Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Is Hong Kong full yet or not? Does Hong Kong need more people, or do we have too many? If we can find answers to these questions, should government act upon them?

Environmental activists think the Big Lychee has reached full capacity, and in order to avoid future reclamation of land and to protect dolphins, they want to clamp down on family-reunion immigration from the Mainland…

There are countless objections to this. A lot of space is taken up by the parasitical tourism industry; the gargantuan Kai Tak cruise terminal will be empty for the first 300 days of operation, while Disneyland begs to be converted into a new town. A lot of space is taken up by underused roads and bridges and adjacent sterilized land. Property tycoons sit on barren stretches of the New Territories. And is it fair to single out Mainlanders when a Hong Kong resident is entitled to be joined instantly by a spouse and kids from, say, Botswana or Venezuela? Still, if it is beyond the wit of policymakers, interest groups and greens to cut visitor numbers and utilize land properly, yes we are full.

But Chief Secretary Carrie Lam says otherwise… 

Well, actually she says otherwise, sort of, except that, but then again, while of course, though on the other hand – and we’re none the wiser. I especially like the bit where it says some unidentified power should be ‘encouraging marriage and childbirth to make good use of the existing population’. All those of us who have been agonizing over how we could be made better use of will be cheered to hear this.

Carrie says we do need more people. Economic growth will be constrained without an ‘infusion of new blood into the labour force’. (This presumes that we want/need an economy that forever expands in absolute terms, and that our schools will fail to produce more productive/innovative/adaptable graduates.) But then she asks who should pay for extra children. She accepts that most developed economies give subsidies to families with children (and she could mention that Hongkongers rich enough to pay profits tax get such a handout via allowances for dependent children) and take other measures to encourage the livestock to breed (or, maybe in Hong Kong’s case, reduce disincentives). What she means here is the whole caboodle: financial subsidies for all kids; maternity/paternity leave; better housing/schools; maybe Finnish baby-boxes.

This raises a whole host of profound issues to do with the role of the state in Hong Kong, doesn’t it? Should government be a Scandinavian nanny, or a Singaporean eugenicist, or a Nazi German breeder of a perfect master race, or an American Head Start/No Child Left Behind helping hand, or what?

But no such searching philosophical inquiry for Carrie. We won’t be going there, not because of principle, but because it…

“…often involves a range of measures that cut across various policy areas.”

Visionary thinking, Hong Kong-style, 2013. Think back over the last centuries and millennia… We could find cures for disease, solutions to poverty, improvements in technology, expansion of learning, freedom where there is slavery, light where there is darkness, peace where there is fear – a transformation whereby the human race moves from being cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers to civilized societies – but we won’t because it…

“…often involves a range of measures that cut across various policy areas.”

I am delighted to declare open a special extra-long weekend, lasting a good four days or so, in which I will be in an anonymous and probably Internet-free part of Southeast Asia. Might take some interesting photos, but then I might not, because it…

 “…often involves a range of measures that cut across various policy areas.”

Hong Kong awakens to a little victory for common sense and good taste over political correctness and obdurate bureaucratic stupidity. One of the vast concrete-pouring projects over at the West Kowloon Mega-White-Elephant Arts and Culture Themed Zone Concept Hub is a thing given the English title ‘Xiqu Centre’. Even pronounced correctly in Putonghua, it sort-of sounds like a Cantonese reference to genitalia. But with even RTHK Radio 3’s newsreaders unable to get their heads around Pinyin, what are the chances of English-speaking tourists and others blurting out the sneeze-like word (‘shee-choo’, very roughly) accurately? And even then, what does it mean? Is Xiqu: a) That martial art where fake monks break bricks with their heads? b) That stringed musical instrument that makes a pentatonic tinkle-tinkle sound? Or c) Chinese Opera?

Some genius worthy of a Nobel Prize has now suggested ‘Chinese Opera Centre’. Amazingly, they’re going with it.

Meanwhile, on the South China Morning Post’s letters page, senior Hutchison executive Frank Sixt complains about people criticizing Hong Kong’s billionaire tycoons, like his big boss, Li Ka-shing. Writing as director of the Li Ka-shing Foundation, he movingly describes the property mogul’s deep concern about the Big Lychee’s less fortunate… 

Maybe someone out there, mindful of the unhealthy divisiveness in Hong Kong society, will buy it. Columnist Michael Chugani gets in an instant response by demanding that the tycoons dip into their unused land reserves to help solve the city’s housing problems.

