Big Lychee, Various Sectors

When bureaucracies are not using it to crucify harmless nonentities to justify their existence, the criminal justice system is a reliable source of entertainment. Hong Kong today settles down into its easy chair to watch two juicy cases unfold: the trial of feng-shui master/born-again Christian/Nina Wang toyboy Tony/Peter Chan for forging a will, and the proceedings against civil servants Mak Chai-kwong and Tsang King-man, who are charged with defrauding the government of housing allowances.

The former production is a fantasy in full Technicolor and stereo, while the latter is more of a morality tale, strictly monochrome with no special effects. In both cases, viewers will be licking their lips in anticipation of the final outcomes: punishments – preferably severe and devoid of any shred of mercy. The harsher, the better. It’s not anything as high-minded as blind retribution; we just want to see them suffer for the pure pleasure of it. Life just hasn’t been the same since they abolished public executions.

Not long ago, Tony Chan was a cheeky ex-bartender who had apparently inveigled his way into the heart and bank account of a flamboyant but dying billionaire widow. He backed up the unconvincing will he said she wrote in his favour with stories of massaging the lady, leading her through quaint-sounding voodoo rituals and otherwise servicing her. The lurid multiplicity of audacities, breaking taboos especially of socio-economic caste, were described with a gleaming grin that just screamed Wipe Me Off This Face.  

The gods have duly delivered, and the private jet, gwailo bodyguards and sprawling palaces have crumpled to dust. The simple Chan family, moon-faced with bewilderment, face vengeance beyond their capacity to measure, and that’s before we even count Tony/Peter’s astronomical tax bill.

The CK Mak/KM Tsang case is at the other end of the scale. Whereas Tony Chan was an upstart blundering into the loopier fringes of the Big Lychee’s high society, these two guys were born to serve the community by ruling over it, going by the colonial book, not taking any risks or having new ideas, ensuring the smooth and efficient administration of the city in the finest traditions of the world’s most brilliant, infallible and modest civil service.

Their alleged crime is – inevitably – one of paperwork and property. They bought an apartment each and then rented them to each other to qualify for government housing allowances. By way of mitigation, we could plead that the loophole was so glaring it looked almost legit; legions of other public-sector staff apparently did it; this was in the days before civil servants became as grotesquely overpaid as they were by the late 1990s; and by some accounts, more flexible housing arrangements in the private sector induced otherwise decent bureaucrats into a sense of entitlement. Oh, and the whole thing came to light within days of CK Mak’s appointment as Chief Executive CY Leung’s Development Secretary – raising the distinct possibility that the revelation was a time-bomb set off by supporters of the Donald Tsang/Henry Tang/tycoon/bureaucracy establishment.

Looking around, do we see any fellow members of the audience musing over these things, and wondering whether the system should go easy on the perpetrators of this rather lame HK$700,000 mishap?

Nope.

Oh, there are one or two right over there in the corner who seem to be muttering a bit of sympathy: really, be honest – who wouldn’t have done the same thing in their position, know what I mean, right?

Can I be the first to suggest that any serving or former public servants who defend these two on grounds either practical or principled probably took advantage of the scam themselves? I can? Cool.

Vivid comic tragedy and sober parable – a nice balance. Let the entertainment commence.

While we’re on the topic, following some mention of Elsie Tu’s part in a long-ago mystery about a cop who somehow shot himself with five rounds, these two guys… 

…were last seen trying to raise financing for the movie.

In Norway, if you commit 77 murders you get a 21-year (extendable) prison sentence. In Singapore, the penalty for overstaying your visa can be caning as well as jail. But at least they have reputations for being consistent. Hong Kong can’t decide whether it is namby-pamby liberal or viciously cruel. If a white tourist pulls a driver out of his taxi and steals the vehicle, he receives no real punishment; if local people want to cross the street, they get fined (‘Why not target dangerous drivers’).

The Hong Kong system seems to impose quite severe penalties for offences against property and in cases that damage Hong Kong’s reputation (such as an enterprising schoolboy selling pirated software online). Yet punishments are often surprisingly light where an identifiable victim is genuinely harmed (‘Taxi driver who killed three pedestrians’ gets three years and four months in prison).

So we shouldn’t be surprised that, if people commit an offence that has no apparent victim and allows prosecutors to pretty much presume guilt without proving that a crime took place, they will be put behind bars for three times the amount of time a deadly taxi driver gets, or half the time a Norwegian mass-murderer gets. The two cases we have recently seen involved a 22-year-old loser and a 61-year-old public housing tenant. For making multiple deposits of cash over years into bank accounts on behalf of persons unknown and unpunished, they were given 10-year prison sentences for money laundering.

