Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Henderson Land launches the most expensive residential development in Kowloon City, it says here. The apartments on sale range in size from 286 to 433 square feet. Agoraphobics who fear getting lost in such expanses will be relieved to learn that these are the gross sizes, which include bits of communally owned corridors, stairwells and lobbies. The actual living spaces in these units are a far cozier 182 to 282 square feet. The prices are HK$3.95-6.28 million.

The ‘per square foot’ scam, which allowed developers to lie about the size of homes, is finally coming to an end, and Hong Kong must adjust to a new method of pricing flats. Thus, the average price per square foot in this Midget Mansions project would formerly have been advertised as HK$14,079, but is now HK$22,032.

Henderson Land’s boss is 84-year-old Dr the Hon Lee Shau-kee, whose number-one son procured three baby boys from a surrogate mother to ensure the continuation of his virtuous line, and presumably sweep the old man’s grave for decades to come so his ghost is at peace and doesn’t come back to trouble us. Another of Lee’s claims to fame was the infamous apartment on the ‘88th floor’ of a 46-storey tower.

Now, as if the old guy isn’t pushing HK$22,000-psf shoeboxes in Kowloon City, he pops up on the front pages proposing HK$1 million homes on agricultural land he has been sitting on for decades in the New Territories. (He calls them 300-square-foot; maybe, like Germans and Italians of his age who still think in Deutschmarks and Lira, he is thinking gross area – but who knows?) The Standard calls him a ‘feisty billionaire’, while the less charitable might prefer ‘wily old goat’. Either way, it is hard to believe that his suggestion springs solely or primarily from concerns for the well-being of the people of Hong Kong, let alone a specific urge to make homes affordable. (That said, it must be obvious to these tycoons that squeezing more and more local people out of the property market is hardly a sustainable model, and at some stage they would need to focus on sales volume rather than margins.)

Lee is presumably hoping to unlock the value of this old farmland at long last out of self-interest. As a supporter of failed CE candidate Henry Tang, he also probably relishes putting CY Leung in an awkward spot. But that doesn’t mean million-dollar homes are a bad idea. There are unanswered questions. How can the low price be reconciled with current construction costs, recently pushed up by, among other things, former Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s infrastructure mega-projects? What about the cost of roads, sewerage and other civic amenities?

Whatever his motives, Lee is doing everyone a favour by highlighting the glaring contradiction underlying Hong Kong’s interminable housing problem. One the one hand, government wants homes to be affordable; on the other hand, government insists on slapping a huge de-facto sales tax on homes. If (as the academic in the article suggests) purchasers didn’t have to pay the land premium until they sold these cheap homes, the concept is basically a sort of Home Ownership Scheme. In theory, all residential land in the city could be treated this way. Such a system (pay when you sell) would bear a slight resemblance to a capital gains tax on real estate. That’s hardly the most elegant alternative to the high land-price policy, but it’s still a more radical idea than anyone else has come up with lately. Even if it does come from the boss of Henderson Land.

The first week of 2013 hints at a year of wackiness to come: Starbucks metastasizes its way into Vietnam; Colorado (possibly) buys marijuana from vending machines; Mainlanders hoover up baby milk powder everywhere from Australia, to the UK, to plucky little Tai Po; and Beijing’s foreign policymakers conclude that Western moves to make the Middle Kingdom part of the global club are aimed at ‘retarding and undermining China’s power’.

Hong Kong’s partially dethroned tycoon/bureaucrat establishment starts the new year with a degree of chutzpah bordering on hubris.

Failed Chief Executive candidate Henry Tang bounds back into the public eye to whine about victor CY Leung being the pot calling the kettle black over illegal structures. The spoilt rich kid was due to have the Big Lychee’s top office handed to him on a plate – to the extent he barely deigned to bother with the make-believe campaigning that the quasi-election called for – and still can’t come to terms with the (admittedly still barely explicable) fact that he and his plutocrat buddies lost. As for any equivalence between the pair’s respective illegal structures: CY’s are irregular add-ons like yours and mine, while Henry’s massive basement possibly involves a criminal fraudulent planning application. So overbearing is the man’s sense of entitlement that he seems to believe he is in a position of moral superiority. We can only hope the gods are looking on. In all fairness, he still has his old sense of humour, mischievously stirring things up for his pro-Communist nemesis by telling us he can’t wait for democracy.