A suitably stern riposte to the letter would make the point that Hong Kong’s tycoons have not (unlike their American contemporaries) made their vast fortunes through innovation or other value-creation, but by ripping off consumers via cartels. Their companies and subsidiaries are parasites on the economy, extracting wealth in the form – for example – of 20-year mortgages families must pay on tiny, shoddy apartments. The donations they make to charity look big, but compared with the amounts they have skimmed off the economy over the decades, they are drops in the ocean. If such donations were (say) 10 times bigger, they might qualify as guilt-money; as it is, they are PR stunts, calculated, with increasing desperation, to ward off demands for reforms to create a more level, less feudal, capitalist economy where players have to compete. Like in Shanghai.

Sixt would be more convincing if he just pointed out that the tycoons have done nothing illegal: the Hong Kong government allows cartels and collusion.

As for tycoons ‘caring’, try opening a basic social-enterprise supermarket to help the low-paid that undercuts Park N Shop and see what happens.

Another Nobel Prize test… Hardly anybody likes Chinese Opera, therefore you should: a) Build a HK$2.7 billion Chinese Opera Centre; b) Don’t build a HK$2.7 billion Chinese Opera Centre.

Mainland China is now up to its ears in giant rubber ducks, inspired by – or blatantly and unquestioningly copied from – Florentijn Hofman’s installation in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. Chinese state media denounce the phenomenon as a danger to the nation’s creativity (it is actually a symptom rather than a cause; there are also concerns about the more prosaic issue of intellectual property). Meanwhile, as the anniversary of the 1989 Beijing massacre comes round, several of the vast waterfowl turn up in lieu of tanks near Tiananmen Square.

Lest anyone imagine that June 4 is too sacred or tragic an occasion for parodies, Hong Kong’s own pro-democracy movement joins in. The Big Lychee’s radical protestors never saw a message they didn’t want to dilute, and it is usual for a single-issue gathering to acquire a multitude of causes and slogans. Almost as a caricature of this tendency, so it is with, of all things, this year’s 6-4 vigil. The burning question: should we adopt a new, extra slogan this time – one that sounds pretty much like a pro-Communist Party one? The answer, after much bickering: um… no.

In view of today’s date, the South China Morning Post discreetly suspends its ongoing ‘Celebrating Hong Kong’ campaign, launched last week to mark its 110th anniversary. A quick glance at the promotion’s announcement on Day 1 had me hastily turning the page. That was no accident: the editors and designers’ aims were clearly to please the boss and hope readers would sympathize and not pay much attention.

Which I duly did. I think I saw former Chief Secretary Sir David Akers-Jones, a selection of second-tier tycoons and deputy tycoons, possibly one of those Olympic cyclists who crop up all the time, plus a handicapped person succeeding against the odds, and maybe something about children? On the back page was a selection of historic photos showing Hong Kong since 1903, with a rather labored emphasis on those occasions in the last 10 years when the city has wheeled happy smiling children out to wave Chinese flags for visiting Mainland athletes and astronauts.

It would be like shooting low-hanging fruit in a barrel, and I ignored it. Then Asia Sentinel did a vicious little piece mocking the SCMP as a Singaporean-style ‘captive monkey grinding the government organ’. This strikes me as a tad unfair. The Lion City’s state-guided media and publicity machine do a highly professional and indeed slick job, often managing to appear semi-convincing to at least a few of the more credulous among their increasingly aware and media-savvy audience. The SCMP campaign, lacking Singapore-type official propaganda specialists to enforce quality control, looks more like a lampoon than a serious attempt to persuade.

And lo – parody it surely is. On Sunday, what promises to be a regular feature on Outstanding Rich and Obedient but Still-Nice Hongkongers of Today focused on one Brandon Chau. ‘Big name, big ambitions’. On closer inspection, we find Brandon to be the offspring of Brenda and Kai-bong Chau, the king and queen of inoffensively tasteless celebrity from years back. Brenda and Kai-bong, about whom innuendo swirled, are also a sort of code word among those in the know to indicate when something in the press is a joke and not intended to be taken seriously. The SCMP slaves tasked with putting the 110th rah-rah project into print are having a great laugh here, and I think we should all join in. The city’s Chief Executive, CY Leung, approves the paper’s ‘Celebrating Hong Kong’ crusade as “a great way to bring people together,” and if it is going to be satire this well done, who am I to disagree?

