Big Lychee, Various Sectors

RIP former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013). Anyone whose death prompts dancing in the street among ‘adult education tutors’ and the Socialist Workers Party in London and Glasgow must have been truly magnificent. People hated her almost pathologically to the very last because she disproved the existence of the gods they worshipped. To take just one example: she took the noble, brave and hard-working coal miners who selflessly provided Britain with its fuel, and revealed them to be a collective parasite dependent on state subsidies borne by productive economic activities and the less well-off who struggled to pay electricity bills. Among her other crimes: not groveling to hostile foreign powers, hostility towards communism, skepticism towards trendy urban intellectuals, an unabashed attachment to small-town values, and a lot more, some of it downright embarrassing. The reactionaries of the left never forgave her for refusing to even acknowledge their illusions, which they had to watch being shattered by three consecutive election victories.

For the right-thinking among us, the fact that she provoked such hilarious degrees of loathing from these particular types of people was reason enough to adore her. Still, there are two slight problems. One is the question of how much she was a symptom rather than a cause of radical reform. The statist, Fabian, planned economic model had been visibly failing for a good 20 years; if she hadn’t come along at that time with a new awareness of the coercive nature of taxation, nationalized industry and labour unions, someone else probably would have (though without the amazing hairdo). The second is that she had a tragic sense-of-humour deficit.

Thatcher’s role in the Big Lychee’s fate was to extract surprisingly detailed promises from Beijing about the city’s autonomy post-1997. She also (not being totally incapable of wit) once referred to our local legislative body as ‘Hong Kong County Council’. If – by some cosmic twist – she were running Hong Kong today, she would approve of our low taxes and public spending, but she would probably be concerned that ad-hoc hand-outs like subsidized computers for poorer kids would become silly money-wasters like the taxpayer-funded school milk rations she had the originality and sense to scrap in the UK.

She would find plenty of targets here for her famous handbag. She would be outraged by the huge gap in compensation levels between the civil service and the private sector. Aside from wasting taxpayers’ money, high public-sector pay and benefits distort the labour market, luring otherwise commercially productive talent into pen-pushing bureaucratic comfort. She would also take an axe to public-sector entities that compete unfairly with private industry, such as the Mortgage Corporation and the Trade Development Council. She wouldn’t know where to start when it came to choosing which vested interest to eat for breakfast every morning. Small stock brokers who presume the right to nap at lunchtime and live off bloated bid-offer spreads wouldn’t last long. The cops and traffic wardens who mysteriously allow unfettered illegal parking might find themselves replaced by hungry private operators armed with wheel clamps.

She would question the need to for the government to nurture an entire caste of serfs dependent on the state for their housing. She would free them to live where they wanted, rather than where the bureaucrats decided they should, by making them owners of their homes. In so doing, she would hugely increase the proportion of the population who possess assets – helping one way or another to reduce the city’s existing inequality of wealth.

This list could go on and on. Of course, the media, politicians and her own officials would scramble to talk her out of such drastic, indeed unthinkable, changes. “But, but, but,” they would splutter (as they do with everything from road pricing to gay marriage), “there is no consensus!”

To which she would reply with the phrase (with which she is widely credited): “Consensus is an absence of leadership.” As we have surely noticed…

Whatever happened to former Security Secretary Regina Ip’s New People’s Party? One minute they were poised to become the silent-majority, sensible-centrist, ultra-moderate, middle-class answer to the trouble-making, unpatriotic radical chic of the Civic Party. The next minute they’ve faded into obscurity. But wait! Here they are, advertised on a minibus to remind us that they are still around, and that there is more to them than their dominatrix leader and her plutocrat-with-a-conscience sidekick Michael Tien. 

Out of curiosity, I have to investigate Legward Wong. (Mock not: it’s a real, if obscure, Anglo family line, not a clunky transliteration of his given name, which is Cheuk-kin.) The popular belief is that Regina acquired her young followers at Stanford University and through her Savantas ‘think-tank’ and thus, it loosely follows, they are probably a bunch of vaguely well-intentioned losers on the make. As opposed to the trendy, youthful idealists manning the pro-democracy barricades, and the trainee-despot patriot-thugs obediently tending the grassroots for the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK and similar true Leftist groups.