Eagle-eyed news junkies will have noticed that Henry’s old Liberal Party buddies have been popping up rather a lot in recent days. Selina Chow, leggy ex-newsreader/legislator/tourism czar, appears from nowhere to carp about the dreadful CY Leung. Then the ever-odious James Tien does the same. Now James announces his party’s call for a two-year freeze on unemployment benefits for the able-bodied. With jobs easy to get and welfare payments low, I doubt there is much of a problem with couch potatoes on the dole, but that’s not the point. The point is what the Liberal Party says about such people developing ‘psychological inertia and long-term reliance’.

By way of taking a deep breath and counting to ten lest I hit someone, a bit of background. The Tiens (and the Tangs) came to Hong Kong from Shanghai to flee the Communists. The British, relieved to have some fellow non-Cantonese turning up, greeted the newcomers with the ultimate licences to print money: textiles quotas. They didn’t even need to own or run garment factories; they just sold the precious rights to export clothing to Western markets to other people who did all the work. That’s how Henry’s and James’s dads became billionaires. As with the property tycoons who succeeded them in the plutocratic hierarchy in the 70s, this was wealth – a major welfare handout – given them on a plate, with zero entrepreneurism or innovation required. A chimpanzee could have done it. But a chimp would be smart enough to keep its thoughts on ‘psychological inertia and long-term reliance’ to itself.

Why have these slimy nematodes suddenly slithered into the limelight? Presumably, they see CY Leung’s problems and smell blood. To the extent they are being waaay too premature here, it’s because they are waaay too dimwitted to realize it. One, probably the, main reason for their eagerness is that the pro-democrats have essentially sided with them. Ex-Chief Secretary Anson Chan senses that this strategy is going nowhere, but for the mainstream pan-dems it is an inadvertent meeting of rather unimpressive minds: the psychological inertia of heirs to textiles fortunes and the pro-dems’ long-term reliance on permanent and automatic opposition to the government.

I declare the last of a rapid succession of weekends, mid-week weekends and semi-weekends open with a cunning plan to register my pan-dem-style, long-term reliance on disliking Michael Jackson: downloading a pirated version of his Thriller album, thus denying his estate the royalties, then – without listening to it – deleting it and dumping it in the trash folder of my PC.

When Hong Kong’s new government under Chief Executive CY Leung introduced special stamp duty measures to keep hot Mainland money out of the property market, the Real Estate Developers Association wailed that the move would “damage our reputation as one of the freest economies in the world.” It is hard to believe that the property cartel had suddenly acquired a deep concern for the city’s image. Rather, a new refuge for scoundrels opened for business.

Fears for the Big Lychee’s international standing are not new. But with a new, at least semi-reformist, administration in place, vested interests and opponents are looking for weapons, and warnings of reputational damage will do nicely.

It is a sort of moral blackmail, and it seems to be cropping up on an almost daily basis. Today’s is from whatever parasites want to keep thousands of families in subhuman housing conditions in order to build a private (ie, for rich overseas folk) university. Like the wretched sports stadium in Kai Tak – which CY has shamefully acceded to – this is a vanity/giveaway project left over from the Donald Tsang era. The proposed site could accommodate some 10,000 public housing units. Changing the plan now would, of course, ruin Hong Kong’s “image as a centre of excellence for education,” whatever that is.

In most cases, the supposed reputation at risk is a figment of local imaginations. But even if our ‘reputation as a blah-blah’ is real – hard-earned, even – does it outweigh the local community’s needs? Policymakers should be putting the onus on their opponents to prove it. Instead, in true inoffensive, harmonious fashion, they will no doubt be cowed into submission. Business constituencies, sectoral lobbies, opportunistic politicians and bureaucratic interests will all probably help in the scaremongering. (Let’s leave aside how a decades-old rigged system of land hoarding and collusion with a property cartel can produce a civic reputation for anything positive.)

As every newspaper editorial reminds us, a policy address is just a couple of weeks away, and CY has his golden opportunity to seize the initiative with high-profile, populist, and necessarily short-term, moves. In today’s China Daily, academic Victor Fung Keung discusses ways to find at least interim shelter for dwellers of subdivided apartments. He favours the conversion of old factory buildings. This is not as easy as it sounds because most such blocks are not sitting empty but are already used for various purposes – not least, er, subdivided apartments. As he points out, bureaucrats so far are dragging their feet. There are fun alternatives, for those who can get their minds round them. Shipping containers anyone? Seriously. Short/medium term housing like this can go almost anywhere, from the Central reclamation to Kai Tak.

