Big Lychee, Various Sectors

For the second day in a row, the South China Morning Post gives extensive front-page coverage to aging Mainland state banking bosses who should be retiring but aren’t. All riveting stuff, of course, and needless to say we can’t wait to read the next five instalments in the coming week.

Sadly, the continuity-in-banking story seems to have reduced the amount of space available for other China news, like the unveiling of People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, which has been hacking the hell out of corporate and government America these last few years.

If the New York Times wasn’t scratched off Beijing’s Christmas-card list after the expose of Premier Wen Jiabao’s family’s fortunes, it certainly will be after this. (Some more here and here.) There are two winners here: Internet security company Mandiant gets tons of glowing, free publicity, while the US government gets a nice stick with which to beat Beijing.

Chinese nationalists believe the US is out to surround their country. The ‘Mary Ma’ column in today’s Standard seems to buy into this, endorsing the theory that the US is letting Japan devalue its currency in return for Tokyo’s help in creating a ‘corridor for the Americans to re-establish a foothold [in Asia]’. If Washington is trying to surround China, it is not with weaponry so much as with mistrust. It is pretty easy to do, as Beijing – or its apparently uncontrollable militant elements in and around the PLA – is doing at least half the work.

Ten years ago, most East Asian countries largely felt at ease with a rising China. Not so now. Beijing demands ownership of Philippine and Vietnamese waters and bullies a weak client state into undermining an ASEAN meeting, while its frigates lock their fire-control radar onto Japanese ships. The cumulative effect is the China Threat, and an East Asia in which Beijing squanders its goodwill and ends up friendless, even potentially surrounded by enemies of its own making.

The Mandiant report confirms what most people already assumed, but in considerable detail (the company pretty much hacked the hackers). No doubt Western security agencies do plenty of hacking of their own, but letting hundreds of kids loose scattering malware around government and commercial sites, including energy and telecoms networks, and stealing whatever they can find, is something else. The indiscriminate nature of the attacks suggests a sort of naivety or even hubris (you wonder if some of them got a kick out of being caught).

With what are still massively inferior armed forces, Chinese security officials, well-schooled in the principles of asymmetric warfare, probably feel entitled to level the playing field through on-line economic sabotage. But in terms of national reputation, it must be counterproductive. Anyone who wants evidence that China will not be co-opted into the established global order now has some more. Anyone who wants evidence that China simply cannot be trusted now has some more (regardless of whether these and other acts of aggression are authorized by the top levels in Beijing or are the work of rogue nationalistic/PLA elements).

More than ever, the US – in whose mouth, of course, butter never melts – can convincingly tell East Asian countries in particular that the lawless land of Bo Xilai will continue its insular and aloof middle-kingdom exceptionalism, treating the world as it treats its own, on the amoral conviction that might is right.

Or, as China’s nationalists would put it, China will forge its own place and modus operandi in the world, and not submit to the shackles represented by hypocritical Western values and the failed, so-called rules-based systems of the last century.

As well as congratulating the fluent English-speaking, Harry Potter-loving geeks of Unit 61398 at 208 Datong Rd for their peculiar achievements, we declare the weekend open with a tribute – dedicated to the nostalgists out there – to an earlier and much-loved generation of hackers: Whatever happened to phone phreaking?

Maverick/wacko/scumbag pro-Beijing businessman Lew Mon-hung spends the afternoon at the Independent Commission Against Corruption, who are investigating his alleged, rather desperate, attempt to get the anti-graft sleuths off his back for an earlier – and needless to say, also alleged – offence. As the crestfallen face suggests, this is called ‘digging yourself into a hole’. If the agency has a case, it seems that Lew imagined he could threaten Chief Executive CY Leung: call the ICAC off, or I drop a political bombshell by spilling the beans about you.

Is it still blackmail if you don’t have anything serious on your intended victim? One for the lawyers. Either way, the dirt Lew said he would dish out proved illusory. More stuff about trellises and a claim that CY dangled the promise of a symbolic political post if he won last year’s quasi-election. Maybe his defender will advise him to go for an ‘unsound mind’ plea, perhaps in the footsteps of Charles Guiteau, the disgruntled office-seeker who assassinated President James Garfield in 1882, as someone whose dashed hopes fuelled his psychopathic delusions. The alternative would be to come across as a grubby, distasteful, odious lowlife who thinks the rules don’t apply to him.

