I thought it was just a couple of pages and would take 10 minutes. It’s actually over 20 pages, and will take hours. By ‘hours’, I mean ‘weeks until completion’, because I can’t be bothered to do more than five minutes a day.

Best be oblique. The proposal is for online provision of a service or function we will call ‘widgeting’*. While mundane, widgeting can be fairly important. But: a) most of us need to use such a process only rarely; and b) existing online or real-life methods mostly work fine.

The proposal offers improvements that sound desirable, like ‘greater convenience’. But it insists that they be delivered by (decentralized, verifiable, secured, ‘immutable’ etc) blockchain, when simple procedural changes (like a more user-friendly system) would suffice. The proposal also assumes that untrustworthy or malicious actors are a major problem with current methods of widgeting. This is not usually the case – but where it is, the problem is organizational or institutional, and shouldn’t be swept under the carpet by a superficial technical fix.

To complicate things, the proposal relies on at least some parties paying for use of this platform – or ‘remunerating nodes for their work’. The proposal allows for crowdfunding, though that makes sense for only a narrow range of widgeting-related activities. (Widgeting can be one-off and for-profit, but it is often a small part of a larger non-commercial activity. It does involve admin and other costs, but these are usually bundled into other much bigger budgets or payments. There could be some potential for value-creating through data-gathering.)

As if this weren’t masochistic enough, the business model does not rely on real money, but will have its own cryptocurrency. This will, it seems, acquire some sort of value of its own as ‘the ecosystem grows’.

Talking of masochistic: did I mention that, for a laugh, I agreed to be paid for what I thought would be a 10-minute proofread in these ‘tokens’?

There are several people – fairly smart, I always thought – spending months on this obsessive attempt to find a problem for the visionary anarcho-glam fantasy tech solution.

*Don’t waste time being intrigued about what ‘widgeting’ is. Trust me – it’s boring.

From HK Free Press, a look at the Greater Bay Area. It quotes promoters of GBA who aren’t sure what it is they’re backing, and skeptics who don’t really know what it is that won’t work. The reader is none the wiser. This in itself is the story.

Like Belt and Road, GBA is a vague concept – a label mostly applied to existing economic trends or infrastructure projects, and pushed by shoe-shiners as visionary waffle abounding in ‘opportunities’. 

Officially, it is a grand national-level strategic plan for the region around Hong Kong to become a tech/finance/blah-blah ‘powerhouse’ hub-zone. There is probably potential for rationalizing and consolidating functions in the metropolitan area. But no-one is talking about merging the various cities (even just on the Mainland side) or creating a bigger single administrative entity. All we see are small-scale tax and other measures supposedly to help Hongkongers who move over the border to reside or work.

Essentially GBA is a (geographically illiterate) relaunch of the ‘Mainland/Pearl River Delta integration’ buzzword from the 2000s. From Beijing’s point of view, the need to make Hong Kong psychologically and symbolically less separate in terms of identity is now more urgent. Rolling the city into the GBA – a trendy hip-sounding brand a la San Francisco or Tokyo – is a semi-sophisticated attempt to do that. “We are now all Bay Area citizens.”

But historically, Hong Kong’s sole business/economic role has been as a location where you can do things you cannot do on the Mainland. The city’s whole purpose and competitive edge arise from its stark institutional differences from the hinterland.

That’s why international business types say rule of law and a free flow of information are key to Hong Kong’s success. Yet to Beijing, these features threaten national (that is, CCP) security. All the CCP values about Hong Kong is the free flow of capital, so Mainland enterprises and elites can convert their assets into hard currency. The rest can wither.

At most, GBA will be a slogan to try to justify, or distract attention from, the ongoing erosion of Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms. The underlying process will not be about integration so much as conformity.

On a more amusing note – a nice pithy turn of phrase…

More here.

We interrupt this coronavirus epidemic for a few hours’ tear-gas, pepper-spray and arbitrary-arrests mayhem, starring a cop apparently on some sort of acid-dexedrine cocktail waving a Glock around. Agonized official hand-wringing follows about the harm this terrible violence will cause an already ailing economy. But, as ever, there is no acknowledgement that government might need to fix any underlying problem. It’s all the fault of flowers laid outside an MTR station which spontaneously erupt into burning barricades that can only be overcome by spraying chemicals into bystanders’ faces. We must crush the flowers.

So as WuFlu recedes, back we go to the imbecilic cycle – under the stiffened resolve of Beijing’s new overseers – of trying to tear-gas and arrest the city into peace and harmony.

To put moaning about the Financial Times or Apple Daily online paywalls into perspective, here’s an article on the political science of this that costs US$240 to read. Courtesy of the bizarre world of academic journals. Fortunately, they let you have a pithy abstract that probably gives most of the plot away…

Beijing has been unable to impose its nationalism directly from above. Instead, it has [co-opted] local elites, who have promoted state nationalism from within. This … has led many among Hong Kong’s political elite to compete in expressing an increasingly overt Chinese nationalistic posture as a way to signal loyalty to Beijing. [This has backfired], triggering … a … popular Hong Kong sub-state nationalism. [And, voila! You get…] intensifying radicalization and polarization between the authoritarian establishment and the democratic opposition.

In academic-journal ‘abstract’-speak, they use the word ‘monist’ for ‘mouth-frothing top-down Leninist control-freak’. They also use the phrase ‘a reactive form of popular Hong Kong sub-state nationalism’. This means ‘HK independence movement’. Which the CCP, Beijing’s new knuckle-dragger bosses, the local administration and, not least, the police seem determined to deliver.  

Police have arrested Jimmy Lai and veteran pro-dem activists Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho and most-harmless-man-on-the-planet Yeung Sum. This looks inexplicably rash. How does the regime benefit if it brings flimsy charges against such high-profile, mainly moderate, figures? It just provokes mainstream public opinion and degrades the city’s justice system.

