Big Lychee, Various Sectors

To no-one’s great surprise, the Hong Kong government formally shelves the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide. The phrase ‘formally shelves’ is a little face-saver for an administration that had insisted MNE was essential and then backed down in the face of 12-year-old schoolgirls. After looking around, carefully surveying the thousands of tiny pieces strewn on the ground, and organizing a committee to ponder what to do next, Education Secretary Eddie Ng concedes that MNE will never fly. (Let’s acknowledge the plucky little Fresh Fish Traders School at Tai Kok Tsui, where national education will go ahead regardless, to spice up their regular classes in garoupa-gutting and sea bass-filleting.)

Not everyone is happy. Ng at one point essentially blamed the pro-Beijing teachers’ group and the infamous China Model booklet for this debacle. Their member of Anna Wu’s Committee on Implementation [sic] of MNE abstained from voting on scrapping the thing in a huff. Opponents of despotism should recognize the vital role played by the pro-Beijing groups themselves in undermining MNE. Give them enough rope… This fits in with loyalist mentality; for fear of being accused of insufficient patriotism, you go too far. In its wildest dreams, the Democratic Party would never hope of turning school kids into dedicated anti-communists, and these clowns do it with one silly booklet.

It would be in keeping with the Big Lychee’s civil society activists to keep fighting on an obscure point of principle, and maybe launch a judicial review or two. According to the Economist’s obituary, Eric Hobsbawm claimed that “Next to sex … there was nothing so physically intense as ‘participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation’.” The Marxist historian had a point. As anyone who was on the 2003 July 1 march knows, it feels good. You want to do it again, and the danger is that (like many later July 1 demonstrations) it becomes self-indulgent and embarrassing. It seems that the anti-MNE forces are going to accept the ‘formal shelving’ as the interment is really is and let the administration deal with its shame. It’s not like there won’t be more struggles to come.

It would be nice to think that the government will learn a lesson, and that Beijing’s emissaries here will too. But which lesson? CY Leung can console himself that this is another leftover from predecessor Donald Tsang. Pro-Beijing all-purpose busybody Rita Fan satisfies our constant curiosity about her latest thoughts by declaring that CY shouldn’t blame Sir Bow-Tie. We can safely conclude that he can and should, though it seems he won’t. He is being given some good advice: stick to the things people want – cheaper homes and fewer Mainland tourists – and everyone will love you, eventually, and all will be harmony.

As for Beijing officials, we can only guess what they are thinking. The rebellious Harbour Folk, manipulated by evil British and Americans, send hordes of vicious, Hello Kitty-wielding teenagers in middle-school uniforms to overthrow the city’s Party-appointed leadership. Do you decide to try subtlety for a change and back off and go easy on the Mainlandization so they calm down? Or (for fear of being accuse of insufficient etc) do you decide that they must be crushed and made to see and confess the error of their ways?

Art corner… poking around obscure parts of the Internet, I accidentally discovered  this:

(Duck = Japan; naked boy = China; boy’s ‘little brother’ = Diaoyu Islands; woman = Russia (why?); laughing kid = US; other ducks = Koreas.)

What intrigues me is the original painting. Who did it? Where does it come from? Is it part of a series? Having lost the original url, I turn to a similarity-based image search engine, a Google for pictures rather than words, and it finds that I am not alone in being curious (the French poster wittily suggests the title Noodle Eaters). But we are none the wiser. That site has the original with no adornments, in case anyone wants to add labels indicating which features in the picture relates to CY, national education, Beijing, anti-MNE activists, etc.

Former Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung calls for an ‘interpretation’ of the Basic Law to solve the problem of Mainland women coming to Hong Kong to give birth. Although theoretically a legally informed verdict by a part of the nation’s legislative body, an ‘interpretation’ is in fact an overturning of a Hong Kong court decision via an edict issued by China’s executive authorities. Local loyalists to the Communist Party like interpretation as it degrades judicial independence in Hong Kong. Indeed, the procedure should come under the category of evils we now label ‘Mainlandization’.

Chief Secretary Carrie Lam makes a pointed response…

Responding to Leung’s remarks, Lam said: “Hong Kong is a law-abiding community and judicial independence is its core value.”

