Big Lychee, Various Sectors

I dropped by the local Wellcome supermarket five minutes after its 8.00am opening yesterday. People were already struggling to carry away multiple 12-packs of toilet paper. There were none left inside, and the shelves were also empty of rice and bleach. Just like in all the news and social media photos – but it’s weirder to see it in real life.

Surprisingly, the Bloomberg opinion piece likening Hong Kong to a ‘failed state’ has not yet triggered a whiny press-release tantrum from the government. The article focuses on a collapse in government credibility and legitimacy, official dithering over things like face masks, and of course the panic-buying. (It also spots Carrie Lam’s narrow bureaucratic focus – where closing museums counts as decisive grand strategy.)

Perhaps the petulant press statement will have to wait while our officials beg the Boy Scouts for help in quarantining possible plague carriers.

While comparisons to Russia’s crisis in 1998 or Venezuela may seem far-fetched, these places have never claimed to be international financial hubs or a ‘World City’.

In some ways, the Bloomberg article goes easy on the Hong Kong authorities. It largely overlooks the transformation of the police force into a tool of political control. If there was ever a time to get the cops back into their smart blue uniforms, the WuFlu scare is surely it – instead, they are whacking frightened residents in Sai Kung and Tai Po. And while the article hints at the weakening of Hong Kong’s legal system, it doesn’t mention the increase in politicized prosecution and other administrative decision-making.

The column does say that the administration’s lack of contingency plans and shambolic performance suggest ‘deterioration’, which should seriously worry the business sector. And ‘the next shock will be worse’.

Speaking of which, HK Free Press looks at the backlog of catch-all ‘riot’ and other cases that will be going before the courts over the coming couple of years.

I do actually need a new bottle of bleach. Will just have to gargle with absinthe for the time being.

Here’s a claim that Chinese authorities are rigging the WuFlu data to fit a predetermined mortality rate. Patriots, on the other hand, may prefer the charts showing a ‘very rosy picture’ of declining new infections.

If you like your news simultaneously good and bad, there’s Dr Li Wenliang: after mentioning the new disease online in late December, he was intimidated into silence by Wuhan police; he later caught the virus, and was reported to have died of it yesterday, before state media backtracked and insisted he was still alive – but they now seem to say he did die (subsequent to the time he didn’t, so we’re right). Great moments in ‘public opinion guidance’ CCP-style.

Hong Kong has succumbed to panic-buying of toilet paper, rice and other commodities. The city has a history of refugee-society skittishness leading to near-legendary frantic scrambles to redeem cake coupons or get free Snoopy dolls. But we now have a government that is beyond incompetent, beholden to the aforementioned CCP, and devoid of credibility and legitimacy. Officials were last seen dithering about school exams and sorting out how to implement the quarantine they announced two days ago. The only thing irrational about it is that Hong Kong apartments are too small to store all those toilet rolls. (Having spent time in North African villages many years ago, I can manage perfectly well without it.)

Art Basel is cancelled. Some gallery owners had been worrying that taking part would be an endorsement of Beijing’s oppression of Hong Kong – the fear of quarantine and a toilet-paper famine tipped the balance.

Just checked to see if the government has advised against panic-buying. Seems not. Very wise (or maybe they’re too dim to think of it).

I declare the weekend open with a range of illuminating reading matter…

Asia Dialogue examines how Beijing is losing Hong Kong – not much new, but the last half dozen paras are interesting.

An in-depth – and damning – account from Chublicopinion of how Wuhan officials suppressed news about the WuFlu outbreak.

In a similar vein, China Media Project on how China’s official media handled – or didn’t handle – the WuFlu outbreak in January.

How is Beijing’s supreme central core tackling the crisis? The Jamestown Foundation offers a nerdy look at why the Central Leading Small Group for Work to Counter the New Coronavirus Infection Pneumonia Epidemic comes under Li Keqiang rather than the Emperor-for-Life.

ChinaFile asks whether WuFlu will damage the CCP’s legitimacy. If you think it obviously must, Asia Dialogue looks at why China’s younger generation seem so pro-CCP.

You know ‘traditional Chinese medicine’ is unscientific junk, but here’s a reminder.

On to Formosa, and Ketagalan Media on the impossible position the KMT finds itself in trying to convince Taiwan it wants to be annexed by China.

Beijing interrupts this healthcare crisis with some mouth-froth about how any attempts to leverage the virus to promote Taiwan independence is hitting a raw nerve (or ‘doomed to fail’). Equally amusing, Anonymous hacks into the UN’s website on behalf of Taiwan.