On the subject of the rules not applying, Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong looks set to make a killing from selling hotel suites at the Apex Horizon, while government officials try to work out what’s going on. While developers routinely outsmart (or otherwise find ways to obtain privileged treatment from) our bureaucrats, this case is hilarious not only for being so blatant but for highlighting the idiocy of the high land-price policy.

The government says it wants homes to be affordable, yet insists on the payment of a huge, up-front, de-facto tax on residential land. If the kitchen-less apartments at Apex Horizon look like decent value for money, it’s because they don’t have this element in the price. Buyers could end up in a legal or financial nightmare. But it would be nice to think that a load of families end up with a (by local standards) bargain home that’s perfect – apart from the stranger who comes in and puts a chocolate on your pillow every evening.

At first sight, Cheung Kong’s sale of individual hotel suites at its Apex Horizon project looks like yet another in Hong Kong’s long history of inexplicable property loopholes. Over the years, land sold cheaply for hotel development has mysteriously ended up with for-sale ‘serviced’ apartments on it. Buildings that were supposed to be x floors high mysteriously ended up 2x or 3x floors high. And so on and so on. Developers made billions in extra profit against the spirit of the outline zoning plan/land lease/plot ratio mumbo-jumbo after some never-identified bureaucrat used his discretionary powers to alter the letter. Meanwhile, the Independent Commission Against Corruption goes after some boy scouts or something.

It does appear, however, that this project is kosher – or at least the loophole is a general one, applicable to all hotels built under land leases finalized before a particular date. It is legal for a developer of such a hotel to sell individual units. The anti-speculation stamp duties would not apply, as this is commercial, not residential, property. The buyers would therefore be investors hoping to make returns from rentals. Presumably, they could let to themselves and thus use the property as a de-facto residential unit.

However, commentators warn, they could be busted simply for cooking in their new home, let alone changing the furniture. Indeed, the whole building could be confiscated (and wouldn’t that be a sight to warm the heart?). The government has issued a rather vague  warning to would-be buyers. The latter, needless to say, are turning up in droves to put their money down as if these were HK$2 million parking spaces Cheung Kong is putting on sale. Which maybe they are, in a way.

For a change, it’s arguably not the Hong Kong taxpayer being cheated here. But can we say the same for the purchasers of these units? As anyone who has read Alice Poon knows, Hong Kong developers have honed their money-making skills to the extent that home-buyers go on paying them for life. They do this by owning the estate management companies and charging residents monthly fees for security, swimming pools, clubhouses and other facilities. Who knows how much extra profit, rising in line with inflation, this rakes in from each apartment sold over the decades?

Now think how much in management fees you would have to pay if you owned a unit in a hotel – a building purpose-built to be crammed full of little-used facilities and services, from business centres to guest refrigerators to laundries to little shampoo bottles. Could it be that Cheung Kong boss Li Ka-shing’s wily managers have identified an amazing golden goose: a development people can sleep in, built on cheap commercial-zoned land, with built-in income streams, and with Hong Kong and Mainland easy-money zombie-lemmings blind to any down-side (possibly additionally mesmerized by the magic Superman ‘Li’ factor) jostling to sign the contract and hand over the cash?

Since we don’t need to ask whether there are any limits to what we might politely call property developers’ ‘appetite’, let’s look on the bright side. Let’s ask whether, in fact, Li Ka-shing is the good guy here and deserves not a bronze, not a silver, not a gold Bauhinia Star – but a platinum-plated plutonium one for this genius money-spinning idea. Or, as the South China Morning Post more somberly puts it…

Now don’t get too excited. Hotels in Hong Kong can provide lucrative returns, and a sensible investor would be an idiot to sell one. But, having said that, times are strange. Lunatics are paying millions for parking spaces. It’s a bubble. You can go back into hotels later when the whole thing has crashed.