Either way, temporary relief for micro-slum dwellers will attract a thousand possible objections. Current planning/zoning/etc regulations bend over backwards to stop people from having a home. Apartments must have windows on three sides (obviously not possible in an old factory). Residential neighbourhoods must have specific levels of school, hospital, market and transport facilities (obviously not do-able for vacant waterfront reclamations).

The most radical fix to housing – and an environmentally friendly one – is to open up the 200,000 or whatever empty apartments we have in this city. Obviously, there are some administrative and other problems here, but the real anguish would be over principle. In this case, private property rights. If the world’s rice harvest failed, and speculators had bought up all Hong Kong’s grain inventory and stashed it away to wait for prices to rise, would the government listen to voices saying “don’t damage Hong Kong’s reputation for free markets,” or would they force the supply onto the market?

CY’s short-term answer to getting people out of the city’s worst housing will probably fall short of fast-tracked factory conversions, let alone wackier and more radical options. The key questions are: how far short, and how much the blame will lie with spurious objections from vested interests and blind opposition? His main chance to win over the population (he has a 49% approval rating to lose) could actually rest on it.

The New York Times seems to be getting heavy on Hong Kong colonial nostalgia. A couple of weeks ago, one of its columnists offered this moving tale…

THE other day I went into a family-run noodle shop and when I paid, I handed over a colonial-era one-dollar coin with the British queen’s head. I instantly felt a pang of regret.

“Sorry, could I swap it? I want to save the one with the queen’s head,” I explained…

In its report on yesterday’s pro- and (mostly) anti-government marches, the paper encounters a carrier of the blue ‘dragon and lion’ banner…

She said that she was displaying the flag as a nostalgic symbol of a time when the Hong Kong economy seemed to offer more opportunities for young people, and when Britain, before the return to China, was granting the people of Hong Kong growing autonomy.

“We’re missing the golden old days of Hong Kong,” she said.

You can dab tears from your eyes, or you can get arrested over it. The Standard (on page 2) says that one group of protesters yesterday sang God Save the Queen – which is borderline surreal – and someone was arrested for burning the People’s Republic of China and current Hong Kong flags. And can it be any coincidence that the street where radical legislator Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung underwent his inevitable detention by the cops was… Queen’s Road Central?

This symbolism is almost calculated to drive a particular type of patriot berserk with rage. But the reports all suggest that most of the marchers on the pro-government assembly, with their uniformly dull, mass-produced placards, were less than passionate, and not simply because their average age seems to have been 20-30 jaded years higher. House News reports that at least some of the people marching in support of Chief Executive CY Leung received HK$250 each. This is no great surprise, until you get to the glorious and exquisite detail: the cash was dispensed by someone operating out of a portable toilet.

You couldn’t make this up. Numbers, on the other hand, are easy to fabricate, and the gaps between police and organizers’ estimates for the sizes of the demonstrations are so wide as to make them worthless. The pro-CY (‘silent majority’) group estimates it attracted 60,000, while the cops say 8,000; the anti-CY organizers claim 130,000 versus the cops’ 26,000. By all accounts, the anti-CY march looked distinctly bigger than some of the more embarrassing July 1 events in years past, but nowhere near government-toppling-size.

The Leung administration has a policy address and annual budget to deliver. It will be interesting to see how the still-new leadership uses the opportunity to unveil attention-grabbing, agenda-setting, populist measures – or at least how it tries to.

CY and gang are long on big, if vague, well-meaning intentions but short on ability to implement. The tycoon-bureaucrat nexus and the pro-democrats are both willing CY to fail in whatever he tries to do, from building more affordable housing to cleaning the air. What his team should do is ask: what can we announce that will attract real people with real signs, rather than paid oldies bussed in by the kaifongs, to the next pro-CY gathering? And do it. But what we will probably get is a slightly jazzed-up version of the traditional policy address/budget formats.

The real silent majority probably stayed at home in the warm yesterday. One thing they might have seen had they ventured out was a new phenomenon in Central’s venerable Gage Street: a line of tourists outside the hovel that is the Lan Fong Yuen stall. Apparently, the centuries-old vendor of Hong Kong’s sickly traditional ‘pantyhose’ milk tea has made it into the guide books. Not all of them were speaking Mandarin, but most were. One was a late-20s woman in nouveau-bourgeois bright leather/sequins/perm with a little boy she loudly called ‘Bobby’. Maybe she thought an English name would help them fit in during their visit to Hong Kong – who knows? Unfortunately, the kid refused to acknowledge it. Then, I’m guessing, it was round the corner and up to the egg tarts place.

