Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Just when you think the nightmarish mix of insanity and malice must be reaching its limits, it gets worse. Trade Development Council/Economic Development Commission emperor Jack So says Hong Kong – suffocating under the crush of 48.6 million visitors last year – must prepare to receive… 100 million.

Obviously, anyone suggesting such a physical impossibility is brain-damaged beyond hope and incapable of rational thought. Among the many reasons such lunacy can’t/won’t happen:

• China will one day cut taxes on luxury goods, thus eliminating the arbitrage effect that attracts most Mainland shoppers here;
• Additional crowding and pollution will make Hong Kong so unpleasant to be in that tourists will start to stay away in favour of nicer places like Lagos or Shinjiazhuang;
• Hong Kong people will finally snap. Angry mobs will burn down branches of Sa Sa, overturn tour buses and lynch ‘locusts’. It’s amazing that it hasn’t happened yet.

But the fact that So makes this forecast shows just how deranged, unhinged and sadistic the Big Lychee’s stagnant little pool of self-selecting ‘elites’ are. The South China Morning Post gives this psychopath a full-page mega-shoe-shine today (presumably to atone for Jake van der Kamp’s recent column on how the TDC concocts crap, self-serving statistics), in which we see blather about how he will ‘continue other aspects of his public service’ in future. Scary.

Suddenly, a little ray of sunshine bursts into our bleak lives. Ex-Chief Secretary Henry Tang’s wife Lisa Kuo appears in court and admits guilt over the couple’s illegal basement. Memories from around 18 months ago come flooding back: Henry’s admission of adultery; public disbelief that Beijing would scrape this far down in the barrel to find our next Chief Executive; the conveniently timed revelation about the 2,400 sq ft subterranean palace; Lisa taking the rap and bursting into tears; the previously-unimaginable rise of Transylvanian half-wolf CY Leung; the press frenzy over the basement’s lavish interior, with its kinky Japanese bathing facilities, pervy window into the swimming pool, private stereo Feel-O-Rama cinema and exclusive cellar full of raspberry ketones. Happy days…

Everyone should make sure their children are shown this sobering sight. A lesson to anyone tempted to live on the wrong side of the law. Henry, after visiting the finest purveyors of eyewear in the city, has moved on from the crime by reinventing himself as a sleazy-advertising-executive type. Lisa, anticipating years of living on Correctional Services Department congee and fishbone broth, has wisely put on weight. She is also clearly drugged up to the eyeballs – I’m guessing on Quaaludes. Can’t blame her. Maybe she can plead diminished responsibility (‘Tang’s wife of 28 years’ to quote the SCMP). Maybe she’ll end up in the padded cell next to the straitjacketed Jack So.

With that heart-warming thought, I take delight in declaring the weekend open.

This just in: This week’s ‘Do you think they’re trying to tell us something’ Award goes to the July 11 Wen Wei Po editorial…

The Alliance for True Democracy (ATD) has proposed three alternative formats for the 2017 Chief Executive Election by universal suffrage, but none of them is acceptable because they all violate the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC). Individuals as well as parties are welcome to submit their own plans for the election through universal suffrage as long as the plans comply with the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the NPCSC. The alliance is actually obstructing efforts to implement universal suffrage in Hong Kong by trying to do it outside the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the NPCSC. If it is genuinely interested in achieving universal suffrage, it must not try to break the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the NPCSC.

The Standard’s front page today provides an interesting juxtaposition. On the right, we have the lead story ‘Brainwashing rears its head’, about a school civics textbook allegedly filling innocent kiddies’ minds with irrational and emotional patriotism. And on the left, we have an ad for LifeNutrition Green Coffee Beans, a product that claims to lose the consumer weight in a way that essentially breaks the laws of physics. (Includes ‘raspberry ketones’ and recommended by a yoga-bim.)

The very idea of a primary-school textbook on the Hong Kong Basic Law strains credibility. Needless to say, it is produced by a pro-Beijing group; equally needless to say, it has triggered instant uproar among the ever-watchful, and possibly quite hard-to-please, folks who led the fight against National Education last year.