To get straight to the point, Legward is less uncool than you might expect, at least for a former ‘Hong Kong Spirit Ambassador’ and winner of an ATV ‘Loving Heart’ award. I mean: Bioengineering. And he was in Sweden, no less, practicing prosthetics and orthotics. (Whaddya mean, what is it? It’s the design, manufacture and application of orthoses – of course.) And he’s pretty serious about making life better for the elderly, which is one of those subjects that are desperately important but way too icky for most of us to want to even think about.

What’s this leading to? It’s to put things in context. Parts of the pro-Beijing camp are gearing up for the coming clash with the pro-democracy, Occupy Central, True Universal Suffrage movement. Former Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung offers a (surely superfluous) warning that the Chinese government would intervene if Hong Kong elected a counter-revolutionary splittist as Chief Executive. More entertainingly, Polytechnic U’s WK Chan accuses Occupy Central visionary Professor Benny Tai of trying to screen out people who don’t share his belief in the Anglo-American democracy that is collapsing in on itself in the Western World as we speak.

The charge that the people fighting a filtering mechanism for candidates in the 2017 CE election are filtering out opposing views sort of sticks, though both sides in this looming clash are equally guilty. The ‘Voice of Loving HK’ and ‘Protect Central’ folk who shouted (and ultimately shut) down yesterday’s Alliance for True Democracy meeting could truthfully complain that the ‘British dog’ organizers hadn’t invited them, even if the Alliance had grandly requested the presence of National People’s Congress sub-chairman Qiao Xiaoyang. Conversely, if the pro-Beijing groups were to hold a gathering, they wouldn’t ask the pro-dems to come along. (Compare the two sides. Each regards the other as puppets. Both can be embarrassing; the pro-Beijing rabble yesterday played into the pan-dems’ hands by silencing the event with their venom. The gap between them is cultural; Hong Kong is the city where East most definitely does not meet West, except to heckle.)

If Beijing is to implement political reform in Hong Kong for 2017, it will have to split the pro-dems. It would not hurt if at the same time it distanced itself from the more mouth-frothing, hate-spewing elements in its own camp and relied more upon the relatively cuddly moderates who give the United Front a human face. So we might be seeing a bit more of the Legwards, Clarices and Huberts. (Hubert – University of Woolongong and… fashion design. Obviously.)

North Korea makes a big public show of activating nuclear facilities and threatening to raze Washington DC to the ground, while the US flies B2s around the planet via Pyongyang and grandly orders its flashy-if-it-works anti-missile system into Guam. And do the world’s stock markets collapse (Hong Kong’s is more worried about bird flu)? Does the gold price zoom?

It’s similar with that other epic struggle of evil totalitarian power against lovers of freedom and humanity – the Hong Kong dock workers’ strike. Although the odds are usually stacked against organized labour in the city, a nervous government seems to be pressuring the employers behind the scenes not to provoke wider public opinion. Consequently, active support for the workers remains limited to predictable political, student and other quarters. The chances of the Big Lychee’s valiant citizens bringing tycoon Li Ka-shing’s retail cartel to its knees remain sadly small… 

On a brighter note, the strike could help hasten the decline of our space-wasting, past-its-peak port. According to experts, the only growth area left these days is low-value transshipment cargo (containers switching ships en route from one distant place to another, as opposed to stuff going in and out of the Pearl River Delta region). Such activity can take place in other regional ports with few problems, and delays caused by a strike are just the thing to send business away for good. We should be so lucky. Now, how can we pull it off with tourists?

Meanwhile, investigative journalists around the world are sifting through a ton of leaked materials from the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere relating to offshore holdings of the (supposedly) mega-rich international elite. There are two differences with Wikileaks: the information is already proving far more fascinating; and there’s no Julian Assange sex-symbol/martyr/bore to hog the limelight.

Much depends on how squeamish the ICIJ are about releasing data; as CBC suggests, they need to be careful about naming names. Even so, we should be assured of some local angles, given that half of Hong Kong and a lot of well-connected folk over the border seem to have something registered or otherwise stashed away in BVI. Material on our local tycoons’ holding companies may not be especially interesting. Dirt on Beijing princelings’ ill-gotten gains would be, however. And wouldn’t it be utter delight if any past or serving Hong Kong government officials’ names crop up?

What a pleasant thought with which to declare the second segment of our second four-day weekend in a row open.

