Big Lychee, Various Sectors

If China’s new leadership is serious about reform, it needs to deliver action, not just words. That’s the gist of every other op-ed piece and comment column in the international press over the last few weeks. Two stories today give us a hint about what action we can expect.

First, an official think-tank urges the government in Beijing to tighten its grip on the Internet. Plucky little Hong Kong gets a name-check here, with the Chinese Academy of Social Science’s Blue Book citing the local backlash against national education as an example of the dangers of social media. The basic philosophy here is that if the ruling regime can stamp out discussion of and complaints about corruption, pollution, injustice and other government failings, the country’s problems will miraculously vanish. It’s not exactly fresh thinking, and history suggests it ultimately doesn’t work. (Echoes of the 80s in the Eastern Bloc in Europe: the USSR’s international direct dialing system was replaced by old-style operator service for ‘technical’ reasons, and in some Warsaw Pact countries people needed a licence to own a typewriter – and photocopiers were kept under lock and key.)

Second, the Big Lychee itself is to enjoy the continued attention of Zhang Mingxiao, who is appointed head of the central government’s Liaison Office here. After a quarter-century career in the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office – where he is deputy director – he obviously knows the city intimately. And his recommendations for the place he has watched so closely? That, as the South China Morning Post reminds us, we get on with implementing Article 23 of the Basic Law to introduce national security laws, and we guard against evil foreign forces interfering in local elections.

It was great fun last time, and I must say I can’t wait for another attempt at Article 23. You’d have thought after 2003 and this year’s spat over national education that these people would get the message and maybe try something different – but evidently that’s out. As for local elections, presumably Zhang feels more comfortable with the one taking place today for Hong Kong’s deputies to the National People’s Congress: hardly anyone is even aware that it’s happening, and China must have finalized the 36 winners weeks back. The new-look radical reformist regime in action. Next week, they tell the wives and children of Li Peng, Jiang Zemin, Wen Jiabao, Xi Jinping, et al to surrender their billions in shareholdings, real estate and sports cars and stick to mending socks.

If Zhang wants to make himself useful, he could urge the Hong Kong authorities to clean up some tawdry little black spots in town that desperately need some socialist civilization with Chinese characteristics. Anyone walking below Lan Kwai Fong first thing in the morning, even on a weekday, can’t help noticing that the quantity of broken bottles, cigarette butts and disgorged human stomach contents has been growing alarmingly. Today was particularly bad, with the Wyndham/Wellington Street intersection even hosting a crime scene, following what looks like a brutal and unprovoked assault on an innocent refuse bin. Who’s doing this? We can rule out one possible group of suspects because I see they are still hard at work with their studies. And I don’t think we can blame Mainland tourists.

One quick way of reducing Hong Kong’s air pollution would be to raise cross-harbour tunnel tolls. The main (Causeway Bay-Hung Hom) tunnel’s toll has been HK$20/HK$10 for cars/taxis for what seems like decades. Increase that charge, say, fivefold and cut the other tunnels’ fees by a few bucks, and you would almost certainly migrate a lot of commuters onto buses (currently underutilized) and trains, and spread the rest out onto the less popular routes, thus reducing congestion significantly. It won’t happen because assorted vocal scumbags who want to leech off the rest of the population one way or another would wet themselves about the ‘unfairness’ of it all and the supposed impact on their sorry livelihoods.

By contrast, the charges for non-residents at public hospitals went up relatively recently – a mere nine years ago. As for residents, these are flat-rate per-day fees in basic categories like out-patient, in-patient and intensive care; you do not get an itemized bill for each test, procedure or drug. The decision to raise the charges for what are mainly in practice visitors and not for locals seems a bit illogical – if costs rise, they rise for all users. Since raising the rock-bottom hospital bills for entitlement-minded residents would be near-impossible, the obvious thing to do would be to just leave this whole area alone.

For some reason, officials want to go ahead and push up non-residents’ charges. If the only people affected were tourists, it would be no big deal. But Mainland spouses of Hong Kong residents count as non-res. Cue a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, as affected Hongkongers complain that it’s ‘unfair’ and Chief Executive CY Leung’s enemies in the Legislative Council pounce with glee on another policy to fight to the death over.