Despite being a pro-establishment paper, the Standard cheerfully presents us with the (de-facto anti-Communist/pro-democracy/skeptic) Parents Concern Group’s alarmism in full, with the loyalist Joint Committee for Promotion of the Basic Law not even getting a look-in. Had they been mentioned, defenders of the patriotic materials would (or could) have said that what they are pushing is no more manipulative than getting American kids to recite the oath before the flag every day, or swearing allegiance to the Queen, as many Hongkongers would have in the old days when qualifying for citizenship or just joining the Boy Scouts. They might have expressed frustration, even distress, at the way the mainstream Hong Kong community is left so cold by the nationalistic imagery and sentiment that is taken for granted on the Mainland.

How different it would be if the Chinese Communist Party enabled you to lose weight without any change in diet or activity levels.

I try my best – honest – to treat the South China Morning Post’s weekly 48 Hours magazine as a publication to read rather than as a glossy insert to be chucked straight in the bin. But it’s hard going, all those perfect, crisply-focused photo-shoots of glistening food on shiny plates, the stuff about clothes, the sponsored features, and all the pink and red everywhere. Still, I did manage to flick through enough today to see a quote from an actor/film director saying “I believe in the supernatural, because many things … are impossible to explain.”

Of course he has it backwards. If you find many things hard to explain it is probably because you lack rudimentary knowledge, such as a basic grounding in high-school science (and you can always rely on Bob Carroll). “I believe in the supernatural, because I am ignorant” is what he really means (though in fairness it could be “I say I believe in the supernatural, because I have a ghost movie to publicize”).

Still, this sort of thinking is pretty common. An apartment is worth less money because a guy once committed suicide in it and people believe he might return from the dead in some nuisance-making form. People also believe that HK$369-a-can green bean coffee will override the second law of thermodynamics and make energy disappear. But try as you may, you can’t convince people that the Chinese Communist Party is respectable, let alone loveable. Michael Novak said: “Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits.” It seems Hong Kong proves him wrong.

Already cheered by the prospect of mass-suicide by the city’s property agents, Hong Kong attains unsurpassed joy on learning of two more exciting developments.

First is the news that Louis Vuitton, manufacturer of ugly, impractical and overpriced women’s bags (and the bags themselves are pretty unappealing), is suffering some sort of collapse in business and halting expansion of its no-doubt tacky premises in Causeway Bay. Other space-wasting vendors of luxury-brand baubles for the educationally sub-normal will move in, but there is a long-overdue smell of retail blood in the air. The market for pricy tat is peaking, thanks to ‘soaring rents and a crackdown on corruption in the Mainland’.

How interesting: the designer-label industry drives local shops and restaurants out of Hong Kong neighbourhoods in the course of feeding off the theft, intimidation and bribery taking place in China. Could a business model get any more parasitical if it tried? And how intriguing the thought that it was the Chinese Communist Party that enabled and indirectly nurtured the beast before, we hope, killing it off. This is good news for Macau as well, as we can see from the way a hint of possible measures against money-laundering hits casino stocks.

The second reason for rejoicing is the mouth-watering possibility of golf courses being reclaimed to provide badly needed housing. This sort-of has ‘too good to be true’ written all over it. The officials concerned mention the idea in that dispassionate and thoughtful tone that signifies bullshit – like former Constitutional Affairs Secretary Stephen Lam when he used to intone on his latest vacuous proposal for political non-reform.

Having said that, this is the exact opposite of a Stephen Lam scheme in that just about everyone is bound to love it. Now they’ve mentioned it, can our leaders possibly back down without having millions of us rampaging onto the links/fairways/bogeys or whatever up at Fanling and just tearing the greens to shreds? Could this be Chief Executive CY Leung at his most cunningly wolf-like and diabolical? By tormenting the tycoons who plot his demise while putting shots at their beloved HK Golf Club, and winning him badly needed public approval, it would be populism at its finest.

The South China Morning Post quotes a highly perceptive Dr Andy Kwan Cheuk-chiu of the government’s housing advisory body as saying…

Some private golf clubs pay nominal rents to the government while running the site like an exclusive club for the rich … This is blatant exploitation. The government should return the land to the people.

One of his counterparts, one Lau Ping-cheung, presents an imaginative alternative view …

…we need to discuss and understand the possible social impact, because Hong Kong is an open city with lots of rich people and foreigners who might be interested in golf.

So: this free-trading city has millionaires and outsiders who possibly find pleasure in hitting a little ball around a field with a stick –therefore its residents cannot have affordable homes. And we thought the politicians we had heard of were insane.