The fists of righteous harmony were in evidence at yesterday’s rally in support of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung (not to be confused with tomorrow’s rally in support of him, nor with tomorrow’s one against him). A senior and burly gentleman whom I hereby name ‘Boxer Uncle’ thumped a reporter from Now TV on the head, which by the Big Lychee’s standards is about as serious as political violence gets.

Boxer Uncle would probably have been irate because, in his view, Now TV tends to lean towards the pro-democracy opposition camp. To the extent it in fact does so, it is because its owner is Richard Li. He is the son of super-billionaire Li Ka-shing. The boy Richard blames his pro-establishment father for the suicide of his mother, and mildly supporting the government’s opponents (he bought ad space in the Civic Party’s newspaper for a while) is his way of getting back at Dad. (There probably should be an ‘allegedly’ or two sprinkled around that.) To complicate things, Li senior’s businesses are pre-eminent in Hong Kong’s property cartel, whose members utterly despise CY Leung.

Confused? You will be. Yesterday’s gathering was organized by Caring Hong Kong Power. Tomorrow’s pro-CY march will be convened by something called the Voice of Loving Hong Kong. The anti-CY demo comes to you courtesy of the Civil Human Rights Front, while a semi-separate assembly in favour of the same cause comes under the banner of the League in Defence of Hong Kong’s Freedom. Some anti-pro-CY folk got together yesterday to irritate the Caring HK Power people by waving colonial flags; they are still thinking up a name – maybe the Caring Voice of Human Freedom or the Civil League of Loving Power.

Caring HK Power have previously mounted protests against right of abode for foreign maids and in favour of National Education. Judging by their past activities and the no-nonsense attitude of Boxer Uncle, they are a humourless, surly bunch who are essentially anti-democrats as much as pro-anything. The Voice of Loving HK has just been formed by one Patrick Ko Tat-pun, an obscure member of legislator Regina Ip’s New People’s Party. As the South China Morning Post puts it: ‘He also disclosed that he had joined a social club in Shenzhen several years ago without being aware it was affiliated with the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department’. With such a charming name (good for a karaoke place) and an amusingly accident-prone leader, they sound like a nicer set of people, but – as Ringo Starr said – tomorrow never knows.

While either or both groups may be funded by some sort of patriotic elements, it is unlikely that they are directly guided by Beijing’s officials in the local Liaison Office, which has never shown much apparent interest in organizing democrat-style street activities, but would do the job far less shambolically if it did. If yesterday’s assembly is anything to go by, the pro-CY demonstrators do more damage to the Chief Executive’s image than the pro-democrat opponents. Maybe the property cartel are behind them.

The virulently anti-Chinese Communist Party, mystical/wacko Falun Gong sect/cult will also be parading tomorrow. Maybe their presence will draw out the Hong Kong Youth Care Association, a very obvious United Front tool with whom FLG have been engaged in extensive banner wars in Tsimshatsui. Somebody else is demonstrating tomorrow as well, but I can’t remember who it is. The anti-sex brigade? Dog lovers? The Judean Popular People’s Front? So hard to keep track. It’ll be crowded out there.

In the midst of all this protest and discontent, the SCMP letters page suddenly spouts something from a parallel universe in the fifth dimension. Someone in distant Sai Kung complains that his phone company texted (I presume) him his monthly bill on the 25th of the month, as I bet they do every month. Such an intrusion of everyday reality and life appears to have shattered his Yuletide revelry, which we can only guess is spent at the escapist child-like wonder end of the Christmas Spirit scale. I know Sai Kung’s a bit out of the way, but the idea that a Hong Kong phone company would suspend its computer-generated bill-sending system for Christmas Day is amazingly touching.

Click to hear ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by the Beatles!

 I declare this week’s midweek semi-weekend open.

Following its earlier revelations about Vice President Xi Jinping’s family’s fortunes, and the New York Times’ on those of Premier Wen Jiabao’s, Bloomberg indulges in yet more wanton interference in China’s internal affairs by listing the riches of the offspring of the post-Mao era’s ‘eight immortals’. The kids of Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun and other luminaries have acquired so much wealth and rank that the news agency has done a whole series on the subject, complete with fun graphic.