On the face of it, Mainland spouses are indeed non-residents, so should be treated as such, and the Court of Final Appeal endorsed the principle earlier this year (concerning maternity fees). However, the disgruntled have a point. If a Hongkonger marries someone from Timbuktu, Greenland or Tahiti, the spouse gets to live here instantly with an ID card, thus cheap local hospital bills. Marry a Mainlander, and your spouse joins a lengthy waiting list to come here. It is hard to see why the government is choosing this particular fight. Maybe the idea is just to burden Legco’s oppose-everything brigade with yet more causes.

Far better to clamp down on the great tourism menace. I’m not sure what free meds columnist Lau Nai-keung is getting from Queen Mary’s these days, but his lapses into lucidity seem to be getting more frequent – to the extent that we’re in danger of missing the rabid mouth-frothing venom and hate of past times. In an article on thinking out of the box, he questions the value of the tourism industry and asks why no-one proposes slapping a hefty tax on all the designer-label junk visitors buy, so at least we get some revenue out of it (and hopefully drive some of the crowds away).

Hong Kong has long been in a trance about tourism. Years of official boasting about rising visitor numbers have left people unable to imagine that the industry might cost most of us more than it’s worth.

The equation for finding out would start with what visitors spend, then subtracting how much of it promptly leaves the city’s economy (most of it, given that we don’t manufacture the junk). You would also include luxury retailers’ higher rents, at least some of which will also end up overseas as part of big landlords’ offshore investment portfolios. And you would add luxury retail outlet staff’s incomes, minus what they were earning before the tourism boom drove their locally-oriented employers out of business.

Then we get to the fun part: the externalities. This includes the costs arising from the extra pollution caused by tour buses, like the medical treatment of additional cases of pulmonary diseases. It includes the cost of cleaning up the wee-wee and other items deposited in public areas by tourists. It includes the cost of extra time it takes locals to buy things they need after their local shops close down, or the higher prices for infant formula in their neighbourhood. And of course it includes the rising rents that surviving locally-oriented retailers pass on to us. Then there is the mental stress, as I, and a million others, get increasingly irritated at having to drag Japanese, European and the inevitable Mainlanders out of the way every time I go to my local 7-Eleven for a few cans of drink. (I can say “Who said you can come to this neighbourhood?” in Korean, Italian and Polish.)

Net outcome, probably: a few landlords and luxury brands are raking in billions that won’t trickle down, some retail workers might have seen a pay rise, while the other 98% of us are net financial losers – subsidizing the landlords and designer labels. It’s a parasite industry, and we should start spraying some DDT. This is a battle nearly all parts of the non-tycoon part of the population could agree on. But it’s ‘a pillar industry’, and ‘less tourists = more wealth’ is too counterintuitive for most people to bear.

At least we could put cross-harbour tunnel tolls up for non-residents.

It’s not every day that the Hong Kong government issues a press release about Andy Warhol. The angle, perhaps predictably, is that the exhibition of the 60s icon’s works in the city’s Museum of Art is the ‘biggest in Asia’. World’s highest per-capita consumption of oranges, most vehicles per kilometer of road, more suicides than road deaths – and now this.

Usually, when the Museum of Art hosts a special collection from afar, a bit of credit goes to some dusty institution – typically on the Mainland – where the ancient paintings of misty mountains are usually housed. Warhol has to be different. Aside from the artist’s own museum and our Leisure and Cultural Services Department, this exhibition has been brought to you by no less than BNY Mellon, Christie’s, the Economist, Bloomberg and the HK Jockey Club Charities Trust. Never have so many people been so eager to help out in transporting a few Brillo boxes round the world.

Did Warhol anticipate how retro his works would quickly become? The old Brillo logo, familiar to many of us from our childhood, seems to have had a revamp at some stage in favour of a tackier or more eye-catching design. Another of his subjects, Campbell’s soup cans, have also been redesigned over the years – though, wittily, the company celebrated the 50th anniversary of his most famous work by producing limited-edition Warhol-ized labels.