This prompted pointed criticism about ‘a mockery of criminal justice’ and ‘grotesque injustice’. Such comments seem to have hit a raw nerve, since Director of Public Prosecutions Kevin Zervos not only wrote tetchily to the press in response, but is now giving interviews (here and here) proclaiming that he wants to go after criminal masterminds as well… 

But of course he can’t, because the people whose money is being laundered are outside Hong Kong’s jurisdiction. What is happening here is that Mainlanders who have acquired wealth – legally or illegally – are smuggling it out of the country contrary to Mainland, but not Hong Kong, law. Some might be relatives of national or provincial leaders who have amassed fortunes through corruption; others might be mid-ranking officials or businessmen on the take; some could be legitimate entrepreneurs who fear sequestration of assets or just want to emigrate.

It is happening in hundreds of bank branches in Hong Kong every day (why else do we have so many banks all over the place?). If you are a licensed remittance agent or money changer, you can do it with impunity. If you are a real-estate agent accepting a suitcase of cash from a Mainlander buying a Hong Kong property, you will go unpunished. If you own one of the high-rise cash laundries known as casinos in Macau, you will go free and be lauded as a visionary. If you are the bank accepting all these deposits, you are immune. But a couple of harmless dimwits performing a task barely one step up from collecting cardboard go to prison for 10 years. Leaving aside the unfairness, there is the cost of imprisonment to taxpayers of over HK$200,000 per inmate a year. And you have to ask: what else could the Director of Public Prosecutions and his staff have been doing with their time?

It is not only the 99.99% of money-launderers who are have their acts together who have nothing to fear from the Hong Kong authorities. You can run parasitical cartels that suck wealth out of the productive workers and small businesses that power most of the economy, and no-one will touch you. No-one except the magnificently irritating veteran activist Elsie Tu, who starts the countdown to her 100th birthday in June by giving Li Ka-shing a fine tongue-lashing…

One of the Hongkong International Terminals contractors abruptly announces that it is shutting down, leaving hundreds of its striking port workers without an employer. The tactic is clearly designed to scare the strikers into accepting the pay offer currently on the table. The supposedly laid-off dockers say their skills make them irreplaceable. We all like to think we are.

Business seems to be accommodating any delays at the port with few problems, and shipments can always go through Shenzhen’s container terminals, which of course are also partly owned by HIL owner tycoon Li Ka-shing. So the employers clearly have the upper hand. The crane operators and stevedores, on the other hand, can claim to have a good case, and visiting Australian dock workers were shocked at their Hong Kong counterparts’ relatively poor pay and conditions. In an effort to exploit public opinion, strikers and their supporters have set up camp outside Li’s headquarters in Hong Kong’s central business district.

The Chinese Communist Party’s Ta Kung Pao sees this as a test-run for the pro-democracy camp’s Occupy Central campaign for universal suffrage. The pro-Beijing camp is understandably nervous about a potential alliance between labour, activist pro-dems and the usually passive and agnostic broader public, some of whom are happily donating cash to the strikers now conveniently situated at the end of Queens Road. If a few thousand people assembled outside Cheung Kong Center for a continuous National Education-style protest against Li’s property hegemony, it could cause a real shock to the system. Where would it leave the pro-Beijing Voice of Loving HK, now insisting on its credibility as a self-funded movement of common folk who support the status quo? In the same place it would leave Beijing and all its local lieutenants: forced more and more into a position where they side with plutocrats against the other 99%.

Fortunately for them, it almost certainly won’t happen. In a pointed analysis in Ming Pao, HK Polytechnic University’s Professor Pun Ngai complains that the pro-dems themselves will undermine any such alignment. As she puts it, they are into political democracy but not economic democracy; their worldview is so ‘conservative’ that they stay inside their own little bubble while broader civil society grows up in response to inequality, property hegemony and issues like heritage and infrastructure. The CTU labour federation supporting the dock workers is part of the pro-democracy milieu, but the pan-dems as a camp show little interest in grasping the opportunity that Ta Kung Pao sees.

A Marxist interpretation might be that this is simple class loyalties at work: the home-owning professionals of the Democratic and Civic Parties occupy privileged perches in the upper percentiles of our grotesquely distorted distribution of wealth. (The Aussie dockers must be on well over double their Hong Kong counterparts’ take-home pay – and for far fewer hours a month – yet Hong Kong has a higher per-capita GDP.) But if the pro-dems saw it that way, they wouldn’t be in politics; they’d join the Voice of Loving HK, and kick out its clerical-staff and small-trader useful idiots. We can only conclude, not for the first time, that they are in love with being an opposition without a hope.