She added: “Dealing with the issue of the influx of mainland mothers giving birth in Hong Kong involves complicated legal matters,” pointing out that [current Justice Secretary Rimsky] Yuen had already been investigating the matter in person.

Last month the government invited a Queen’s Counsel from the United Kingdom to advise on how to reverse a law that automatically grants right of abode to all babies born to mainland parents in the city. The Court of Final Appeal ruled in 2001 that mainland babies born in Hong Kong had right of abode regardless of their parents’ nationality.

(Note the implicit slapping Carrie gives technically high-ranking old Elsie in the first sentence. Note also the symbolism of the government turning to Britain rather than to Beijing for a solution.)

Amending the Basic Law is a no-no, for reasons that are not exactly clear but seem to have something to do with the infallibility of the Chinese Communist Party and its offshoots. Essentially, the Party cannot admit that it made an error that must now be rectified. Leung refers to amendment as ‘complicated’ – official CCP-speak for ‘embarrassing’. China’s pre-1970 silence on Japanese sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands is also described as ‘complicated’.

Interpretation as a possible mechanism to veto decisions made by Hong Kong judges is essential to the maintenance of one-party rule in China. No alternative or rival source of power to the CCP may exist. This is what Elsie Leung meant in lamenting that the ‘legal profession in Hong Kong, including judges, lacked an understanding about the relationship between the central government and the special administrative region’. It is irritating – if not worse – to Beijing’s true-believing followers when these judges willfully challenge the nation’s only permitted source of power. They and the legal system they work for should, in her view, automatically yield on the rare occasions there is such a conflict.

Right of abode for Mainlanders was the subject of the very first ‘interpretation’ in 1999 (as Yash Ghai points out, the Standing Committee in Beijing overturned a 90-page decision by Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in a one-paragraph ruling). Although legal types were outraged, public opinion was more forgiving. Today, Hong Kong is physically inundated with Mainland visitors and residents’ patience with the crowding, upheaval and price rises is being stretched. We have already seen Mainlanders portrayed as insects, and one video on YouTube shows a sizable crowd at Sheung Shui station chanting ‘dai luk gau’ or ‘Mainland dogs’ at groups of understandably intimidated-looking visitors. Something really nasty is waiting to happen (I am amazed no-one has thrown any tourists off the Mid-Levels Escalator yet; it’s only a matter of time, and it might be me).

So ‘interpretation’ in the case of Mainland mothers would be publicly popular. If we were paranoid we might imagine that Beijing is stuffing Hong Kong with Mainland mothers in order to prompt an action that degrades the rule of law here with local people’s approval. Even if that’s probably not the case, the crush of Mainland mothers threatens the courts as well as the hospitals. Finding an administrative solution is important if, like Carrie Lam, you value our 99.9% independent judiciary.

Speaking of Hong Kong residency and Rimsky Yuen… What do Fanny Sit, Moses Chan, and Dodo Cheng have in common? The answer, of course, is that they are all Hong Kong actors. Fanny is the one whose family name should, under some systems of Romanization, be spelt ‘Shit’ but usually isn’t; Moses is the one we can’t recall anything about; Dodo is the one who had a boob job. And what do they all have in common with Rimsky? Nothing much, you might think. But that’s because you have had right of abode in the Big Lychee for so very, very long. Atlantic knows better.

Not a lot of variety in the headlines today. Hong Kong doesn’t handle tragedy with ease. In some places, dozens can die daily in trains or mines and no-one cares; in others, communities shrug and move on after this month’s maniac with a semi-automatic sprays innocents in a school or mall. In an extraordinarily safe city, grieving for large numbers of dead strangers is almost an otherworldly experience. Some are self-conscious about it, and others perhaps pay too much attention to detail.

Obviously, the first step is to Google ‘black handkerchiefs’. Indeed, there are such things, and the search engine suggests two main users: Israeli Olympic athletes remembering the 1972 Munich massacre and gay male seekers of casual sex using colour codes to indicate that they are into… sadomasochism. As we mark the first 100 days in office of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung, the question on everyone’s lips is: why is this guy doing this? With a wipe of his nose, CY explains all.

CY’s first three months have had a new and distinctive flavour. There has always been something abstract about ‘integration’. Now – bearing the useful pejorative ‘Mainlandization’ – it’s suddenly real. CY seems to regard managing it as a mission, whether it’s curbing excesses like mainland mothers or parallel traders, pushing National Education to the point of provoking civil disobedience, or getting Beijing’s representatives out of their seclusion at the Liaison Office to come on in and be part of the family.