In a sense, industrial relations problems are by definition the fault of the bosses; a management that does its job properly doesn’t get trouble from employees. The exact rights and wrongs at Kwai Tsing container terminals are complicated by the fact that port operator Hongkong International Terminals outsources the actual dock work. Such an arrangement can encourage exploitation of workers if the operator drives such a hard bargain that the sub-contractors have to underpay the employees (as happened when the Hong Kong government outsourced cleaning back in pre-minimum wage days). The operator can wash its hands of any involvement, and indeed HIT hasn’t put a press release on-line since November.

Much of the press and industry would have us believe that this strike is a threat to Hong Kong’s port (or ‘status’ as a leading one) and this is in turn a threat to the well-being of the city itself. The truth is, the port is a sunset industry – even without factoring in any long-term decline of the Pearl River Delta’s low-value, high-volume export manufacturing sector. If, horror of horrors, the berths and cranes move to nasty upstart Shenzhen, what happens? We lose thousands of filthy trucks clogging up our roads and thousands of containers piled up all over the place; meanwhile, we gain lots of semi-downtown space for useful things like housing and parks.

What really makes this strike interesting – political, to be exact – is that HIT is part of tycoon Li Ka-shing’s empire. The sensible, harmonious pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions is largely standing on the sidelines in the dispute, while the pro-democracy Confederation of Trade Unions and the Labour Party are taking high-profile roles. Students and other activists are also joining in and raising funds for the strikers. Who said dock workers aren’t sexy? This conflict has the potential to attract much broader support from that sizable part of the community with a grudge against property tycoons and the establishment in general. A citywide boycott of Li’s Park N Shop supermarket chain, anyone?

But, like the prospect of the container port suddenly moving across the border, we are probably running ahead of ourselves. If anyone’s going to put pressure on the employers, it will be the government. The last thing it needs, with political reform and Occupy Central in the works, is a rallying point for anti-establishment labour and all the other opposition troublemakers and disgruntled citizenry. And let’s not forget that Beijing has just ordered Li and his fellow tycoons to support Chief Executive CY Leung’s administration. Some sort of compromise solution is more than likely. Spoilsports.

On a brighter note, I can declare the Ching Ming one-day non-weekend open, almost.

After dragging out the inevitable, the Hong Kong government finally abandons its plan to allow company directors to conceal their ID card numbers – and thus, in many potential cases, their true identities.

It takes a lot to get Hong Kong government officials to admit that they have made a stupid mistake. And when, after exploring all other avenues, they climb down, it is almost too painful to watch as they laboriously and self-consciously attempt to appear not to be climbing down – even though we know, and they know we know – that they are. In the Hong Kong context, the citing of a ‘lack of consensus’ is the last refuge of a policy-making scoundrel.

You almost feel a twinge of sympathy. Well, OK, you don’t. In a manlier culture of governance, someone would say “Yes, I screwed up,” and resign. Here, the humiliated error-makers will be eating bitterness for years to come.

Among the guilty are the Privacy Commission, which, perhaps in a fit of empire-building, seems to have encouraged the notion that ID card numbers are private – the exact opposite of their true purpose of specifying which Chan Kwok-hung, John Smith or Zeng/Tsang Xiaofeng/Siu-fong someone is. We can also point the finger at Financial Services and Treasury Bureau officials, and ask whether at some stage their determination to push the measure through was influenced by Beijing, where leaders have been humiliated by revelations about their families’ accumulation of vast, sometimes Hong Kong-registered, wealth. We can also blame legislators; those representing business interests had their own predictably murky motives to support the proposal, but those supposedly representing the people too easily swallowed the ‘privacy’ argument.

It wasn’t widespread public opposition that forced the government to backtrack, but objections from experts, many in the financial services sector, unaccustomed to criticizing official policy. The attention of the international media did the rest.

The subject of the next government climbdown is likely to be altogether more populist, and that’s the proposal to issue a licence for a new 3G mobile operator. Cynics assume that Mainland state telecoms giant China Mobile is behind this – using its influence in Beijing to bully Hong Kong officials into letting it directly own a chunk of limited local spectrum.

Critics (including vested interests) claim this would slow mobile Internet speeds by 30%; government officials themselves admit that the figure would be 18%, which is a noticeable deterioration in service quality, and a flabbergasting thing to admit. Both sides also agree that the telecoms sector already has sufficient competition. In short, the government, or at least civil servant Susie Ho, is virtually arguing against its own proposal.