Click to hear Tame Impala’s ‘It Is Not Meant to Be’!

Stores and street-market stalls in Hong Kong sell fruit and vegetables in non-transparent bags. A clear label on the outside tells you how many pieces of produce are in the bag and what the total price is – for example, six oranges for HK$20. However, there is a catch: retailers lie about the number of pieces in the bag. When the purchaser gets home and gets his oranges out, he invariably finds that there are five, maybe even four, rather than six. It has got to the stage where people think they are getting a really good deal if a bag of 10 oranges, potatoes, or tomatoes contains eight rather than seven.

Anywhere else in the world, retailers would be fined or even jailed for doing this – assuming irate consumers hadn’t already strung them up. These goods are, after all, essential to life, not silly luxuries. But in Hong Kong, it is perfectly legal. And the suppliers collude with one another to ensure no alternative providers can get into the market.

Now, however, in a radical move that food vendors bitterly oppose as a gross infringement of their freedom of speech, the government is passing a law requiring the labels on the bags to show the true number of items. (So accustomed are some Hong Kong shoppers to being cheated that some even half-agreed when the vendors claimed the new law would create intolerable confusion.)

The law is about to take effect, but there are still a few days to go, so the shop owners and market-stall holders are making the most of it. Some are dangling bags of 10 (really seven) apples for HK$20 in front of customers and promising a free pear with every sale; others are offering 20 (really 15) carrots for HK$30, but with a brand new, shiny dollar coin as a free complementary gift at no extra charge while stocks last!!! A few really desperate ones are actually cutting the price, so buyers get a bag of 100 (really 68) grapes at a price equivalent to 90 of the things.

Common sense tells us that the new law will not change anything in reality. Consumers will go on paying HK$2.80 per banana – only the label will state openly there are just five bananas, not eight, in the HK$14 bag. But the vendors’ desperation to sell their existing inventory under the old right-to-rip-off-buyers system suggests otherwise: that their cheating was real and effective, and having to tell the truth will damage their pricing power.

The above is all true, except that we are – of course – talking about real-estate developers, not fruit and vegetable sellers (who are great). Even the bit about freedom of speech (see Section 3 – Disclosure of information on gross floor area (“GFA”), Infringement of freedom of expression)… 

For added disbelief at the nerve of these scumbags, feel free to read their ‘Dear friends’ message to the Hong Kong public.

And on a not-totally unrelated note, Kind-Hearted Employer of the Week Award goes to the dock contractors for Hongkong International Terminals who are willing to be flexible about how long staff have to work per day…

Bitcoins, gold and silver crash, and Forbes asks ‘what next?’

According to the conspiracy theories floating around, the rapid drop in the value of gold happened because the US government, big banks and funds chose this time to organize a massive short. Why? The Federal Reserve wants people to hold US dollars in order to save the pitiful currency. (‘A high-frequency trading bomb in certain NYMEX/COMEX markets on Friday, following days of spin and misinformation’ say these guys.) Therefore, this is a good time to buy the yellow metal before it goes back up to its true level.

People who believe this have a huge hang-up about quantitative easing and the unrestrained printing of ‘fiat’ currency by governments with no hope but to inflate away their countries’ vast debts. In the popular imagination, these gold bugs are holed up in the hills with stores of food and ammo, but many are normal-looking people wearing suits and walking on the streets around us as we speak. Either way, they know in their very marrow that when governments print money as they have been doing, you’re bound to end up needing baskets of cash to buy a single loaf of bread.

Less excitable and more moderate commentators see the tumble in gold as an overdue correction of a classic speculative bubble. Investors who believed bullion would hold its value as all else was debased (or investors anticipating such sentiment in the market) piled in over the last few years and drove the price up. But – Hong Kong milk powder and Spam notwithstanding – the much anticipated hyperinflation never came; indeed, the Federal Reserve may even be whispering about tightening monetary policy at some stage.

These moderates see themselves as realistic and essentially non-ideological. To paraphrase Keynes, when the monetary conditions change, I change my policy. When a credit crisis threatens debt deflation, you print however much money it takes to prevent being sucked into that vortex. As Milton Friedman vividly demonstrated on TV many years ago, inflation is easy to stop: you switch off the presses. Deflation, as various Southern European countries are now finding out, kills society.

