Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Business and Professionals Federation of Hong Kong, a more-than-averagely sleep-inducing think tank, urges the government to let people use part of their Mandatory Provident Fund retirement savings for home purchase during their working life. The group adds that Singapore allows it, which may or may not impress us deeply.

As things currently stand, the proposal has a flaw: thanks to former Chief Executive Donald Tsang we have a deliberately engineered artificial shortage of housing for sale. Any financial inducement or assistance to purchase residential property will simply be used to further bid up the prices of the inadequate supply of available apartments. The same also applies to tax allowances for mortgage interest payments and suggested government subsidies for young first-time buyers: the extra cash just goes into the sellers’ pockets, which in effect means the property developers.

Former Chief Secretary, elder statesman and BPFHK boss Sir David Akers-Jones is no friend of our local real estate tycoons (unlike one of his successors, Rafael Hui). So we can rest assured this is not some lame scam but a well-intentioned proposal. (The property moguls have their own think tank, the rather out-of-favour Bauhinia Foundation, which essentially backed nice-but-dim rich-kid Henry Tang for Chief Executive. Akers-Jones of course supported CY Leung.)

Given improved supply of housing – or simply a collapse in prices given that we have 200,000 or whatever units empty – the BPFHK’s idea looks fair enough. And why stop at housing? Maybe people could withdraw MPF money for health costs (also allowed in Singapore) or to help their kids out with college tuition, or repay their own student loans.

Or – and here’s a radical idea – maybe we could allow people to withdraw MPF funds and put the money into savings for their retirement. To which many people will reply: isn’t that the whole purpose of the compulsory MPF system in the first place? And we all know the answer to that.

As people in Hong Kong are becoming increasingly aware, the MPF has proved a rip-off. A letter in the South China Morning Post recently complained that the writer’s total MPF savings (presumably allocated in ‘safe’ fixed-income funds) were actually less after some 10 years than the total payments into the system. The writer would have more for her retirement had she stuffed the cash under her mattress.

When the system started, the financial companies running MPF services justified their fees by (among other things) pointing out that start-up costs were high. Mr Webb in 2007 calculated that fees at that time meant that over several decades you might get back only half the contributions-plus-returns you should have a right to expect. That’s right: 50 cents in the dollar. More recently, some service providers have been moving towards lower-cost structures. But the basic principle still applies: the MPF isn’t helping people save for retirement – it’s making it harder.

For the better-off, the MPF account is a bit of left-overs in a far-off corner of the portfolio. But for people on average incomes, a big chunk of their savings is being pocketed by someone else. Where are the hundreds of thousands of workers marching on the street in angry protest?

Maybe the BPFHK’s suggestion will wake people up a bit. ‘Aging ex-civil servant accidentally starts mass rioting; hundreds of fund managers reported hanging from lamp-posts’.

Which brings us very neatly to a fine opportunity to plug the signed, limited-edition-but-still-available print Sir David Akers-Jones Psychedelic Freak Out, now seen on one or two more-eccentric businesses’ office walls. And yes, of course, you are allowed to withdraw funds from your MPF account to buy them.

President Barack Obama, fresh from winning an election (not least because his opponents had degenerated into a bunch of extremist freaks), passes through one of the world’s few remaining bits of authentic mid-20th Century-style Third World, complete with horrid flag, where the dictators are having to open up to avoid becoming absorbed into Yunnan Province, and he’s apparently a bit full of himself and can’t help but deliver what is, if you look at it, a more-than-slightly condescending speech to what a predecessor of his, when governor of the Philippines, would have called ‘our little brown brothers’.

No doubt well-intentioned, but a bit too heavy on the mission civilisatrice. It reminds me of the ‘sanctimonious sermonizing’ (Malaysian then-Foreign Minister Badawi) of then-Vice President Al Gore in the late 90s when he toured Asia dropping trendy buzzwords like ‘reformasi’, ‘People Power’ and ‘doi moi’ without knowing one from the other.