On an even brighter note, HK Magazine celebrates its recent acquisition by the lavishly funded SCMP by interviewing an inoffensively tasteless but hitherto unaffordable non-celebrity, complete with a pictorial representation of absolutely uncanny likeness.

Click to hear Slave Time by the Slaves!

After the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, several apparently educated people I know stopped eating fish. Their logic was as follows: hundreds of residents of areas like Sendai had been swept out to sea and drowned; fish live in the sea and somehow or other consume bits of dead animal matter; therefore if you ate fish at that time, you would be eating dead Japanese people.

I told them (guessing) our seafood doesn’t come from anywhere near those Northwest Pacific waters. I told them all the oceans at times must have human remains in them (Osama Bin Laden would become some soon after). I told them we are all carbon-based life-forms, living off the food chain that starts with carcasses, bacteria and worms, and statistically we all probably contain a few atoms of what used to be, say, Shakespeare and/or Confucius, not to mention long-extinct giant slugs and carnivorous ferns. I even ventured to suggest something like, “What’s wrong with eating a little bit of Japanese person now and then?” All to no avail.

Perhaps it is simply more fun to freak out about mysticism and nonsense than to calmly accept basic science. Certainly, the international media seem to think so, happily picking up on Apple Daily’s expose about a Hong Kong branch of Starbucks making its coffee out of… ‘toilet water’.

The very phrase conveys disgusting images. Ricky the trainee barista crouches down by the porcelain bowl, scooping God-knows-what out of the pan – and what’s the betting he didn’t even flush it first. Doubly revolting (actually, impracticable) when you recall than many areas in Hong Kong have a separate flushing-water supply piped in from the sea, so it would be salty, not to say full of bits of tsunami victims.

So, obviously, that is not what was happening. The Bank of China branch of Starbucks was drawing plain potable water from a regular tap in a restroom. Yes, there is a urinal nearby. No, the two are not connected by any plumbing. If you would be too squeamish to fill a water bottle here, you have led an overprotected life and could use a bit of therapy. After trundling the stuff back to the serving area, Starbucks filtered it. And, needless to say, they would have boiled it – because that’s how you make coffee. It’s safe.

The South China Morning Post quotes a Hong Kong University expert who points out that there is a risk of pathogens being transferred from the restroom to the food preparation area. Which is true. But, being carbon-based life-forms that excrete waste products, Starbucks staff, like the customers, will inevitably go to restrooms several times a day anyway, and – on pain of being fired – will no doubt wash their hands, etc, each time, right?

Predictably, the company’s managers instantly turn into complete wimps and start groveling to the press and public about being sorry and how from now on they will use only special, hyper-expensive, pure, distilled water specially flown in by Boeing 747 from an exotic, endangered glacier in Hawaii. It is a pathetic sight: a vast global brand letting itself be pushed around by a scientifically illiterate, panic-prone commentariat.

The big boss of Starbucks could have been photographed drinking from the infamous tap and letting his infant children sip from the same cup. He would then declare that his company targeted only educated and rational customers, not riffraff who wet themselves about nothing. “If you’re so stupid that you think this water is dangerous,” he would say, “you’re uncool, and we don’t want you as a customer. Go to Pacific Whatsit where all the losers hang out.” What a wasted opportunity to have some real, manly, forthright PR that enables a company to manage events rather than vice-versa.

The Standard carries a (relatively) in-depth piece on the ‘hidden desperation’ of former Executive Council member and HK Mercantile Exchange founder Barry Cheung. A vast sum of money must have come from somewhere to account for the gap between the HK$1 billion invested in HKMEx and the pocket change generated in revenue. The article points out the exchange’s connections with several Mainland tycoons (notably Wang Nubo, the one who tried to buy a chunk of Iceland) and a couple of Russian billionaires. The guy who had the international development rights for British boarding school Harrow also turns up. A possible implication is that good friends of Barry who have recently been arrested were forging bank guarantees to help keep HKMEx afloat.