The appearance of Liaison Office Deputy Director Li Gang at Queen Mary Hospital on the night of the ferry tragedy – with CY playing eunuch to Li’s Empress Dowager Cixi – might have been intended as a gesture of sympathy, but it looked and felt bizarre enough to partially overshadow the fatalities. CY’s protestations that he was personally running the rescue operation were similarly jarring; they only make sense as a response to the ‘order’ top leaders in Beijing publicly issued that the Hong Kong authorities take the accident seriously. Are we supposed to think Beijing is really concerned, and therefore loveable, etc? Or is this a pattern we need to get used to, where the CE defers to Beijing’s emissary and pretends, Mainland-style, to be hands-on manager of the emergency services’ operations in times of crisis?

CY could have been (and can still be) a popular and successful CE. The things he would need to do are pretty much the same things that would soothe the anti-Mainland and anti-Beijing backlash. Administratively, it would not be too difficult to reduce the crush of Mainland visitors and make homes more available. But the script calls for ‘integration’, not a return to relative isolation, or at least insulation, from the Mainland. Restricting Shenzhen folks’ visits or barring non-residents from buying property sends an atrocious message to the nation as a whole, let alone just to Hong Kong. So, if we can’t have that, we have to carry on with this self-flagellation. Being swamped with Mainlanders is good for you and necessary so live with it. Except, for all their passive and placid ways, Hong Kong people probably won’t (or can’t). So something is going to snap. Meanwhile, CY is busy working on his next image-battering mess: insisting on a means test for the revamped old-age welfare payments in the face of broad opposition in the Legislative Council. (Hint: remind the lawmakers that the extra HK$4 billion a year it would cost without means-testing could otherwise be spent on people who need it.)

I say something is going to snap; a euro-mainland-property crash would be a blessing and a relief. I declare a weekend of declining retail sales open with today’s Best Headline winner…

Click to hear ‘Wolf City’ by Amon Duul II!

Unseemly responses to the Lamma ferry disaster fill the press today. Jumped-up amateur politicians demand that the government should make it compulsory – right now (bang fist on table) – for all children to wear lifejackets at all times on boats that are painted blue sailing within one nautical mile of Yung Shue Wan on public holidays, so such a tragedy can never happen again. And the authorities wheel out generous numbers of emergency service workers at a press conference to give teary-eyed accounts of plucking injured toddlers to safety. It would be less unpalatable if the aim had truly been to honour the rescuers, but the effect was more ‘unpopular executive branch hastily jumps on reality TV-type bandwagon in hopes of reflected glory’.

So I find myself flicking through the Hong Kong edition of China Daily, where politically correct life goes on. Such is the weirdness of our times, I find myself nodding in agreement with the deranged fanatical freak that is mouth-frothing patriot Lau Nai-keung. Chinese people’s assumption that sit-down toilets are modern and civilized and squat-type ones are inferior is wrong, he says. He then links this up with the West-worshiping anti-traditionalism inspired by the May Fourth Movement.

His technical points are 100% spot-on: squatting beats sitting, end of story. While we’re at it, we can add that washing after evacuating the bowels is vastly better than using toilet paper. British and American tourists giggle at French bidets and view the hosepipe next to the squat pan in Southeast Asia with disgust. They think foreigners are backward for being cleaner. Lau’s motives might be duplicitous and political, but he is right to denounce Chinese and others who unthinkingly fall for the Anglo-Saxon commercial world’s marketing scams.

After mocking French bathrooms, English-speakers snicker at French women, who are semi-savages because they don’t shave their legs or underarms (or at least they didn’t until they finally succumbed to Gillette’s campaigns to convince us that fur on female humans is abhorrent). The list goes on, from absurd cosmetic products to things like junk food and the fad for MBAs. Brought to you by the English-speaking world to exploit your innocent belief that it must be good because we made it and you didn’t. And can we interest you in these very civilized and advanced microwavable ready meals and frozen pizzas?