Many hotel owners in Hong Kong could use this loophole and emulate Cheung Kong’s Apex Horizon model (and remember many of them are the fellow tycoons who rather pathetically imitate Li’s other ideas, like dotcoms and REITs). By selling hotel rooms as quasi-residential units, they would give Hong Kong a new supply of homes (chuck a hot plate in the corner – the government will never find out).

But wait! There’s more! This would mean less room for legitimate hotel guests. This is a genuine counter-tourism measure if ever there were one.

The experts say that the government can’t plug this loophole because of sanctity of contracts blah blah blah. It would be the ultimate win-win. And what a beautiful prospect: the parasitical property-tourism monster eating itself.

Which brings us to… Fun Juxtaposition of the Day Award, which goes to the Standard for putting this week’s story about a Mainland tourist letting her kid pee in a Hong Kong restaurant (well, a Tsui Wah) right atop an ad for the pretentious L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon high-class eatery. That should subliminally induce a few cancelled reservations.

As Samuel Johnson might have put it, “Sir, a Singaporean’s protesting against the government or performing oral sex is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

The docile people of the Lion City are finally getting uppity. Last Saturday some 4,000 of them gathered to protest against their authoritarian rulers’ dreams of demographically re-engineering the city-state to enlarge its capacity for economic production. In plain English: cram in loads more foreigners of working age. As with Hong Kong, currently inundated with tourist-shoppers from over the border, the ruling mentality is that the little island’s prime purpose is not to be a home for its people, but to serve as the location of a GDP and a headcount that must be grown as ends in themselves.

Unlike in Hong Kong, protests in Singapore – like free speech – are at best tightly restricted. And the turnout in Hong Lim Park looks puny out of a population of 5.3 million. However, the organizer of Saturday’s event notes some interesting phenomena: the fading of the euphoria following the big day, and the way people upload photos and feelings onto the Internet. All instantly recognizable to anyone who was on Hong Kong’s half-million-strong July 1 march in 2003. Everyone attending such a gathering comes away with a buzz – a new awareness that you can push the government around. It’s addictive.

To their credit, the Singaporean authorities seem to at least half-accept that the future is one in which they serve the people, rather than the people serving some demented old visionary eugenicist’s crazed experiment in nation-building. They have been coming to terms with this for some time – why, it’s the 10th anniversary of the Great Bartop Dancing Revolution!

If Hong Kong is anything to go by, the Lion City’s elitist, self-selecting leadership has to face the fact that the demand for liberalization and accountability won’t proceed at a steady pace: it accelerates. On the government website today, the box at the top contains a rolling list of headlines (pre-dating the protest) eagerly assuring the public that the plans to accommodate a 6.9 million population are in their interests. Meanwhile, shoe-shining People’s Action Party members of parliament elected through a rigged polling system are desperately trying to explain to voters why they have voiced support for the plan. Unlike in Hong Kong, constitutional reform does not have to be aligned with a distant and paranoid Communist Party’s need to maintain absolute control. You just need to push the door hard enough.

One of the protestors on Saturday held a coyly naughty slogan about 6.9 being a kinky number. Which brings us incredibly elegantly to the oral sex side of Singapore’s great awakening. Yet another government official is being done for being fellated. This follows the city-state’s year of lust in 2012. There was a time when oral sex was illegal in Singapore (or, if memory of a court judgement serves, illegal unless participants went on to have procreative sex – it was back in the time when the city’s leaders took an almost masochistic pleasure in making themselves a global laughing stock). It seems this is no longer the case. But even so, you get the impression that they still have a few things to learn about this particular form of intimacy. I mean, you can do it without a government defence contract.

Hong Kong bureaucrats’ unwillingness to accept that they are wrong can lead to much hilarity. Behold the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, whose office is insisting that collating publicly available information from various sources and publishing it on-line as a package breaches data privacy laws. Or, at least, might. The reasoning is idiotic.

The story so far… Back in the mists of time, many companies and organizations in Hong Kong fell into the habit of asking for clients’ ID card numbers in order to confirm their identity, for example in day-to-day telephone transactions. Many people came to mistakenly believe that these numbers could and should be secret, like passwords.

Earlier this year, a government proposal to bar public access to company directors’ ID card numbers ran into belated opposition as the media and others realized the repercussions. To underline the fact that these unique numbers are no more than identifiers, corporate governance activist David Webb gathered those of 1,100 directors from publicly available sources, added his own, and put them on a single page on-line.

