Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Hong Kong government might penalize property developers who hoard newly built apartments in the expectation that prices will continue to rise. At least, that’s what Chief Executive CY Leung says (he actually hints that the real estate industry has a social responsibility to ensure a ‘timely’ supply of homes). REDA, the property cartel’s lobby, has the nerve to whine that this would ‘infringe the principle of a free-market economy’. (They said the same about the special stamp duty on non-residents’ apartment purchases. These are also the same scumbags who claimed that a regulation requiring them to advertise true rather than inflated apartment sizes would go against the Basic Law’s constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.) I have a lot of time for free-market economics, but my most cherished principle is that if the property tycoons hate something it must be good, so I would say: go for an anti-hoarding tax.

Reasons it won’t happen are numerous. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing you would promise to consider if you are trying to mollify critics who expected tougher action on housing prices in last week’s policy address. The number of extra apartments this policy could open up is in the few-thousands range, which might soften prices slightly, but hardly significantly. Also, it would be a far more radical move than it initially sounds. Drip-feeding (and, we can be sure, coordinated) supply of units onto the market, with pro-tycoon newspapers helpfully reporting apparent rushes of buyers, is one of the pillars of developers’ margins. And, as cynics will note with glee, one of the biggest hoarders of unsold apartments is Hang Lung, run by the slightly wacky Ronnie Chan, who is one of the few tycoons to back CY rather than Henry Tang when the former’s bid for CE looked no more than a grandiose publicity stunt. Still, you can’t help but detect a hint of nervousness when a solidly pro-tycoon editorial voice says “The so-called vacancy tax is far-fetched, and won’t work. Many people are saying that.”

A far more effective – and hugely radical – measure would be to penalize private investors’ empty units. The exact number of these seems to be a bit of a mystery, with some people saying 240,000 and others saying more like 100,000. Administratively, it sounds like a nightmare; how do authorities know whether an apartment is empty? Morally, it comes down to whether property rights apply to people who hoard necessities of life that fellow-citizens need. The best argument, reinforced by a couple of recent hikes through Hong Kong’s countryside, is probably environmental. Why cover more land (or coastal waters) with concrete to duplicate existing but unused infrastructure? (Unless the alternative is to continue the current trend of dedicating countryside to canines, in which case, pave it over.)

Property bulls will dismiss Hong Kong’s 13.6-times-income affordability ratio as misleading ‘because half the population live in public housing’. But that’s putting the cart before the horse; property is too expensive for half the population to buy. In Manhattan, this sort of trend is leading to the banishment of the (lower- and middle-) middle class. In Hong Kong, we don’t have a New Jersey next door to move to. As it stands, the housing situation almost looks designed to bar families from becoming middle class and even force some of the younger generation back down the economic ladder.

Articulating it this way would be a great way to prepare the ground for the inevitable market crash. It seems pretty clear that CY and his team see this coming and don’t want to take any blame. If they had a sense of adventure, they would talk the market down now. They should announce plainly that anyone buying a flat in City One Shatin for over HK$10,000 a square foot is stupid and shouldn’t waste time crying about it when they end up in negative equity. Furthermore, they should publish a formula based on current and estimated incomes and financing costs and other factors to produce official target affordability ratios for households in different income groups. Pledge to deliver that (say, it might work out at HK$5,000 psf in City One) through suspending land premiums, building ‘artificial islands’ or whatever it takes in the years to come – and watch as prices halve and much of the problem solves itself.

CY Leung also pledges, among all this, to boost home sizes. While we’re waiting for that, meet the tiny-house people.

The Apple iPhone is no longer cool, and the company’s share price has dropped. It is no coincidence that this happens at the precise moment my employer takes my trusty old Blackberry from me and replaces it with a shiny black wedge of iPhone 5. Since I hate phones and phoning, I have never had a personal mobile, so whatever the company gives me is what I (barely) use.