The gold bugs snort that printing more money to cure the results of having printed too much money is illogical. If economics were a pure, cold science, they would probably be correct; but it’s partly about human behaviour and perceptions.

Maybe now we will find out who’s right. If it’s the mainstream moderates, the whole post-2007 panic is finally at its closing stages. Gold has crashed, and will stay crashed, for basic macroeconomic reasons. Leaving aside North Korean nukes, Spanish default, etc, we can get back to Forbes’s question. What will crash next?

Can we think of an asset class like gold that has, arguably, been inflated into a bubble by the idea that it is the only thing around that will hold its value during the hyperinflation that – it now seems – we won’t be getting? Here’s a clue: there would be a lot of spiky-haired real-estate agents looking for work…

Meanwhile, China is lapsing into mouth-frothing diplomacy again. The United States is threatening Asia-Pacific security by not ordering the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam to surrender half their territorial waters to the Middle Kingdom, it seems. We must console ourselves with the fact that this is purely for internal consumption, and the officials in Beijing don’t actually believe a word of it. Mustn’t we?

And to end on a cheerful note, the South China Morning Post today brings us not one, but two, hilariously great moments in Chinese censorship…

Yesterday, rising food prices were giving the poor ‘generalized anxiety disorder’, for which a psychiatrist prescribed ‘having fun while shopping for bargains’. Today, the Consumer Council’s Michael Hui pleads with retailers “to scale their prices down and live with the Hong Kong people in times of difficulty, sharing the benefits of cost reductions with the public at large.”

And indeed his prayers are answered, with a Park N Shop spokesman assuring us that the Li Ka-shing-owned company determines ‘special discounts on various items to ease the pressure on consumers’. And they all lived happily ever after.

A closer look at the Consumer Council’s press release shows that, thanks to the generosity of Asia’s richest tycoon, the price of alcoholic drinks has dropped 5% in the last year. Who needs diapers or Wyeth Promil Gold Number 2 baby formula when you can get – as I did not long ago – large-size cans of Yanjing (China’s fair-ish ‘official state beer’) at two for HK$11.80? Cheaper than Watson’s water.

One item leaps out from the Consumer Council’s shopping basket: Spam. Seventy years ago, this plasticky pink substance helped defeat Fascism by providing allied soldiers and civilians with cheap and transportable protein. Apparently, around 1946 or so, half-starved refugees arriving in Hong Kong noticed colonial administrators eating cans of Hormel’s ‘SPiced hAM’ product and concluded that it must be oh-so high-class. Next thing, it turns up in Cha Chaan Teng instant noodles for breakfast and reaches the same status in Cantonese cuisine as abalone stuffed with frog ovaries. Anyway, it’s up 12.7%.

An op-ed piece in today’s South China Morning Post examines the Hong Kong dock workers’ strike. While accepting that their working conditions sound nasty, the writer says the dockers are not that badly paid – being in the top 30% of the city’s earners. Rather than being oppressed proletariat, they are closer to middle-class, heavily exposed to unaffordable housing and rising grocery bills. Meanwhile, a commentator at Lingnan University points the finger at Li Ka-shing-owned port operator HIL for its supposedly ruthless approach to outsourcing the supply of container-handling labour.

This all suggests that the strike’s organizers and supporters could have fine-tuned their story more effectively by zeroing in on Li Ka-shing personally at the outset. Not only are the dock workers crushed by the cartels in terms of unaffordable housing and ever-spiraling Spam costs, but they are on the receiving end of the port operator’s determination to squeeze every last penny out the business regardless of the interests of employees. In other words, they represent all of us victims of voracious family-owned monopolies, only more so. As it is, despite some defiance, the strike has an air of fizzling-out about it. Whatever happens, whoever you are, you are still going to be working for KS Li.

People who can barely afford to feed themselves tend to be miserable. This stunning, Nobel-class discovery comes to us from the Mood Disorders Centre of Hong Kong’s Chinese University. If the unhappiness continues for over six months, it is classified as ‘generalized anxiety disorder’. Quoted in the Standard, a chief economist at the Centre suggests that the only known cure for the affliction is to delink the Hong Kong dollar from the US currency. This is why all mood disorder centres need chief economists – such a refreshing change from handing out lithium.

I would have thought that getting depressed while suffering from such poverty is in fact perfectly normal, and the hungry destitute who are happy are the ones suffering from a disorder – but what do I know?

