Big Lychee, Various Sectors

This was the weekend of cops invading multiple shopping malls, marching dozens of young arrestees onto buses, stepping up obnoxiousness towards the media and still finding time for some average-scale rampaging around unwelcoming neighbourhoods, though managing to be absent during a pro-Beijing wacko’s ear-biting and stabbing attack. (Badiucao art work on the ear…)

One relatively minor neighbourhood incursion was in my own, when a platoon of paramilitaries with bright lights, gas masks and pump-action shotguns came galumphing along Hollywood Road in a haze of tear smoke. They gruffly demanded that bystanders ‘go away’ (a few retreated a whole 20 feet up the hill outside Marks & Spencers), then proceeded to probe the exotic and mysterious Mid-Levels Escalator for protesters. The dreaded cockroach menace had in fact swarmed down the street 15 minutes earlier and vanished – a couple of them had nonchalantly taken the adjacent table in the restaurant where I had just had dinner.

The Hong Kong Police continue to ramp up their repression-of-everything-everywhere, semi-curfew tactics. The force is presumably under pressure from Chinese public-security advisors somewhere up the chain of command, who are impatiently demanding that the protests be suppressed with whatever ruthlessness it takes. After all, it works on the Mainland, right? The harder the cops try, the angrier the public gets – and so the cycle goes on.

One distinctly possible next step will be to place greater restrictions on media coverage of protests and, particularly, police action. The Mainland advisors must be aghast at how the press here can record and disseminate almost everything the cops do – feeding public alienation and handicapping the authorities in their battle to assert control.

This cycle of repression-resistance-more repression is a microcosm of Beijing’s whole years-long approach to Hong Kong: try forcing the city to conform and obey – and when it rebels, try doing it again, but harder.

In its recent post-Plenum communique, the CCP outlined its intention to do just this. In brief, by ensuring that: Hong Kong’s future leaders are overtly pro-Beijing, the civil service serves the government’s political ends, the legal and law enforcement systems protect the state rather than the people, and schools deliver lots of lovely ‘patriotic’ education. More of which later.

After last Sunday in Salisbury Road, the Hong Kong Police now bring you the Tuen Mun neighbourhood-revolt suppression and the Lan Kwai Fong Halloween anti-mask freak-out. The best explanation I’ve heard is that Beijing is demanding that protests be crushed ASAP, Mainland-style, and no-one in Hong Kong has the ability or willingness to point out how it won’t work here and instead make things worse.

Another theory is that Beijing is deliberately trying to create conditions that would justify sending the troops in. That sounds less likely, not to say idiotic – but the current cycle of ever-greater use of force points to that eventual outcome anyway.

The CCP’s Plenum has issued a vague statement about strengthening national security in Hong Kong…

Hong Kong-based China watcher Johnny Lau Yui-siu said he expected to see a clear shift in policy direction as Beijing looks to strengthen its control over Hong Kong.

“This is clearly suggesting a wide range of unprecedented controls that are going to be exerted over Hong Kong as Beijing has lost its patience for one country, two systems,” he said.

“The communique sends a strong political message that might see Hong Kong respond by introducing new legislation to restrict free speech online, outlaw abuse of the police and increase controls on campus,” he said.

Pretty much what many of us have assumed for some time. This will produce greater resistance within Hong Kong, test the local pro-establishment camp’s loyalty and provoke greater international criticism. To what lengths will the CCP go to avoid relatively simple changes that would give Hong Kong more responsive local government and confidence that it will not be subjected to more Mainlandization?

I declare the weekend open with some choice reading…

Atlantic does a profile of localist hero Edward Leung.

Reuters recalls that all politics and news are local, and produces a big report ‘Below Lion Rock’ on how Wong Tai Sin is faring in the protests.

A Water Revolution of a different sort: Zolima Citymag on the challenge and cultural meaning of swimming around the whole of Hong Kong Island.

SupChina’s introduction to Hong Kong independence – the Panda in the Room.

And in case you can’t get enough depressing stuff out the Plenum, the Globe and Mail on Xi Jinping’s creepy narcissistic religion-substitute national(ist) ethos: the Outline for the Implementation of the Moral Construction of Citizens in the New Era.