However, Lau is not coming from a rational and humanist mindset. His point (OK, I’m putting words into his mouth) is that gwailos are not only evil but inferior, gifted only in misleading Chinese who are left gullible by centuries of imperialist abuse. This is the Diaoyu Islands-in-toilets. Xenophobia and nationalism is easier than establishing a constructive and positive case for perpetual one-party rule. Especially when the party is based on the failed European ideology of communism and has done more than any bathroom fittings to destroy traditional Chinese culture. Still – he’s right about the toilets.

Outside of Bangladesh, the Philippines or Indonesia, the deaths of at least 38 people in a ferry accident is a major deal, so it is hardly surprising that Hong Kong is in something of a state of shock following Monday night’s tragedy off Lamma Island. The disaster will be remembered for years to come, not only because of the scale of the loss, and not only for any repercussions from the official investigations still to come, but because of the atmosphere and background – and zeitgeist – all around it.

October 1 was the day following, and the official public holiday for, the lunar Mid-Autumn Festival, traditionally a time for joyous family gatherings. The families on the Lamma IV were sailing to the harbour to watch the fireworks celebrating an annual event always marked on October 1 – the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, marked by another public holiday pushed forward this year to the following day. This confluence of old cultural and modern Communist observances is not exactly auspicious.

Hong Kong’s greatest maritime tragedy for four decades had to happen in 2012, a year (so far) of exceptional strangeness. The year when Hong Kong’s new Chief Executive, CY Leung, unexpectedly came to power owing to an unknown combination of local popular protest and Beijing-influenced surreptitious sabotage, manipulation and internal wrangling. The year when the downfall of Bo Xilai and his wife and cronies exposed the rottenness of China’s government system and sparked infighting in the midst of a national transition of power, leading (probably) to the rash intensification of China’s obnoxiousness to its neighbours over territorial claims. And the year the Big Lychee’s great phobia finally poured out in the backlash against National Education, the influx of Mainland visitors and the whole trend of Mainlandization.

Just to make things more jarring, the ferry disaster attracts unprecedented involvement by Beijing. To quote the South China Morning Post:

…state broadcaster China Central Television ran in its main newscast last night[:] “Comrades [President] Hu Jintao , [Premier] Wen Jiabao and [Vice-President] Xi Jinping … issue important instructions, ordering the Hong Kong government to spare no effort in searching for missing persons, treating the injured and comforting their relatives.”

The CCTV report was preceded by the unusual appearance of a Beijing liaison office official with Leung on his first hospital visit hours after the National Day tragedy on Monday night.

Li Gang, deputy head of the liaison office, spoke for two minutes at Queen Mary Hospital in Pok Fu Lam, detailing how he felt and what Guangdong authorities would do to help.

Li – who has no role in the city’s administration – went a step further, becoming the first public figure to confirm deaths. “We are deeply sorry about the deceased citizens,” he said.

Guangdong, meanwhile, sent four big salvage ships that were eventually not used because, sources said, the waters at the scene were too shallow.

Maybe it was because the death toll was so large, or because it was National Day. But it was almost as if a contingency plan were in place – perhaps drawn up after the 2010 shootings of Hong Kong tourists in Manila – for multiple displays of Mainland activity and concern the next time Hong Kong underwent a tragedy. Such an attempt to curry favour and gratitude and to underline the Beijing leadership’s deep interest would seem this contrived, inappropriate and even a bit creepy, wouldn’t it?

And then, of course, Li Ka-shing enters the scene. The Hong Kong Electric staff pleasure launch ultimately belonged to Asia’s richest man, so into the hospital he goes to meet survivors and offer them generous sums of money, upon which Hong Kong’s ever-pragmatic press lavishes extensive attention. The fatal collision attracts other quintessentially Hong Kong characters onto the stage. Commentators and passers-by expressing shock and outrage that emergency vessels didn’t attend within seconds and that, with no manifest, the police couldn’t instantly name every passenger on the boat. Last and beyond any doubt least, Lamma island residents arriving back home on the damaged ferry, safe and unharmed, complaining that they had to give the lifejackets back.

It’s not as if Saturday and Sunday had been great, with tourist masses finding new spots to inundate, two kids drowning off Shek O, and a vague feeling that there were more suicides going on than usual. Maybe next year, four-day weekends can be fun again.