One sure antidote to feelings of gloom is the insightful quotes South China Morning Post reporters manage to find to make their stories complete. Thus we have a psychologist called Kathleen Kwok saying that low-income people should try to be positive and ‘have fun while shopping for bargains to reduce stress’, while another chief economist – this time at Bank of Communications – basically declares that the poor might as well just slash their wrists. Penniless old folk delving for half-rotten fruit at the wet market can console themselves with the thought that at least they have a wealth of options.

Click to hear ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’ by the Damned!

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has the subtitle A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism because the work was supposed to atone for his misdeeds – producing imaginative and un-socialist music that displeased Stalin, who at that time in the late 1930s was sending millions of people to gulags or firing squads. Martin Lee, the elder statesman of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, could probably sympathize.

In an effort to make a constructive contribution to the debate on the 2017 Chief Executive election arrangements, the old guy suggested that a nominating body modeled on today’s Election Committee could be acceptable provided it produced a ballot with at least five names on it. This number, he reasoned, would be sufficient to ensure a pro-dem could run, in line with the last two quasi-elections.

For breaking ranks, Lee was roundly attacked by other pan-dems, whose stance is that only pure universal suffrage is acceptable. So now he has apologized. The damage, however, has been done: the pro-dems have unwittingly revealed – or unwillingly acquired – a bottom line.

Presumably, Lee was trying to forestall a more tightly controlled system, such as one that results in a choice of just two pro-Beijing candidates. His proposal is, if anything, probably more liberal than the Chinese government is willing to allow when Hong Kong gets a universal vote. Although Beijing can always refuse to confirm a Chief Executive election winner, Chinese officials are clearly unnerved at the thought that the ballot could even include a CIA-backed stooge plotting to overthrow the Communist Party. And no, the fact that Hongkongers wouldn’t vote for such a person won’t wash (why do you so badly want one on the ballot, then?).

Pro-Beijing commentators loudly welcomed Lee’s remarks as pragmatic and constructive, and are relishing the opposition’s discomfort. The big buzzword in United Front circles right now is ‘compromise’, and poor old Martin – who always did have a charming naivety about him – has duly delivered.

Maybe this is what happens when you reach a certain age. The pro-democrats’ struggle has become all-consuming over the years as the inescapable truth of the nature of one-party rule has dawned on them. If you can’t have full democracy, you can at least wallow in a never-ending righteous battle for it. They are in their element right now, planning a trendy and noble campaign of protest of which Martin Luther King would be proud. Lee – too old for sit-ins these days – suggests a quick and simple alternative. Easier, and leading to the same inevitable outcome in practical, albeit not theoretical, terms. But of course less fun, less glorious.

The weekend is declared open with the thought that ‘Martin Lee’ is an anagram of ‘Lame Inert’ and a hard look at the ad on the back page of today’s Standard. It shows some sort of gender-confused, colour-blind psychopath who, ever since his lobotomy, mixes striped ties with checked shirts and forgets to finish dressing in the morning, and you too can look like him if you shop at Brooks Brothers…

Aficionados of the art of unrestrained, indeed compulsively incontinent, shoe-shining reach with glee for their favourite sick-bags this morning as the Standard indulges in an unseemly double-grovel of tycoon Li Ka-shing and his number-one son Victor.

The paper leads with the story of how the plutocrat is personally getting involved in the dock-workers’ strike at Kwai Tsing container port, and so “with Li’s help, the strike will end very soon.” Reuters seems to think otherwise, but what would they know? And while we’re waiting for Superman to solve his (or his contractors’) industrial relations problems faster than a speeding bullet, we are invited to relish the glowing coverage of boy Victor in the HK General Chamber of Commerce’s hitherto unheard-of bulletin, The Bulletin. Hong Kong’s disharmony is a media-made fiction, the green-friendly visionary scion intones (no strikes here!), and the city has a special place in his heart. (The Bulletin is here; tragically, it won’t open properly without an obscure add-on from Adobe – the PDF obsequiousness plug-in – which I can’t be bothered to download.)

Former Central Policy Unit boss Lau Siu-kai doesn’t share Victor’s optimism. He sees radicals hijacking the Occupy Central protests next year, with the result being bloodshed. He is not alone. Ever willing to encourage the elderly to play a productive role in the community, the South China Morning Post kindly publishes a letter from former Chief Secretary Sir David Akers-Jones of West Kowloon (the 33rd floor at Sorrento, to be precise). One flap of a civil-disobedience butterfly’s wing, he warns, might cause a tornado of rioting because, after all, it’s still 1966 isn’t it.

