Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Hong Kong government gets ever more desperate in its attempts to calm public anger at the flow of infant milk formula out of the city to the Mainland, where parents fear that locally sold powder will poison their kids. Officials put the word out last week that many of the parallel traders are Hongkongers, not riffraff from Shenzhen. But that didn’t work. Then they talked of making formula subject to an obscure strategic commodity reserve system originally instituted for rice in some long-forgotten bad old days. Then they decided to try that old standby, the multi-pronged approach. Yet the smugglers are as determined as ever. Now, it’s gloves off: time to get tough.

The government introduces the Toucan Limit. Specially trained tropical birds will patrol all New Territories rail stations and border checkpoints, ready to leap on parallel traders carrying three or more cans of milk powder and peck their eyes out with their enormous, gaily-striped, razor-sharp bills. In an uncharacteristic display of no-nonsense, screw-consensus decisiveness, authorities say children will not be spared.

Meanwhile, far away in a classier part of town where mothers breast-feed and worry instead about political indoctrination of their offspring, we get one of those bizarre little stories that are fast becoming the hallmark of Chief Executive CY Leung’s administration. Eva Chan, who shot to her 15 minutes of fame last year opposing the proposed National Education syllabus in schools, says that an obscure CY aide called her as the controversy reached its climax, claimed to be able to speak for Beijing’s local Liaison Office, referred to the CE as ‘out of the equation’ and offered a meeting at which the Central Government emissaries would have good news. The policy was ditched days later.

You can make of it what you will. You can believe that the Liaison Office, not the CE, was – therefore, still is – micromanaging Hong Kong affairs. You can believe that the Liaison Office panicked last September that another 2003 7-1 mini-uprising was about to take place. You can believe that the Western District spooks were getting involved because national leaders themselves have called for National Education during their rare, road-closing, mega-motorcade expeditions into the Big Lychee, giving the policy some sort of sacred aura the rest of us couldn’t see. In short, it’s another bit of weirdness, like maverick businessman/politician Lew Mon-hung’s claim that CY offered him a seat on the Executive Council.

Cue Regina Ip, former Secretary for Security, and now lawmaker and leader of the New People’s Party (total membership: Regina and a pal). Eager to serve the community/convinced that her people need her/perpetually on the make, the former ‘Broom Head’ obviously sees CY’s mishaps as a looming opportunity, presumably in 2017, when Hong Kong gets to choose its leader through some sort of universal suffrage.

Regina thinks Lew Mon-hung probably was offered an Executive Council seat, but sensibly sees the funny side. People with few friends, she no doubt realizes, do whatever they have to. Regina also goes populist over the Mainland Visitor Menace and calls for limits on Mainlanders’ trips across the border.

It should be easy: you just get Mainland authorities to restrict the number of trips people up there can make to Hong Kong per day, week or whatever. (A precedent exists for Macau, though that was aimed at Mainland officials blowing public funds in the casinos.) In practice, it is fraught with difficulties.

Hong Kong’s leadership lobbied very important people in Beijing to speed up the liberalization of outbound travel for Chinese nationals to boost Hong Kong’s tourism trade after SARS. It was even presented to the public as a ‘gift’. Even if we don’t care that Mainlanders increasingly see Hongkongers as a whining, spoilt and ungrateful pain, we have to accept that there is an etiquette problem here.

More to the point, the symbolism is highly charged. In response to kids waving British-era colonial flags, Hong Kong reverses integration with its hinterland by erecting new barriers against everyone else from the People’s Republic of China. Japanese, Australians, Indians, Peruvians – all are welcome, as many times as they like. The so-called compatriots are to be singled out. This is unbelievably off-message and offensive to the deepest principles underlying Hong Kong’s return to its motherland; it is a mark not simply of public disquiet up in Sheung Shui, but of Regina Ip’s lust for power and glory. Meanwhile, our only hope lies with the plucky toucans.

The excuse HK needs? Extrapolate this: just-released HK Police stats, showing 2011 (l) vs 2012 (r).

Stock market analysts misjudge Deutsche Bank’s fourth-quarter profit by a factor of eight. They can be forgiven. They don’t work for the company, so all they can do is look at charts and do their voodoo. Unlike Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang, who has teams of highly paid bean-counter and economist bureaucrats watching over the city’s revenues pouring down the gaping government gullet day after day.