A pinch of salt may be in order here. The Standard’s Sing Tao parent group is a pillar of the Hong Kong tycoon milieu that loathes Chief Executive CY Leung and all his works. Along with some other parts of the media, it relishes any chance to inflate the Leung administration’s plentiful but pretty lame supposed scandals (illegal structures; sale of a small portion of a property portfolio ahead of real-estate tax hikes; leasing out of sub-divided apartments; an ancient civil service housing benefits fiddle; and… I think that’s it).

That said, those are everyday stories of Hong Kong property irregularities; HKMEx is different. Would someone who had tirelessly worked his way into the establishment, faced with possible bankruptcy, engage in large-scale criminality in order to rescue a major investment and/or preserve his social standing? On the one hand, we’d like to think the idea is preposterous. On the other hand, such things are daily occurrences just a few miles north of here.

Other instances of alleged corruption in the Big Lychee in recent years, like former CE Donald Tsang’s freebies-from-developers, or even former Chief Secretary Rafael Hui’s dealings with Sun Hung Kai, can be seen as opportunistic and aberrant. But when you combine the hubris, sycophancy and incestuousness of our local self-styled elites with cross-border murkiness, and you get a nasty smell, it begins to look more systemic.

On an infinitely more amusing note, China Daily delivers yet more orchestrated mouth-frothing about the pro-democracy Occupy Central plan. Buses and taxis will have to be cancelled or re-routed, the writer says, therefore “bloodshed will almost certainly happen,” possibly with numerous deaths, as in the London riots of 2011. The Great 2014 Chater Road Number 15 Bus Re-routing Massacre. The usual contrived United Front alarmism, in other words, with the poor author probably not even believing it himself. What is interesting is that one of our friends from yesterday, HK University of Science and Technology economics professor Francis Lui, crops up again.

Yesterday, he was talking nonsense about how a state’s economic reliance on a large hinterland deprives it of autonomy. (Does he realize that he is contradicting Article 2 of the Basic Law?) Today, he is quoted as saying that Central generates one fifth of Hong Kong’s GDP (and God knows how he works that out), therefore Occupy Central will cost the city HK$1.6 billion a day. This is like saying that Hong Kong’s GDP gets reduced by one 365th every time we get a day off courtesy of a Number 8 typhoon signal; it’s economically illiterate. As with the China Daily columnist, we have to wonder whether he really believes what he is saying.

And which would be worse: he does, or he doesn’t? To be stupid is unfortunate; to stand up and knowingly recite gibberish in public to curry favour with power-holders of limited legitimacy is just plain pitiful. I’d be intrigued to know what his students think.

I declare the weekend open with a little oddity from an oldish dictionary…

A gathering* of pro-Beijing bores, the South China Morning Post reports, tries to solve the great mystery of why Hong Kong people seem to like their own city. (I am not being pejorative here, just completely accurate and objective: whoever drew up the invitation list went to great lengths to approach only the most tedious members of the establishment and loyalist camps.) The conclusion is that they are suffering some sort of mental derangement because China’s economy has grown to the point where Hong Kong’s per-capita GDP is now a mere five or six times that of the Mainland…

A recent outspoken defence of local culture was the result of a “psychological imbalance” among Hongkongers who felt powerless when faced with the mainland’s economic growth, said speakers at a pro-Beijing forum yesterday.

…

The event, organised by the Hong Kong Development Forum, was intended to “rethink [they’ve thought about it once already?] the rise of nativism”, and was hosted by Hang Lung Properties chairman Ronnie Chan Chichung.

Professor Lau Siu-kai, former head of the Central Policy Unit think tank, and lawmaker Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee said Hongkongers had long felt superior to people across the border, but that with the mainland’s growth they feared they were losing their edge. They also felt [‘felt’ as in ‘know for sure’] their interests were being harmed by travellers buying up stocks of infant formula milk and causing a shortage of maternity beds.

“They are two sides of the same coin – pride and abasement,” Ip said.

…

Lau said the campaign had no clear objectives or strategies and lacked a powerful leader.

Peking University law professor Qiang Shigong said the lack of national education in the city made it difficult for Hongkongers to understand the culture on the mainland.