Just time to note… Former Director of Prosecutions, now curiously hyper-pro-Beijing, Grenville Cross calls for Internet censorship, curfews, more prosecutions of kids and additional equipment for the cops to counteract spreading hatred of the police (don’t ask how that works). No idea what this is supposed to achieve – but we’ll give it a go anyway. Cross by name, dementedly cross by nature.

In other matters… A semanticist notes that I use ‘Leninist’ and ‘Stalinist’ interchangeably. To me, ‘Leninist’ refers to organizational principles, like top-down ‘democratic centralism’ to enforce ideological discipline and United Front tactics to neutralize opposition. ‘Stalinist’ means such a system under the rule of one domineering individual, featuring such delights as a personality cult, extra-grandiose vanity projects, paranoia-driven purges and compulsory Xi Jinping Thought Studies in the workplace. Academics and nitpickers will no doubt know better. I will continue to just toss a coin when deciding which to use.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor insists she has not met any law-breaking demonstrators during dialogue sessions and underscores her support of the police. Beijing has also directly urged unwavering support for the HKPF. So much for Carrie’s earlier slightly conciliatory noises about a possible independent inquiry into the cops.

When police unions bullied Matthew Cheung into withdrawing his apology to the public for the (apparently police-condoned) Yuen Long triad attack in July, it seemed pathetic. Some thought local officials feared a mutiny in the law-enforcement ranks. Since then, the police have ramped up their use of force against the Great Cockroach Menace, obscured their badge numbers, pursued protesters within hospitals, apparently taken partial control of the MTR, assumed the right to de-mask and assault journalists, and obtained a sweeping injunction giving them and their families privileged privacy-protection treatment.

Who is in charge of whom?

Given that Beijing officials have essentially sidelined the local administration, it seems clear that this leaves the Liaison Office largely running things. But it also seems likely that Beijing has already built up more influence within some local institutions than we would like to think – certainly in the police.

We see cops sporting Chinese flags on their equipment packs, and shotgun-toting ‘bald sergeant’ Lau Chak-kei has been adopted as a patriotic hero in the Mainland. The HKPF’s top officers and staff associations are regulating government officials’ public statements, demanding the right to use other departments’ staff and vehicles, neglecting routine patrolling and other crime-fighting duties, and creating new legal or quasi-legal powers for themselves.

After what must have been years of CCP infiltration and co-option, the police management and unions have been activated as a United Front tool.

Not all cops would see it this way; many seem more convinced than ever that they are defending society from evil. And not all are on-side with the rapid transformation of a broadly respected public service into a publicly unpopular and oppressive force. Some purging will be in order as the CCP consolidates control later. The rest of the civil service, teachers and others will follow. This is how it goes.

Anglia Ruskin University rescinds pro-Beijing legislator Junius Ho’s honorary degree, following a bout of ‘increasing concern’. While the pro-Beijing camp does not have a monopoly of obnoxiousness, it seems to account for the vast majority of racist, homophobic, triad-linked, hate-spewing, borderline-criminal scumbags who take part in Hong Kong ‘politics’.

This is partly by default. Decent and independent-minded people are unlikely to align themselves with the thuggish Stalinist CCP (and it wouldn’t want them anyway). It is also a result of the United Front practice of buying loyalty. Ho is a lawyer who works on the not-very-legal but lucrative transfer of New Territories ‘ding’ house-building rights – an archaic system that harms Hong Kong’s overall interests but which Beijing supports to keep rural power-holders onside.

Devout, true-Red believers are rare, and relatively few pro-Beijing party activists can be called ideologically committed; most are simply opportunists. This is overt and unapologetic where the pro-business factions are concerned. It is also apparent among the broader-based groups, notably the DAB and its differently-branded proxies, which attract a lot of lightweights and dimwits.

Not all of these schmucks are necessarily evil. It’s just a lot easier to be nominated as an election candidate for a well-resourced Beijing-backed party, provided you are happy to parrot the official line on everything. For example, it’s hard to imagine lawmaker Elizabeth Quat being as vulgar and crass as Junius Ho. She even dabbles in saving the whales and other environmentalist causes. Her university will never need to strip her of her degree.

Oh it can’t – it doesn’t even exist.

Meanwhile, my Twitter career is complete…

For the 20th week in a row, a group of top-level Hong Kong government officials sit in a conference room. The Ad Hoc Rampaging Protesters Unleashing Chaos and Violence Committee comes to order. As in 19 previous meetings, attendees are discussing what the administration can do to bring an end to the regular and unending cycle of rallies and demonstrations turning into mayhem on the streets.