If an FS says we will have an x-billion budget deficit and it turns out to be a 10x-billion surplus once, you could put it down to bad luck. When he does it most years, as the Standard’s graphic shows, there is something wrong. It now looks as if his predicted 2012-13 HK$3.4 billion deficit is going to be a HK$40 billion-or-more surplus. That’s four times the amount the administration plans to spend over several years phasing out dirty vehicles to clean the air.

The SCMP quotes lawmaker Ronny Tong as saying that this miscalculation must be deliberate. Quite a lot of people believe this, the theory being that it is a way of managing expectations and quelling calls for handouts or higher recurrent expenditure. But such a tactic, if that is what it was, stopped working years ago. The tactic ceases to exist once you accompany it with the plethora of witless electricity subsidies, tax rebates and other handouts seen over the last few years. Anyway, such a blatant and futile attempt to hoodwink the public annually would be clear proof of idiocy.

The only other explanation is, well, idiocy. The sort that manifests itself as incompetence. A real walrus, rather than an impersonator, would do a better job of monitoring and estimating the incomings; based on which, he would either reduce them or prudently raise spending on something underfunded like health, from budget to budget. As it surely says he is supposed to in his job description.

Tsang could argue that Hong Kong’s fiscal system, which randomly delivers revenue in huge clumps out of synch with either the calendar or the economic cycle, is the problem. But after merrily not reforming the tax system for six straight years, that would also be an admission of incompetence. His best hope is to plead insanity.

Some interesting mutterings are going on about whether ‘the’ (more accurately, ‘some’) Chinese believe they are a separate race descended from a different line from that of the rest of humanity. It’s an irresistible topic. Lots of cultures see themselves as apart. The Japanese claim their stomachs are different from everyone else’s (though this has largely served as a justification for import barriers on rice; their snow is different too, hence tariffs on foreign skis). And could anything be more arrogant than the American fundamentalist Christian assumption that their country and constitution are favoured by God (a belief directly inherited from the English puritans).

Modern DNA analysis has blown claims to racial exclusivity away, and no self-respecting Chinese archaeologist or anthropologist today would dispute that we are all distant cousins. (Those who once did presumably did so out of political rather than scientific conviction.)

I declare the weekend open with this thought: it’s not as if being a Homo erectus was something to be proud of.

Many, many years ago, as a boy, I used to regularly dress up in special clothes and take part in a gathering in which, at one point, a large number of people would watch as I rang a bell, and another participant lifted an object into the air for all to see. It was the moment during Mass of transubstantiation, when Catholics believe bread is turned into the body, and wine into the blood, of Christ. On one such occasion, I experienced a vivid flash of enlightenment as the bell rang. It’s still wine in that chalice, I thought – what the heck am I doing? As Christopher Hitchens said, you don’t become an atheist, you just realize you are one. (Typically. the Holy Romans have an intellectually robust explanation for it all. It’s more like sherry, by the way.)

Here in Hong Kong, we have a small group of people who take part in similarly strange rituals involving the suspension of rational common sense and belief in a sort of supernatural. A prime example is former Justice Secretary Elsie Leung, who over the years has taken part in such ceremonies as the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress and the National People’s Congress. Many delegates (like more than a few Catholics on Sundays) go along with these things for the sake of form, but Elsie and some others genuinely, devoutly believe. Their faith that a humane, fair, benevolent and most of all legitimate political process is taking place is total.

Obviously, it’s not just Catholics and Communists who can embrace non-reality. You still have a few days to book a past-life reading with this guy; I recently heard of an apparently sane and educated pregnant woman who wanted moxibustion and/or accupuncture to move her baby out of its breech position; and I am surrounded by people who do things like putting small triangles of carpet at doorways to prevent wealth from leaving the room. But the believers in the sanctity of the Chinese Communist Party are different from the ordinary delusional: they have a real possibility of influencing governance.

Normally, they are the only people who would pay attention when someone mentions the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or CCPPPPPCCCC for short. The CPPCC is a talking shop. A single post on Weibo can have a hundred times as much impact on the nation. We can judge how important it is from the fact that the deaf and barbarians are allowed to know what’s going on. Membership is a pat on the head for loyalty, especially for the sort of loyalty tested by endurance, sacrifice and humiliation. Its uselessness is plain to all but those who live the fiction.