This suggests that China Mobile (assuming it is behind an attempted high-tech land-grab) will be repelled, and at least some local officials are in fact working to that end. As in the Mainland oil industry, there are three big telecoms operators (Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom) with varying degrees of influence among different factions, ministries, maybe the PLA, maybe princelings and so on. Hong Kong authorities are not necessarily under any pressure to kowtow to this particular company, state-owned or not. One of our officials will just have to say, “Sorry China Mobile, we tried our hardest to help you out, but as you can see our political and regulatory structures just won’t allow us to hand you a slice of this pie.”

I mean, can you seriously imagine the Hong Kong government genuinely trying to increase competition in part of our domestic economy?

Conspiracy theorists looking for similar cases where officials somewhere in the bureaucracy have sabotaged policy will find plenty of possible examples. Among the biggest would be Article 23 and National Education, both of which would have had far better chances of implementation had they not been so mysteriously badly handled (that is mis-handled in an abnormal – rather than the usual – way).

Anyone despairing of the quality of governance and more in Hong Kong can always seek relief through a weekend in Macau, perhaps to inspect: the latest design in ladies’ wear; and rumours that Mainlander tourists are avidly taking photographs of a bust of casino mogul Stanley Ho (the shall-we-say flattering likeness is placed next to a far less appealing work he ‘rescued’ for the nation from evil foreign thieves)… 

…work on the city’s new super-max prison, being built not far from the (apparently extremely grotty) current facility on Coloane Island, on a hilltop, with multiple watchtowers in rather close proximity to the airport, but I’m sure they know what they’re doing…

…whether plentiful visitors are still enjoying the local sights (yes); and whether there are any new additions to the Anglican cemetery (no, not since 1977 so far as I could see)… 

Irresistible force meets immovable object. Beijing makes clear the limits to political reform in Hong Kong, saying that public consultation on universal suffrage in 2017 depends upon broad public agreement that an individual who confronts the Chinese government cannot be elected Chief Executive. Meanwhile, the Occupy Central movement sets out its grand step-by-step strategy to achieve a fully democratic poll with no screening-out of candidates deemed hostile to Communist Party rule.

OK – irresistible force meets easily-tossed-aside object.

The last time Beijing was this assertive and unambiguous in defining the parameters was in the wake of the 2003 mini-revolt, when a peremptory Basic Law ‘interpretation’ ruled out meaningful moves towards democracy for the 2007-08 elections. The aim then, as now, was to nip in the bud any unrealistic hopes. The Occupy Central movement can be credited for convincing Beijing to come clean and spell it out, rather than go on muttering coded hints in the hope that we will come to understand the message about semi-democracy via some sort of subliminal osmosis.

In short: sit down in the streets of Central for a few days if you want, but it’ll make no difference. With one pronouncement from Qiao Xiaoyang, there’s nothing much to fight for. The experience of Article 23 and National Education has shown Beijing that the best form of defence against Hong Kong’s habit of pushing back is swift and early attack.

While predictable, it’s a shame, because Occupy Central has a moral simplicity and purity about it that could have been a stirring sight. The South China Morning Post gives a page to academic Benny Tai’s vision of a four-step process drawing on the principles of deliberative democracy, civil disobedience and self-sacrifice. To the extent that it goes ahead, the overseas media will love it. Whether it gets serious local support depends on how Beijing acts following its clear, no-nonsense edict on what will and will not happen in 2017.

If Chinese officials treat the Occupy Central movement with benign neglect, much of Hong Kong public opinion will tend to do the same. But if they turn up the vitriolic rhetoric, the local mood will swing more strongly behind the pro-democracy underdog.

What would make Beijing lose its cool, and thus harm its chances of getting most of the city to accept the ‘no confrontational candidates’ rule with little fuss? How about this…

Tai suggests that the discussions [among the public] take place in schools across the city and that participants vote electronically for their preferred proposals.

“The key point of the movement is about developing a democratic culture of rational discussion and consensus building by the people themselves,” Tai said…

A citywide ballot of preferred proposals, either in the form of a civil referendum or a by-election triggered by the resignation of a lawmaker, would then take place by April or May next year to obtain “the citizens’ authorisation” – the penultimate step in the plan.

Former Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho Chun-yan … has already indicated that he is willing to resign to trigger such a referendum if it can help the movement.