There is silence around the table as one policy secretary after another mumbles or shrugs. Suddenly, the Security Bureau boss sticks his hand up. “I’ve just had an amazing idea! Let’s send in hundreds of riot police to fire tons of tear gas all over the place! I bet it’ll work this time!”

I was at the ‘illegal gathering’ (the SCMP’s description) yesterday. Although there were plenty of black-shirted (but mostly non-battle-equipped) younger folk there, the crowd had above-average numbers of the middle-aged Respectable Bespectacled Brigade, including media types, perhaps because the rally’s original theme concerned press freedom. Some were in wheelchairs. They did not seem to present a threat to law and order.

There were also platoons of heavily equipped riot police everywhere, obviously just waiting to start firing their sub-lethal weaponry. Soon enough, the Peninsula Hotel was shrouded in smoke. Many demonstrators squeezed out through the Avenue of Stars. Tourists with luggage waited in vain for taxis outside the InterContinental. And a few hours later – in accordance with the routine of nearly five months – clashes broke out further up Nathan Road, with the usual arrests, injuries, etc.

Other districts saw outbreaks over the weekend. The almost ritualized heavy-handed police tactics – tear gas everywhere, arrest anyone you can grab – has become one of the main causes of the protests. Protests against police over-reaction are met with more police over-reaction, which leads to (duh) more protests.

Back in the government conference room, nobody asks if this is isn’t getting really stupid. However, Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala in the Guardian step in:

The escalating weekend insurgency and the police brutality deployed in response have marooned the territory in a cycle of violence that is doing serious damage to its economy, rule of law and public trust in its institutions.

… The authorities are boxed in: any political reforms that fall short of concessions or real dialogue would likely worsen the situation, as would no action at all.

They mention the ‘Northern Ireland’ scenario of perpetual troubles.

The authorities – essentially Beijing – are indeed ‘boxed in’. It is fanciful to imagine the Leninist Xi Jinping regime allowing Hong Kong even mildly representative government. But it is also hard to see them going ‘full-Mainland’ via a rapid imposition of censorship, martial law, suspension of habeas corpus, and so on, given the risks of serious insurrection and international sanctions.

There are several other variables. Beijing’s fear of rebellion crossing the border would override any other consideration, for better or worse. There are strategic international factors at play (sanctions, etc). And there is the possibility of factional struggles among the CCP elites.

A more local variable: the owners of Hong Kong’s hotels and malls must be starting to feel pain. Local policymaking traditionally revolves around the needs of these family-run conglomerates, whose heads have correspondingly shoe-shined Beijing for decades. They probably have little clout, and few friends – if only they had been nicer to their fellow citizens over the years! It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of parasites.

Barring a serious – and hard-to-envisage – shift, perhaps we do face a real prospect where this does not end. A future of permanent paramilitary occupation and low-scale insurrection, but blissfully few tourists.

After the 2014 Umbrella Movement, Beijing (via the Hong Kong administration, via district-based civil-servant ‘Returning Officers’) barred many younger localism-tinged hopefuls from the ballot using a concocted political test. Oddly, many activists you would expect to be disqualified, like Eddie Chu Hoi-dick, have been allowed to run in November’s District Council elections.

The only one still waiting for a decision is Joshua Wong. The Returning Officer in his area has mysteriously gone sick, in the way someone might if her conscience did not allow her to obey anti-democratic orders from above (or, you may consider, in the way someone might if she was actually sick).

What brings about (the boy Joshua aside) this outbreak of tolerance among Returning Officers? It would be Beijing’s instinct, after four months of a popular uprising, to suppress opposition voices. It could be that, in a freakish fit of common sense, local officials convinced the Liaison Office that disqualifications would provoke yet more loathing for a government that has run out of legitimacy. Another theory is that the civil servants or their local superiors are petrified of being blacklisted by the US – though this assumes they have a choice.

District Councils are a big yawn, but there has been a recent strenthening of support for pan-dems, and a surge in new voter registrations – and this is a golden opportunity to give the government a big kick up the backside, and Beijing a message.

I declare the weekend open with a multitude of painstakingly curated reading matter.