My initial reaction: the Blackberry is for adults and the iPhone is for children. Still, after a few days, and fixing things so my emails are forwarded to it, I am growing a bit more accustomed to the toy.

Challenge number one, as you would expect for an item dedicated to corporate use, was transferring a load of MP3s onto the beast. Unlike a Blackberry, which you can plug into a PC and use as an external drive, the iPhone deliberately makes this difficult. You have to download the iTunes music player onto your PC, and even then you can’t just copy files, you have to ‘sync’ (don’t ask). I created a specific playlist and managed to transfer it onto the phone, but it was partly by accident and I don’t know if I could repeat the process. My one attempt at downloading an app failed because I lack some sort of Apple ID password; my attempt to get one failed, though I didn’t try very hard. I think the idea is to get you to see the PC as a subsidiary component of the iPhone rather than the (more practical) other way round, or just make you source all your software needs from Apple’s patch of ‘cloud’.

These constraints are obviously designed to ensure that Steve Jobs’ estate goes on sucking in revenue for eternity. Presumably if you cooperate and sign up to Apple this and Apple that, you can revel in all the music and fun programs you want, but it punishes you for stubbornly refusing to kowtow. All of which makes me wonder: why do so many people line up for nights to buy these things? (Or why did they until last week?)

Some people apparently admire its beauty. I’ve been told I need to buy a case, but there is a school of thought that the contraption is too beautiful to cover up. Mine will go naked for the simple reason I can’t be bothered.

It goes without saying that the Blackberry keyboard was faster, but improvements that make things worse are what progress is all about.

There are some good features. Rumours that what I’ll call ‘unofficially acquired’ music wouldn’t work on the thing are unfounded. Also, the camera is OK. I’m not sure how it does it, but you can take a 270-degree panoramic photo, and if the subject – long-suffering helper, in this case – runs behind you at the right time, you can get the same person in a picture twice…

Perhaps best of all, the web browser is 100 times better than the clunky Blackberry one, and you can do things like watch YouTube while crossing the street. This is probably the clincher. 

On balance, this is a cynical product that attempts to trap deluded consumers in a monopoly by mesmerizing them with hyped-up ‘style’ (who cares how thin it is?) and some amusing features, a few of which might actually be borderline useful (like the compass for when you exit an unfamiliar MTR station). The boss should have gone with Samsung, perhaps. But it costs me nothing, so I can’t really complain.

One other drawback: if you’re not discreet, you look like one of these idiots you see all over the place constantly sweeping little shiny slabs’ screens with their fingers.

I will now try to download an app that declares the weekend open.

The best part of 20 years ago, I was a minion sitting in a Hong Kong conglomerate’s boardroom with a picture of the Queen on the wall, as a senior corporate executive lamented that the government was unlikely to act decisively on a major policy issue that happened to affect the company’s business. The Chairman sneered and said, “Well, what do you expect from an administration that can’t even put a tunnel toll up?”

I have just heard a hint that Chief Executive CY Leung might announce in his policy address (starting 11.00am) that he will somehow attempt a long-overdue change to the cross-harbour tunnels’ toll structures. The current arrangement sucks thousands of vehicles through the congested and polluted downtown area because the cost of using that tunnel hasn’t changed since the 1990s; meanwhile, the two outer tunnels sit relatively unused. My reaction was that if CY pulls this off, he should get a Nobel Prize. The problem is legislators: those from functional constituencies support vested interests like transport and will oppose a fee hike, while the ever-deluded pro-democrats think higher tolls will hurt some imaginary little guy – and to hell with kids’ lungs.

Chances are that if the tunnel tolls are mentioned at all, it will only be as part of some far bigger planned pollution strategy. But it is interesting that we are suddenly reminded at this time of one relatively minor example of Hong Kong’s myriad impossible-to-implement-but-blindingly-obvious solutions to horrible problems. In theory, CY has a chance today to say ‘Change starts now’, and get people to believe it. But in practice, he is condemned to work within the half-democratic-half-authoritarian government structure bequeathed by history and almost designed to make sure nothing gets done.