Economist Francis Lui Ting-ming said it was impossible for the city to gain autonomy because its economy could not stand without the mainland.

…

The Hong Kong Development Forum seems to be a one-man band, namely staunchly pro-Beijing Executive Council member and proud Bronze Bauhinia Star holder Cheung Chi-kong. As boss of the One Country Two Systems Research Institute, he is accustomed to framing questions with a view to suiting the pre-arranged, correct answer.

You would have thought Ronnie Chan would have a more grandiose and cosmopolitan, less insular and – frankly – lame conference to go to, but maybe it was a quiet day.

For Lau Siu-kai see Cheung Chi-kong and insert appropriate propaganda/think-tank name.

It is sad to see former Security Secretary Regina Ip stooping this low. Her name was mentioned as one of Beijing’s possible ‘Plan B’ replacements for Chief Executive CY Leung, and this is exactly the sort of shoe-shining you are expected to do to prove yourself. ‘Abasement’ indeed. (Just because Mainland officials are falling over themselves to assure us that journalist Willy Lam’s report on Plan B is definitely, absolutely, indubitably untrue, it doesn’t mean it is true. It would not be beyond these cunning fiends to arrange for Lam to pick up an apparent leak in order to give everyone in Hong Kong a bit of a kick up the rear. A lot of CY’s foes, let alone friends, would gulp at the thought of, say, Regina as CE.)

Lack of national education in the city makes it difficult for Hongkongers to have a clue who Peking University law professor Qiang Shigong is. As for understanding the culture on the Mainland, maybe the problem is that people in the Big Lychee know about it, from Bo Xilai to babies down toilets, all too well.

Economist Francis Lui Ting-ming thinks a city state cannot be autonomous because its economy relies on that of its hinterland. Maybe he should study Singapore – utterly reliant on Southeast Asia and fearless owner of half a dozen squadrons of F-15s and F-16s. He is a courtier (see definition 2) at HK University of Science and Technology, an institution sadly still awaiting its first Nobel Prize in his subject area. Like his fellow academic from what we Chinese culture experts call Beida, he frets about how all Hongkongers (apart from him, I guess) don’t understand the Mainland. This may cause them to lose out to global competition, he says; he doesn’t tell us how or why, because obviously we’re too stupid to get it.

A quick glance back up to paragraph 5 of today’s generous donation from the SCMP: “Lau said the campaign had no clear objectives or strategies and lacked a powerful leader.” Right – so why were you all sitting there blathering away about it?

The Hong Kong Legislative Council Development Panel yesterday discussed the provision of a new military dock on the reclaimed Central harbourfront. This has become one of those development/environmental/conservation controversies that tend to crop up when a city’s population wants a higher quality of life and the government is in the grip of psychopathic town planners who definitely cannot be trusted and quite possibly are in the pockets of construction/engineering/real-estate interests.

The saga goes back to 1994, when the British and Chinese were negotiating handover small-print. The British military headquarters (the Prince of Wales Building) was next to a Navy patrol-craft station and dock. For reasons of face rather than strategy, the People’s Liberation Army wanted the same facilities post-1997 as the Brits had. They could, in theory, have demanded relocation of the military HQ to the new coastline. Instead, to allow for the reclamation, they accepted a new naval station and dock out on Stonecutters Island and asked for a dedicated pier for what was going to end up an inland HQ complex in Central.

Fast-forward to 2013, and the big fuss is about the rezoning of the site from ‘Open Space’ to ‘Military Use’.  (In their usual modest way, the bureaucrats have already built the pier itself. It looks a bit like what the old Queen’s Pier would look like if they built it today, with some sort of sloping roof thing to add a dash of Sydney Opera House to the otherwise utilitarian facility.) In theory, the re-zoning could allow for a huge space to be sealed off from the public and/or covered with all sorts of mega-towers. Although not visibly participating in the hoo-hah, the PLA is sending out telepathic vibes to the effect that picnickers, cyclists and dog-walkers will suffer minimum inconvenience when enjoying the gorgeous new green and sunny waterfront, when it’s finished.

District Council member and planning activist Paul Zimmerman sees two possible explanations for the government’s decision to re-zone. One (more or less) is that the pier will be needed if and when Beijing decides to sort Hong Kong out once and for all with a Tiananmen-style massacre of civilians. As he points out, existing transport connections would serve the purpose perfectly well. The other is that Hong Kong government departments want to offload the responsibility for cleaning the pier toilets to someone else – meaning, in this case, the PLA.