This is important because, although everyone’s too nervously polite to mention it, Asia from now on is going to be the focus of a struggle for power and influence between China and America. In the medium to long term, this clash can only become fiercer. China’s regional stance is to stress cooperation and mutual respect one minute and to lash out with more-or-less blatant threats of violence if any of its neighbours questions its increasingly acquisitive policies. To make things interesting, many Southeast Asian countries are essentially run by ethnic Chinese who are outnumbered by poorer natives who tend to have a latent racist streak. This should be fertile ground for the US to win the hearts-and-minds contest to be friendly neighbourhood cop and force for stability. But patting people on the head – this patronizingly – for taking their oh-so-impressive baby steps to democracy doesn’t help.

Maybe Hong Kong’s Central Policy Unit could offer some communications advice*. Pro-democrats like Emily Lau are naturally alarmed by its emergence as a propaganda machine. More interestingly, a civil service union is upset that the CPU could play a role in selecting appointees for government advisory bodies, claiming that the pen-pushers have some sort of magical power to perform this function, which mere mortal outsiders obviously lack. This sounds like an opportunity for the CY Leung administration to bring some uppity bureaucrats into line in the decision-making/policy-implementation scheme of things. A long-overdue thumping, that is. If only.

* Basically: shut your eyes and pretend they’re Europeans.

The Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ editorial comes up with snarky comments about the Central Policy Unit, calling them ‘slickers’. (The word can mean cheats or swindlers as well as sophisticates, but it is probably an allusion to their high salaries. Or maybe it’s a typo; I read it as ‘slackers’ at first glance.)

The column is the voice of the property tycoon/bureaucrat/Henry Tang/Donald Tsang nexus that was supposed to go on running Hong Kong after mid-2012, but as it happens didn’t. The Central Policy Unit has been through some personnel reshuffles since incoming Chief Executive CY Leung assumed power last July. The new boss, Shiu Sin-por, was former head of the One Country Two Systems Research Institute, to which CY has long been close.

In colonial times the CPU did low-profile but by all accounts serious policy research. Today, its reports tend to affirm existing policy approaches, mostly on uncontroversial social and demographic issues or politically correct cross-border economic matters. The Standard’s complaint is that the Unit wants to boost staff numbers – the new members, it goes without saying, to be hired on the usual other-worldly Hong Kong public-sector salaries. But the commentary also describes the evolution of the CPU into a shadow official PR agency with several particular roles.

One is to bolster government publicity efforts in favour of its own policies – most recently the proposed means-tested hike in elderly allowances. These TV and radio spots anger opposition legislators by casting their stance in a bad light and rousing public opprobrium against them. Given the mess we have for a political system, it is no wonder the government sees a need to speak directly to the population, though as propaganda the ads are lame and probably as self-defeating as the pro-democrats’ own refusal to cooperate with the Leung administration on principle.

Perhaps more interesting, as part of its supposed function of monitoring public opinion, the Unit is following Internet discussions – presumably to find out what the city’s youth are thinking. It is easy to deride this sort of work, or portray it as something sinister. But it looks like exactly the sort of thing our officials haven’t bothered doing in the past. Accurate (rather than filtered) reports of what the citizens out there are saying won’t automatically make policymaking less clueless, but it can’t hurt.

Another area is a longstanding job: helping to draft the CE’s Policy Address and other big announcements. The Standard, accusing the CPU of being too expensive, could have pointed out the insipid nature of past Policy Addresses, but of course didn’t.

Finally, we learn that the CPU is responsible for ‘recruiting talent … for all government advisory bodies’. To former CE Donald Tsang, these appointments were treated as pats on the head for shoe-shiners. Our favourite was Bunny Chan, who seems to sit on every committee going. Will a new generation of wolf-admiring stooges now start to replace Sir Bow-Tie’s choices when these old sycophants hop off?

More to the point, will the advisory boards continue their traditional role of maintaining a thoroughly pathetic pretense that the government listens to the public? Or will they play a less passive PR role for the government and perhaps start publicly urging official action or policy measures that – it just so happens – opposition lawmakers won’t like? Pick the right sort of members for them (and you could do worse than just picking names like courts do for juries) and the tired, stale old boards could take on a new life as suitably suggestible and credible weapons in the government’s fight against its widespread detractors. Another reason, ‘Mary Ma’ would say, not to increase the CPU budget.