These phrases and concepts are almost designed to turn the calmest and most amiable Beijing official into a mouth-frothing ranter. Through Communist Party eyes, only the state, not the public, has the right to decide on a people’s consensus; for activists to hold a referendum is to usurp the sovereign power; and citizens do not authorize anything except via the institutions controlled ultimately by the one-party state. What to Benny Tai seems a reasonable and trendy approach to civic activism could be interpreted by hardcore Beijing ideologues as an attempt to wrest control of Hong Kong. (If you need a clue about who would be behind such a thing, note that deliberative democracy is basically an American concept, and Benny Tai shows little interest in, say, Confucius.) This will be yet another illustration of the cultural divide between Beijing and its awkward Special Administrative Region.

Beijing has announced its bottom line, and that’s fixed. But there’s an easy way to go about it, and there’s a hard way, and that will largely depend on whether Chinese officials can bite their tongues in the face of Occupy Central’s (mainly inadvertent) provocation. The coming 12-18 months will be an interesting test of the Chinese Communist Party’s sense of humour. (And everyone else’s, as the Hong Kong government’s Constitutional and Mainland Affairs officials revert to mind-numbing, zombie-like ‘tape recorder’ gibberish.)

All concerned have a four-day Easter weekend – which I take pleasure in declaring open – to consider the best course of action.

Much frothing of mouths, as Hong Kong learns that Chief Executive CY Leung notified the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office in Beijing last October just before announcing a 15% ‘buyers stamp duty’ on non-residents buying property. Even pro-Beijing lawmaker Tam Yiu-chung seems to have found it noteworthy that HKMAO boss Wang Guangya said there wasn’t enough time to bounce it off the central government but to go ahead anyway.

The idea that this represents a breach of confidentiality of Executive Council proceedings is a bit of a stretch given the supremely hierarchical nature of China’s governing structure; things can leak downwards but not upwards. And as for the possibility of Mainland officials abusing the insider information and rushing out to buy a Hong Kong apartment or two, we can only declare ourselves shocked – shocked! – that anyone could imagine such a thing.

On the one hand, the exchange sounds rather like one between a company’s CEO and its chairman, with the latter saying, yes, strictly speaking we should’ve notified the board – leave it to me. Which doesn’t say a lot for the ‘two systems’ bit of the ‘one country, two systems’ formula. On the other hand, this particular policy initiative was aimed squarely at Mainlanders, and, as with limits on baby milk formula exports, it has gone down badly among some members of the public up there, fed up with spoilt, bratty Hong Kong.

Should we be surprised that Leung picked up the phone to Wang? Should we have been surprised if we had learned that he had not? Or should we be surprised to find that we’re not sure either way?

Not at all surprisingly, witless reporters compete to ask Cheung Kong boss Li Ka-shing the most inane questions at the conglomerate’s earnings results press conference. How would the property tycoon and asset trader define ‘love of country’ – a quality Beijing officials say Hong Kong’s CE must have? Among other things, the great man says ‘speaking the truth’. As in not saying an 886-square-foot apartment is actually only 664 sq ft? Or not portraying a high-rise cluster of shoeboxes in noisome Tseung Kwan O as occupying idyllic verdant wilderness? I can only agree.

But wait! Good news: one-country-two-systems is alive and well. China says its exports to Hong Kong rose 35.6% in the year to February. Hong Kong says its imports from the Mainland dropped 18%. One-country, eat your heart out (leaving aside the fact that ‘one country’ shouldn’t be exporting to/importing from itself in the first place). Even better news, for both Mainland export scamsters and Hong Kong taxpayers: no 61-year-old public housing tenant is involved here, so there will be no need to sentence anyone to 10 years in prison (@ approx. HK$0.5mn p.a.) for this. 

Finally, Hong Kong’s biggest teachers’ union is producing Liberal Studies materials on the barely nascent Occupy Central pro-democracy campaign. Is this brilliant or what? You can’t get National Education into schools, but you can teach kids how to bring the central business district to a halt through non-violent civil disobedience. I almost feel sorry for the pro-Communist brainwashing brigade sometimes.

Click to hear ‘Patriot’s Lullaby” by Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies!

To no-one’s great surprise, the Court of Final Appeal rejects foreign domestic helpers’ claim to right of abode in Hong Kong. This is a story with several very distinct angles.