That garish silkscreen effect has become something of a cliché, with even Chief Executive manqué Henry Tang getting the treatment. But at the time, it must have seemed zany at best and odious at worst. A young Communist revolutionary fighting for freedom from colonial oppression would surely have hated the decadent bourgeois capitalist American’s portrayal of China’s adored Great Helmsman. One such teenager was Tsang Tak-sing, a school student in the mid-late 60s who was arrested by the Hong Kong police for distributing pro-Communist leaflets. Even today as Secretary for Home Affairs, Tsang seems slightly nonplussed by Warhol’s Mao prints. I suppose his public viewing of them could be an example of China exercising its warm and cuddly ‘soft power’ – but it is more likely that civil servants released a photo of him alongside the insulting pictures out of pure cluelessness…

Despite the copious sponsorship, the museum is charging a HK$20 admission fee to the Warhol exhibit. Even when no world-renowned Brillo Boxes are on show, there is a HK$10 charge (with concessions for school groups, the elderly, etc). The museum’s counterparts in central London, along the Mall in Washington DC, and in Macau just across the water are all free to enter. They do that because even a modest fee tends to put off potential visitors, and doesn’t even start to cover the costs of running such facilities. The upshot is that the HK Museum of Art rarely seems to have more than a handful of people in it apart from staff, and as a result the cost of each visit to the taxpayer worked out a few years ago at some HK$250.

One thing the government does provide completely free of charge is parking space right in the middle of Hong Kong’s central business district. In theory, parking is illegal on these streets, but in practice you can not only park – you can double park. Today’s Standard reports a police clampdown on the practice, but this is a joke.

The cops primarily blame truck and van drivers who are making deliveries. The second most-guilty parties, according to the boys in blue, would be operators of security vehicles abusing special privileges by eating lunchboxes. Way, way down the page, the Standard’s police spokesman also eventually mentions passenger cars driven by chauffeurs. The truth is that the big black seven-seat tanks and Mercedes are 90% of the problem. (Which reminds me: do you pronounce it ‘alp-hard’ or ‘alfard’?) It also seems pretty evident that the powers that be turn a blind eye to the problem because the alternative – making ever-so important and famous rich businessmen wait or walk – is simply unthinkable.

To quote Assistant District Commander blame-security-guards: “Sometimes, a three-lane road effectively becomes one lane when cars park or wait on the second lane.” In other words, “I’m cool about people parking illegally on the first lane.” Meanwhile, there’s not even enough space on the sidewalks for pedestrians. The Museum of Art’s nice and empty, though.

“We have no intention of putting pressure on local courts or judges,” proclaims Hong Kong’s Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen, as he points a gun to the judiciary’s head and tells them to choose between defying strongly held and emotionally charged popular opinion or further shredding the principle of rule of law in this city.

The Mainland and Hong Kong worthies who painstakingly drafted the Basic Law did a fairly admirable job of keeping the Big Lychee’s post-1997 constitution short and succinct. Unfortunately, the government is now wishing they had put a bit more detail in the bit about immigration and right of abode. Specifically, they wish two clauses of Article 24, listing who has right of abode, were subject to the following italicized amendments:

(1)  Chinese citizens born in Hong Kong before or after the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region except where neither parent already has right of abode here.

(4) Persons not of Chinese nationality who have entered Hong Kong with valid travel documents, have ordinarily resided in Hong Kong for a continuous period of not less than seven years and have taken Hong Kong as their place of permanent residence before or after the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region except those with brown skin who wash dishes.

Two possibilities come to mind. One is to just live with the law and accept the fact that Mainland mothers’ offspring and the longer-serving overseas maids can live here. Given that we are supposed to be wetting ourselves about the dreaded looming disaster that is the ‘aging population’, this option could in theory be a ‘win-win’. The alternative is to accept that Mainlanders and poor yet irritatingly cheerful Southeast Asians are unacceptable as fellow citizens to Hongkongers who are already feeling shoved to the margins of their own city by what seems like a billion tourists, and amend the law.

However, this is Chinese, not Hong Kong, law, and for some reason Beijing does not do amendments, at least not to the Basic Law. It could be that Mainland officials fear a loss of face if they admit that the original drafting was inadequate, but more likely is a general distaste for the idea that the meaning of laws must correlate with their actual wording rather than with the executive’s mood at any given time.