More evidence that Hong Kong’s political middle ground is evaporating: moderate columnist Michael Chugani tears Carrie Lam to shreds.

A warning to keep away from security or ‘bodyguarding’ companies. I get copied in on email-newsletters from a couple of local ‘risk consultancy’ types. One is a company run by an ex-cop trying to drum up business; the analysis is purely focused on gory mayhem in the streets. Another – some sort of personal security outfit – issues lengthy blood-curdling advice copied to everyone in and around the government on how best to crush the radical fanatic terrorists in our midst. At best they are pandering to corporate clients’ paranoia; at worst, they are mouth-frothing jackboot fetishists.

One thing they don’t mention, but AFP does: violence against Hong Kong government critics.

Not only does the protest movement create artwork – here’s a Yuen Long MTR attack infographic. The Resistance also does mass-spectrometry (or something fancy like that): an analysis of the Hong Kong Police’s new Made-in-China tear gas.

The Diplomat goes inside Hong Kong’s leaderless uprising…

Many young Hong Kongers face a terrifying choice: Continue a grotesquely uneven battle against a superior power or acknowledge that the rest of their lives are going to be without civil liberties, without democracy and under Beijing’s strict and brutal control.

A Chinese U professor in Asia Dialogue says Hong Kong’s protests are asking only for the city has been promised…

The protest is a small price to pay in the short term if the people of Hong Kong want to preserve the city’s future. Without it, the outcome is inevitable: the city’s gradual absorption into the Chinese system, losing its identity, culture, values, and everything that makes Hong Kong unique and different from the rest of China.

Some historical perspective from Manchester, England: Hong Kong and the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

And the first time I have ever linked to Teen Vogue: Joshua Wong (need you ask?)

Bloomberg looks for signs that wealth is fleeing Hong Kong for Singapore, and doesn’t find many, really. Bear in mind that people with vast fortunes to move around try not to leave signs, and that the stability of the monetary and financial systems would be the last things to go – long after the rest of us have emigrated or been used for organ-harvesting. That said, it is amusing to see Singaporean officials’ crocodile tears over the plight of Hong Kong.

Foreign Policy reports on how Hollywood’s shoe-shining of the CCP is backfiring in Southeast Asia. As with the NBA drama – another Xi Jinping hubristic overreach screw-up.

Asia Dialogue again, on why the CCP fears religion…

Inspired by American propagandists including Walter Lipmann (1889–1974) and Edward Bernays (1891–1995), the CCP assumes that if a government wants to change the content of its citizens’ beliefs, it can.

(In related news, Beijing has just released new ‘guidelines on ethnic unity’ – perhaps ‘forced cultural uniformity’ would be a better description.)

And say a big welcome to China’s new (‘learn from’) Comrade Lei Feng!

Finally, someone you shouldn’t learn from at all – but he’s the last hope for China’s Soft Power: that amazing/heroic stunt drinker from Hebei you’ve watched in horror.

In an effort to make the mostly empty Zhuhai bridge look useful, the authorities are going to allow private cars to drive across the zillion-dollar infrastructure boondoggle. At least that’s how the SCMP reports it.

In fact, this will only apply to cars that already have cross-border permits. There are some 30,000 such vehicles (including trucks and buses), currently restricted to designated land boundary control points. (Quite a few, it seems, are already eligible to use the HK-Macau-Zhuhai White Elephant, but given the nightmarishly Kafa-esque permit quagmire, and perhaps a lack of compelling reasons to go to Zhuhai, few do.)

To put it into perspective, an extra 40 – yes, forty – Hong Kong cars will be eligible under the first phase of this initiative.

As the SCMP item mentions, bus operators are also struggling on the bridge, as are truckers. Has it occurred to anyone that it could make an amazing cycle path?

There is talk of allowing all 600,000 or so private cars in Hong Kong to use the bridge, but capacity constraints at either end (plus multiple immigration checks) make this pretty much impossible. One desperate solution to ‘maximize’ bridge usage is a system where car owners book a slot ahead of time.

All this is meaningless, of course, to the 90% of Hong Kong households that do not own a private car. Hong Kong’s transport planners are largely unaware of their existence – so spending thousands of man-hours devising a highly complex policy for 40 cars seems like a really cool idea.

Breaking news for that 90%: the Curfew Control Commissar will allow you to use the MTR up to 11.00pm tonight!