I couldn’t resist asking Mr Z if he could think of a third possibility coming in at around 5 on a scale of Zero (urban warfare requirements) to 10 (toilet-cleaning avoidance). He suggests that the PLA might prefer the new zoning status for relatively innocent reasons like control over security, maintenance and costs. One of the functions of the berth will probably be ceremonial; if I were the local PLA chief and followed the local news, I would probably play safe and want to run the site just in case Occupy Central/Post-80s/Scholarism or whoever turn up when some General arrives for an inspection visit.

The problem with the toilet-cleaning avoidance theory is that there must be a Leisure and Cultural Services District Officer (Grade 2) (Hong Kong Island) (Central) (Public Conveniences and Latrines) (Cleansing) somewhere with a big map with lots of coloured pins stuck in it, eagerly licking his lips at the prospect of expanding his headcount, budget and overall empire thanks to additional responsibilities on the new waterfront. These people will kill to get more toilets to clean.

Mr Z adds:

…a ‘goodwill undertaking’ of public access of a Military Installation managed entirely under Garrison Law is undefined territory, whereas declaring a ‘Closed Area’ temporarily for use by the Military of a Public Space which is otherwise entirely managed under Hong Kong Law is a well established mechanism.

In other words, who do you trust more as custodian of (partial) public space on the harbourfront: the Chinese People’s Liberation Army or the Hong Kong government?

Yup, I think we’ll go with the soldiers, thanks.

An irritatingly jovial-looking Barry Cheung strides purposefully onto the front pages, seemingly without a care in the world. It is almost as if, following the demise of his HK Mercantile Exchange, defenestration from the Executive Council, the Urban Renewal Authority and the boards of AIA and Rusal has given him a new lease on life. It is almost as if being under police investigation in connection with HKMEx is a thrill and a delight – perhaps even (courtesy of today’s Standard’s ‘Character Builder’ column) some sort of ‘fish-water joy’… 

Of course it could be that, being the only non-Japanese man in the world who thinks bold blue suits are cool, Barry is delusional and doesn’t realize that he could be facing legal issues of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev- or Michael Adebolajo-type proportions. Alternatively, mindful of the fact that if he were Japanese he would have disemboweled himself sometime late last week, he is playing it as cynical as he can, calculating that even the most egregious possible criminal charges can be grinned away, a la Nina Wang beau Tony Chan (last seen looking a tad morose, even by his wife’s gloomy standards).

Among the many pastimes Barry is abandoning is the Hong Kong United Foundation. All the signs are that this self-described ‘think-tank’ was to be clumsily modeled on the Bauhinia Foundation, the umbrella organization for the shoe-shiners and other hangers-on who gathered around former Chief Executive Donald Tsang and – if we can be allowed to break the rule about using too many adjectives – his nauseating and smug entourage of arrogant, talentless bureaucrats and incessantly grasping tycoons.

Why would Chief Executive CY Leung and his sadly sparse and not wholly impressive assortment of acolytes want to emulate Sir Bow-Tie’s pretentious and self-serving PR outfit? (It’s still in existence, wetting itself, as ever, about the dreaded ‘aging population’ crisis.) The answer, so far as we can see, is a paucity of imagination. The last administration had a quasi-independent ‘think-tank’ to push its favourite policies, so we should do the same. And it should be run by a self-satisfied businessman-cum-bureaucrat who later goes on to get himself into legal trouble (Anthony Wu in the Bauhinia Foundation’s case).

With luck, we will be spared the Hong Kong United Foundation. However, the South China Morning Post reports that Barry will be focusing on a sub-project of the HKUF: Speak Out HK, a website aimed at countering all those negative vibes coming from dissident elements among politicians, the press, activists, university students, taxi drivers, labour unions, educators, housewives, small entrepreneurs, the elderly, school kids, the middle class, employees at 7-Eleven, small furry animals and on and on.