The list included some important ‘famous’ people, so no doubt lots of us visited the site and enjoyed the brief thrill of seeing banker David Li’s and developer Ronnie Chan’s ID numbers. After the initial frisson, some of us became intrigued by the pattern of distribution of Hong Kong Chinese, Western and Pinyin names throughout the alphanumeric list. A few possibly had the presence of mind to save a copy of the page. Then the PCPD demanded that the site be removed and issued one of the stupidest press releases Hong Kong officialdom has produced for – at a guess – a good few months.

Mr Webb took the list down. Publicly trapping a Hong Kong bureaucracy in its own silliness must be tempting, but the point had already been made. Indeed, the PCPD’s actions – essentially censoring information you can already find somewhere else – only attracted more attention from international media. That meant more attention for Mr W’s own views on the PCPD’s sheer illogicality, and the importance of ID card numbers in maintaining transparency. Indeed, the press release could almost have been designed to further undermine the PCPD’s case…

The PCPD notes with concern the recent commentary in the media that ID card numbers are not personal data but mere identifiers…

But they are mere identifiers, whatever some people might use them for. “The PCPD notes with desperation that much of its current and past work on ID card numbers has been pointless, and indeed wrong.”

…data users who collect personal data must observe the provisions of the [privacy laws]…

As Mr W points out, he was merely collating previously collected data. If the PCPD is right, a kid who gathers Cantopop stars’ birth dates on-line and puts them on his Facebook page is breaking the law. Where the PCPD gets really, embarrassingly stupid, however, is in its contortions over the ‘original purpose’ of data collection…

The act of putting up the names and ID card numbers of others which have been obtained from public registers on the internet for uncontrolled public access is use of personal data that is not directly related to the original purpose of collection…

So a piece of data that is publicly available from one information source for one reason may not be made publicly available elsewhere for some other purpose. The real reason for this principle in our privacy rules is to prevent companies from abusing clients’ data to make money (using contact details to compile phone or mailing lists, say). The PCPD declares, with a straight face, that data somehow transmogrifies from public to private when copied and pasted among public domains.

To save its precious face, the PCPD stubbornly clings to the fact that HKID card numbers are indeed used as authenticators ‘in real life’. Rather than discourage this practice as insecure, they seek to give it official approval, which of course then logically requires them to try to treat ID card numbers as personal and private, which we can’t because they are the way we all ultimately sort out one John Chan from another. As a final insult to our intelligence, the press release ends up with a reference to police prosecutions of people using other’s ID cards. We are presumably supposed to infer that making directors’ ID card numbers public will actually encourage crime.

Seeking an explanation for the ridiculousness of these privacy officials’ arguments, people are now seeing the hand of Beijing here. The government’s proposal about company directors’ details would make it harder for the press to trace national leaders’ families’ hidden wealth. Then the Privacy Commissioner turns into a blundering censor of websites. But Beijing wouldn’t do it so clumsily. Only the knuckleheads at the PCPD could manage that, and it surely can’t be long now before they have to climb down.

Click to hear the Jaggs’ ‘I’ve got Your Number’!

North Korea is testing nukes. Tensions and mutual provocation between China and a remilitarizing Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are getting worse. Egypt and Syria could implode at any time. So could Spain and Greece in their own ways. The US Federal and state governments owe US$20 trillion and rising. In Hong Kong, where a flood of inbound tourists is driving local people up into the hills and onto outlying islands in search of space, the Chief Executive has been officially declared ‘depressing’. And what’s the leading news story today? A guy in 50-murders-a-day South Africa shoots someone.

I am obviously missing something. Why are we – who are unknown to the people involved or their families – supposed to want to know about this Pistorius character? Why are we supposed to be interested that the (to me) hitherto unheard-of victim, one Ms Steenkamp, was either tragically cursed with the appearance of a publicity-seeking bimbo, or in reality had a wonderful personality? Where is the news story here? The alleged killer is a sports star; sports stars tend to be dim and make bad decisions; this one kept guns in the house; occupants of armed households are statistically more likely to be shot at home. Where, to repeat, is the news story?