It seems Hong Kong officials use Reuters as their preferred conduit for leaks (or ‘scoops’ as media folk call them), while their Mainland counterparts prefer the Financial Times. The latter today reveals (paywall, etc, possibly) that Beijing will eject Chief Executive Carrie Lam, maybe in March, after things have ‘stabilized’ ha ha. (Reuters catch-up here.)

The precedent is the FT‘s shock story (if memory serves) on the imminent dumping of Tung Chee-hwa in favour of Donald Tsang back around 2005.

The FT’s latest exclusive on CE defenestrations falls a bit flat by suggesting that the ‘leading candidates’ to replace Carrie – as an interim – are Henry Tang and Norman Chan.

Slightly buffoonish nice-guy billionaire-scion Henry was due to get the job in 2012, but a last-minute switch (at the same time Xi Jinping was coming into power) led to ultra-patriot CY Leung ‘winning’ the quasi-election. Installing ‘Illegal Basement’ Henry at this stage would look like a sop to the very tycoons Beijing partially publicly blames for Hong Kong’s woes. It would also be an insult to the whole city to appoint someone with so little gravitas – though arguably it would give us all a laugh. He could only be a temporary and very, very obvious puppet.

There would be a nice symmetry to it: in 2005, a dimwit tycoon was replaced by a dimwit bureaucrat; in 2020 it’s the other way round (with a rabid-Red CCP fanatic from 2012-16 as an interregnum).

If Beijing wants to go for a halfway convincing CE, technocrat Norman Chan makes more sense. He has just left the top post at the HK Monetary Authority, which oversees the currency peg and bank regulation – which is at least a real job requiring some brain cells. But that’s what people said about former Financial Secretary Donald Tsang, who went on to become another failure.

Whatever happens, any Hong Kong CE from now on will be no more than a figurehead while Beijing presumably tries to sort out a more sustainable and effective approach to imposing ethno-nationalistic neo-Confucian Stalinist dictatorship on a modern, free and pluralist society.

Hong Kong’s resistance – now a direct confrontation with the CCP and an international issue – may just be beginning. But at least perhaps everyone agrees that, after 22 years, this whole routine of appointing CEs who turn out to be crap and scrabbling around for another is getting a bit stale.

Update: anyone worrying that an ‘interim’ arrangement isn’t allowed under the Basic Law (here, here) can rest assured that, if you’re the CCP, anything is allowed under the Basic Law.

As part of Operation Clueless Mayhem on Sunday, the Hong Kong Police sprayed Kowloon Mosque a fetching blue. It was a fairly typical deployment of the water cannon: truck prowls along street looking for a target; driver steers up to roadside, stops, and sprays small group of people who are doing nothing; truck trundles away again. But, unlike dozens of other incidents in which the cops have doused bystanders and buildings with the chemical-laced blue-dyed liquid for no obvious reason, this occasion triggered Horrified Panic in the law-enforcement hierarchy and government.

Why does a mosque warrant special post-spraying commiserations, when the cops have never shown any remorse after firing rubber bullets at reporters, pulling a mentally disabled bystander to the ground, tear-gassing old people’s homes and pigeons, invading MTR trains, chasing schoolkids, etc? The only explanation can be… Muslims.

Someone in the police management must have dimly remembered a connection between mosques and Muslims, and vaguely recalled that Muslims might mean something ultra-sensitive.

So the cops hurried round to pretend to clean the place up, and held some painfully embarrassing press conferences. These involved a claim that it was an accident, and another that the idea had been to nobly protect the mosque (a five-year-old caught with hand in cookie jar could do better). The police PR experts added awkward assurances about how much we respect ethnic minorities. Most gruesome of all was the appearance of a real live Mohameddan officer who regaled the media with tales of how much all his infidel fellow constables love him. Then the Chief Executive herself emerged from her bunker to visit the centre and hobnob with turban-wearing elders, who accepted her whiny and hollow apologies with good grace.

Having set this precedent, the cops and officials than had to go and say sorry to St Andrews Church across the road, because they had given that place a spraying as well (a blue-rinse looks better on an elderly Protestand lady). The cops also assure everyone they respect freedom of religion – as if that has anything to do with this.

Watch for a water-cannon truck to be struck by a lightning bolt next weekend.