As is the case with anything else to do with China, it is the scale rather than simply the nature of the phenomenon that is most impressive. In a place with some 20% of the world’s population, you might expect a fifth of the planet’s nepotism, kleptocracy, high-speed train crashes and shoppers drenched by exploding shark tanks. The concentration of wealth and influence in a relatively small group of well-connected brats is probably comparable to that of Somoza’s Nicaragua or Suharto’s Indonesia. Nicaragua had a population of 3 million when Somoza’s family and friends ran the place in the 1970s, so multiply that amount of feudal, corrupt, economic despotism by a good 400 or so, and you can see why Bloomberg can’t cram it all into one article.

“The Chinese Communist Party, pretty much led by these eight people, established their legitimacy as rulers of China because they were stronger and tougher than the other guys,” said Barry Naughton, a professor of Chinese economy at the University of California, San Diego. “And now they’re losing it, because they haven’t been able to control their own greed and selfishness.”

The Chinese government’s response has essentially been to accuse the New York Times and Bloomberg of a plot (it’s here, here, everywhere you look this year) to destabilize the country in order to prevent its rise to greatness. Hong Kong is also a victim of this anti-Chinese conspiracy among decadent bourgeois American media. Huffington Post takes a noble and vibrant part of the Big Lychee’s culture and – I can only say – belittles it, and in so doing implicitly trashes all those other treasures and gifts to humanity produced by 5,000 years of civilization: paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass, the scallop cheesy opera pizza. How dare they?

I declare the week’s second weekend open.

Click to hear ‘You’re No Good’ by Terry Riley!

Armed lunatics in the US mow down kindergarten kids and firemen; factory fires in South Asia kill hundreds of sweatshop workers; North Korea and Iran upgrade their respective nuclear weapons capabilities. And then, bursting out of the world’s maelstrom of outrages and calamities: a Hongkonger has to wait two and a half hours for lunch. (Don’t mock. A few years back, burly firemen went on hunger strike to protest the amount of volleyball they had to play or something, and within hours were fainting from the trauma.)

The politically correct angle is that China has opened the world’s longest high-speed rail service, and it will “not only improve transportation conditions, but also cut logistics costs, boost the comprehensive development of land resources along the route, enhance the investment environment and improve economic collaboration and the division of labor between regions.” (‘Comprehensive development of land resources’; nicely put.)

A mildly skeptical view is that the 2,300-km, eight-hour Beijing-Guangzhou ride isn’t worth it. It’s quicker, and barely pricier, to fly, though at least the thing didn’t fly off a viaduct and kill everyone.

The South China Morning Post’s ravenous reporter on the inaugural service gets everything in perspective: the lunch service on the gleaming space-age bullet train was atrocious. She waited only two and a half hours because railway staff noticed she was with the press and hoped she would go easy on them if they fed her before the rest of the starving passengers – wrongly, as anyone who knows the Hong Kong media’s fearless dedication to the truth would have expected. (Indeed, no flaw is too minor or distasteful to cover up, with supplies of cupcakes running out and “Chewing gum left on the window sill of the new train.” Ewww.)

In terms of energy costs and returns on investment, high-speed trains make economic sense up to a particular speed over distances too long for buses but too short for aircraft. China’s cross-country network is probably money down the drain, especially given that ticket prices are out of reach for people like migrant workers. Still, the attendants are no doubt very charming, and the drivers wear the most stunningly white gloves to reassure you how safe you are, even if a tad hungry…

Meanwhile, back in the Big Lychee, vehicle owners continue in their pursuit of unusual personalized registration tags, providing further stimulation for one of our more unusual art forms. Following Last March’s Dear Shanice, here’s Shanice’s reply.

While Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung gets his ritual pat on the head from Party General Secretary Xi Jinping in Beijing, the city’s pro-democracy legislators prepare a motion of impeachment against him. Against Tung Chee-hwa in late 2003 on grounds of incompetence, or against Donald Tsang a couple of years ago on grounds of collusion with property tycoons, such a stunt could have roused and inspired the populace. As it is, the exercise will be as embarrassing as it is futile. At best, it will be of passing interest as a theoretical constitutional curio (how often in Chinese history do motions to impeach happen?).

I suppose the pro-dems have to take every chance of unity they can get. It would be in character for them to soon start falling out over the issue of political reform. Under Donald Tsang, constitutional reform became an indigestible policy hairball. His Constitutional Affairs Minister, Stephen Lam, became renowned for expertly parroting bland inanities as part of a grand stalling exercise designed to keep the existing distribution of political power intact while presenting a slight appearance of change.