As Hong Kong’s luxury-brand emporia shut their doors (though not enough), an older SE Asian Globe article about how the glitzy overpriced-garbage retailing/ultra-high rents phenomenon also affects Singapore.

And lastly, some subversive music before the PRC collapses: the Chinese national anthem in the style of Epaksa. (I had to look it up too – Epaksa is the Korean behind an immensely annoying musical genre known as ‘techno-trot’, as seen in this Japanese commercial for cockroach spray.)

Hong Kong’s government has lost so much credibility by now that the public automatically perceives any announcement as garbage. Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s decision to impose quarantine on everyone coming in from the Mainland has predictably met with derision (and apparently triggered a run on toilet paper – though that might just be inspired by the general ongoing ambient official incompetence).

Chances are that the threat of quarantine will dissuade a lot of people from crossing the border. It could certainly make life very difficult for anyone who has to make the trip.

Spare a thought for retired low-income Hongkongers living in Shenzhen who need to pick up medicines here our Beijing-groveling tycoons who are members of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. They were already dreading the prospect of having to spend two weeks in the nation’s capital attending the ‘two meetings’, which start on March 3.

In the old days, they could get away with goofing off and having long lunches, massages and naps in their hotels while the rubber-stamp bore-fests took place. Some would even sneak back to Hong Kong for a few days to attend to their family-owned rent-seeking cartelized conglomerates’ business. That all changed when Xi Jinping took over and demanded that even billionaires must display patriotism by showing up for mind-numbing lectures and briefings on Party-State ideology.

Now, if the ‘lianghui’ go ahead, the plutocrats’ two-week ordeal in Beijing will be followed by 14 days’ confinement back here, sitting in isolation behind nailed-up doors, wearing a GPS bracelet – while their devious siblings and mentally challenged heirs wreak corporate mayhem in the boardroom. As if they are not suffering enough from plummeting rents.

Having received a premonition, meanwhile, the Mormons have already fled.   

Antony Cheung, mild-moderate pro-democrat and former government official, asks where Hong Kong goes from here. After the 2003 SARS/Article 23 trauma, Beijing appointed a mediocre but arrogant bureaucrat as Chief Executive, and pushed cross-border integration. As Cheung notes, these are not exactly promising options this time round (though don’t underestimate the CCP’s ability to double down and compound its mistakes).

He does not hold back on the awfulness of the current administration, and he hints at the need for a more representative political system. But, as is invariably the case with these op-eds (why is this???), he fails to spell out any ideas – simply concluding that…

If goodwill still exists, adversity could force all sides to forge the determination to review the fundamental situation and contemplate bold but necessary choices.

Almost as gutsy as Carrie Lam proposing to set up a committee to consider the possibility of doing something! The ‘fundamental situation’ points to just two possible ‘bold but necessary choices’. First is a more bottom-up, representative government – which totally contradicts the CCP’s top-down, control-obsessed Leninist worldview. Second is a Mainlandized authoritarian regime that suppresses opposition and dissent – provoking deep local resistance and defiance.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong ‘government’ continues to do its remarkably good impression of a lump of rotting meat that no-one can or will take away. This is at least good news for creators of brutal memes…

The Hong Kong government shuts most remaining passenger border crossings. Of the 14 control points, this leaves only one overland link with Shenzhen, namely Shenzhen Bay. The other main one is the airport. The other two are the little-used Zhuhai Bridge and the usually empty Cruise Terminal.

While this doesn’t hermetically seal the city off from the Mainland, it does funnel travellers through a couple of points where they can be (we assume) subjected to thorough inspection. Shutting down the huge crossings at Lo Wu and Lok Ma Chau is a major step.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam stoutly denies that the U-turn has anything to do with naughty hospital workers pointing a gun at her head, and further insists that she has Hong Kong’s interests at heart. Sure.

Question: What has had a massive impact on Hong Kong recently but, being 0.1-0.2 microns in size, can be viewed only with an electron microscope? Correct – the government’s credibility.

(Is it just me, or is the official announcement (top link) noticeably lacking in the usual whiny, shrill and defensive finger-pointing? Almost as if someone is learning to be grown up and swallow their pride. Or maybe the regular scribe is off sick.)

Possibly jumping the gun – but the impression I’m getting is that WuFlu is more flu than Black Death, and the immediate health scare is going to start subsiding before long. In which case, our battered and bruised local leadership must go back to all that unfinished business. Former Governor Chris Patten offers some pointed reminders of the messes that need to be sorted out (video, more quotes and pithy responses here). (Update: whoops.)

Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the delightfully empty streets while they last. For those employed in traditional local sweatshops, work continues much as normal, maybe with a free bag of face masks thrown in. But lots of people at reputable, serious-sounding international companies are ‘working from home’, and expect to do so for at least another week or more. Which makes me wonder: why do these firms rent huge expensive offices, if their staff can get so much done by email and conference call (and these companies do seem to be conducting business as usual) on their sofas in their apartments?

Just as we feared Hong Kong’s glamour had faded forever, Selina Chow – former svelte TV newsreader and head of the Liberal Party – returns, calling for Hong Kong to close its border. Radiant in her defiance, like the hospital staff threatening to strike.

While the overtly ‘pro-Beijing’ DAB stooges must obey the CCP regardless of public opinion, the ‘pro-establishment’ business-based political groups once again follow their conscience and side heroically with the people. When the chips are down. It’s amazing how plummeting profits concentrate the mind.

Some say that travel bans don’t work against disease anyway. Others point out that other countries are doing it – and Hong Kong must either bar or be barred. The Hong Kong government, last time we checked, was still dithering and mumbling excuses. It has mustered the resolve to tell civil servants to work from home and shut sports facilities, but it has a huge hang-up about restricting cross-border travel.

The government lost all credibility long ago. What a combination: Hong Kong’s scared and leaderless populace meets up with its out-of-control, head-smashing paramilitary police force. You would have thought that someone in authority might think that, under the circumstances, this would be a good time to put the cops back into their pre-2019 smart-blue-uniform, friendly-helpful-polite mode. Wouldn’t you? No, of course not. Stupid question.

On the subject of questions, here’s one someone had to ask eventually: is Chief Executive Carrie Lam suffering from emotional or psychological problems, or even some sort of neurological disorder? The withdrawing into a shell, the lack of empathy – are these the result of extreme stress, or is this the way she really is? Another possibility is that, as a devout Catholic, she is overcome by some sort of martyrdom complex, in the grip of an Opus Dei-style self-flagellation thing, or re-enacting the Passion.

Or, more likely, her administration is powerless and waiting for orders from above. Beijing has the right to keep Mainlanders from Hong Kong by imposing its own outbound travel restrictions. But it seems Hong Kong may not on its own do anything that looks like ‘closing the border’.

Beijing’s officials must oppose such steps because of the symbolism – it looks like Hong Kong is part of the outside world rather than part of China. The long-term aim, after all, is to wean Hongkongers off the idea that they are a separate jurisdiction with a distinct identity, and convince them they are part of the Greater Bay Area and glorious motherland. Whatever you do, just don’t politicize the issue.

The rumours are untrue. Unfortunately, it is not feasible for the government to issue face masks to all 7 million residents. But thanks to our multi-pronged® efforts, we can assure the public that large shipments will be arriving in the next few days, and existing supplies are sufficient provided people mellow out and do not hoard the things. If you have spare masks, please consider passing some on to those in need. In the meantime, the government will give priority to hospitals and medical personnel. We would also remind everyone that it is far more important to wash your hands with soap frequently. Heung Gong ga yau!

Is it really that difficult to sound vaguely like you give a damn? Apparently, it is: all low-paid brown people requested to stay indoors.

As the hostile tone of press statements shows, officials feel under siege and are in hyper-defensive mode – as if the whole world hates them.

Which it does. Even the Hong Kong government’s supposed allies are stroppy. The pro-Beijing DAB suggests closing the border and a member distances himself from the Fanling quarantine plan. Lawmaker Regina Ip demands a ban on Mainland tourists. Colleague Ann Chiang proposes steaming masks for re-use (which is apparently a stupid idea – but any original thought from CCP loyalists is impressive, and indeed subversive). Michael Tien ponders a state of emergency, while Alice Mak calls panic-buying ‘sad’. The tourism industry – a bloated parasite sector force-fed by officials – is even more miffed than usual.

While no-one in Hong Kong has died of the WuFlu (we have a name at last), ‘events’ are dropping like flies. Dozens of conferences and bore-fests about green fintech blockchain opportunities have, to everyone’s relief, been cancelled. Galleries want to pull the plug on Art Basel. Could the mega-tedium Rugby 7s be next?

I declare the weekend open with various topical and thought-provoking links…

HK Free Press on how the Electoral Affairs Commission is suppressing what little democracy we have. (HKFP is preparing for a big upgrade.)

The Progressive Scholars Group report on Hong Kong police brutality.