Every time we go through the process of ‘interpretation’ – a summary declaration of a new meaning to a legal clause, notionally by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress – rule of law in Hong Kong get that bit more tarnished. Beijing’s right to overturn Hong Kong courts is an inevitable requirement of the one-party system, but it has usually been exercised where some sort of ‘national’ interest is at stake; local immigration is essentially a domestic matter for Hong Kong. Right of Abode is of course a hot topic, and it would be highly expedient for Hong Kong officials to use this route as a de-facto amendment. However, it is hard to escape the feeling that Mainland officials and sympathizers like former Justice Secretary Elsie Leung like an occasional ‘interpretation’ as a way to gradually and cumulatively tame the wild, uncontrollable and alien common law.

The administration of Chief Executive CY Leung has a baser political motive to toss this at the courts right now. The people who will denounce ‘interpretation’ and argue, in effect, for allowing millions of starving brown hordes to invade Hong Kong are the same people leading the attack on CY over the illegal structures saga. Rimsky Yuen’s actions are no doubt part of a long drawn-out independent process, but it’s certainly a convenient time to get the government’s most outspoken opponents to damage their own public standing.

Flicking over the page of the newspaper, the mood darkens further… 

Two obvious sexual deviants, probably on the run from the forces of law and order, are for unknown reasons sitting on a roof. The older one is some sort of psychopath and capable of the most horrific acts of cruelty and evil – and indeed fantasizing about one right now. The younger one is mildly retarded and easily manipulated. Below the picture is the name ‘JM Weston’. The ‘o’ in Weston is leaning to the right, hugely enhancing the importance and meaningfulness of the eerie scene in ways too numerous and profound to describe. Barely pausing to declare the weekend open, I am mysteriously impelled to buy shoes.

Jackie Chan. Actor in a long list of humdrum movies. ‘Ambassador’ for a dozen lame government campaigns (plus some on the Mainland, as pictured here). Supposed cause of suicides among female fans after announcement of marriage. Cheater on wife, subsequently. And noted political philosopher, opining again on the rottenness that is Hong Kong and its spoilt, libertine people…

It is the second time in three years that the kung fu star has made controversial remarks about restricting freedoms in the city where he was born.

In an interview with Southern People Weekly – part of Guangzhou-based Nanfang Media – published on Tuesday, Chan said: “Hong Kong has become a city of protest…

“People scold China’s leaders, or anything else they like, and protest against everything.

“The authorities should stipulate what issues people can protest over and on what issues it is not allowed.”

In April 2009, Chan came under fire at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan for saying … that he was starting to think “Chinese people need to be controlled, otherwise they will do whatever they want”.

Like embarrassing themselves by talking rubbish in Southern People Weekly. That’s a sort of People magazine, known for interviewing Burmese former President-elect-turned-prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this year – and not exactly world famous for that. At least it’s a step up from the Boao Forum, which is a gathering by and for Asia’s most uncool losers-cum-‘leaders’ who don’t get invited to rub shoulders with the titans at Davos.

Southern People Weekly also attracted attention earlier this year for a cover story about China’s 1958-62 famine – an event that officially didn’t happen. (Some 30-40 million people starved to death so Mao Zedong could send food to places like East Germany to prove the superiority of his form of Communism. And he ends up on Yuan banknotes.) Balancing such adventurous content with ideologically correct material presumably keeps the publication out of trouble, assuming we think that reporting Hongkongers’ eagerly exercised right to scold China’s leaders counts as ideologically correct.

Jackie Chan is perhaps doing something similar. By spouting the stuff Mainland officials like to hear, he no doubt hopes to keep his silly movies on Mainland screens. (I assume they’re silly; I’ve never knowingly seen one – give me Aces Go Places any day.) So he’s just acting. Maybe beneath the thespian mask he has a deep concern for and commitment to civil liberties.