Which brings us to the key point. Some bores say that one of the three 18-hole golf courses at Fanling should be preserved because it hosts the international Hong Kong Open tournament every year. They are putting the cart before the horse. We face a classic win-win here. We look the other way when we see ragged schizoids sleeping under bridges because they shout at invisible people and smell bad. We prefer to forget they exist. Similarly, we leave golfers to plod around out in Fanling in their pink knickerbockers because they are so crushingly tedious to have around. (The only thing interesting about them is that statistically they are 20 times likelier than average to be struck by lightning.) Hong Kong has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to permanently solve both the scourge of unaffordable housing, and the tragic mental illness that is golf.

To quote CY Leung: “Hong Kong is not short of land, but we are short of determination.”

For a ‘historic moment’, it’s not much to get excited about, really. The Chinese government’s top official in Hong Kong, Zhang Xiaoming, is to have lunch with the city’s legislators. To some, this is noteworthy simply because it hasn’t happened before. To others, it sort of feels meaningful – but it depends on why it is happening now.

There was a time when formal contacts between the Liaison Office and a branch of Hong Kong government were seen as sinister – a mixing of well water and river water. Indeed, for the first few years after the 1997 handover, Beijing’s emissaries here were close to invisible. Today, they openly mingle around town. This is evidence of a tightening Mainland grip on the Big Lychee or a sign of a growing normalization of relations between the Central People’s Government and the Special Administrative Region, according to taste (the two are not necessarily exclusive). Radical and vociferous pro-democrats are saying they welcome the lunch idea, which is the main thing.

It is all about the pan-democrat camp, and the pesky people who vote for them and turn out, in body or at least spirit, on occasions like the July 1 march. The Communist Party’s traditional Leninist-feudal attitude has been that pro-dems, as people who refused to kowtow, were non-people. It was considered a big deal when some who were barred from even entering the Mainland were permitted to cross the border on a Legislative Council trip in 2005. It was a major deal when some HK Democratic Party figures were invited to the ugly skyscraper in Western to sit with Liaison Office officials and discuss political reform in 2010 – though rival members of the pro-dem camp failed to recognize the symbolic significance of the all-powerful one-party state giving face to an opposition whose existence it had refused to acknowledge for years, and the DP ended up having to kowtow to their fellows’ anti-Beijing political correctness.

Both these ice-breaking events took place after then-Chief Executive Donald Tsang lobbied the central authorities. The pan-democrats’ snubbing of these friendly gestures made Sir Bow-Tie unpopular among the Beijing officials, but it seems the new Chinese leadership (and, to the extent anyone asks for its opinion, the newish Hong Kong administration of CY Leung) are going to try again anyway.

This could be because the old approach – pretending the pro-dems and their 60% share of the popular vote don’t exist – so obviously doesn’t work that the Liaison Office feels it has no choice. (Divisions and sheer willfulness within the patriot-tycoon-Leung coalition may also be driving Zhang and his people to something, anything, different.) It could be because the Beijing officials are becoming more subtle and crafty and think a charm offensive will win over local hearts and minds. It could be that the Occupy Central concept, with its visible if hardly earth-shattering momentum, is spooking them even more than we thought. And, of course, all these explanations (and others) could be true.

Pride of place must go to Occupy Central. We know the Liaison Office has been orchestrating a broad-based United Front campaign to demonize the movement. (As if to labour the point, today’s China Daily insists it hasn’t been.) For every innocent member of the public who believes the scare stories of bloodshed and economic ruin, several more seem bemused and others probably impressed that Professor Benny Tai’s threat of civil disobedience deserves such flattering attention from the cadres and their contrived collection of loyalist and pro-establishment lackeys. (Listeners to RTHK Radio 3 this morning were treated to the Liberal Party’s usually ladylike Selina Chow whining about how the protestors should occupy the government palace at Tamar instead. It is hard to distinguish who is more desperate: Beijing with its horror of Occupy Central, or the comrades/shoe-shiners with their fear of not toeing the line.)

Tactical lunch advice for the pro-dems: resist the temptation to blow it and do the drearily predictable – shouting slogans, waving placards or bleating the obvious about universal suffrage. Just turn up (neatly dressed, of course), act respectable, speak only if spoken to, and otherwise… smile knowingly at Mr Zhang and colleagues. You have been invited because you are rattling them.

An average number of new disgruntled pressure groups started protesting in Hong Kong over the weekend, including the Sai Kung League Against Driving Into Cows and the No to Dumping 80% of All Trash in Tsuen Mun Campaign. And then there was the Alliance of Double Stamp Duty Victims march.