RTHK Radio 3’s morning show has an unmistakable tendency on occasion to poor news sense, pushing a non-story into the top position and going on and on, minute after laborious minute, into greater and greater detail about it. Today’s treatment of this ‘Bladerunner’ Pistorius banality was no exception. It was followed by similarly lengthy coverage of the UK’s horsemeat-for-beef trauma, which is at least vaguely amusing. Horse is not merely edible: it is wasted on the sort of people who eat processed packaged lasagnas.

Then RTHK turned to Warren Buffet and pals buying Heinz. A report that could have been more enlightening had a discussion of how ketchup is originally Chinese not intruded. (Ketchup, of course, is not Chinese – tomato is a New World species, and East Asian cuisine doesn’t get that low. The word comes from Malay and means what most of us call ‘nam pla’, or simply ‘fish sauce’, and seems to have come from Hokkien. Tons here and here.)

There’s a clear pattern here. In fairness to my friends at RTHK, it isn’t always this way. But occasionally, the programme’s usual producer is away and a guy called Phil Space steps in. His aim is to pad the show out with clips on far-away events cut-and-pasted from the BBC World Service or whatever, with priority given to bulk rather than newsworthiness or relevance to Hong Kong. Thus we get lengthy tearful tributes to Ms Steenkamp’s vivacious wit, weird dollops of ketchup all over the business news, and the interminable American sports correspondent gushing however much inanity it takes to complete that 30-minute cycle as effortlessly as possible.

I’m sure it’s the result of under-funding of a low-priority, English-language station. I’m sure that during the 23 hours a day I don’t listen, Radio 3 is perfect. And I’m sure I’ll feel absolutely rotten when they email me in that slightly defensive tone of the under-appreciated public-service provider. And, as we languorously declare the weekend open, we must note that it’s a slow day today.

OK, so the guy had no legs – why are we supposed to give a damn?

As a glance around the Macau ferry cabin shows, if you put a Mainland tourist in a seat on some form of transportation he or she will almost instantly fall asleep, whatever the time of day. So you’d have thought they’d be happy to spend the night in a bus – a stationary one, indeed, for extra comfort. But apparently not.

The big story in Hong Kong today is the trauma faced by an elegant Manchurian-visaged lady from all the way up in Jilin, who felt she hadn’t really stayed in Hong Kong, what with one night being spent in a parked coach after a tour group mishap. Meanwhile, Ocean Park turned visitors away for the second day running when it filled up. The tourism lobby’s response is to plead for more attractions; legislator Yiu Si-wing says, in effect, screw the Hong Kong people’s need for affordable homes, and use land to build some idiotic fake ‘Shaolin’ monastery for his parasitical industry.

As it happens, the Chinese New Year five-day weekend started off with Tourism Commissioner Philip Yung indicating that it is dawning on the Hong Kong government that the city needs to do something about this deluge of visitors. Officials will, he says, review the capacity of immigration, hotel and other tourist facilities. Tellingly, he feels a need to warn us not to assume that they will consider curbing the individual visit regime that gives many Mainlanders multiple entry access to the Big Lychee. For that is, indeed, what 99% of us will want to assume.

A quick glance at the Tourism Commission reveals a rather motley assemblage of bureaucrats tasked with facilitating, liaising, liaising and facilitating all manner of superfluous projects designed to attract yet more and more tourists into the Big Lychee. One of them also has to ‘housekeep’ the HK Tourism Board, which does the marketing and publicity flimflam devoted to the same gruesome aim; another coordinates MICE tourism initiatives. With such exciting, meaningful empires to run, they will side with the landlord/retail/hotel lobby rather than the community, and focus on expanding capacity rather than tackling the demand side.

The fact that both the commercial and bureaucratic interests accept that there is a problem is important. They are implicitly admitting that our sacred tourism industry imposes costs as well as benefits. They are also, reluctantly, highlighting some key questions. How many more Mainland visitors can we realistically cram into this city? There must be a physical limit to the number of traders crisscrossing the border with tons of stuff as absurd as instant noodles. (Seriously: how much profit can you make on that?) There are only so many shoppers of fashion, cosmetics and gold you can cram onto the sidewalks of Causeway Bay and Tsimshatsui. Cake shops, Lantau campsites, the Mid-Levels Escalator and a thousand other spots can only handle so many bodies.