Even with the advantage of a (almost) five-year term to play with, vaguely bold visions could go wrong. He has to improve housing availability, but you can see what’s going to happen here: just as we get to boost the supply of new units, US interest rates go up, Southern Europe defaults, the Chinese financial system explodes, and CY wakes up one morning and finds that he’s ‘caused’ a humungous property crash, and all the idiots who had bought HK$12,000-per-sq-ft apartments next to Tseung Kwan O landfill are up to their ears in negative equity and leaping off the roof with their kids. Last time, the blame attached itself to Tung Chee-hwa, but no such luck now.

As the press sit waiting with their pencils and pads, and Long Hair turns up with his cage of snakes or whatever props he will employ this year, we peruse a page in the Standard that often brings out a smile. Not because it has Nury Vittachi’s no-doubt side-splitting work. Not because it has the nauseating shoe-shining of the Fame and Fortune column. No – because of the daily Chinese character. During a smoggy season when we could use just a brief bit of early morning rain to rinse the air, isn’t it amusing to know that yu3 fen3, or ‘tiny drizzle’, literally means rain-powder?

Sesame Street today was brought to you by the verb shang4 fen3 – ‘to powder a dumpling’.

Hong Kong’s judges do their annual whatever-it-is where they all sit in their wigs and robes and listen to a government minister approved by the Chinese Communist Party pledge his undying commitment to judicial independence. China’s own top judge has just said much the same thing, but of course no-one seriously believes a one-party state is compatible with ‘Western-style’ separation of powers. Indeed the CCP specifically rejects such a system.

Hong Kong’s virtual independent court system, with a political veto held in reserve for Beijing via National People’s Congress ‘interpretation’, is as autonomous as you can get under the current regime. Idealists like to dream that the Big Lychee could serve as a model for the introduction of semi-rule of law on the Mainland, but a brief history of Chinese law suggests that the culture of governance up there simply cannot adapt to such an alien approach. As with the banking system, pollution and corruption, on the one hand China will collapse if it doesn’t change, but on the other hand it can’t and won’t change – and what’s the point of worrying our pretty heads about it?

The South China Morning Post gets down to the nitty-gritty, namely wigs…

The tiresome conflict between barristers and solicitors turns into abject childishness. To casual observers, barristers look like the sexy bit of the English-style legal profession, swishing around and dazzling juries with their oratorical skills in court, while solicitors do all the boring Xeroxing and stuff for people’s mortgages. Look deeper, however, and it’s not quite like that. The decrepit old has-been begging for drinks with a Southeast Asian floozy draped over him in a flea-ridden Wanchai pub is a barrister. The smart and witty woman in designer business attire with a Mercedes and three apartments is a solicitor. Obviously, there are exceptions, but this is my experience.

You wouldn’t have thought that people would be jealous of the right to wear one of these peculiar-looking wigs. The judges’ ones look more like open-faced balaclavas. According to my history teacher many years ago, this style became fashionable in 17-18th Century Europe when aristocrats started to suffer hair-loss as a result of syphilis, which had spread from the New World. Barristers’ wigs have a more crew-cut look; as we shall see, this is highly significant.

My first thought is that the solicitors are being a bit pathetic in wanting to wear wigs in court lest jurors regard them as less important than barristers. Then I read Bar boss Ramanathan’s jeering about how the solicitors are being insecure, and it occurs to me that maybe the solicitors have a point. Who is being insecure here? A self-confident, laid-back barrister would say to a solicitor adversary, “Sure, wear anything you want.” At best, the barristers are suffering sumptuary law syndrome, where one class of infantile inadequates forbids another from wearing the same clothing, to make themselves feel important. At worst, barristers suspect the solicitors are correct in thinking that jurors will favour the arguments emanating from beneath the grimy rolls of grey horsehair.

My solution of Solomon-like wisdom and fairness is this: either all advocates in a court must agree to wear identical (or no) headgear, or they must all conceal the tops and sides of their heads with Park N Shop plastic bags. Simple. 