There’s the rule of law angle. If the CFA hadn’t ruled against the Filipino maids, the government would almost certainly have asked the rubber-stamp Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to ‘interpret’ the relevant part of the Basic Law. In practice, this means amending the law through the back door purely for the sake of political expediency. Such an intrusion of Mainland-style rule of man damages Hong Kong’s rule of law; ultimately, if pragmatism demands an injustice, it is preferable to do it on this side of the border and preserve at least some integrity for the local legal system.

There’s an interesting cui bono angle – who benefits? This ruling keeps foreign domestic helpers in middle-class Hong Kong’s homes, doing the cooking, cleaning and child-minding. This frees up middle-class wives to work; they need to, because otherwise the families can’t pay the mortgage. They can’t pay the mortgage because the government has rigged the housing market to make homes ridiculously overpriced. Take the maids away, and many double-income households would become single-income, inevitably meaning less wealth being available to flow from the middle-class workforce to the half-dozen families running the local property-developer cartel. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s just joining the dots.

There’s a subliminal nationalism angle. Most of the helpers concerned are from the Philippines. The Philippines is a joke country; it is the Asian nation China can most easily bully, but it is also the one most likely to mishandle or overreact to intimidation. From Beijing’s point of view, it is appropriate that Hong Kong keeps Filipinos in their place. To Manila, this case could be a reminder that the most demeaning treatment Filipinos receive is from their own country’s incompetent leadership, which leaves them with no option but to migrate – but it probably won’t.

There’s the principles vs populism angle. The government was desperate to get this result because of overwhelming public opposition to allowing Filipino maids’ kids into Hong Kong (as with Mainland mothers, subject to a separate court case). This is the same government that constantly tells us that we have a pressing demographic crisis that can only be solved through a boost in the number of children – and that we shouldn’t discriminate against brown people and Mainlanders.

And that leads to a cultural and racial angle, summed up by the New York Times, which asks if Hong Kong will embrace a more multi-ethnic future. As with legal systems and age demographics, this case highlights Hong Kong’s values schizophrenia. On the one hand, the city is supposed to be part of the People’s Republic of China, with the national anthem on TV and smiling patriotic schoolchildren – sons and daughters of the dragon – waving red flags to greet visiting Chinese astronauts and Olympians. On the other hand, the city fancies itself as a diverse melting pot like New York or London, attracting the brightest and the best from around the world, as indeed it must if it is to maintain the region’s biggest clusters of financial, legal, technical and other skills. In practice, much of Han Hong Kong is insular, culturally solidly Chinese and fears external competition, while a smaller part of the ethnic Chinese populace are cosmopolitan and, often, Western-educated. The first group are in Beijing’s eyes surely the ‘politically correct’ population; the second group plus some non-Chinese are what keeps the place ticking. It is a contradiction Hong Kong government officials can’t resolve, so they wing it.

As, perhaps, does the Court of Final Appeal.

Senior Chinese officials are accustomed to dividing the rest of the world into those who obey and those who are to be crushed. They therefore find nuanced expectations-management difficult; it requires semi-openness about your ultimate negotiating position and a willingness to appear as if you at least halfway respect your audiences. How ironic that they are having to adopt such a relatively subtle approach when persuading Hong Kong to accept one particular reality – the reality that when it comes to the next Chief Executive election, potential candidates will be divided into those who obey and those who are to be crushed (or at least left to feel crushed when barred from the ballot).

National People’s Congress Law Committee Chairman Qiao Xiaoyang spells out that people who confront Beijing cannot be elected Hong Kong CE when ‘universal suffrage’ is introduced in 2017. With the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK’s Tam Yiu-chung alongside him begging to have his obnoxiously smug faced severely slapped, it is easy to feel incensed. And sure enough, the pro-democrats express outrage, warning that this suggests the screening-out of candidates who are unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party.  

An interesting three-way struggle looms. The pan-democrats’ alliance for full universal suffrage will attempt to rally public opinion behind absolute refusal to accept any screening (a threat they can theoretically deliver on through their veto power over an electoral reform bill in the legislature). Beijing will use all its warm and cuddly charm, charisma and public-relations skills to convince the community that the package it eventually proposes is at least better than nothing and warrants grudging acceptance. And the Hong Kong people will not just be onlookers. If (say) 60% of them end up backing the pro-dems in the opinion polls, Beijing’s proposal will lack all credibility (as would the subsequent CE election if 40% or less of the electorate votes). If a clear majority support Beijing’s package, at least some pan-dems will have to break ranks with the absolutists, or face a voters’ backlash down the road. The Hong Kong government, meanwhile, will hang around trying to look useful.