What protests would I ban if I ruled the world? The ones where Greenpeace dress in protective suits and come out of supermarkets holding a pack of GM cookies in tongs, for anti-scientific scaremongering. Any more than one huge, mass-pan-democrats march with no specific cause in one month, to spare red faces from low turnout. Society for Truth and Light prayer gatherings asking for God to stop public lesbian breast-feeding, or whatever the latest thing is – though, then again, maybe not, as they’re quite funny. Pet owners campaigning for dogs’ right to access parks, therein to defecate and scare little children. Time to reach for the pepper spray.

Chan’s comments echo an old Cold War-era joke. An American says to a Soviet: in the USA, we are so free we can stand in the street and shout ‘the President of America is an idiot’.” The Soviet replies: “Same in the USSR – we are so free we can stand in the street and shout ‘the President of America is an idiot’.”

Hey – it’s funnier than anything by Jackie Chan (probably).

The rather grandiosely named Advanced Institute for Contemporary China Studies was founded at HK Baptist University in 2008 to become a ‘world renowned centre’ in its field. Instead, it seems to have been hijacked by United Front elements determined to reveal evil, foreign, non-reds-under-the-bed influences in Hong Kong’s education system – with predictably amusing results.

It had a hand in the infamous ‘brainwashing’ booklet that prompted the city’s many suspicious parents and students to rise up last July against the proposed introduction of National Education in schools. The subject is now toxic and dead.

It also produces the so-called Blue Book, which is purportedly an annual report on Hong Kong’s political, economic and social development. The book recommended the abolition of the Native English Teacher scheme because the barbarian language instructors had ‘taken root’ in Hong Kong, and proposed that all Permanent Secretaries (the top civil servant in each policy bureau) should be appointed by Beijing. And it alleged that a HK Chinese University course was funded and essentially run by an ‘American fund’, a phrase presumably intended to make readers think ‘CIA’. For this falsehood, and for trying to give the impression that others were responsible, the Institute (sorry, Advanced Institute) director Professor Victor Sit has been fired.

Baptist U’s student paper reported last month that a pro-Beijing businessman donated the funding for the Blue Book, and he was Tsang Hin-chi. This tremendously grumpy old boy is a past member of the National People’s Congress and a myriad lesser organizations, and has a HK$10 million doctorate from Sun Yat-sen University. He is boss of Goldlion, a tie (and of course real estate) company, and has criminal convictions for some sort of long-ago trading-document falsification. He donates millions in cash to Chinese Olympic gold medal winners, and has embarrassingly, on occasions, stopped scowling and broken into teary-eyed song at gatherings of the normally sedate HK Chinese Chamber of Commerce (the catchy Without The Communist Party There Would Be No New China). And he has an asteroid named after him. Oh, he also bought a liver harvested from an executed prisoner – so they say.

Apart from the fact that it has more backbiting and cattiness than a Miss World contest, and many of its members lapse into pathological obsessions about inane perceived slights and injustices, the world of academia must be a hellhole to inhabit because most of the intellectual rigour and enquiry has to be directed towards begging all sorts of odious people for funding and grants. Maybe Baptist U should have settled with having a plain, everyday not-very-Advanced Institute of something less hazardous, like tiddlywinks studies.

Here is his happy smiling self, joyously handing over HK$1.5/5 million for the Blue Book to Baptist U’s Victor Sit (r) and yesterday’s firer of Sit, Baptist U boss Albert Chan…

…to bring a little ray of sunshine and delight into our lives!

Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung tries a new tactic against detractors in yesterday’s Legislative Council interrogation: exasperating them to death. The session (OK, the short bit I could bear) included a flashback to the deeper mysteries surrounding the CE quasi-election earlier this year, but inquisitors successfully wrestled the topic back to the mind-numbing subject at hand. Perhaps this helps explain CY’s above-averagely Sphinx-like performance; from Beijing officials’ point of view the trellises, lies and videotape saga is a perfect distraction from some genuinely intriguing questions about how illegal structures were made public in such a way as to derail a whole rigged election and dislodge an entrenched ruling caste.