The name suggests that they support innocent home-buyers frozen out of the market by the extra levies the government has imposed on property transactions to (allegedly) ease prices. In fact, the organization represents real-estate agencies – the intermediaries who skim a commission off every deal. By pulling the plug on speculation as the frenzy expanded into such idiocies as hotel suites and parking spaces, the government has hit these agencies hard. They can make so much during a bubble that they outbid other retail outlets for ground-level space and drive ordinary shops out of whole stretches of streets in residential neighbourhoods. Recall that buying and selling little concrete boxes does not add to GDP. Even the cartel-supporting Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ editorial struggles to express sympathy.

It would be heartening if the government announced that 90% of agencies should close, and 90% of the spotty inadequates who staff them find more productive employment. Instead, the official statement justifies the extra stamp duty as better than nothing as the bubble gets closer to bursting. (One factor in all this is that our lower-performing high schools produce graduates that are numerate and hard-working but still somehow barely fit for salaried, wealth-creating employment, and it’s either this or being an insurance salesman.)

The government press statement says the extraordinary measures “will be adjusted or withdrawn once the property market has restored to normal condition.” Can anyone remember a time when the real-estate sector was in a ‘normal condition’?

Not all critics oppose the extra stamp duty out of self-interest. Some dislike it in principle, for interfering in economic freedom and maybe even infringing the Basic Law. But this is about practical politics, not theoretical economics. When the government feels a need to do things like ban people from carrying more than two cans of infant formula out of the city, you know something isn’t right. Hong Kong is undergoing extreme economic distortions, and even the most competent and popular administration would be tempted to compensate in the short-term through counter-distortions.

The property bubble and unaffordability of housing is partly the result of ultra-low US interest rates and Hong Kong’s dollar peg. A further factor is the prevalent local investment psychology (not peculiar to Hong Kong) that real estate is the only asset class. Last but not least, there is past government policy to starve the market of supply and allow developers to build for outsiders and investors rather than end-users.

If critics of the extra stamp duty proposed scrapping the dollar peg or came up with some magic-wand quick-fix to the housing costs problem, maybe more people would listen. The only half-way sensible suggestion was to put container-accommodation in spare space under bridges, and few people above the age of 15 had the imagination to handle that idea.

The killer argument against the government measures is simply that they don’t work. But at the margins, at least, maybe they do. The recent peaking of residential prices – insofar as the indices are reliable given such low volumes – suggests that the government’s measures have had an impact. If the frenzy had been allowed to continue into and beyond parking-space territory, we would be building up towards an even bigger collapse when it finally comes, and secretaries and taxi drivers would have been caught up in it and we all know what happens next. It isn’t solving the problem, but it might be reducing the ultimate carnage a bit.

This is damning with faint praise. But then, we can look forward to seeing the sight of property agencies turning back into hairdressers and stationers, and agents flinging themselves from tall buildings – and consider saying to the government, “Okay, carry on.”

Are these people mentally diseased? Hong Kong, they say, must double the number of hotel rooms in the next 10 years in order to accommodate the rising number of tourists. Here’s a better idea: how about not building more hotels and not accommodating more tourists?

To everyone’s great relief, grinning fraudster Tony/Peter Chan has finally been found guilty of forging tycoon Nina Wang’s will. But a far bigger scam is taking place all around us. Evil, grasping bloodsuckers are trying to con 7 million innocent people into thinking that a bloated and still-expanding tourism industry is good for them.

If you draw a graph of annual tourist numbers in Hong Kong in the last 10 years, it would look something like this…

Draw a graph showing median household incomes, and it looks something like this…

The numbers are rough guesstimates from memory, but the key thing is the basic pattern: visitor numbers have doubled or trebled, while people’s earnings have barely risen. All that money we are told tourists bring into Hong Kong mysteriously doesn’t end up in our pockets. Rather than ‘create jobs’, tourism at best displaces existing ones. Rather than develop the economy, tourism crowds out other activities, reducing opportunities for those of us who aren’t landlords or designer-label retailers. Indeed, if you put a price on the hidden costs from increased crowding, traffic, rents and frustration, this parasite industry is probably eating into – reducing – many or most people’s wealth.

A reporter yesterday asked Chief Executive CY Leung a garbled question that hinted at the possibility that tourism harms residents. CY replied with the predictable blather about striking a balance. But why should there be any balance at all? If tourism damages the vast majority of the population’s interests, stamp it out.