The cold, white, stiff corpse that is Moral and National Education is to be buried deep under the ground, with a tube sticking from its mouth up to the surface, to give the impression that it might start to breathe again. The handful of schools that have adopted the subject may have no official guidelines to follow; they will also be allowed to change its title. So they could decide that the course should consist entirely of calisthenics and call it Physical Education, or they could dedicate it entirely to calculus and call it Advanced Mathematics.

Among the friends the government has lost because of this episode are its, well, friends. When schoolkids and teachers marched, when the pro-democrats hurled abuse, when the pro-Beijing politicians looked away in silence ahead of election day, a group of reluctant loyalists did what they saw as their duty and calmly supported MNE as a harmless and inconsequential but nonetheless vital area of study for the city’s children – with as straight a face as they could manage. They’re not happy.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy many light-years away, Chief Secretary Carrie Lam professes utter bewilderment. Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is do you Mrs Lam? One minute everyone seems laid back and relaxed about developing new towns in the northeast New Territories, then suddenly they’re up in arms about it – and for all sorts of reasons. She wonders whether the answer could be ‘innovative’ ways to communicate with the public, such as this new-fangled thing called the Internet. Way back in the darkest days of Tung Chee-hwa, this was always the cause of popular opposition to policy: people’s sad inability to understand it. Just explain it to them successfully, and they will believe.

In this particular case, it might actually be true. Maybe the government really is going to minimize developers’ involvement and maximize supply of public and affordable housing. Maybe it really will make sure all the new apartments go to Hong Kong people and not Mainlanders. Maybe it really will arrange a fleet of winged pigs to fly commuters from the new settlements to and from town free of charge. But people haven’t heard it in a way that convinces them it’s true. Broadcaster Albert Cheng seemingly has more credibility in managing to insist that it’s all part of a strategy to merge Hong Kong and Shenzhen – and create another desolate Tin Shui Wai, though that location in a combined super-city would surely be buzzing.

The charitable among us might almost feel sorry for Carrie and her colleagues. Something is happening that’s far bigger than they can manage. Hong Kong is experiencing a backlash against attempts to turn it into something it isn’t. The government can’t admit that a secret but ham-fisted policy of Mainlandization was launched, let alone promise that it will now be suspended as counterproductive. It can’t (apparently) drastically reduce the number of Mainland visitors or bar them meaningfully from buying second homes here. It can’t even officially admit that National Education is completely over and done with and has ceased to exist. It can’t do much else because its own citizens won’t let it.

Maybe the government should enlist mouth-frothing Communist Party loyalist Lau Nai-keung to deliver its message in his unique ranting style. His column today announces the imminence of China’s Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere…

As with Cheng, he offers no evidence for any of this. He concludes by saying that Beijing must “formulate a revolutionary strategy to achieve a breakthrough, and any new policy measures will inevitably include Hong Kong,” where, of course, we just can’t wait. I suppose World War III might resolve the New Territories issue one way or the other. Lau ends with the rather lame comment “the new situation will become more apparent late next month.” In other words, ‘I know no more about any of this than anyone else’.

The weekend is declared open with a question: What have the Moon Goddess and Chairman Mao Zedong done for us lately? Full answers will appear here on Monday and Tuesday respectively.

Lest we forget: quite a lot of the parallel traders who exploit glaring arbitrage opportunities by carrying goods like phones and Yakult yogurt drink north across the border are Hongkongers, not Mainlanders. The Shenzhen authorities would like to remind us of this, and are clamping down on these people in what the Standard calls ‘apparent retaliation’ for the Big Lychee’s crackdown on the Mainlanders swamping Sheung Shui.

It is hard to see the logic here. The Mainlanders transporting cargoes back to Shenzhen are breaking Hong Kong immigration laws by working here without the correct permit. Both they and the Hongkongers carrying goods are breaking Mainland laws by trying to evade payment of import/sales taxes. Hong Kong is applying its law correctly, and Shenzhen customs should be doing the same by requiring all travellers, from anywhere, to pay the duties and taxes they owe on items they are carrying.

Maybe that’s what this ‘retaliation’ is for. Could it be that when Chief Secretary Carrie Lam went to Beijing recently to moan about the Great Mainland Courier Menace, she effectively snitched on Shenzhen for not running its customs department properly? If so, it’s yet another in a long line of snubs by haughty Hong Kong officials towards their peasant-like counterparts around the Pearl River Delta.