Presumably, this is connected with the appointment of Xia Baolong and Luo Huining to Beijing’s Hong Kong Affairs bureaucracy. The knuckle-draggers know no other way.

I declare the weekend open with an array of more-or-less worthwhile diversions (with a rather heavy viral load)…

Apple Daily‘s hour-long documentary on the Hong Kong protests, Battle Against Tyranny.

Not one but two rants from Philip Bowring on the HK administration’s dismal response to the virus: a government that waffles into incompetence, and looks terrible compared with Singapore.

Another must-read Geremie Barme translation in Chinafile: academic Xu Zhiyong daringly tells Xi Jinping to go.

HK Free Press on what WuFlu tells us about socialism with Chinese characteristics.

China Media Monitor reports a swiftly/prematurely published book in five languages about how the CCP and nation valiantly defeated the disease.

Dan Blumenthal in Real Clear World on the Xi Jinping flu…

It is a high-tech authoritarian state experimenting with complete social control. To succeed it requires lies, intimidation and obfuscation. These very ingredients have exacerbated a public-health crisis and laid bare a government that fears the truth.

Atlantic offers more on how the CCP’s obsessive surveillance and censorship opened the door to the virus outbreak and provides a cheery assessment of the disease: ‘the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable’.

HK Free Press on how China is tightening censorship around the world.

Harvard Biz Review asks how much money does the world owe China?

A little history of how, after doing without the revolting stuff for centuries, the Chinese managed to get into drinking cow milk.

A nostalgic look back at studying in China in the 1970s.

And the Slightly Distasteful Cartoon of the Week Award goes to: CCP pyramid ass kissing for a harmonious society…

In Mui Wo…

The latest opinion poll shows Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s confidence rating has fallen to an unprecedentedly dismal 9%. If you’re wondering how she manages even that – who are these 9%? – bear in mind that this is approaching what statisticians call ‘the Lizard-man constant’.

The annual Budget ritual takes place today. With the plague-ridden city in flames around him, Financial Secretary Paul Chan will insist that the HK$1 trillion-plus fiscal reserves must be conserved for a rainy day. And we can predict that he either will or won’t give everyone a few thousand bucks as a special treat, and be despised mightily for it either way. Then there will be the usual one-off handouts for the usual ‘sectors’, including subsidies for tourism and retail operators – cash that, in practice, will end up ensuring that landlords’ sky-high rents get paid for another month or two.

Bloomberg notes that the Hong Kong stock market is at its lowest compared with global counterparts, especially the Mainland market, since 2004. As the reports says, the Mainland market is more retail- than institution-driven. We could add that it is also artificially propped up by official edict. In addition, other markets round the world (like the US) are probably relatively more over-valued. Most of all, the Hang Seng Index no longer reflects Hong Kong’s domestic economy: most of its components are Mainland giants or other companies with most of their operations outside this one city. Gone are the days when it was full of quaint local companies like Lane Crawford and Wharf.

Still, even if it has little direct relation to stock-market valuations…

“Hong Kong has a rather unbalanced economy, which relies heavily on sectors like retail and tourism that will be hit hard by the virus due to less mainland visitors,” said Ronald Wan … of Partners Capital International Ltd.

If I could destroy one branch of Louis Vuitton or Burberry for every time I read that…

No – the Hong Kong economy does not ‘rely’ on retail and tourism. It would be more accurate to say it ‘depends’ on them, in the sense that an addict cannot handle life without easy relief from a daily fix. It would be even more accurate to reverse it and say ‘retail and tourism rely on Hong Kong’. Now replace ‘retail and tourism’ with ‘high rents and landlords’, and the picture becomes totally clear. These are parasites.

Paul Chan will now roll up your sleeve and let them start sucking away.

With the WHO’s blessing, China’s leadership magics the coronavirus away and – while we’re distracted – puts Gui Minhai in prison for 10 years. This is the same leadership that has placed new (as in plucked-from-pre-retirement) bosses into its more-streamlined Hong Kong Affairs bureaucracy. Of which some more analysis…

Suzanne Pepper at HK Free Press says the appointment of obedient loyalists with zero clue about Hong Kong doesn’t look good. But she sees a slight (theoretical) glimmer of hope:

Director Luo is said to be a soft-spoken man with a knack for solving difficult problems. If he can use the new streamlined channels of communication to correct the official narrative on Hong Kong resistance and foreign force infiltration, he would at least be taking a step in the right direction.

I can picture it now… “Hey guys! Guys! You’d never guess, but it’s nothing to do with hostile foreign forces – it’s all our fault for not letting them have more representative government or respecting their identity and freedoms.”

Philip Bowring at Asia Sentinel doubts the two new bosses know what they’re in for:

Hong Kong is an entirely alien environment for Luo. He might as well be walking on Mars. He will be bewildered by its freewheeling press, pesky reporters, rude politicians and impolite students…

Xia Baolong will have no qualms stomping on his liaison office teams, or threatening civil servants who question his bombast. Winning hearts and minds was never his concern. He may hector the protesting youth, academics, civic activists and pro-democracy politicians … He will have to stomach the lampooning, cartooning, and graffiti that Hong Kong typically showers on pompous bureaucrats.

There is that. Watching these two grapple with the sheer strangeness of a free pluralistic society might be entertaining. Speaking of which, on the apparently mystifying continued presence of Carrie Lam as Chief Executive and nominated scapegoat, Bowring intones:

The party will not concede to protest calls for her removal. That would be showing softness to dissidents, which is never an option for the party. Besides, Lam has always been the loyal marionette, who never let judgment or dignity get in the way of her obedience.

Ouch.