Nonetheless, we find ourselves sitting up and taking notice when the new Hong Kong members of the CPPCC Standing Committee are announced.

The great shoe-shining Sing Tao/Standard laud the new appointees as having attained some sort of pinnacle in the nation’s power structure. Which is exactly what the CPPCC is for: the grandiose granting of face to those who have eaten their bitterness uncomplainingly.

The five new Hongkongers in the CPPCC’s upper tier are hardly members of the truly faithful. Adulterer rich-kid Henry Tang cruelly had the office of CE handed to him on a plate and snatched away at the last second after trying to dump basement-related misdeeds on his wife. Peter Lee is the number-one son of Henderson Land’s Lee Shau-kee and bachelor father of the famed designer-label test-tube triplets.

So far, so embarrassing, you might think, but Sun Hung Kai’s Walter Kwok and former Chief Secretary Rafael Hui – both looking at corruption charges – are being dropped from the CPPCC, so on a net basis, this is an improvement in average quality and integrity of the Hong Kong delegation. That said, Henry is also being investigated for possible criminal activity concerning the omission (or not) of that basement from building plans. Are the people who pick the top CPPCC members confident that nothing will come of that? More likely, given their charitable view towards other members’ conduct, they just don’t see it as a major problem. They had no choice, anyway.

Anthony Wu is (or was) a stalwart of the Donald Tsang bureaucrat-tycoon establishment that expected to ride to power on Henry’s coattails. A pat not just on the head but on his tummy, for being a good boy during a disappointing year! SC Lam seems to be filling the space vacated by the previous chairman of the HK United Federation of Fujianese Associations of Organizations. Liu Changle is boss of patriotic Phoenix TV, which, unlike ATV, has never erroneously announced the death of a former Party General Secretary.

What we really want to know is: who has been dropped, or simply not appointed, simply as a plain, good old-fashioned kick in the teeth? One, inevitably – a bit regrettably, too – is Lew Mon-hung, whose attempts to take CY out while the Independent  Commission Against Corruption poked around his company have brightened up our lives so much over the last 10 days or so. Another is the man the Standard’s Mary Ma column finally has the good taste to call ‘Sir Bowtie’.

‘Mary Ma’ wistfully imagines that Beijing has something bigger and better in mind for Donald. First Chinese on the moon, perhaps. Commentators offended by the way he hobnobbed with tycoons like to see his absence from the list as a snub, though by CPPCC standards, a yacht-ride is surely a very minor blemish indeed. Crowds of insiders crop up in the media this morning mumbling about how Beijing doesn’t want to set a precedent; just because first CE Tung Chee-hwa was elevated to a noble position in the nation’s top ‘advisory’ body, it doesn’t mean they must all be. The devout believers are among those who think so. Most of us will consider this, and nod in broad agreement with this solemn reasoning. Until it dawns on us that the whole thing’s a bunch of twaddle.

Probably, they just don’t like him.

A quarter of East Asians have a genetic predisposition to suffer badly from flu, scientists say. Perhaps the researchers can next try to identify another hereditary trait found among a small but influential segment of the region’s people: compulsive agonizing about civic status.

One manifestation of the condition is ‘hub syndrome’. Hong Kong’s policymakers over the last 15 years have been tragic victims, obsessing about turning the city into a centre for every buzzword-theme from Chinese medicine to logistics to cruise ships to education to arbitration to the inevitable tech to endless dozens of others.

Jealous and vain counterparts on the Mainland are just as badly afflicted. Shenzhen wants to turn its Qinghai piece of muddy reclaimed land into the Manhattan of Asia. Across the estuary, Zhuhai’s Hengqin Island has been set to become a shipping, then a tourism, and more recently a gosh-how-original high-tech hub. And up the Pearl River, Guangzhou has been long been planning to turn the wastes of Nansha into a world-class commercial, logistics and services zone.

During the 2000s, it was almost impossible to avoid at least a weekly conference at which Pearl River Delta municipal figures would take it turns to show the audience a Powerpoint presentation. In each case, their city was to be the ‘dragonhead’, while the town next door would be the blah-blah centre, and the county up there would be the whatever zone, and Hong Kong would provide lots of cooperation and partnership. Nowhere in the region would not be a dragonhead or a hub. And it’s not just the south. Tianjin, Chongqing, Xiamen are all at it. Up in Shanghai they are, as ever, about to overtake Hong Kong, this time as a free-trade zone with every amazing world-class, international, global, cross-border advantage, you can be sure.