And, more philosophically, who is the city for?  Before 1997, officials assured us that strict immigration controls at the border were to be a vital ingredient in ensuring ‘50 years, no change’. Just as we wouldn’t have to share tax revenues with the Mainland, nor would we have to share our territorial space. Call it selfish or less-than-patriotic, but that’s what the Basic Law said. What happened to that?

Our politicians are mostly too busy reporting Chief Executive CY Leung to the Independent Commission Against Corruption on what seems like a weekly basis, but if they could spare the time there would surely be a receptive audience for some serious solutions to an unsustainable problem that profits a small handful at the expense of the rest of us. Shut Disneyland down, and use the space for housing; it would solve the ‘land shortage’ at a stroke, and transport links are even already in place. Impose a hefty tax on luxury crap, and to hell with that ‘free port’ reputation, which was originally about opium anyway. Induce Beijing to scrap the Mainland’s taxes and duties on imports and luxuries, which it will sometime – probably just after the Tourism Commission has made us pay for extra immigration halls and other infrastructure that will subsequently go unused.

The list could go on. There is even a name for it, courtesy of the Urban Dictionary, a compilation of contemporary slang and usage …

Counter-tourism (n.) Offensive measures taken to deter, prevent and respond to tourism.

Before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics began, all the manhole covers in and around the city were welded open as a counter-tourism measure.

Great moments in creeping Mainlandization: The good ship ‘New Nation’ uses the traditional rather than simplified character ’國 ’but insists on using the Mandarin-in-Pinyin form for the Romanized name, rather than the local Cantonese-in-whatever system, in which it would come out something like ‘Sun Kwok’ - which many right-thinking people would surely consider more pleasing to the eye.

Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung’s lawyers demand an apology from the HK Economic Journal for publishing an article mentioning alleged links with triads; the paper issues a lame quasi-apology, aimed more at its readers than anyone else. The offending column simply mentioned remarks attributed to – inevitably – maverick pain-in-the-rear Lew Mon-hung. As numerous commentators are now pointing out, if anyone made a slur, it’s the Lew-dicrous businessman/politician/buffoon.

Pro-democrats and defenders of free speech see an attempt to intimidate the press, but temper their alarm with surprise at the embarrassing stupidity of CY’s action. CY’s extreme lack of political-PR street smarts leaves others who are usually given to undermine him bemused. One explanation is that CY was nagged into it by supporters. Another is that allegations of gangster links hit a very sensitive, deep-down nerve.

Earlier last year, I had an email – probably still buried in an in-box somewhere – from someone with a long and dependable memory. The writer, who’s an old friend, recalled being present at an occasion well over 30 years ago at which a youthful CY was unambiguously associating with one or more known triad figures. Rumours of connections of this sort are two a penny. In some times and places, it is probably hard not to cross paths with triads, whose sprawling array of personnel and activities overlap with all sorts of legitimate business and respectable society. Surely.

The lawyer’s letter controversy overshadows another story: activist Koo Sze-yiu’s nine-month prison sentence for flag desecration.

When they made flag-burning illegal in Hong Kong after the handover, the authorities went to some lengths to remind everyone that quite a few democracies, as well as dictatorships, had such laws. Since then, a couple of flag-mutilators have been fined, and in 2011 an old Mainland farmer was jailed for a few weeks for the offence.

The magistrate in Koo’s case cited public safety as a concern because the protestor burned a plastic flag, but does that mean it is illegal to set fire to, say, a Park N Shop bag? Koo and his buddies have burnt Japanese flags on the streets plenty of times. What if they burn a plastic one? Basically, the sentence (OK, two sentences) is silly, not to mention a gift to Koo, who welcomes and indeed relishes the martyrdom.

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (Correctional Services budget divided by number of inmates) suggests that it costs HK$290,000 a year to keep someone in prison.

On a brighter note, we can now declare a magnificent five-day weekend, plus the Year of the Snake, open. Then there’s February 14.