The Millions explores the overlap between the HK protests and The Hunger Games.

Nikkei on why Xi Jinping is in such a grumpy mood. (Yes, it’s the US trade deal and HK/Taiwan – but heart-warming to read the detail.)

David Webb explains how the HK government could in theory – without Beijing’s say-so – significantly democratize the Chief Executive ‘election’ system by expanding functional constituencies. (This is a good poke around the gory innards of the rotten boroughs structure, right down to the 10 seats for Taoists. Of course, this is not a ‘voting system’ at all, just a rubber-stamp for Beijing’s initial choice of CE. This is not a design flaw, but the whole point. In practice, any reform needs permission from the Leninists.)

CMP recounts the early days of WuFlu, and explains how the CCP manages the media at a time like this. Reuters also reports on the initial outbreak and delayed responses. And Minxin Pei says the disease is the result of Beijing’s autocracy.

Bitter Winter on the CCP’s rectification campaign against its religious members.

SE Asia Globe asks whether Sihanoukville can ever recover from being Belt-and-Roaded?

A think tank says Canada and Taiwan should be good buddies. Multiply by the number of free countries. What are the HK protests, Taiwan election, WHO and ICAO leading to?

Kings College London launches a great website on China’s Mao era in everyday objects. Worth seeing for the site design alone.

NPR with the (or one of many) definitive and authoritative answer to the Big Mask Question. In short: the basic blue masks are of limited use in particular circumstances, but otherwise not much point. But wash your hands. Also, eat your fruit…

Among yesterday’s scenes from Hong Kong’s Time of Plague – people stripping shelves bare of hand-gel and even food. Do Carrie Lam’s aides brief her that this is happening, or is she oblivious to this unmistakable, age-old sign that maybe citizens’ confidence in your administration is not what it could be?

Atlantic is admirably quick off the mark with an article about how the Wuhan virus is bolstering (nurturing? deepening?) the pro-dem protest movement.

You wonder what Carrie did in her past life to deserve one near-fatal blow after another. First, the dismally handled extradition bill, intended to be quietly rushed through but ending up as a toxic-waste atom bomb exploding in her face. Then the unleashing of an out-of-control paramilitary protest-suppression police force amplifying the collapse of government legitimacy. And now a disease from the Motherland causing such debilitating symptoms among officials as denying reality, dithering, and then making partial U-turns when it’s too late.

(Owing to insufficient bandwidth, we’ll ignore the many self-inflicted minor wounds, like Carrie’s complicated relationship with face masks.)

What happens next? Is this not a great time to push an Article 23 national security law – maybe with a National Anthem (Compulsory Adoration) Ordinance to ease the way?

But wait! There’s more!

Another vignette from yesterday: residents outside a New Territories public hospital shouting at approaching Mainlanders that the facility is for ‘British dogs’ only. (The pestilence does not impair snark.)

Not only is the Wuhan virus pulling the Beijing-appointed Hong Kong government further down into the swamp of ignominy, it is undoing all that hard work officials put into bringing Hong Kong and the Mainland together through ‘integration’, Bay Area opportunities, the Mega-Bridge to Nowhere, the High-Speed-be-in-Wuhan-for-lunch-Rail Link, familiarization tours for schoolkids, and dozens of other initiatives to strengthen national pride and consciousness and lovey-dovey cross-border kinship.

Here’s the irony. All of these messes – the extradition bill fiasco, the degrading of the HK Police, the outbreak of a mystery bat-to-human disease, and the latter’s negative impact on cross-border relations – have their origins in Chinese Communist Party desire to maintain and tighten its control and instil harmony throughout its domain.  

The Wuhan virus claims an unexpected victim: the UN’s ICAO civil aviation agency. As with the similarly afflicted WHO, China’s government has pushed its own people for appointments to the body and worked to freeze Taiwan out. Now comes the deliciously enjoyable backlash, complete with an apparently panda-hugging director-general whining. Beijing’s obsession with claiming Taiwan alienates not just the island, but the world.

The sickest institution of all, however, must be the Hong Kong government, which has spent the last week prevaricating over whether to require inbound travellers to complete forms, keeping schools closed, whether or how to tighten border controls, and of course whether to encourage the face-masks it also wants to ban.