When not trying to turn humdrum urban sprawl into gleaming clusters of wealth-creation by decree, the obsessive-compulsive city-builders of Asia work on the principle that more equals better. The more people, trucks, ships, containers, tourists and buildings you cram into a given space, the mightier and more prosperous it will be.

Hong Kong’s previous Chief Executive Donald Tsang said that the Big Lychee needed a population of 10 million to compete as a financial centre (the additional 3 million people all being bankers, you understand). Needless to say, he didn’t get the job done. Instead, it is left to legislator, inheritor of a textiles fortune and tourism lobbyist James Tien to demand that we cram more, more, more and more human beings into every little crack and crevice in our high-rise concrete maze. In particular, he wants imported labour and, most of all, lots and lots of lovely tourists. You can never have too many tourists, only a shortage of tourist facilities, which need to be built on prime real estate at taxpayers’ expense. If Hongkongers keep refusing to see the wisdom of this – if ‘hostility continues’ – he warns, Mainland tourists will turn their back on the city and head to Paris.

Quel dommage.

To show us how it’s done, megalomaniac planners in Singapore’s National Eugenic Hygiene Directorate proudly present: the Lion uber-City, where locals who refuse to breed fast enough will be shoved aside into reservations to make way for several million young, energetic and obedient foreigners, carefully selected for their willingness to mate with university graduates. Already blessed with taxi-drivers trained to tell overseas visitors about the world’s cleanest streets and number-one container terminal, Lee Kuan Yew’s gift to humanity will gain its 6.9 million population target and thus be assured its 1,000 years of magnificence.

Hong Kong’s biggest contribution to world news today is the continuation of billionaire Cecil Chao’s US$65 million quest for a man to straighten out his gay daughter. Aside from displaying to the planet the subtlety, sophistication and intellect of our visionary and respected business leaders, the story underlines the enlightened nature of our government, which is so sensitive to minorities’ feelings that it refuses a public debate on equal rights for gays because a few people in the city “worry that launching a consultation exercise may cause undesirable impact on family, religion and education.”

With consultations threatening undesirable impacts on the family and religion (and I always thought the exercises were a charade), officials aren’t going to change their minds in a hurry about that issue. But that might not be the case with the number-two story from the Big Lychee at the moment: the plan to implement the new Companies Ordinance, which reduces public access to corporate directors’ identity details.

This story has already been picked up in the Western media because journalists’ right to confirm directors’ identities through publicly available Hong Kong company records enabled Bloomberg and New York Times reporters to dig up the dirt about senior Chinese officials’ families extensive fortunes. Now it is getting another run following the appearance of a 1,768-signature petition in local newspapers.

Most reports overseas on this issue refer to the stories about the Chinese elite’s vast hidden wealth. They also tend to mention local concerns about Beijing’s increasing influence over local affairs. Their readers might conclude that the Hong Kong authorities are trying to change the law in order to protect the privacy of Mainland princelings who are laundering their billions here. In fact, it seems to be more the other way round. Few noticed the changed privacy rules when the new Companies Ordinance was passed last year; it’s only now, with amendments going through the Legislative Council, it has become a big story.

Although HK ID card numbers serve no password-type purposes, most people see them as personal and secret; the Privacy Commission, always on the alert for reasons to justify its existence, has encouraged paranoia about this. As if Hongkongers weren’t already touchy about privacy. Proposals long ago for a high-tech road pricing system failed at least partly because of fears that drivers’ whereabouts could be monitored by some sort of unnamed Gestapo (ie, their spouses). Many people regard banks’ pooling of individuals’ credit information as a vicious assault on inalienable human rights. Government officials who are directors of companies are themselves breaking the law right now by not putting their personal postal addresses on record.

The government would not usually lose sleep over local journalists’ objections to a new law. If overseas media join in with ‘Asia’s World City to cover up for corrupt businessmen’, they might start to worry a bit. Most of all, however, far more respectable if discreet parties also have a strong interest in maintaining current standards of disclosure. Financial services providers rely on access to directors’ details to authenticate identities. Is the Huang who was nailed for fraud a few years back the Wong who walked in the door today? It helps prevent things like… money laundering.