Across the page: this is becoming a mental health issue. Following government measures to calm the Hong Kong residential property market, investors with a staggering paucity of imagination – maybe it’s the financial equivalent of obsessive-compulsive disorder – are piling into vehicle parking spaces. The Standard report mentions 80-square-foot spaces going for over HK$1 million and notes that the major developers are now selling the car parks attached to their new projects, whereas normally they would rent them out.

You would have thought this last point would tell us all we need to know about the wisdom of buying the little oblong bits of concrete at these prices. The families behind the city’s property cartel invest their fortunes in Australian infrastructure, British ports, Asian hotels, Canadian energy and no doubt an extensive range of international equities and much else. For Hong Kong’s unoriginal middle class, the universe of possible asset classes begins and ends with local real estate.

There is a picture of the new Chinese Communist Party chief Xi Jinping on each of the first six pages of today’s South China Morning Post (on average: none on page 2, two on page 3). After a nail-biting American election, the ritualized unveiling of the new seven-man Politburo Standing Committee doesn’t exactly scream ‘world’s next superpower’.

What will this new line-up of radical, young, reform-minded black hair-dye consumers do? They will trim the state-owned industries to encourage the more vibrant private sector, despite the fact that their families, friends and power bases depend on the privileges accorded the SOEs. They will allow market-based interest rates, so the masses get a return on their savings and capital is allocated efficiently, despite the fact that their families, friends and power bases are the main beneficiaries of the current system of subsidized policy loans. They will shift the economy away from investment to consumption, despite the fact that their families, friends and power bases thrive on the state’s direction of resources away from consumers. And of course they will crush corruption – in other words, deprive their families, friends and power bases of their lucrative livelihoods.

They will give the courts more independence and allow a free press to introduce badly needed transparency and accountability to the political system, even though the Communist Party probably won’t last five minutes afterwards. They will release political prisoners and allow open public debate of political issues to give the system badly needed legitimacy, even though the one-party state’s authority will collapse almost immediately. They will end controls on things like petitioning and the Internet and learn to trust rather than fear the population, even though no Leninist system has ever done so before. Like the UK government in Scotland, they will allow referendums on independence in Tibet and Xinjiang, secure in the knowledge that the regions’ peoples will overwhelmingly support continued union. They will build stability by respecting other countries’ territorial rights, even though such a move would provoke the army and frenzied ultra-nationalists into overthrowing the regime. They will serve the country, rather than expect the country to serve them, their families, friends and power bases.

Oh yes.

I love the Standard’s shoe-shining of incoming Premier Li Keqiang, whom they describe as an ‘enforcer with compassion’. His qualification for such praise:

He was governor of Henan in 1998 when tens of thousands of people contracted HIV from illegal blood-buying rings.

Li oversaw a campaign to squelch reporting about it, harass activists and isolate affected villages. When Beijing’s stance changed, Li showed canny instincts by quickly channeling aid to victims and making shows of compassion.

Makes you wonder what the enforcers without compassion in China are like. (And you have to wonder how damning the Standard would be about the guy if they weren’t trying to shoe-shine him.)

As I say, flicking through today’s South China Morning Post, you get picture after picture of the cherubic Xi Jinping and his cohorts – marching on stage, waving to the crowd, sitting down, standing up, clapping each other and marching off stage, in identical black suits, with identical ties and identical spectacle frames, for page after page after page. Then suddenly you get this…

Yet another overpriced-crap-for-morons company has come to Causeway Bay to pay the planet’s highest retail rents. It’s called Hackett. I could just about keep the vomit down until my eyes came to his footwear.

This just in: CPC Congress wins worldwide plaudits!