Click to see Tony Hancock go through all this long before most of us were even born!

An admission: I sometimes find the more radical demands by militant members of exotic sub-categories of ‘LGBT’ a bit irritating. Men who dress as women insisting that we all pretend they’re not men, for example – even if they’re not quite as wearisome as the Democratic Party’s Emily Lau. Mostly, though, we’re all pretty laid back about sexual orientation these days, probably accepting that, like left-handedness, such variations are part of mother nature’s mysterious way. Still, the first time I heard demands for gay marriage, maybe some 15-20 years ago, I couldn’t help thinking: they must be kidding. The concept was, to use an overworked phrase, counter-intuitive.

An unexpectedly big protest against gay marriage and adoption took place in France over the weekend. UK Conservative Party proposals to back full gay marriage have run into a similar sort of reaction from members and activists and outsiders. The ‘anti’ movement in the US is more religiously inspired, but I would guess there are feelings of unease among secular and otherwise moderate people there too. Some of the French protestors manage to present a philosophical objection on grounds of logic or semantics; why do we or the law have separate words for man/father and woman/mother? Among the more empirical-minded Anglos, it is perhaps a gut version of the same feeling: people should be free to be gay and have civil unions and all that, but not to twist everyone else’s reality to their own minority wishes.

That said, opinion surveys suggest that younger people find it easier to get their heads around same-sex marital and family institutions, and the political trend seems fairly steady in that direction. My own acceptance of same-sex marriage/parenthood is more of a shrug. Marriage can be plot to make women sacrifice their aspirations in order to enable a man have both a successful career and wonderful offspring. Or it can be a scam whereby a guy has to start again from scratch after a woman legally takes his kids, home and savings from him. You want to run such risks? Be my guest, whoever you are, with whoever you want. Also, I know of one same-sex couple in Hong Kong bringing up kids in a massively superior environment than that offered by the Mainland orphanage they came from, and there must be many such examples.

Most of all, however, I really can’t stand the sort of people who oppose gay marriage on religious/moral grounds. Which brings us to Hong Kong’s rally yesterday – not against gay marriage, not against gay equality of any sort, but against a public consultation on gay equality.

It was a crowd of fundamentalist Christians, including the inevitable Society for Truth and Light. Anticipating that even in Hong Kong’s oh-so-conservative, we-are-Chinese society, the tide of time is turning against them, the Christians are eschewing homophobia in favour of the language of liberty and pluralism. Even the demonstration was called a prayer concert for ‘inclusive love’. And the pastor interviewed on RTHK Radio 3 claimed that it was all about protecting freedom of speech. (He made this claim twice, and the interviewer incredibly failed to follow it up, which makes me wonder whether RTHK is among the government departments that have been infiltrated by the fundamentalists.)

Anything these fundamentalists oppose is probably worth supporting. The word is that Chief Executive CY Leung will broach the possibility of a public consultation on equal rights for sexual minorities in his policy address on Wednesday. Such an exercise is a well-established way to sink a proposal, but it would be fascinating to see how the civil servants would rig this one – through leading questions and spurious concerns about a lack of consensus – without making Hong Kong look idiotic. And this is a subject overseas media would pick up on. Chances are that with housing, air pollution and poverty on the administration’s plate, not even a consultation will happen. Which is a pity, if only to see the Biblical literalists getting worked up.

My day officially begins, as it so often does, with the first refreshing sip of hot, black, water-flavoured liquid at Pacific Coffee. Customers are so few this early in the morning that they are outnumbered by staff. My coat and bag occupy the seat next to me. We all know what that means: go away and sit somewhere else. It is a simple and universally understood signal from the human in the adjacent chair that at this hour of the day a little personal space is appreciated. Sadly, a certain sort of intensely imperceptive inadequate does not seem to get it.