Look at it as another problem left by the Donald Tsang administration. I would rate the chances of a U-turn as higher than, say, the chances of a phone call from Cecil Chao.

With Snake Year – like all years – bound to continue and end as it begins, this is the time for us to get our lives and affairs in order. Home owners will give their properties their annual clean-up and overhaul, hence the Hong Kong government’s recent publicity campaign on window-inspection. Debtors will do whatever it takes to repay their loans. Enemies will try to put the past behind them and become friends. Aging statesman Sir David Akers-Jones will release a pamphlet called The Legislative Council: What’s Gone Wrong to remind us of his unceasing sprightliness*. Come February 10, everything will be set for 12 months of happiness, prosperity and safety.

But not for pro-Beijing businessman and politician Lew (normally rendered ‘Lau’) Mon-hung. He is ending the Year of the Water Dragon under Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation, and on a PR crusade against Chief Executive CY Leung, whom he accuses of lying about having professionals examine his home for illegal structures. Media lacking empathy for the CE – which is to say most of the press – are especially relishing the trellis side of the story. The Standard has all the dirt here, here and here, and suggests that Lew is telling CY “Let’s die together.”

It’s a mess. Lew (or ‘Dr Lew’ to you), an earthy, self-made type with a bit of maverick about him, stuck his neck out by supporting CY when obedient patriots assumed they were supposed to be backing Henry Tang as the new CE. He says he subsequently expected a reward in the form of an Executive Council seat or at least appointment to the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference talking shop, but ended up with CY not answering his calls. He and another director of his Pearl Oriental Oil were arrested and released on bail by the ICAC a few weeks back; the company’s auditors resigned citing ‘professional risk associated with the audit’. Then he starts making the accusations about CY fabricating the story about three experts conducting a trellis hunt – a claim Leung’s buddy Barry Cheung strongly denies.

If you change the order in which the above happened, you get a story where Lew threatens to reveal CY as a liar, CY turns the ICAC on him, and Lew spills the beans in self-defence. But not even the fiercest enemies of the Wolf suggest such a thing. What we have here is a gruff, opportunistic, auditor-repelling operator finding the shit hitting the fan, and his supposed friends don’t want to know, so he loses it. Not that anyone’s paying attention, but the pan-democrats further damage both Lew and themselves by basically siding with him.

Mainland emissaries in the Liaison Office must be wondering what they have done to deserve the job of monitoring and guiding people who, at best, act like teenage schoolgirls massacring each other on Facebook, and at worst threaten civic chaos and mayhem where we’re supposed to have all that lovey-dovey harmony and cooperation. This goes right to the heart of the whole United Front system. The Communist Party is institutionally paranoid. China doesn’t trust most Hongkongers. It would be easier to be nicer, more open and more trusting, and attract support from a broader base of normal and decent local people, but clearly that’s not how the Leninist mind works. In order to build up influence and networks, Beijing sometimes resorts to unreliable and even shady characters, including the erratic, friendless and desperate.

Not a great way for Lew, CY, Beijing et al to start a new year, but an intriguing note on which to declare the weekend open. 

* Probably not available at all good bookstores. The little treatise, which quotes Sir SY Chung** in the second paragraph, notes the plethora of candidates and parties at last September’s election and recommends more, “smaller, but not too small” constituencies, broadened (but presumably not too broadened) functional constituencies and a proportional representation system called the Single Transferable Vote, which is explained in rivetting detail. Having completed that last sentence, you may consider yourself to have read the pamphlet.

** Whaddya mean “Who?”

Criminal sentences in Hong Kong often seem curiously inconsistent.

A few days ago, the Standard reported a court case about a male Lan Kwai Fong bar employee being convicted of raping a drunk woman he had taken from the night-club district to a Wanchai motel. The judge knocked a few months off a five-year sentence in recognition of the guy’s ‘voluntary work record’. The story does not answer a lot of questions. If we adopt the slut-walk, reclaim-the-night, no-means-no principle, we assume that there were or can be no mitigating factors allowing for alcohol, hormones, misunderstandings, mixed messages or things starting off OK but getting out of hand. Not everyone sees this as realistic. But if we do, this is a straight case of predatory maniac attacking totally helpless and vulnerable victim. And the sentence looks way too low.