Flicking through to the news about the latest report from Hong Kong’s Director of Audit, I stumble across a little story about our city’s Financial Secretary John Tsang. The Hong Kong Dollar peg, he says, is not to blame for local inflation. Adopting a Singapore-style peg to a basket of currencies, he goes on, ‘would take away the territory’s independent monetary policy’. I am tempted to think the Standard has made a mistake, but a Bloomberg article backs it up.

Assuming they’re not both wrong, that leaves us with two possibilities: Tsang knows not even basic economics, or he is for some unfathomable reason trying to convince us to believe blatant falsehoods. The peg deprives Hong Kong of an independent monetary policy and ties us to a currency that is being debased, inevitably resulting in price inflation here (whatever it might do in the US, where debt deflation has been a real threat). The peg, under current circumstances, can only cause inflation here; we do not have an independent monetary policy. Tsang states the exact opposite of the truth.

There is a third explanation, and that is that in his garrulous and jovial spirit – augmented perhaps by a glass too many of a fine claret – words just poured forth unordered, at random, with no consciousness behind them. In fact, I hope that is the case.

Tracking down the audit results online, I then encounter a press release from the slightly sinister-sounding Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration (which if I recall correctly is a restructured version of something with a less creepy name). The government department is teaming up with the Hong Kong Evangelical Church School Services team to promote an Interschool Healthy Rap Contest and to remind youth ‘to stay away from unhealthy information’. The theme of the contest is ‘Healthy Information for a Healthy Mind’. Yes, this is what I’m thinking too.

We must be careful when approaching anything marked ‘evangelical’. It doesn’t always mean Biblical literalist lunatics who can’t understand science and are getting ready for the Rapture. Most sects calling themselves Evangelical Lutherans, for example, are what Muslims probably call Moderate Christians. And a glance at the HKECSS website suggests that the government’s partners are not from the Hong Kong tradition of Ark-building and trying to sneak Creationism into schools. Rather, they are in the far older, bigger and more noble Hong Kong tradition of hand-wringing, fretting, lying awake at night and pretty much wetting themselves all day about… young people and their possible lapse into unwholesomeness.

They also do a lot of good work with new immigrants from the Mainland and no doubt many other worthy causes. Which is more than we can say for the civil servants employed at vast expense with full pensions at the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration. What other things do they do with our tax dollars? Why, they ‘encourage the youth to develop healthy online habits’ through ‘the Healthy Mobile Phone/Tablet Apps Nomination Programme; the Meritorious Websites Contest; the Healthy Internet Video Contest [and] the Healthy Information Student Ambassadors Scheme’.

You can keep kids away from unhealthy information here. Paranoids worried about National Education may wonder if red-stained Beijing fingerprints are anywhere to be found on all this. I don’t think so. It’s just a bunch of space-wasting bureaucrats who absorb valuable oxygen and other resources thinking up almost surreally ridiculous ways to keep teens safe from real life, teaming up with a church charity that (I bet) knows a source of free-flowing financial assistance when it sees one.

And, eventually, I hack my way through to the Director of Audit. Sentence 2: “In 2012-13, the [Environmental Protection Department]’s estimated expenditure on managing air quality is $627 million.” Makes the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration look like a bargain. 

Mainland shoppers report months of nightmares after visiting Pacific Place

What a magnificent line. I imagine it appearing in a 1950s black & white movie. “If they take down Elsie, we’re all doomed!” Perhaps Elsie is a local heroine in a frontier village, facing down the bullying, outlaw bad guys; or maybe she’s a Lassie-style canine valiantly guarding vulnerable young children from evildoers armed with paraquat.

In fact, the phrase in full is, “If they take down Elsie, they also take down the authority of the Basic Law and the central government.” It comes from Lau Nai-keung, mouth-frothing ultra-patriot and scourge of Hong Kong’s ‘dissidents’. He occasionally experiences spasms of lucidity, and has had a couple recently.

His China Daily column last week considered Executive Council member Franklin Lam, currently accused by government detractors of exploiting insider information about new taxes when timing the sale of several of his large collection of properties. Lau points out, as others have, that if Lam had no foreknowledge of the new taxes, his role in the government’s top policymaking body must be marginal.