It is hard to see what Speak Out HK is designed to achieve. What you get is reminders of the great job the Mainland is doing about the virus du jour, some anti-Long Hair cartoons and a series of articles baldly stating the opposite of what everyone knows is more-or-less true. It is unfair to pick on the Secretary for Security for saying that women shouldn’t get drunk in order to avoid rape! The filibustering in the Legislative Council is terrible and so are the pro-dems who sit by and do nothing! People who think there is anything wrong with the Executive Council don’t understand how it works! The filibustering in LegCo wastes public money and harms us all!

This is genuinely saddening. It’s like the editorials in China Daily but without the wit and subtlety. Although you can’t turn black into white, it would be possible to craft less strident, more thoughtful, at least semi-convincing excuses for the administration’s problems, if someone really wanted to. But you might as well post North Korean press releases for all the persuasiveness of this stuff.

Obviously, a bunch of web designers and hack writers are making some money out of producing the content, and are no doubt sniggering away as they cash their cheques. Good for them. Presumably, some donors or aides of CY imagine, or at least pretend to imagine, that millions of people who think Hong Kong can and should be better-run will flock to this website, read it, and conclude that in fact government critics are wrong and everything is indeed fantastic.

Does anyone up there in CY-Land perceive that this is just a private-sector version of the ridiculous Hong Kong Our Home campaign, and that ultimately any government of a free people has two choices: deliver policies that make life better not worse, or get pissed on. It’s that simple. Maybe Barry now has, or will have, time to ponder it. 

Sudden thought: Positive Energy Day was last Sunday and I was too busy checking out the giant rubber duck. What happened? Was anyone hurt?

Click to hear none other than the late great Frank Zappa directly addressing Mr Cheung!

Hong Kong, Beijing officials sometimes insist, is an ‘economic city’ not a ‘political city’. Although superficially nonsensical, it is, like the exhortation to ‘focus on the economy’, simply code for ‘everyone shut up about the crappy state of governance’. But of course people can’t and won’t, and in the absence of measures by Beijing to fix the problem, the city seems to get more and more political every day.

The South China Morning Post leads with pro-Beijing Legislative Council President Tsang Yok-sing decrying the post-handover uselessness of the Executive Council. In colonial times, the Governor’s little group of advisors mainly came from a handful of big (British) companies and monitored and prodded the top tier of civil servants who formulated policy. Popular expectations are far greater today, and political appointees are supposed to do policymaking; Exco membership has meanwhile simply become a pat on the head for every political party and interest group (a Liberal, a DAB, a Heung Yee Kuk, a moderate ex-pro-democrat) not openly opposed to the administration. Some members are shoe-shiners, others are – a new word is born – shoe-shinees. Its size, let alone composition, must prevent it from having any meaningful policymaking function.

Why is ‘Jasper’ Tsang, a leader of the Communist loyalist Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK, pointing this out? At a time when Exco is shedding members for assorted vaguely sleaze-like but mostly pitiful reasons, he should be doing his patriotic duty and pretending all is well. Could it be that his wife’s Canadian passport is emanating some sort of bad feng-shui that makes him blurt out the truth? Some more resolute members of the faithful are angry enough with him already for his willingness to accommodate radical lawmakers’ right to filibuster.

One of them, commentator Lau Nai-keung, blames the Legco presidency. (Though Lau doesn’t spell it out, the speaker of our little local parliament enjoys public approval for even-handedly implementing the ultra-British procedural philosophy in his Chinese – traditional characters – translation of Erskine May, and it has sort of gone to his head.) He then goes on to identify no fewer than three examples of evil anti-China forces apparently subsidizing new dissident media in Hong Kong.

The first is Harbour Times, aimed at the local political caste, as previously discussed. Lau picks up on the publication’s hope to attract political advertising, and concludes that it will thrive by carrying paid-for Western propaganda; this will be music to the enthusiastic but cash-strapped publishers’ ears, but I fear it may be too much to hope for.

The second and easily most interesting (though not really new) is WeiboScope, which monitors the Mainland’s version of Twitter. In other words, it displays to the world a vast amount of China’s dirty laundry, thus disproving the infallibility of Lau’s sacred Communist Party. To get an idea of how many billions the CIA, MI6 and KMT are feeding the Hong Kong University project, ‘deleted posts search is too load intensive so we disabled it’. (See also the related China Media Project.)