Then, today, we get the Solar System’s biggest and most horrifying money-laundering shock-horror scandal for the last 100,000 years. Teenage Mainlander school dropout delivery guy comes to the Big Lychee and launders around HK$50 million a day for a couple of years through one account in one of the Bank of China group’s lesser-known members, the Chiyu Banking Corp. (It specializes in serving the Fujianese community, and its name is popular among Internet scammers.) The guy gets over 10 years in prison, and the judge says she should have been allowed to give him more. Maybe he is a thoroughly unpleasant scumbag – we have no idea. But the people whose HK$13 billion were laundered are nowhere to be seen. And Chiyu Banking Corp, which must have picked up a few bucks in handling charges, swears that it complies with all the rules, and so far there is no sign of the regulators or police doubting them.

After my father died a few years ago, I received a cheque containing my modest share of his estate. If I recall, it worked out at some HK$300,000. It came with a copy of the will and some lawyers’ letters, but that wasn’t enough for HSBC. After some form-filling, they demanded proof that my father was genuinely no more. I was about to trouble grieving relatives for a copy of the death certificate, when someone emailed me a pdf of an obituary in a respectable publication praising his achievements in one of the world’s less prominent disciplines. After showing it to his higher-ups, the HSBC Premium person let me deposit the bequest. It took a few weeks, all told.

I should have gone to Chiyu Banking Corp, who no doubt would have understood. And the Mainland dropout delivery guy should perhaps have been a bar-tending rapist. Meanwhile, all those other obscure banks that line our streets seem invariably busy. Indeed, people from the Mainland and elsewhere are buying local apartments every day with suitcases bursting with millions of dollars in cash. And Hong Kong preserves its ‘reputation as a financial centre of integrity’.

In his policy address last week, Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung proposed setting up over a dozen committees/boards/councils to investigate/tackle/whatever a wide range of challenges/issues/stuff. It is probably misleading to lump them all together; some have specific questions to answer (like how to scrap the fishing industry now the fish are all used up), while others have vaguer aims (like how to develop an industry based on unscientific folk quack remedies otherwise known as traditional medicine). The party line on why we need all these bodies is that conflicting interests and the need for due bureaucratic process make it impossible for the administration to ram new policies through Right Now.

Former Central Policy Unit boss Lau Siu-kai comes up with another explanation, or at least a more candid version of the official one: the appointees are intended as a sort of counterweight against the civil servants resisting change or (I’m guessing) trying to clog everything up with red tape to justify their existence. Margaret Thatcher said “consensus is an absence of leadership.” CY’s predecessor Donald Tsang said, in effect, “consensus is something we can’t take any decisions without, and thus the perfect reason to make no decisions.” CY’s definition would be something like, “consensus is something I must try and force bureaucrats and vested interests to accept, but God knows how.”

The new committee everyone is talking about is the Financial Services Development Council. It initially attracted attention because it was packed with Mainlanders (well, OK, a handful of them), mostly princelings (well, one – Levin Zhu, son of estimable reformist former Premier Zhu Rongji). The body’s contingent of Westerners went largely unremarked.

It raised more eyebrows as its Chairman, former-lots-of-things Laura Cha explained the Council’s form and function in a variety of ways, starting with ones that were plain wrong, then moving on to ones that were sort of half-right, before finally coming up with the correct version: it is a public entity, not-for-profit, and will not accept donations or act as a sovereign fund.

As for what it will do, it sounds vague, but we can sort of guess. It will, with the help of its well-connected native-Mandarin talent, lobby Beijing for pathetic favours to give Hong Kong an edge in listing Mainland companies, developing the much-vaunted but rarely seen ‘Yuan business’ and what we might euphemistically call managing Mainland funds. It might do a bit of think-tank-type research, or maybe not. It might go to places like Dubai and urge the people there to partake in the aforementioned highly exciting Yuan business. Except HK Monetary Authority boss Norman Chan – a stalwart of the Donald Tsang-tycoon-bureaucracy nexus that opposed CY Leung – has beaten them to it.

Frankly, the other committees, like the ones on the harbor and land supply, will probably be far more interesting.