For real soap opera, we have to go back to our former colonial rulers. The story starts with an ugly rich woman widely held to be a stunning beauty who marries a dimwit heir (or demi-heir, or something) to the figurehead monarchy that reigns-not-rules over the UK, Australia and other fun places. Pregnant, she goes into a London hospital with some sort of ultra-morning sickness we would rather not hear about. For a joke, an Oz radio station calls the hospital pretending to be the Queen, and apparently gets through. After some hilarity, the nurse who accepted the call is besieged in her home by Britain’s highly intellectual press, where, in a decidedly unfunny twist, she kills herself. Tom Wolfe couldn’t think this up. The Oz DJs are now being ritually strung up in the global village square, while everyone neatly sidesteps the obvious issue of the poor nurse’s pre-existing mental health condition, and no-one asks why so many media consumers are so fascinated by all these nonentities. Hong Kong thinks it’s good at this stuff, but really we’re years behind.

For local melodrama, we must stick to real estate. An interesting article crops up in the South China Morning Post’s business section on the collateral damage resulting from the Hong Kong government’s measures to cool down the luxury property market…

The unexpected bomb dropped by the Hong Kong government in late October on the city’s overheated luxury housing market is akin to America’s carpet bombing in the late 1960s of what was then known as communist North Vietnam.

At least, that is how one market watcher describes the government’s attempt to curb the city’s property prices.

Both actions had little regard, if any, for unintended casualties or victims…

The levy has virtually removed new mainland investors – who account for more than 40 per cent of new homes worth HK$12 million or more – from the city’s luxury housing market…

But the mainlanders’ hasty retreat has also sparked a chain reaction that has put a heavy toll on various businesses that used to live off that mad rush of buyers. They include public relations and advertising companies, which help developers market new projects, hotels where developers wine and dine potential mainland investors and suppliers of food and drink, as well as firms that provide entertainment at such marketing banquets.

We then get a sob-story about a property-focused PR company losing money after the cancellation of a sales bash for 500 ‘VIP guests’ coming to Hong Kong to launder their money and buy up local housing to keep empty. Back on page A4, the rise of a new class of young working poor is blamed on high property prices and the consequent lack of opportunities. So this is the other side of the story: the innocent victims of the carpet bombing. Could it possibly happen to a nicer bunch of people?

Tomorrow’s excitement…

Jovial ex-civil servant Mike Rowse was dumped in deep disciplinary doo-doo by Henry Tang, following the too-tiresome-to-recount Harbourfest scandal massacre outrage disaster tragedy of 2003, post-SARS. So he can perhaps be forgiven for having a bit of a grudge against the textiles scion and rejoicing at the last-minute and freakish reversal of Henry’s pre-ordained appointment as Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. Then again, on balance, any fair-minded and objective person should surely regard Henry as somewhat repellent – if not as a spoilt rich kid who, having no bureaucrat to hand, had to blame his wife for his subsequent basement disgrace horror calamity atrocity, at least as a symbol of a corrupt and parasitical tycoon-bureaucrat caste.

In a South China Morning Post column, Rowse wonders why Hong Kong’s pro-democrats are siding with the pro-Henry bloc’s property developers and other Friends of Donald against Chief Executive and interloper CY Leung. The late veteran pan-dem Szeto Wah, Rowse argues, wouldn’t have made such a glaring strategic error. It doesn’t take a Sun Tzu or Machiavelli to know that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

Anyone unfortunate enough to switch on RTHK Radio 3 this morning would have awoken to an earful of mouth-frothing rants from a woman possessed by a hatred of some great evil – a barbarity on a par with the genocide at Srebrenica, but probably on a larger scale. Of course, it was the Democratic Party’s Emily Lau, and the subject was CY Leung’s illegal structures and whether he lied about having them. She always seems to have had only two modes: mute and unhinged. But even the more sane-sounding pro-dems find themselves in this ridiculous position where they are trying to topple a man hated by the traditional establishment leeches and who is at least attempting to fix social and environmental problems his predecessors refused even to acknowledge. They are serving as tools for the property developers.