Beijing cannot and will not lose this fight – hence the relatively open plain speaking yesterday. As the jittery tone of the pro-dems’ response suggests, Xiao’s comments still leave unanswered questions. If we were to be totally blunt, we would set out the inescapable truth as follows:

The PRC is a feudal state. There is only one emperor. You publicly bow down to him and swear loyalty, or you are an enemy and an outcast. Hong Kong’s pro-democrats are under the influence of an alien culture of pluralism in which ideas and possible rulers compete. If it is any consolation, history is on their side. Why do Chinese officials repeatedly, defiantly and loudly rule out ‘Western’ methods like multi-party systems and balance of powers? Because they know it’s going to happen. But not here, and probably not now. Certainly, Hong Kong’s pro-dems don’t have what it takes to make it happen – not that they’ll be allowed the chance to have a go anyway.

This just in: Another Nina Wang bequest comes to light…

Three stories combine to form an exquisite microcosm of Hong Kong today.

First, the whole range of opposition figures and organizations – from stale old moderates to fiery young radicals – form an alliance to push for full universal suffrage. By this time next year, the group will be ripe for schism, as Beijing offers a 2017 election proposal that wins grudging public support for being the first real step forward since 1997, even if far from genuine, elect-anyone-you-want democracy. It could even be that parties themselves will split; it is hard to see lawmaker Emily Lau compromising on anything, while her Democratic Party colleague Albert Ho might break down if Beijing’s local officials ask him round for a cup of tea nicely enough.

Of course, if the Central People’s Government reverts to obstinate-paranoid-temper-tantrum mode, it will hand public opinion to the Alliance on a plate. Assuming Beijing will be smarter than that, the pro-dems’ only hope is to have some fresh electable charisma suddenly rise up from nowhere and shine through the grey, depressing miasma of the current line-up. (Imagine, if it is possible, a Hong Kong pan-democrat version of the moribund US Republican Party’s sudden new great black saviour Benjamin Carson.)

Second, the government launches a public engagement exercise on land supply strategy. We can assume that the difference between a public ‘engagement’ and a public ‘consultation’ is that in the case of the former, officials don’t bother pretending to want to learn what the people think.

There are several possible ways of looking at this. One is that the administrative and political barriers to accessing Hong Kong’s reasonable supply of God-made, ground-level space are for all practical purposes insurmountable. Therefore, in order to free up land for homes, we need to relocate commercial and infrastructural facilities onto reclamations and underground. Another is that this is another scam for the bureaucracy-construction complex, to keep the billions flowing as wasteful projects like the Zhuhai Bridge and the Big Hole to Shenzhen wind down. A third is that this is a shock tactic designed to soften people up for the unpleasantness necessary to open up traditional sources of land. The strange dashed-lines-in-the-sea map suggests someone is not totally serious about something. You be the judge.

Third, the 84-year-old mother of pro-Beijing barrister and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Alan Hoo holds a press conference to denounce her offspring as a very naughty boy who, among other things, has locked her out of her home and won’t talk when she phones. Former radio personality and convict and would-be legislator Pamela Pak wipes the tears from her eyes – but that probably goes without saying. Hoo thus joins the lengthy list of embarrassing brutes and delinquents who somehow turn up on China’s national political bodies. (Can anyone imagine a pro-democrat casting their aging parent out onto the street? Simply unthinkable.)

The background to this caddish behaviour is something to do with the old lady’s failure to attend Hoo’s third wedding ‘because his second divorce had cost her a lot of money’. The South China Morning Post categorizes the story as ‘Family’; presumably ‘Lurid, exploitative, prurient tripe about semi-celebrities’ wouldn’t fit. We get such a saga every year, on average. Late pop singer Anita Mui’s shoe-hurling mother and late tycoon Nina Wang’s father-in-law similarly complained about disgraceful lapses in the financial aspects of the younger generation’s filial piety.

The SCMP mentions that Hoo’s first wife was actress Flora Cheong-Leen. She is, of course, the daughter of Hilton Cheong-Leen, a legislator and civic figure from many, many moons ago. And to prove that the weekend is being declared open by cosmic forces from the fifth dimension, a missive from him appears just a few pages away in the Letters to the Editor. It is very, very long, and several repeated readings of it reveal that it manages to say absolutely nothing.