Meanwhile, over in sunny Mui Wo, another famous committee, the South Lantau Gwailo Gossip Gestapo, is scratching its head over the identity of the cunning foreigner who (allegedly, according to a banner recently erected on a railing) cheated workers of their ‘blood-sweat money’. Embarrassing, at best. At worst – let’s not think about it…

Click - and you really must - to hear Red Baraat’s ‘Chaal Baby’!

Rabid patriot Lau Nai-keung is back in at least semi-mouth-frothing mode on the subject of the 2017 election. His thesis rests on two assumptions: first, that the pro-democrats are capable of devising a cunning subversive conspiracy; second, that Beijing would allow an election system that would accommodate such a plot. It is hard to say which is less likely.

He foresees the pan-democratic ‘dissidents’ camp agitating, bullying and outwitting conservative forces, and managing to push through liberal democratic reforms. The pro-dems would then use this open election structure to get one of their own elected as an unpatriotic Chief Executive hell-bent on confronting Beijing, thus condemning Hong Kong to chaos as China refuses to appoint the rebel. Lau concludes with a glimmer of hope in the form of a pro-CY Facebook page that transforms itself into a force for good, or something (I think his deadline was approaching).

While this scenario would be undeniably entertaining, it is impossible. The pro-dems will have no say in constitutional reform for the same reason the tycoons, the functional constituencies, the civil servants and CY Leung himself will have no say: Beijing makes the decisions on this. It might look like local elements are lobbying for this or that structure. They might believe they can or even do influence the outcome. Indeed, the pro-dems in particular will play a leading role in legitimizing the farcical public consultation process, by taking it seriously, oblivious of the inescapable fact that a one-party communist state will not accommodate an election whose result is not pre-arranged.

What we will probably get is a guided form of democracy. The current Election Committee will be renamed the Nomination Committee. Being ‘broadly representative’ of the community, it will comprise 50% local United Front/Communist Party members, 25% businessmen with Pinyin names, 15% local tycoons who make an extra-special promise to do what they’re told this time, and 10% pan-dem lawmakers, social workers and troublesome priests. With Beijing’s local Liaison Office working overtime on the phones, this body will ‘nominate’ two people acceptable to the Central People’s Government. It is unlikely that Beijing would try to be clever and put one strong, favoured candidate on the ballot alongside a presumed no-hoper – Hongkongers might vote for the wrong one out of their usual ingratitude and awkwardness. So a real contest will probably take place at this stage, albeit between two similar, patriotic loyalists. Include a free press and rule of law in the mix, and it’s a better deal than Singaporeans get. Universal suffrage with Chinese characteristics. (This all assumes the Party isn’t overthrown following defeat by the Japanese in the Great Diaoyu War of 2016.)

So why is Lau Nei-keung delivering a ‘dissidents engineer dangerous election system’ scare story? Maybe he is paranoid and delusional enough to believe it; after all, it would be much harder to hate a pro-democracy/anti-Beijing movement that is an ineffective joke, and as something of a convert to the patriotic cause from years back, the hatred seems important to him. Alternatively, this may be the start of a public opinion offensive designed to make us think the consultation process is authentic, and/or the pan-democrats’ proposals will represent a threat.

Onto far more serious matters…

‘Headline of the day‘  goes to CBS.

‘Mystery of the month’ goes to North Dakota, home of what looks like a huge city that shows up on satellite photos at night but oddly isn’t there during the day. Pretty easy to spot cities on this photo… 

Moving east-northeast from Chicago (‘C’ in the middle) you cross Detroit, Toronto and Montreal; head south from there and you hit the DC-Philly-NYC-Boston corridor. Go northwest from Chicago and you cross what I guess is Twin Cities, and then that question mark. A big city out in the middle of North Dakota, where the biggest conurbation would fit into a corner of Lamma. One clue is that, unlike the other metro-regions, this blob of lights has no core. The answer is here.

Lastly, I declare that the bottom of the cooperation barrel has truly, finally been scraped, now Hong Kong Public Libraries have signed some sort of mutual-backscratching ‘cultural exchange’ agreement with something called the Bavaria State Library, repository of many famous works on lederhosen, beer-hall putsches and the magnificent, toffee-making Crown Prince Ludwig, plus all those yodeling chocolate cuckoo clocks…