Lam’s successor, Raymond Tam, has the same civil service background. The government has now named Lau Kong-wah as his Assistant Secretary. Lau is a Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK veteran who lost rather handsomely in his attempt to win a seat in Legco last September. As a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party’s local front, he is quite an audaciously partisan choice. The pro-democrats predictably see this as an unfair consolation prize for losing the election, and foresee trouble ahead if Lau favours his own side and shuns them during the coming phony public consultation and horse-trading over election systems.

That is too simplistic. As with the DAB’s Tsang Yok-sing serving even-handedly as president of Legco, it would be counterproductive for Lau to be seen to discriminate against pan-dems. The DAB resents and envies the opposition’s role as representing mainstream Hong Kong and having the moral high ground.

But it is a complex appointment. It is hard not to wonder who really wears the pants in the Environment Bureau, where Secretary KS Wong seems to a casual outside eye to be overshadowed by the better-qualified but (to Beijing) politically awkward Christine Loh. Similarly in the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau, you have to wonder how much Secretary Raymond Tam will be in charge when his assistant is a DAB stalwart, loyal to the country’s monopoly ruling party – which is also final arbiter of Hong Kong’s electoral system. The difference is that, unlike with air pollution, Beijing ultimately calls the shots on this subject. Assuming Tam is as doggedly loyal as his predecessor, we can be sure that he and Lau will have most points covered when it comes to lobbying pro-Beijing and establishment forces in Legco and stage-managing the public consultations.

This is important because Beijing has grudgingly conceded nominal universal suffrage for the next CE election in 2017. Beijing will determine the package; candidacy would inevitably be off-limits to non-loyalists, but by past standards it would be a sort-of meaningful step forward. Typically, we would expect the pro-dems to be split between idealists and pragmatists, but many have indicated than any sort of guided democracy will be unacceptable. The Democratic Party’s Emily Lau sounds pretty tough on the issue. And Beijing might actually have an interest in unifying the opposition camp against a relatively serious reform package.

Failure to deliver would be a huge setback to Beijing/DAB’s hopes for a more appreciative and adoring ex-colony. But failure to deliver because the pro-dems vetoed a package that conservative lawmakers supported only reluctantly would be the ultimate win-win: keep the current political structure and turn the city against the opposition.

The new boss at Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, Zhang Xiaoming attracts glowing praise from the city’s elites, it says here. The pro-Beijing elites in question are ex-legislators Maria Tam and Rita Fan, labour unionist Cheng Yiu-tong, legislator and second-generation tycoon Michael Tien and Chief Executive CY Leung.

The all-purpose blandishments – more bland than ishments, really – are strangely similar, as if written by the same, slightly rushed person. Zhang can pick up his duty fast and easily. He learned well from dealing with major events in Hong Kong. He is a scholarly person. He can further promote exchanges and communication between the Mainland and Hong Kong. He is polite, considerate and kind towards small furry animals.

The Standard asks some, presumably non-elite, pro-democrats what they think. The Civic Party’s Alan Leong imperiously requests and requires the new emissary to ‘learn in a humble manner’ – maybe ‘tremble and obey’ would have gone down well. The Labour Party’s Lee Cheuk-yan expresses highly original concerns about Article 23 national security laws. The Democratic Party’s Emily Lau accuses Zhang of covering up numerous illegal structures at his home. None of them drool at the prospect of his further promoting exchanges and communication.

I have been waiting for a decade and a half for a Hong Kong or Mainland bigwig who bucks the trend of pushing for more communication (or improved – quantity and quality are one where communication is concerned). It would be refreshing. “I think the most important thing is to have less communication,” the Chief Executive said in response to a reporter’s question, “most of our problems would go away if we would all just shut up, sit down and stay very still. And by the way, I’d like to clarify my comments yesterday about how chickens are Hong Kong’s most important resource: I meant to say ‘children’.”

Ladies who still have money left over after buying bizarre skin-care ‘serums’: you have a neatly trimmed and pleasantly styled, if unremarkable, head of hair, which generally suits your average, slightly simpering appearance. But you’re not happy with it. Instead, you want it to look as if you’ve been pulled from your bed at 4am and dragged by the legs through a pigsty… 

What to do? The answer is something called ‘Sen by Kim Robinson’. An ad in the Standard says so. Doesn’t fix the simpering, though.