Typically, they start by hovering. They sidle up and survey all the unoccupied seats available. They hover some more, and maybe turn around 360 degrees – maybe twice – rather like that stupid thing dogs do before they lie down. Then, with a dozen empty spots to choose from, they point at my coat and bag and ask some dimwitted question about whether someone is sitting there. I say ‘intensely imperceptive’ because not only do they ask, but they fail to be affected by the withering look I give them, starting with a blast of gamma rays straight into their eyes, followed by a slow and disbelieving sweep of the rest of their pitiful form. On a charitable day, I move my things with what must be visible incomprehension and disdain, verging on pity, that someone could be so cretinously gauche.

The late-20s marketing floozy who occasionally makes me go through all this often decides at this point to go back to the counter to collect her order, and then… goes and sits somewhere else anyway, where she fiddles with her iPhone. Do the gamma rays take that long to sink in? Is this her way of trying to pick me up? Is she mentally diseased? Most peculiar.

The fresh-faced gwailo who commits this most egregious of faux pas is easier to read. He is new in Hong Kong and doesn’t understand the sacred importance of a few feet of distance from Les Autres. He feels exposed and lonely, and wants to be near a white man in case the natives turn out to be cannibals. (Also, he probably has hemorrhoids. This recurring nightmare of modern Hong Kong life takes place on the big soft easy chairs rather than the slightly firmer smaller ones. Since I only perch alertly, rather than recline like some idle slob, it makes little difference which sort I sit on, and this trial might not take place so often if I sat elsewhere – but, yes, it’s the principle.)

Today, a new example of these misfits appears, and he truly outshines his pitiful peers. From his manner of hovering, I instantly sense something a bit creepy. He is a slightly spotty 30-something Stanley from the mailroom who has worked his way up to assistant sales manager. After the idiotic and tiresome request, I move my things laboriously, surely leaving him in no doubt that he is causing a degree of annoyance that only the most socially inept could manage, but he is impervious. After sitting in his newly sequestered chair, he has to find somewhere on the little round shared table to put his drink and croissant. He has not thought this through. He then starts tentatively rearranging my newspapers and coffee. Big mistake.

Many right-thinking citizens would simply strangle him, but I am classier than that. I make the sort of tutting sound normally reserved for dull-witted children, and I glare. Then, muttering an appeal to the almighty, I gather up my paper and drink and nod to a row of 10 empty seats and five empty tables a few yards away.

“If I go and sit over there, are you going to follow me and start moving all my stuff around?” This delivered more in the tone of “Move one step in that direction, and I chop up your entrails with a meat cleaver and feed the bits to pigs.”

I don’t wait for any blinking, spluttering or head-shaking. But after I complete my removal and arrange my belongings to form a suitable buffer zone, I see him bow his head, make a sign of the cross, and pray. Then he tucks in to his breakfast.

The babies thrown from rooftops, the passers-by frenziedly chopped in wet markets, the late-night defenestration of furniture and spouses, the impulsive branding of maids with irons. This is how it all starts – inconsiderate and obtuse strangers create unceasing, niggling irritations, slowly piling on the frustration and pressure, before eventually sending normal, decent people insane. Luckily, I can now declare the weekend open with it all off my chest.

The front page is largely fictitious today. Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung ‘survives impeachment bid’, we are told. Ever since the procedure was invented in Medieval England, impeachment has largely been a political rather than legal weapon. The pro-democrats trying to get CY beheaded in the town square are no doubt inspired by the example of US President Bill Clinton, who was charged with perjury in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Substitute a car port roof for a vivacious and curvy intern, and a trellis for a cigar, and you’ve sort of pretty much got the case against CY. Clinton was found not guilty by the Senate, which acts as the court.