I’m really looking forward to Valentine’s Day this year because afterwards these wretched Cartier commercials that are clogging up YouTube… 

…will go away. Probably. Either way, YouTube Jewel of the Week Award goes to this: Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 show on the bits Beethoven chucked out and improved upon while writing his 5th Symphony. They don’t do network TV like this any more.

‘Professor of Social Work’. Can any job title make a right-thinking person reach for his pistol more quickly? Paul Yip Siu-fai, holder of this position at Hong Kong University, chides the Big Lychee’s leaders for failing to adopt a Singapore-style population policy…

Both Singapore and Hong Kong share very similar population characteristics: a rapidly ageing population and very low fertility rates. Both worry about the negative impact of a shrinking workforce with an ageing society.

However, the way the two governments are responding to the challenges is very different. Singapore has been trying to divert the course of its population development to a desirable direction whereas Hong Kong’s last administration just wasted time … we have yet to develop an integrated approach to enable our population to grow stronger and better.

He then describes priority housing, paternity leave and other Singaporean measures that, he says, lead the Lion City’s women to produce two babies each rather than Hongkongettes’ rather miserable 1.6. He continues…

The Singaporean government also realises the importance of building a strong, high-quality workforce. It has pledged that, by 2030, two-thirds of Singaporean workers will hold professional, managerial, executive or technical positions, up from half at present … increase the percentage of young people [at] university … identifying potential migrants who can contribute to the economy … diversified its industry [via] biomedicine, advanced electronics and green energy…

Unlike Hong Kong, where university attendance is low, growth even in boring old financial services is slow and the tourism industry is unbalanced. The Professor admits that immigration is provoking a backlash in Singapore; he also bemoans Hongkongers’ ‘protectionist’ views on migrant labour and foreign students, and business opposition to pro-family policies.

Buried away in the article is a brief mention that GDP does not necessarily equate to happiness. And few would dispute his concerns about Hong Kong’s livability. But the bottom line here is that humans are economic inputs – production units, sort of like ants, only harder to breed. The purpose of their existence is to expand output and replicate, and if they aren’t doing it enough to be able to repeat the cycle adequately, bureaucrats need to start micromanaging tertiary education rates and the number of children families have, to rear a ‘strong, high-quality workforce’.

For the last 15 years or so, Hongkongers have been told through various subtle or blatant means that their city is losing competitiveness, that other places will ‘take over’ – that they should fear the future. Some of the scaremongering may have had an element of truth; a lot of it seems to have been spread by local elites to suit their own agendas, while more than a little of it can be traced to Beijing’s officials seeking to cow the population into tameness and obedience.

Anxiety about Singapore is a particularly inane and facile part of this phenomenon. The correct view of Singapore is: Who gives a damn about Singapore? (If you do care about the place, it should be out of concern that they have held their economy back by importing semi-skilled Third World labour to keep outdated industries going. One former civil servant down there says the Lion City should ditch its World City pretentions and accept that at best it’s on a par with – he says – Zurich, Tel Aviv or an obscure turnip-growing community in England called Boston.)

Same goes for the ‘aging population’ hype. Some people deny climate change; I can’t believe that the aging population is a problem. How can people living longer because they are healthier be a ‘problem’, unless you see the world through the perverse eyes of a social-engineering eugenicist eager to roll out his detailed plans for universal compulsory euthanasia and pining for the days when typhoid eliminated the production units before their economic utility declined?

Hong Kong does have a cohort of poor elderly born and raised – and denied much education – during the chaos of the 1930s-40s. And we have ample resources to look after them. Subsequent generations will mostly have enough earning power to provide more for themselves in old age, and good enough health to work a few years beyond traditional retirement age if necessary. Education, antibiotics, clean water, sewerage systems and ample nourishing food have not created a ‘problem’. Former Chief Executive Donald Tsang and his followers would have you believe in this bogeyman, but they wanted an excuse to hoard the people’s accumulated wealth.

Obviously, Hong Kong does have some real problems. A massively screwed-up land/housing system, a distorted economy, unbreathable air and a Communist-approved government too weak to override the silliest little interest group. If babies could solve these problems – great. And we wouldn’t need to push Hong Kong women into reluctant motherhood: just give permanent residency to all those Mainlanders and Filipinos, and we’d have all the kiddies you could possibly need.