Of course, it could be that Lam was excluded from discussions on the issue precisely because of his property interests. But this is really about the nature of Exco. It is a big, unwieldy group, and its composition (a DAB member here, a Liberal Party member there, a rural leader there, a businessman there) is the depressingly predictable result of box-ticking. Members are not there to influence policymaking but to share the blame for the subsequent screw-ups.

Lau also says that if Lam needed to raise funds to cover living costs and contingencies, it suggests the man must have had everything locked up in real estate. This might seem imprudent, but then again, we are not talking about some average Joe off the street. (If his recent sales were any guide, the portfolio’s total current valuation could be somewhere around HK$250-300 million – but that’s a big ‘if’.) Lam is part of a gold-plated ‘elite’ that – as Lau suggests – Hongkongers have long been brainwashed into thinking are superior and trustworthy as endorsers of government authority.

Which leads us to the magnificent fist-banging “If they bring down Elsie” outburst. Rather than ranting about the dreaded dissidents, Lau’s target here is the establishment of the aforementioned elites and the meek (unlike Elsie) patriots who cluster awkwardly around them. This is in fact a criticism of a decades-old political structure, which is why Lau dusts off a familiar old friend, the administrative absorption of politics. The old colonial approach of co-opting elites to go along with the bureaucracy’s decisions doesn’t work anymore, Lau says. We need gloves-off politics: open competition, indeed combat, between ideas for all the world to see and judge.

Thus, rather than trot out the usual ‘correct procedures were followed’ claptrap about Lung Mei beach, the administration should see trouble coming, and let the environmentalists fight it out with the landowners/developers/bureaucrats. And ditto with every other development plan, from the desperately needed to the pointless. Thus, rather than duck a debate on gay marriage, the establishment should put the spotlight on the self-appointed defenders of liberty to see what they really think, and let them lead or squirm as required. Thus, rather than blather about the importance of rule of law, the government – especially the truly pro-Beijing elements – should defend former Justice Secretary Elsie Leung. Be consistent and honest, and confirm she is right that the one-party system cannot and does not allow totally unfettered judicial independence in Hong Kong. Instead, Lau notes with disgust, Elsie’s current-day successor makes remarks that conflict with those of Mainland legal officials and local patriotic lawyers and so “encourages mistrust and abuse towards opinions from the mainland and the pro-establishment camp.”

Essentially, Lau is saying ‘let’s fight democracy with democracy’. The pro-communist tyrant in him might envisage a cleansing Cultural Revolution that eradicates alien ideas from Hong Kong forever. The mild-mannered, intellectual, organic-food fan in him – assuming he’s been taking his pills – might actually believe a fair adversarial process would result in the popular will backing his side, not the pro-dems’ (or the tycoons’, or the bureaucrats’, etc).

It would be refreshing to ditch all this tiresome harmony and consensus and the happy, smiling committees of united pen-pushers, bean-counters, rich offspring, grasping developers and grumpy aboriginal granddads, all pretending to love Hong Kong. Cut the pretention and the hypocrisy. Side with Elsie and see if the dissidents really can bring her down, along with all the other dominoes as well. But, unfortunately – surprise, surprise – Beijing won’t allow it.

The half-hour news segment on RTHK Radio 3 this morning seems curiously focused on one part of the world. Following a genuinely important lead story on international recognition of Syrian rebels, attention swiftly turns to a British court that has overturned the extradition of a Jordanian alleged terrorist on human rights grounds. Officials are angry, and the guy’s lawyers happy. Then we are told about someone resigning from the BBC because of some scandal about a story about pedophiles (but not the same as the BBC’s last pedophile thing). Then we get into serious detail about the situation at the BBC. Then we hear that the guy who resigned had a massive payoff and that British politicians are getting worked up about it. Then we hear said politicians intoning in Parliament or somewhere. Then we get an exceedingly lengthy interview with RTHK’s ‘UK correspondent’ Gavin-something telling us even more – and more – about events at his country’s public broadcaster.