So it is a grand (and some would say archaic) gesture, which means that legislators and their supporters trying to impeach a leading public office-holder are in danger of coming across as pompous, pretentious, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing and/or boorish. In the UK, various extremely moral, ethical and – indeed – unimpeachable heroes of truth and justice went to some lengths to impeach Prime Minister Tony Blair for the war on Saddam Hussein; while the attempt was doomed, the feeling of being involved in such a campaign – and, dare we say, all the publicity and adoring support from trendy people – were better than sex. And this maybe helps explain why Hong Kong’s pro-democrats were jubilantly pronouncing their motion a victory yesterday even while agreeing with anyone pointing out that it was going to fail.

The votes that ‘negatived’ the motion came from the functional constituencies, which does at least give the pan-dems some authentic moral high ground. The story has also attracted a bit of attention overseas, where it could actually enhance the Big Lychee’s image as a modern Western-style democracy, because otherwise those Hongkongers wouldn’t have impeachments there would they? (Or have so much freedom.) I don’t suppose it has been widely reported across the border, though the local edition of China Daily can’t resist the opportunity to put the word ‘fizzles’ in a headline. To Mainland tourists, it must be like finding the Queen’s head on dollar coin: I’ve a feeling we’re not in Guizhou any more.  Meanwhile, Hong Kong continues to await the pro-dems’ proposed solutions to air pollution and housing prices with interest.

The other big item on the front page is an ad. ‘Recover your youth’, it says, ‘with 1,000 glasses of red wine’. To my amazement, the substance in the magic capsules actually exists, even though the word ‘resveratrol’ has ‘dreamed up by marketing department’ written all over it. Needless to say, the claims are garbage, and while red grape skins (or wine) may indeed contain some desirable nutrients, there are far cheaper and more enjoyable ways of obtaining them, which hardly need spelling out. The Standard carries quite a few ads for junk and semi-junk medicine/cosmetic products, and I would be intrigued to know which demographic the marketers are targeting (or think they’re targeting).

For people finding it hard to pin down how they feel about it all, and for amateur linguists and admirers of graphic representation of information, something factual: emotions for which there are no English words.

Wavers of colonial Hong Kong flags, nostalgic for a simpler, happier time before buffoons like Tung Chee-hwa and Donald Tsang started to wreck the city, dance in the streets with joy.  After years of alienation, disruption and anxiety brought on by incessant and unfathomable integration, partnership and cooperation, the Big Lychee experiences a day of plain good old-fashioned, down-home mayhem, just like we used to have.

On both sides of the harbour, deranged wretches wreak their respective versions of havoc. A mother and child in leafy, prosperous, up-30%-in-12-months Taikoo Shing die in one of the city’s most traditional forms of tragedy, the murder-suicide. In Kowloon, the pandemonium is more avant-garde. A man snatches a random baby from a hospital in order (for rather complex reasons) to obtain a saliva sample, and it later transpires that the baby may be that of a (separate) man’s ‘second wife’, a detail that is fascinating because – not despite – of its virtual irrelevance.

In the US, campaigners are demanding better control of guns. But there are 100 million or 200 million of the things, so some perceptive observers are pondering better control of the mentally ill – who are the ones who open fire in schools and cinemas. We have to wonder what Hong Kong, with pitiful psychiatric provision and a default culture of bottling things up to extreme lengths, would be like if half the households had a firearm. The Standard would be twice today’s size.

Back in the days when tycoons were heroes and no-one had ever heard of Yuan business, the Big Lychee had a dear and venerable tradition of bizarre corporate hanky-panky. And this too makes a comeback.

Shares in Agile Property Holdings (whaddya mean, never heard of ‘em?) plunge as its big boss appears in court. But it’s not just ‘appears in court’. It’s ‘appears in court on two counts of indecent assault’. But wait! There’s more! There’s karaoke. But that goes without saying.

And then, to cap it all, we have the inappropriate tacky stock market listing. Was it Club Bboss or Club Volvo? One of them, a couple of decades back, considered going public. Some people were amused, while others squirmed with embarrassment at the idea of a bordello installing itself alongside all those upstanding constituents of the Hang Seng Index.