The third is the House News – yet another opposition/skeptic/pro-dem platform, with content drawn from allover. It leads today with Tsang Yok-sing’s Exco criticism, which would bring us nicely full-circle. Except there’s more.

The common thread running deep-down through this political overload is the aforementioned crap governance of the Big Lychee, which dates back to the 1840s if truth be told, but became curiously and stubbornly onerous with effect one midnight in mid-1997. The more visible and topical aspect of this problem is political reform, and the possibility of a more democratic system for electing Legco in 2016 and the Chief Executive in 2017. Ex-civil servant Mike Rowse is eager to see the reform debate begin. (For some reason, he buys the myth that reform of small-circle functional constituencies is subject to FCs’ veto. The truth is that the majority of FCs are puppets of Beijing – that is their post-1997 purpose. Their representatives will vote for whatever they are told.)

Frustratingly, no-one in the pro-Beijing camp will play along by making any reform proposals. The reason, as Rowse suggests, is that they haven’t yet been told what they are to propose, but when the party line comes through it will be something not very negotiable – not that it was ever likely to be anything else.

As with the Mainland economy, Beijing can’t leave the Hong Kong political structure as it is, but can’t meaningfully change it either. Tsang Yok-sing wouldn’t mind being CE and, with CY Leung’s government in self-destruct mode, must see an opening. In his mild-mannered, unassuming way, he will want to continue taking an interest in the popular mood about both constitutional affairs and himself. Meanwhile, Beijing’s local officials are clearly rattled by the Occupy Central movement, with its intellectual framework and semi-scientific planning process almost designed to creep out Mainlanders brought up on Leninist theory about pulling off revolutions. Thus Lau Nai-keung is seeing enemies crawling everywhere he looks. And with no-one to debate with, the pro-democrats will intensify their sensible-vs-radicals feud. Whatever else, it promises to be entertaining. The not-political city is going to get a lot less not-political before we go back to focusing on the economy.

Two recent South China Morning Post articles explain the pro-democracy Occupy Central movement’s philosophy and planned strategy in as much detail as most of us will probably want.

There are seven components, including non-violent action, civil disobedience, ‘citizen authorization after deliberation’, social awakening and public dispute resolution. This is about process: the theories of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and various Californian radicals-turned-academics converted into flowchart form. It starts off with the first of three deliberation days, in which activists will be joined by 100 randomly chosen members of the public to ‘set the agenda of the movement’. The 100 citizens will each be paid HK$100 travel expenses, so even the penniless single parents and semi-literate elderly of the Northwestern New Territories can take part.

It’s almost unbearably earnest, high-minded, liberal, Judeo-Christian and 1960s. Consider the potential for unintentional condescension and other social embarrassment should any Tin Shui Wai public housing dwellers make it to the gathering of intellectuals at Hong Kong University. Imagine the phone calls when the lucky 100 get their invitations: “You want me to give up a day’s cardboard-scavenging to do what?” “I haven’t set foot on Hong Kong Island since the 1970s.” “What kind of scam is this?”

Countering the idealism are pro-Beijing forces under orders to savagely attack Occupy Central as an unconstitutional and treacherous threat to city and nation. It is a ‘path to hell’ of chaos and dysfunction and a ‘wicked plot’ to oppose Beijing and mess up Hong Kong. Harmless moderates in pro-establishment circles – as we saw a few days ago with the HK General Chamber of Commerce – are expected to nod along sagely to this mouth-frothing. Anyone willing to ‘reach out’ and serve as a bridge across the divide can forget it. This is classic United Front tactics: freeze out the dissenters and make it clear that anyone not with us is against us. Scratch the stuff about harmony. ‘Let’s just chill out and get on’ is not an option.

The Hong Kong people are mostly nowhere to be seen. Not keeping their heads down – just somewhere between uninterested and mildly oblivious. Neither side in the struggle seems to care much about the public/middle-ground/silent majority’s hearts and minds. Whatever Occupy Central’s ongoing abstract deconstructionist conceptualization is about, it isn’t housing, prices or jobs. And the Cultural Revolutionary ranting and screeching is the same old high-decibel overacting as loyalists, functionaries and toadies vie to please the Beijing officials. The icing on that cake: something to declare the weekend open with in the form of commentator Lau Nai-keung descending gloriously into one of his classic bouts of end-times insanity…