One or two likely participants won’t be happy until and unless the police pepper-spray them on camera. But this sort of demonstration, should it transpire, depends entirely on non-violence to have any chance of making an impact. Assuming the vast majority of protestors understand the Thoreau/Gandhi/King principles, things will only get nasty if the Hong Kong Police make it so. And being, as we all know, a bunch of counseling-dependent pussycats, they probably won’t unless someone higher up in government is dumb enough to insist they play rough in order to dissuade onlookers from joining the sit-down. Can we assume that our decision-makers realize that this would be counterproductive and boost public sympathy for the demonstrators?

The SCMP quotes the property tycoon who runs the Tourism Board as worrying about what would happen “if these young people run onto the road and are hit by cars.” Which makes him sound a bit, you know… sort of dim. But then he says Occupy Central could deter tourists. And suddenly, all bets are off. Rioting. Rubber bullets. Broken windows. No tourists. Yes, please.

The committee considering statutory maximum working hours in Hong Kong will take up to three years to produce its recommendations. Sounds as if the body is practicing an extreme version of what it has yet to preach, by strictly limiting its efforts to no more than – what? – 30 minutes per week.

Officials insist that it’s technically a very complex issue. It used to be. Standard working hours raise interesting questions. What about forex traders who love 90-hour weeks? What about people whose irregular tasks mean they goof off some months but occasionally have to do tons of overtime? But policy wonks elsewhere sat down and solved these dilemmas years ago. Hong Kong could do worse than just pull Singapore’s system off the shelf, or Australia’s, or someone else’s.

The real problem was summed up by the committee’s chairman, Leong Che-hung, who said: “We will not underestimate the difficulty for society to reach consensus.” Where there should be a modicum of leadership we have a void. And that brings us back to yesterday’s subject (which, to the disappointment of level-headed observers, produced only one comparison of Margaret Thatcher to Hitler among the fashionably near-psychotic feedback).

As if working hours weren’t bad enough, everyone is gearing up for the biggest urban civil conflict since Beirut: next year’s Occupy Central civil disobedience campaign to force Beijing to deliver 100% pure universal suffrage in 2017. The worst/best-case scenario is that for a few days traffic gets re-routed around the main business district, and commuters have to walk a bit further than usual. That’s it.

But no-one has an interest in being calm and relaxed. Beijing, fearing a mass movement and international attention, sets the nervous tone. Local patriots spy an opportunity to whip up popular feeling against the pro-dems by claiming such civic action will paralyze the entire economy and irreparably wreck Hong Kong’s international reputation as a place where people don’t sit in the street, or something. The pro-dems, more excited than they have been for years, half believe they are capable of such enormities. Egged on by one another, everyone ends up wetting themselves, as RTHK reports:

Pro-government lawmakers [yesterday] wanted to know if police had enough officers to deal with the Occupy Central protest – planned to involve at least 10,000 people – if the district should become paralysed and the protest turn violent. They also asked whether psychological counselling would be available to the officers who’ll have to deal with the protesters, and invited the police to come back to Legco just in case they want additional resources.

And, in regards to a budget item about the cost of government flying service taking part in emergency exercises, they also asked if perhaps the PLA Garrison in Hong Kong might be invited to join in an emergency drill. Pro-democracy members, on the other hand, wanted to know if police plan to employ a giant loudspeaking device – dubbed an “acoustical weapon” – whether Hong Kong stadium will be reserved as a holding pen for arrested demonstrators, and whether psychological counselling would be available to officers who were sympathetic to pan-democrats and would become stressed by having to round them up.

So mutual is the freaking-out that you could easily rearrange the terrors. For example, it could be the pro-dems rather than the pro-Beijing camp who raise the dreaded possibility of the PLA running everyone over with tanks, or it could be the pro-Beijing folk rather than the pro-dems who ask if the cops will use their space-age ‘acoustic weapon’ to turn protestors’ brains to jelly that oozes out of their ruptured eardrums. Top prize for colourful imagery must go to whichever pro-dem asked about herding arrestees into the stadium – where presumably Chilean or Guinean soldiers will be waiting. Interestingly, both camps maintain that our law-enforcement personnel are such weenies that they will need counseling after this forthcoming trauma.

One way for the government to pull the rug out from under Occupy Central: pedestrianize the whole area by July 2014 as a long overdue anti-pollution measure, and install park benches everywhere so everyone, pro-democrat or pro-Beijing, can sit in the middle of Queen’s Road as much as they please.

Click to hear Count Five’s ‘Psychotic Reaction’!