People carry all this junk across the border because it pays better than washing dishes or picking metal and plastic out of garbage dumps. (Mainland demand for Yakult, I am reliably informed, arises from its supposed properties as a female breast-enhancer. Do they drink it or rub it on? No idea.) If smuggling is no longer an option, we can surmise, people will be poorer. What better time, then, for Hong Kong to announce that it will adopt an official poverty line for the first time and revamp the old Poverty Commission?

Chief Executive CY Leung seems to divide his administration’s time three ways: doing stupid things that provoke hostility; doing things that provoke hostility but could have been popular if better handled; and doing things that deserve acclaim but aren’t presented well enough to get it. This is in the third category; they should have made a bigger splash about it. Like the minimum wage – which the last government also bent over backwards to avoid before giving in – a poverty line will force officials and everyone to examine, measure, monitor and possibly end up with no choice but to do something about a problem previously swept under the carpet.

Welfare groups already use a poverty line: an income that is half the median household income adjusted for household size. In Hong Kong, where the median income for the top 10% of families is 27 times that of the bottom 10%, some 18% of the population live on such an income. The welfare lobby say that the cash benefits system is faulty in that it denies handouts to the poor if they live in (ie burden) a somewhat-less-poor household, and can be humiliating to apply for. Oxfam’s account seems to support this.

For an idea of how screwed up our redistribution of wealth is, consider an example that legislators could be shouting from the rooftops but for some reason don’t. A family on HK$100,000 a month with two kids gets HK$60,000 knocked off their annual salaries tax for each one. In other words, the rest of the community pay them the equivalent of HK$5,000 a month for each kid. A family on HK$15,000 a month with two kids meanwhile gets… nothing, pretty much. Weird or what? (They might qualify for help with specific needs like school costs; page 36 here gives examples of what really low-earners get by way of welfare. Essentially, the rich actually get bigger handouts.) This will probably be a less warped system by 2017.

One of the better moves CY Leung has made since becoming Hong Kong’s Chief Executive is to abandon his predecessor Donald Tsang’s harebrained scheme to turn the city into some sort of health-care hub. Inevitably, Sir Bow-Tie’s dream involved real estate: sell land cheaply-but-not-too-cheaply to private hospital operators who would then attract high-paying foreigners and treat some lower-paying local people on the side. It would boost the Big Lychee’s services exports, and some of our middle class would migrate away from overburdened public medical facilities. But balancing the interests of all the ‘stakeholders’ proved impossible (the cost of building a hospital: at least US$1 million per bed).

Meanwhile, demand for public hospital services outstrips supply. A bigger budget – easily affordable given the government’s fiscal position – is one obvious solution. But bureaucrats and others who worry about the aging (owing to being healthier) population resist that idea, and insist that the middle class pay more. Even middle-class people feel embarrassed and even a bit guilty at getting public hospital treatment virtually for free. Hence the announcement a few weeks ago that two of Donald’s sites would be dedicated to affordable private hospitals for the genteel non-millionaire segment. To lure the bourgeois patients away from the all-but-free public service, these new hospitals will (say) offer shorter waiting times, with warmer congee in the morning and a free newspaper.

A snag. A few people might pay, say, HK$750 a day rather than HK$100 for quicker treatment. But the Hong Kong population’s refugee mentality lives on, and for many the idea of spending more when you can get for less is tough to accept. Saving HK$650 and waiting 10 more weeks is second nature. The government’s solution is insurance. But this is still a hard sell alongside the virtually free public-sector alternative. At least one insurer started to offer ‘middle class’ health insurance a couple of years back, with attractive packages (pretty fair coverage for 40-somethings at HK$15,000 a year), and there were no takers. So the government will have to offer a tax break – also known as a subsidy – to suit Hong Kong’s zero-sum financial psychology. In exchange for giving up something cheap (public hospital care), you will get a different but exciting bargain-discount-bonus-no extra charge deal; it might help to get Louis Vuitton or someone to do the marketing, so it becomes something you brag about.