Carrie Lam’s administration entered this health scare lacking:

• trust, owing to past prioritization of Beijing’s interests, lying about police violence etc

• legitimacy, having no mandate from the people but serving as a proxy for the despotic CCP

And we could add:

• basic respect among the public, after years of arrogance, indifference and disdain

• moral authority, owing to cronyism and hypocrisy (Justice Secretary’s illegal structures, etc)

Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that officials are having a tough time. It might not make sense to close a border that 200,000 or whatever people cross per day. Maybe the empty blocks in Fanling are indeed the optimum location for a quarantine-type facility. But coming from these malevolent, deceitful clowns on puppet strings, why should anyone believe it?

One of the funniest lines I read over the holiday was in an article saying roughly “the virus gives the Hong Kong government an opportunity to show it can do a serious professional job”. It is, of course, giving the administration a golden opportunity to screw up even more than it has already in the last eight months. Sounds hard to achieve, but they will do it.

Note how the administration sprinted away petrified at the first whiff of a Molotov cocktail in the lobby of that building in Fanling. The officials are more scared than the residents.

Last night, thousands of health care workers lined up to join a new union. To the public, the nurses and others are natural heroes of the pro-dem cause, a worthy (and maybe more wholesome) successor to the protest front-liners. In stark contrast to the government, they care. To Beijing’s local paranoid overseers, such organization will look like a challenge, leveraging a health crisis to undermine state power, perhaps funded by the CIA.

To the aesthetes among us, they definitely get Poster of the Week Award…

Yes! Tonight’s the Spring Festival Gala! It will be livestreamed on YouTube if you don’t have access to CCTV. (The content is cringe-makingly dire, but the camera scans of the carefully selected, creepily enthusiastic audience is gripping.) Alternatively, you can follow gloriously sarcastic commentary on Twitter from one of the callous foreign beasts stuck with their in-laws in Beijing or somewhere.

Here’s the line-up. This year’s show has a heavy emphasis on the Greater Bay Area, with a lot of performers from ‘Hong Kong, China’, including Jackie Chan singing ‘The Great Wall Will Never Fall’ (around halfway through, part 15(1)). All the usual acrobats, martial arts and kids’ choirs, but none apparently from Wuhan/Hubei. Presumably they’re under quarantine. Or… otherwise indisposed.

The inane CCTV extravaganza – it looks like self-parody but is by all accounts deadly earnest – is a venerable institution, dating back through thousands of years of civilization. The nearest Hong Kong equivalent in terms of crassness is the fake-traditional ‘New Year Carnival’ contrived some years ago as a tourist attraction and studiously ignored by all right-thinking local residents. And tourists. This year’s has been cancelled. Will anyone notice?

Fireworks and other events are also off. First, they scrapped them because of the Dreaded Protester Menace, then because of the Wuhan Coronavirus. I declare the long four-day weekend open with a profound question: For what other reasons might Hong Kong cancel events in the forthcoming Rat Year?

And a selection of things to look at…

The Bar Association’s very detailed, logical and convincing (you can see why the government hates them) proposal for an independent commission of inquiry. (Still no response from officials.)

On the subject of detailed reports, an expert explains all you ever wanted to know about the effects of tear gas with reference to Hong Kong.

Reuters assembles its scoops, investigations, graphics and photographs of the Hong Kong Uprising in one slick presentation.

Atlantic takes a look at Hong Kong’s new pro-dem district councils. (Who would ever have thought that these councils might be interesting as 2020 unfolds? With even the Police Commissioner turning up, teeth grinding, to be questioned, the government obviously realizes it can’t ignore or boycott these constitutionally formed bodies.)

Perhaps the most important article on Hong Kong this week is this HK Free Press piece by a prominent Macau lawyer. Basically, this is Hong Kong’s future…

Money and obsessive stability – not liberty, creativity and social dignity – are becoming the ultimate goals in a materialistic and protectionist region that has grown used to easy money and easy ‘success’. Being ‘patriotic’ – that is, loving the Party – is becoming the highest moral attainment. Economic dependence [on] Beijing is now absolute and freedoms are being traded as commodities.

George Magnus on the US-China ‘more a trade agreement than a deal’.

The Spectator on how Xi Jinping’s dictatorship is more tragedy than farce.

The Guardian on China’s probably-doomed attempts to convince (or direct) women to go back to being baby machines.

For something both literary and relaxing – the London Review of Books has an occasional diarist who’s a government official in Beijing and a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Here’s her account of the civil-service entrance exam. Other very readable columns here and ‘how we covered up a local bureaucrat’s death at a banquet’ here.

The SCMP contrasts the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Chinese in Cambodia.

And a Lunar New Year version of ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ – with synthesized pipa.

(OK – don’t say I don’t do anything for you…)