We all know why the interests of property and retail players outweigh everyone else’s well-being. People like the Economic Development Commission’s Jack So see Hong Kong’s future as a sprawling airport terminal, with nothing but endless rows of glossy international outlets in which local menials sell overpriced branded junk to a constant stream of visitors passing through. It’s already happened to Macau.

One hope is that at some point the Chinese government will lift the heavy import and sales taxes it imposes on luxury goods. When this happens, millions of Mainlanders desperate to buy tawdry designer-label bling will no longer have a financial incentive to come to Hong Kong to get it. It can’t happen too soon.

The EDC’s Working Group on Convention and Exhibition Industries and Tourism would disagree, of course. It is packed with industry figures, especially from the conference and hospitality side. The cross-subsidies and hidden social costs surrounding things like international conferences at the HK Convention and Exhibition Centre are complex, but you can be sure that you are being inconvenienced – including financially – to keep bores in suits flooding into town for idiotic MICE events to benefit no-one but the sacred tourism sector.

For a more down-to-earth illustration, consider Lan Kwai Fong. The bar district’s main landlord (who, like the HKCEC boss, is on the Working Group) gets rich selling overpriced booze to tourists (and locals – but that’s not the point). When I pass by some mornings, I see piles of cigarette butts, bottles, broken glass, vomit, the occasional body (this one on the right was a month ago*) and other dirty and dangerous stuff left by the previous night’s revelers. The Nepalese street sweepers come at around 7.30am to clean it up. One guy makes all the money, while the rest of us pay for the mess.

That’s basically the tourism industry. I declare the weekend open with the thought that we would be better off with a hundred Tony Chans at liberty.

*Yes, we did feed it to the dog.

Like every other city in Mainland China, Shanghai is going to have a Special Magic Economic Zone (in addition to its existing ones).  The creation of districts where the usual laws and regulations don’t apply is by definition an admission that you can’t compete with Hong Kong, but no – an unquestioning press can’t stop itself from reporting that this latest contrived hub might ‘take over from the Big Lychee’, like all the rest were supposed to.

Our media show a similar gullibility over the news that the government is turning down Henderson Land boss Lee Shau-kee’s offer to donate land for affordable housing. No doubt the ranting octogenarian tycoon, with his genetically engineered triplet grandsons, is at best engaged in a cynical PR gimmick and at worst plotting developer-official-collusion-scam #2,931. But it seems likely that part of the problem was the old man’s condition that no land premium be payable. The obvious question here is: why, when homes are unaffordable, does the government insist on slapping a huge upfront tax on them? Sift through today’s news stories and commentary on Fourth Uncle’s offer, and it seems no-one thinks to ask.

One of the biggest instances of the news media’s inability to ask obvious questions must be CEPA, the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, the 10th anniversary of which the South China Morning Post is celebrating with a two-part extravaganza. CEPA was an elaborate PR stunt designed to make Hongkongers think Beijing was coming to the rescue in the wake of the SARS epidemic in 2003. Civil servants on both sides of the border drew up a vast list (still going) of supposed favours and concessions for each other’s industries. For example, Hong Kong exports of (say) scrap metal to the Mainland would be subject to a 0% instead of a 10% tariff. Some mugs called it a free-trade agreement, but for the highly protected Mainland to open its doors to free-port Hong Kong would mean opening its market to the whole world. Officials subsequently reported billions of dollars of trade ‘under the auspices of CEPA’, but it would have taken place regardless.

CEPA was a joke because Hong Kong has virtually no local manufacturing industry. So bureaucrats then attempted to incorporate services into the ‘arrangement’. Mainland interests naturally opposed competition from the Big Lychee’s world-class (honest) professionals, so the net result was continued barriers in those sectors. As the SCMP’s headlines show, Hong Kong lawyers, architects and other billable-hours freaks have never stopped whining about it.

In a last-ditch attempt to introduce substance into the hollow shell, officials took the totally separate scheme to allow solo Mainland visitors into Hong Kong and slapped the CEPA label on it. The liberalization of Mainland outbound tourism was nothing to do with SARS or even specifically Hong Kong; Thailand, Malaysia – and today even Europe and elsewhere – were all part of the gradual process. Nonetheless, commentators in the media swallowed it and saw the ‘individual visitor’ scheme as proof that CEPA was real.