Phew. Eventually we move on, and the next story is about how companies like Starbucks and Amazon are mysteriously paying little or no tax on their business operations. In the UK, that is. Hong Kong gets a brief mention while I am brushing my teeth; I think it concerns companies falling victim to email scams. Then it’s back to the only place that really matters, with the announcer reciting at length from that list that never stops coming down the newswires: Manchester 3, Rotherham 2; Chelsea 2, Bolton 1; Arsenal 1, blah-blah blah-blah, with a last-minute free kick that sounds startlingly similar to yesterday’s last-minute free kick. And that’s your half-hour news cycle, culminating with the air pollution index for downtown London. The name of this show? Hong Kong Today.

Is this what they call de-Sinification?

I had tuned in hoping to hear something about Hong Kong Education Secretary Eddie Ng’s announcement that he wants to increase the length of free education for each child from 12 to 15 years – which is a pretty big deal, even if the details are vague (RTHK3 gives it a quick mention online). This means a real increase in recurrent expenditure, highlighting a contrast between CY Leung’s administration and that of his predecessor Donald Tsang. It also implies a redistribution of wealth from the better-off who pay direct taxes to the less well-off who don’t, in our highly unequal city.

Most of all, it suggests a positive attempt at social engineering. That’s an unpopular phrase, like ‘eugenics’, but governments inevitably influence the structure of society actively or inactively. Donald Tsang was involved in ‘social engineering’ by not providing free schooling for little kids. By reversing that state of affairs, CY Leung’s team would offer a possibility for children born into poorer homes to earn more than they otherwise would in adulthood.

Sir Bow-Tie’s first administration did introduce a small-scale voucher scheme for kindergartens. Eddie Ng’s idea looks like a major expansion of that, and so we will unavoidably have arguments over the sums involved. Sources mention HK$16,000 per toddler a year, or some HK$1,300 a month, which doesn’t sound like it will buy much pre-schooling, unless they pack the kids in 100 to a class (and why not – they’re small, right?). Teachers’ unions are also muttering, though apparently unsure whether to welcome or oppose the plan.

Intriguingly, the Standard’s story hints at juicier controversy to come: more affluent parents, a commentator says, ‘do not want the government to intervene’. I’m not sure what this means. But I do know our hyper-ambitious middle-class parents go to enormous lengths to get their precious princes and princesses into the right kindergartens. The elite, exclusive ones full of high-IQ, piano-playing, Mandarin-speaking toddlers destined for Harvard and greatness as highly paid accountants. Could it be that Eddie Ng’s subsidy plans might crack the doors to such establishments open a bit more to the somewhat less wealthy, thus increasing competition for spaces? Maybe there’s another explanation; either way, this new policy will probably remind us that there are always losers as well as winners when you make things fairer.

Now back to the studio for the latest riveting in-depth update on a distant land’s public broadcaster’s resignation scandal crisis meltdown thing…

China’s 18th Communist Party congress has included all the predictable ingredients: bans on such improbable threats to social order as pigeons and open taxi windows, a blockage of Google, stunningly boring and vacuous speeches, and Tibetans burning themselves to death. Least surprising of all, and the curtain raiser to the gathering last week, was President Hu Jintao’s clear warning that corruption could lead to the fall of the one-party regime. It sounded like a gloves-off, no-more-kidding-around declaration of resolve to really get to grips with graft. So, of course, did all the previous such warnings.

The conventional view is that China’s political structure is almost designed to create corruption. It is a top-down Leninist system, with no checks and balances, no separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers and no oversight from independent courts or media. Add selective economic reform, with bigger and bigger amounts of wealth up for grabs, and the rise of political/business family dynasties, and you end up with a kleptocracy in which the best connected and most powerful can help themselves to as much as they can.

We usually assume that the political structure creates the corruption. But could it be the other way round? Could it be that it is corruption that is the cause of the structure? One of the other predictable events of the congress was the usual announcement that multi-party democracy and separation of powers were un-Chinese and out of the question. This is tantamount to a refusal to change the current system, and therefore essentially a promise that corruption must and will continue. Atlantic quotes a Mainland social scientist as saying that:

…in the name of “stability” the party has “suppressed the livelihood of the people, suppressed human rights, suppressed the rule of law, suppressed reform,” but it has “not suppressed corruption, nor has it suppressed mining tragedies, nor has it suppressed illegal property demolitions and seizures.”