Today’s plan for a distasteful initial public offering is not so much from the whoring as the pimping side. The company is called EK Immigration Consulting. It arranges customers for such ladies of the night as Canada, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Canada, who will sell themselves for money in the guise of attracting investment or something mysterious called ‘talent’.

Speaking of investment, I wouldn’t have thought this company would be a great addition to anyone’s portfolio. I’d be interested to see what the prospectus has to say about some pretty basic political policy risk. When the number of Mandarin-speaking, money-laundering ex-officials reaches, say, 20% of the Canadian/Oz/NZ populations, voters may decide that – wide open spaces or not – enough’s enough, and elect governments that pull the plug on passports-for-cash deals. And shares in EK Immigration Consulting will drop even faster than those in Agile Property Holdings. Sounds like the sort of thing that happened in old times. The reminiscing will no doubt end tomorrow.

“A police officer who believes in black magic has been arrested on suspicion of smuggling dead human fetuses” into Hong Kong. The South China Morning Post tells us his name: Barry Ma, or Constable Voodoo to his customers, who apparently pay some HK$130,000 for the things. Lesser cops would rack up huge gambling debts. It makes a change from speculating in car parking spaces.

Since Barry apparently adheres to the dark arts himself, we must ask what role sorcery plays in the course of his duties. Specifically, can he raise demons and poltergeists to get to grips with the illegal parking problem in our downtown areas? If all the drivers of huge, black, double-parked, eight-seat Alphards were suddenly possessed and drove into the harbour babbling in strange tongues with their heads spinning round, I could foresee a Bronze Bauhinia Star in it for him, rather than the red-faced and humourless disciplinary panel that presumably awaits him.

The SCMP delves into even weirder territory with a report that Chinese interests might buy the Financial Times. In all fairness, the SCMP writer almost immediately refutes his own suggestion by saying that such a deal is extremely unlikely. He assumes that the only potential Chinese buyer would be a (state-owned) media group. But why not a cash-rich private-sector entity from, say, the Internet, property or tech sectors? As Hong Kong (and the SCMP) knows well, there is a certain type of businessman who can’t resist the cachet and supposed political influence that goes with media ownership. It would be like having a huge wine collection, plus a Lear jet, plus a load of polo ponies all together – even if content-wise the paper would collapse immediately. Maybe an Indian conglomerate like Tata would have a better chance of rescuing the publication. Or Bloomberg after all.

The SCMP sees Nanfang, or Southern, media group as the most likely Mainland buyer. As it happens, the company is rather busy right now, caught up between heavy-handed censors and a range of protesting Southern Weekly staff, former staff, academics, netizens and even school students. The propaganda officials have clearly been caught on the back foot (background and updates here; pictures of the crowds in Guangzhou here.)

Hurt-sounding official commentaries are pleading for understanding about the realities of the limits of media freedom in China. Others are hinting that hostile external forces are somehow responsible – the Communist Party’s usual ‘if all else fails’ explanation for screw-ups. (The story is a gift to the Falung Gong, Al-Jazeera and all the other usual hostile forces, but that’s not the same thing.)

If this doesn’t die down of its own accord (they are desperately hosing down little online fires), there are some interesting scenarios. One is that Guangdong leaders pull off one of their Wukan-style conciliatory tricks and satisfy the protestors by essentially admitting official error. That means sacrificing some censors and a bit of face, and inviting future anti-censor protests, but keeps alive the claim that the new regime in Beijing is serious about reform. Another is that the Party reverts to standard killing-chickens-scaring-monkeys form and clamps down with arrests and full-on screeching righteous editorials about the superiority of the Chinese model. That snuffs the problem out, but sends everyone the message that, after all the song and dance, Xi Jinping simply equals another 10 years of the progressively choking grip on debate seen under Hu/Wen – a depressing way to start a new administration. You can’t blame them for trying to muddle through.

Acquisition of the Financial Times doesn’t really fit in this picture. As with so many of China’s ‘contradictions’, there is no apparent way out – unless maybe Constable Barry can cast a special Hong Kong Police demonic spell.