And beneficial. Except, now in 2013, the influx of Mainland tourists has so distorted our retail sector and rentals, and so swamped our transport systems and physical space, that it has become a disaster to ordinary Hongkongers’ quality of life and to China’s attempts to win local hearts and minds.

So, as the SCMP won’t put it: happy 10th anniversary, total-absurdity-and-waste-of-space CEPA. 

The great debate continues: is the kid on the popodom packet male or female? It depends whether we are seeing bare hair or a turban. I think the latter (compare with the special July 4 example above right), and that the chomping juvenile is a Sikh boy. Either way, it proves the point about poor popodom-packaging production values.

Maybe it’s a seasonal thing, but not a day seems to pass in mid-2013 without at least one newspaper column declaring – as if the idea were original or insightful – that democracy is not the solution to all problems. The sentiment doesn’t even qualify as banal. Nothing is the solution to all problems: money isn’t; happy, loving families aren’t; excellent schools aren’t; perfect weather isn’t; even peace, love and understanding probably wouldn’t be; abundant and great food isn’t.

Exhibit 1 in support of this is shown here at the right. The North Indian thali at Woodlands restaurant in Tsimshatsui is a treasure. The culinary genius lies in enhancing the range of dazzling flavours and sensations by rejecting an entire class of ingredients (meat, as it happens). Does it follow that the culture behind this follows through with, say, decent graphic design? Still on a South Asian food kick, I recently grabbed a pack of popodoms. The product is fine. The packaging comprises a grotesquely horrible portrayal of a boy, a rabbit and a scary-looking meal. India: great food, and a democracy – more or less – but lousy commercial artwork.

The Global Times today assures us that democracy is not a panacea for Egypt’s woes. The Arab world seems to surpass even Africa (with which it shares the curse of artificial colonial boundaries) when it comes to being impervious to good governance. Tribalism, misogyny, authoritarianism, cronyism, an infantile inability among public figures to lose an argument, every bad economic policy you can think of, and then – as if you needed to add outright poison to the stew – Salafism, anti-Shiism and the other nihilist outputs of Islam. Egypt is better than many.

Closer to home we have South China Morning Post columnist Alex Lo, who does a sort of Beijing-sympathetic-but-not-pro-Communist, pluralistic-but-not-pro-dem act (there must be a Bronze Bauhinia Star in it somewhere). Today, he gravely informs us that in neither practice nor theory does democracy guarantee calm.

Whoever said it did? If anything, democracy is designed to bring disagreement into the open and give a government with a legitimate mandate the ability to make and implement decisions. Why do the pro-Beijing crowd always blather on about harmony and consensus? Because they have to live in a fantasy land where the Communist Party is infallible, and any so-called problems are figments of malicious opponents’ imaginations, or the doings of their evil foreign friends. ‘Democracy doesn’t solve all problems’ is a code for ‘If we all shut up and sweep crap under the carpet, everyone will be happy and smiling’. One of these statements is true, indeed trite; the other false and a pale attempt to excuse bad and/or despotic rule.

Yesterday’s 16th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover was the now-familiar mixture of ritual, self-delusion, weird juxtapositions and bad weather. Acceptable recipients of the Grand Bauhinia Medal are now in such short supply that pro-Beijing ‘heavyweight’ (I won’t comment) Maria Tam gets one. Textiles heiress Marge Yang gets a GBS; rat-catching lawmaker Priscilla Leung gets an SBS, and Lau Wing-mai – a property guy who supported Henry Tang’s disastrous bid to become Chief Executive – gets the ultimate kick in the teeth in the form of a grimy tarnished old B (for Bronze) BS (emphasis on BS).

The Hong Kong Celebrations Association and other United Front and pro-government groups went all-out to divert attention from the annual July 1 pro-democracy march with more patriotic let’s-all-jump-up-and-down-and-be-happy events than usual. In fact, despite pro-Beijing figures’ scaremongering about a dummy run for Occupy Central, the demonstration seemed to attract a barely average-size crowd. The cops so clumsily under-estimate the turnout that they lend credibility to the organizers’ obviously exaggerated count, but let’s say Chief Executive CY Leung isn’t going to have to pack his bags yet.

All is slogans. The establishment go through the usual stuff about one-country-two-systems and the motherland, but less convincingly than ever; the pro-dems fixate on universal suffrage and wolf-man Leung. Both sides want to avoid reality.