The suppression can be seen as a means to enable the corruption. It is to serve the needs of the Wen family, the Xi family, the Bo family (once) and their counterparts in state-owned industries and the People’s Liberation Army. These are the people who have created this system – and outsiders are expecting them to change it?

It sounds unlikely. But in the upper reaches of the military, at least one ultra-paranoid thinks they might want to, and is determined to make sure they won’t. Australian journalist John Garnaut (of the excellent Is China Becoming a Mafia State? presentation) has received notes of a speech given by a leading PLA general warning of parallels between the fall of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and the possible fate awaiting China’s ruling class. The officer drew on earlier work on a Western conspiracy to lure China’s up-and-coming princelings studying in the US and elsewhere into accepting dangerous Barbarian ideas about freedom and democracy as ‘universal’ values. The Westerners brainwashed Gaddafi’s son Saif this way, and now they have toppled tyrants in the Arab Spring it’s obviously China’s turn.

In short, people who advocate political reform (and economic, legal and other liberalization) are part of a Western plot to overthrow the regime, and Ferrari-driving princelings returning from Harvard to join the power structure are especially suspect. It is an amazing contradiction. Some figures who (like the PLA commissar) are truest to Marxist or Maoist ‘red’ ideals, and who are most worried about vice and fraud, are fearful that the next generation of people with a material interest in keeping the corrupt system will nonetheless want to change it. The clean-handed idealists want, in effect, to keep the corruption, while the corrupt want to end it. It is paranoia squared. It does not exactly bode well for a decline in graft either as an unfortunate by-product or raison d’etre of one-party rule.

This also gives us an insight into the constant warnings about foreign interference, even in little old Hong Kong and, incredibly, Macau. When Chinese leaders mention hostile foreign forces they are not simply looking for a scapegoat for anti-government sentiment. Nor are they necessarily thinking of specific agencies like the CIA, Taiwan or Neil Haywood. It is the very ideas and concepts of democracy and human rights and rule of law, that are seeping into the country and are foreign and hostile. Paranoia is to these guys’ minds what black dye is to their hair.

The Standard mentions the very muted murmurings that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung might be on the way out. What better way to develop the murmurings into a full-fledged rumour than to print a story about an anonymous official denying it? There are also a few whispers going round that would suggest, to put it delicately, that one or two people identified with CY have started to get a bit nervous lest they find themselves on the wrong side of the fence sometime in the future.

If there’s something vaguely familiar about all this, it could be from mid-2000 when our local tycoons were mounting a ‘dump Tung Chee-hwa’ campaign. It’s not that they were going round publicly demanding that the luckless first Chief Executive step down; it’s that they weren’t saying the opposite. This telling lack of endorsement led Chinese government officials to summon all our favourite property developers and other plutocrats to a hall in Beijing, where then-President Jiang Zemin gave them a severe talking to. If you see Li Ka-shing, the Kwoks, Lee Shau-kee and the rest all sheepishly boarding a chartered Dragonair flight in the coming months, history will be repeating itself.

The situation is worse this time around because it’s so personal. The tycoons didn’t hate the crop-haired one; they were angry that property prices had collapsed before they had managed to sell all their overpriced half-built apartments to the suckers. But they seriously loathe CY.

Back in the 1990s, US President Bill Clinton’s wife Hilary blamed the accusations and scandals surrounding her husband on a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’. Some of his problems, like the Monica Lewinsky episode, were purely of his own doing. Other controversies, like the tiresome Whitewater affair, looked exaggerated by detractors. And some were blatant smears, like the idea that the Clintons murdered former advisor Vince Foster. (And don’t forget the cattle futures thing: the Arkansas version of an unauthorized trellis.) No conspiracy is necessary: if enough people hate you and they have this much ammunition, they will declare war.