There are sound reasons to have reservations about CY Leung. His closeness to the cause of the Chinese Communist Party dates back to the late 70s, he has few or no friends, and he comes across as creepy. The alleged illegal structures cover-up is egregious, many (like here) tell us, because ‘a man who will lie about trivia will not be trusted on the big stuff’. Which sounds resounding and principled until you consider that ‘trivia’ is by definition not worth discussing – truthfully or not. The property cartel and yesterday’s bureaucrat ‘elite’ have an obvious vested interest in convincing us that the barely perceptible molehill is a mountain. The pro-dems’ motives are a mystery, or would be to alien political analysts newly arrived from Mars who assume that Hong Kong’s opposition forces act rationally.

Mike Rowse imagines Uncle Wah might have done a deal with CY on constitutional reform. That implies a breakthrough in the relationship between Hong Kong’s mainstream pro-dems and Beijing, which might be a bit much to hope for. But at least he would have thought about the big picture. It’s possible that Hong Kong will be run for 10 years by someone who will at least try to fix housing, welfare and pollution and who, if you attach absolute importance to trivia, has no integrity. What, under these circumstances, would be the purpose of ranting?

Many, many years ago, the US Senate established a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. Over several months in 1973, the inquiry found that President Richard Nixon’s aides had used various illegal methods to – in effect – cheat in his re-election bid in 1972. The thing became a live TV attraction as more and more lurid details were uncovered. Eventually, dozens of people were convicted of burglary, conspiracy and other crimes, and Nixon resigned after the House of Representatives started the process of impeaching him. The perverse thing about it all was that he would have won by a landslide anyway without breaking the law (only one state voted for McGovern, prompting ‘Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts’ bumper stickers).

Now, Hong Kong is to get its own Watergate hearings as Chief Executive CY Leung agrees to face Legislative Council questioning over the infamous unauthorized building works at his home on the Peak. The House Committee’s questioning will probably not dwell on the illicit car port roof and garden trellis as such. Lots of people’s homes have such features; it is not a crime, but a side-effect of absurd building codes; there is no victim. Instead, lawmakers will (or should) want to know two things.

First, whether CY was aware that he had illegal structures of his own when, during the CE campaign at the beginning of this year, he leapt on his opponent Henry Tang for having an enormous, illicit luxury basement in his home. This would of course be hypocrisy, which would in turn make it stupidity, even allowing for the fact that there is no comparison between Henry’s basement, which possibly involves criminal offences, and the Leungs’ home improvements, which would probably not need permission in most sane jurisdictions.

Second, whether CY subsequently lied about knowing that his property had these UBWs. To his pro-dem opponents, if the first is true, the second must also be, and Leung is therefore a scoundrel of the first order, not to be trusted – in addition to being a closet Communist Party member – and not fit to be in office. Their position is that any falsehood about any subject is equally evil: number of socks in drawer, existence of garden ornament, child molestation, cannibalism – all the same. CY’s pro-tycoon detractors will be enjoying the show and possibly fantasizing about Long Hair bringing him down and Beijing putting a developer-worshiping dimwit in his place.

Two examples of CY’s behaviour should give us a hint: the blitheness with which he assured the public that he had no UBW issues, and the keenness with which he attacked Henry over the luxury basement. This suggests either that he is extremely reckless, gambling on not getting caught red-handed at a time of great mud-slinging and media muckraking, or that he was genuinely oblivious about the status of his trellis and car port roof – indeed, probably never even thought about them at all. If I had a trellis, I wouldn’t think about it much. (Maybe I do have one…)

It would be amusing if he were to answer what could be some seriously inane questions (‘on what date did you become aware that your trellis did not conform to Building Department regulations?’) with references to things that matter (‘that might have been the day I asked Christine Loh about ways to reduce the damage pollution is doing to children’s health, or maybe it was the day I met with advisors to discuss options for boosting welfare for the elderly’). Sadly, we are more likely to get hand-wringing contrition and humility for the sake of harmony and consensus. Beijing officials may well see this as an opportunity to allow pro-Henry elements to take a bit of revenge on CY as a reward for henceforth toeing the line. They will certainly want to make sure that the questioning doesn’t uncover anything about the Liaison Office’s murky role in the quasi-election.

Meanwhile, spurred on by legislator Emily Lau’s outraged screeching, pro-democracy lawmakers with a sense of 1970s drama are earnestly preparing impeachment charges. The roadside air pollution index today is ‘High’.