Bloomberg’s William Pesek writes: “Beijing has shackled Hong Kong with one bad, handpicked leader after another.” And – perhaps even more damagingly – with a political structure virtually designed to fail. Why? Is it deliberate and malicious, like the post-1949 economic punishment of Shanghai? Is it out of insecurity and fear of losing one-party control? Or are China’s leaders simply on the take, getting kickbacks from our local property cartel in exchange for keeping this rotten system? No-one’s even asking.

Hong Kong’s problems are not that difficult to solve. Step one: slap a 50% duty on all designer-label handbags, shoes, watches, cosmetics, etc, with a promise to phase it out as the Mainland reduces its own taxes on luxury imports. Within days, we will see less-crowded streets, more room on public transport and cleaner air. Big drops in commercial rents will follow as Abercrombie and Prada and LV and all those pestilential boutiques and perfumed candle stores close their doors. Hongkongers can have their city back, and with it economic diversity and opportunity. Only landlords lose.

What about our reputation as a shoppers’ paradise/free port? Screw it. Tourism is an ‘important’ part of our economy in the same way Japanese knotweed is an ‘important’ part of the ecosystems it invades and takes over. It’s a parasite. Then there’s Disneyland, similar in land area to the residential portion of Shatin – enough space to house half a million people. What housing shortage?

But no – the pro-Beijing crowd recite mind-boggling gibberish about social harmony and positive energy, while the pro-democrats demand an electoral system incompatible with one-party rule. There is hope… Back to Pesek: “Hong Kong is a fascinating proxy for how quickly and deeply Chinese GDP falls over the next one or two years.” When it comes to creating tensions and distortions, our economy beats our political divisions hands down. Is a slowdown in China really something for Hong Kong to fear? A third of property agents will lose their jobs over the coming year. Which means two-thirds, tragically, won’t – but it’s a start. A crash will cause suffering to all the right people. It will also help make the fascinating proxy’s 17th anniversary celebrations far more fun.

I have to read it a second time to make sure – but yes, it really does say…

The government will allow developers to start selling flats 30 months before they are fully built as opposed to 20 months at present in an attempt to boost home supply.

Next thing, they’ll boost the supply of oranges by letting market stall owners sell them before they’re harvested. Of course, it ‘boosts supply’ insofar as it might help satisfy some people’s pathological urge to feel they are purchasing real estate – just so long as you don’t want to do anything weird like live in it. Activist Lee Wing-tat tells the South China Morning Post that the measure sounds like a good way to allow developers to clear their inventories before the Great Property Crash of 2014 wipes out all the suckers who bought at the top of the market. The developers themselves sound suitably grudging and ungrateful.

Traffic mayhem and carnage resulted recently after a car driver freaked out when a man-eating caterpillar attacked her. Needless to say, it happened in Lantau and so is barely worthy of our attention – except for one tiny detail in the Sun’s report, namely that the woman’s husband is foreign. This presumably made the repulsive creepy-crawly all the more aggressive.

It is a sentiment shared by at least one other invertebrate: lawmaker Christopher Chung Shu-kun BBS, MH, JP. (BBS = Bronze Bling for Shoe-shiners, and JP = Look at me, I’m a justice of the peace even though I have no idea what a justice of the peace is. But MH? Mildly Harebrained? Medal of Honour perhaps – but aren’t all medals ‘of honour’? I’m stumped.)

The legislator proposed a motion yesterday criticizing the ever-rising cost of the West Kowloon Themed Cultural District Mega-Hub White Elephant Zone. It should have passed easily but for some reason in his speech he lapsed into what RTHK calls racist comments; foreigners shouldn’t be involved in running the project, he said, because they are ‘flawed by nature’. Pro-democrats voted the motion down (see page 7 – the vote was split along the usual lines, except the pro-dems found themselves in effect defending the government).

Chung himself is, needless to say, flawless by nature, as we can see from his bio. Excellent breeding stock. He is a member of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK, our friendly local Chinese Communist Party front. Still, with some overseas education in his past, he is quite cosmopolitan by DAB standards; many of his colleagues would not even think of mentioning barbarians in polite company.

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least one Executive Council member and one legislator who are married to people who are flawed by nature. Anyone wishing to send Chung their best wishes – or just ask him what the hell an MH is – can email him at office@chungsk.com .

Sinking my teeth into a lovely, juicy, but ungrown and yet-to-be-plucked-from-the-branch orange, it gives me great pleasure to declare this three-day weekend (is it really 16 years?) open.