It’s similar with CY. Short-lived Development Secretary CK Mak has been charged with claiming civil service housing perks decades ago. A genuine, if traditionally ignored, offence. His successor Paul Chan’s family was found to be renting out subdivided slums. Not an offence. CY and everyone else you can name has or had unauthorized building works in their homes. Not remotely noteworthy until the Henry Tang vs CY Leung race turned vicious at the beginning of 2012 and everyone exposed everyone else’s illegal structures. Executive Council member Franklin Lam sold a small slice of his property portfolio a bit before new government property taxes – of which he was unaware – were introduced, and he offered the real estate agent extra commission. Nothing more than unfortunate timing.

CY should feel entitled to stand up and declare that a vast property-developer conspiracy is at work. As with the Clintons, no actual plot has been necessary; poor judgment and bad luck have played into his enemies’ hands. But you need to fight fire with fire. “Look,” he should say, “we all know there is a smear campaign going on against my administration. We all know which newspapers are involved. We all know who owns these newspapers. And we all know who those owners’ friends are, and who they backed in the election last March, and which industries they are in. These are people who feel entitled to privileges, and they are angry that this new government does not share their priorities – because we are trying to help the grassroots [blah, blah, blah].” But that would be politics; we have to have harmony and consensus.

As indeed we shall over the next couple of days, as I now declare the weekend open.

Certain news stories crop up over and over. A young bearded Belgian guy cycling around the world has reached the Tsimshatsui waterfront. The Japanese have invented a human-looking robot that polishes salarymen’s golf clubs. Some unhinged loser in the US has walked into a public place and shot a load of innocent bystanders. This week’s Indonesian ferry disaster was off [insert name of island].

In Hong Kong, someone has had it up to here with barking, defecating animals, decided to do something about it, and the local anthropomorphic community is now weeping as if over deceased children. For some reason, this story – normally a South China Morning Post standby on a slow day – appears in China Daily. Maybe the propagandists want to take our minds off the embarrassing juxtaposition of a democratic Presidential election in the US and the secret rituals ushering in a new leadership in Beijing. (It is the SCMP that goes all arcane-Mainland on us, solemnly reporting that “General Liu Yuan, the political commissar of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Logistics Department, has failed to retain his membership of the presidium of the Communist Party’s national congress.” What can we say? Poor old General Liu.)

The ‘silent serial-killer’ action takes place on Lamma, and the victims are dispatched with the herbicide paraquat. One of the bereaved comments: “Maybe it is someone who doesn’t like … the mess [dogs] leave.” But maybe that’s what the perpetrator wants you to think. Maybe he is really one of the millions who adore dog shit smeared all over the place. Another, who doesn’t seem to get the hint, has lost three canines. One supporter of the rights of dogs to rule over men reluctantly concedes that the beasts can be a ‘nuisance’ and “roam free and … make a mess everywhere and run across people’s vegetables, ruining their produce,” but blames irresponsible owners.

Let’s do an experiment. Take one of these irresponsible owners and feed him enough paraquat to kill him. Then stand back and see if the dog continues to bark, go poo-poo and wreck people’s property. If, as I suspect, it does, the ‘blame the owner’ theory can be laid to rest. It is the dog that is the problem. This is what dogs are and it is what they do.

Humans do not walk around leaving excrement and urine on the sidewalk. They do not frighten small children. They do not make sharp, repetitive, ear-splitting noises in the apartment just above yours at all hours. So why has someone brought a life form that does do these things into our midst? Dog owners who insist on living among non-dog-owners are imposing upon everyone else. Humans do not have a duty to accommodate the noise and mess. Most people suffer in silence, but eventually someone will snap. They have a right to defend their vegetables, not to mention their sanity. The answer is: either dog owners should live well apart from quiet and clean society (or organize an all-doggy condo), or do as the rest of us do and get by without a furry, yappy pack animal leaping excitedly around all the time and being one of the family.

I am sure Bowen Road residents are demanding extra police patrols as we speak.

Come back Lau Nai-keung, all is forgiven – yes, that is a tasteful skull and crossbones China Daily have put its eye…