As it happens, babies are even less likely to provide solutions than a South China Morning Post op-ed piece. (Mercifully: imagine all the whining about the shortage of milk formula if each woman had 3.2 rather than 1.6 of the things?)

I don’t read South China Morning Post editorials enough to be sure, but this morning’s must be the least convincing in quite a while, assuming they’re not getting into satire. After describing the many ways in which mass Mainland tourism is making life unbearable for ordinary Hong Kong residents, it begs us to grin and bear it…

Some people will see the extra deluge of tourists as a heightened inconvenience and intrusion, a cause for frowns, scowls and perhaps anger. Given the benefits of tourism to our city, though, we should instead be smiling and offering a friendly hand of welcome.

Those benefits may not come readily to mind as we negotiate crowded shopping streets and jostle for space on public transport in the weeks on either side of Hong Kong’s official four-day break. Shelves empty of favourite products and reports of baby milk powder shortages and parallel traders cause annoyance. The closure of yet another long-standing restaurant, the victim of rent rises in districts being transformed by luxury goods stores, prompts fears that culture and heritage are being lost. Those with a chauvinistic attitude speak of the cross-border visitors in terms of hygiene and politeness.

Further down the column, it attempts to justify the plea to lie back and enjoy being raped…

Tourists spent HK$305 billion in 2011 and the economic sector accounted for more than 17 per cent of GDP. About 6.2 per cent of the workforce – more than 218,000 people – owed their jobs to foreign travellers. The retail and hospitality sectors benefit most, but the ripple effects extend throughout our economy

No-one has done a proper cost-benefit analysis of tourism in Hong Kong, but we can safely say that between 2000 and 2012 median household income has barely budged from HK$18,000 a month while tourism arrival figures have gone from 14 million a year to 46 million a year. (Hastily Googled sources here, here, here and here – give or take a year and the deflation/inflation over the period.) We don’t know how many jobs have been destroyed as the influx of shoppers and luxury retailers drove small local businesses out of existence. We can assume that most of the HK$305 billion goes straight from the cash tills into the coffers of Italian junk merchants and Hong Kong landlords. That’s why ‘these benefits may not come readily to mind’.

The oh-so important tourism industry is part of the larger parasitical real-estate cartel scam. The rest of us suffer so a small handful of families effortlessly make more billions. But the swamping of Hong Kong with Mainland visitors leads, as the SCMP delightfully puts it, to ‘heightened inconvenience and intrusion … and perhaps anger’. It seems the landlords are nervous. James Tien, born and bred to defend their interests, never stops bleating about how much we need a heavier and heavier crush of tourists. And in today’s Standard, Allan Zeman warns that limits on visits would lead Hong Kong to unspecified ‘trouble’. Both men occupy public-sector tourism-promotion positions; both personally profit from rising rents and belong to the tycoon-bureaucrat establishment that ran Hong Kong under the last Chief Executive, Donald Tsang.

It looks like a simple conflict between the tycoons and the people of Hong Kong. But does it also represent a clash between the tycoons’ interests and Beijing’s? The anti-locust sentiment in Hong Kong is surely a concern for Chinese authorities; it is the complete opposite of what is supposed to be happening 15 years after the handover. Indeed, in a sure sign of the seriousness of the ‘contradiction’, some Mainland observers claim to see evil foreign forces at work behind colonial flag-waving and opinion polls showing Hongkongers to see themselves as less Chinese.

For Beijing to allow curbs on the flow of Mainlanders into Hong Kong would be a loss of face and awkward to sell to the public up there. But if it were the lesser of two evils – if the alternative were growing alienation and hostility among Hong Kong people – the Central People’s Government would surely approve it. And if you were a Hong Kong landlord, and you thought that might happen, you would lean on tycoon-owned newspapers to carry gibberish about how we must welcome more and more tourists with open arms.  

Meanwhile, over at the new Legislative Council building at Tamar, late Monday morning…

A shiny red object lurks in the undergrowth.

Could it be a car – one of those ugly Audis, perhaps?

Parked right on the sidewalk?

Yes it could.

No Legco badge, so presumably not an honourable member’s.