Assume that capacity expands in line with resources, say through importation of overseas nurses, etc. Will the private sector play along and provide ‘affordable’ care? At the moment, apart from primary-care providers in poorer neighbourhoods, private health services have little hope of competing against the public sector, so they focus on the opposite end of the spectrum and aim to maximize revenues from the highly insured and rich. Not all private providers are scumbags, but at least some perform unnecessary operations to stuff their wallets. Would these guys be interested in the patients at ‘middle-class’ hospitals, with their government-scrutinized insurance cover and caps on fees? It’s like expecting property developers to voluntarily build apartments for Hongkongers rather than Mainlanders.

Ultimately, it would probably make more sense for the government simply to set up a second tier of somewhat-less-subsidized-but-somewhat-better public hospital service. Something like the Home Ownership Scheme in housing. That way, at least you get some more resources coming into the system without the government paying every extra penny. Or just fund the public hospitals properly and be done with it. (Or make it illegal to perform unnecessary operations?)

What’s going on here? A bank teller called Teresa is forced to sell high-risk investment products to her clients, and is tempted to steal a big bag of cash that belonged to her wealthy client Yuen. Meanwhile, a small-time gangster called Panther attempts to rob Yuen – a loan shark – to help his debt-ridden cousin Dragon, who suffered huge loss on when the financial crisis hit. The case is being investigated by an upright police inspector called Cheung, but he also has a heavy financial burden on his shoulder as his wife Connie is eager to buy a luxurious apartment they can’t quite afford.

Sounds like just another day’s space-filling items from page 4 of the City section. Actually, it’s the plot to Life Without Principle, Hong Kong’s entry for foreign-language film at the Oscars.

As if to prepare Americans for the eccentricities of the Big Lychee’s culture, the New York Times does an investigative piece about our city’s vanity plates. To our shame, it even carries a photo of the gut-wrenchingly embarrassing Mercedes with a tag reading GIGGLES. Sadly, the NYT didn’t see fit to show WHITEY – a Westerner’s gleaming black Morris Minor convertible I saw zooming up Lyndhurst Terrace the other day. And yes, it’s out there on the Internet. (Innards and all, for car buffs.)

If only the rest of China could attract such positive, if bemused, coverage. Instead, the world’s media contains a steady stream of reports about China’s apparent new-found confidence (or assertiveness, or aggressiveness, or arrogance, or scary, reckless and irrational belligerence – according to taste). We don’t know why the recent territorial outbursts against the Philippines, Vietnam and of course Japan have been happening. Are they to do with power struggles during a time of political transition in Beijing? Are they intended primarily for a domestic public audience as a diversion or to bolster support for the regime? If so, can we assume that this prickly nationalism will subside when things settle down up there? Or is this part of a bigger and irreversible trend towards more and more, in-your-face, bullying uppity-ness? And what happens when, in 2016 or so, President Xi Jinping and the PLA have to humiliate the motherland by publicly backing down from some idiotic claim and gunboat-dispatching after an overpowering US-Japanese or US-Vietnamese-Indian-Australian flotilla says enough is enough?

For people who like to worry, Asia Sentinel offers two disturbing articles. Philip Bowring in Lebensraum and China says the claim to the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands is a thin end of the wedge; the logic of China’s case is that the country is the rightful owner of the whole Ryukyu chain, or at least the ones south of Okinawa. (Turgid historical, or maybe pseudo-historical, detail courtesy of China Daily.)  Next stop, Honshu and then the Aleutians. Duong Danh Huy in China’s four possible positions examines what the curved line embracing almost the entire South China Sea might actually mean. None of the four possibilities can be described as reassuring.

In making both these expansionist claims, however vaguely, Beijing’s presumptuousness and conceit are little short of breathtaking. So much so that we like to think the Chinese aren’t really serious; hence the soothing assumption that this is all something to do with domestic issues, hence the official line from the US, Australia and others that no-one is seeking to confront or contain China and we can all live together peacefully. Behind closed doors, however, there must be real alarm.

CSIS guru and US strategy advisor Edward Luttwak recently patted Australia on the head for quietly taking the Chinese threat seriously. His theory is that Chinese foreign policy is autistic: the country’s leaders are oblivious to how the rest of the world views them or their actions. They are also, he says, making a huge error in believing they can rise economically and militarily at the same time. They would be far better off, he goes on, to focus on economic progress and adopt a stance of unarmed cooperation with neighbours (and oh boy, wouldn’t they be receptive to that idea). He gives a good introduction to the idea in this short video. It’s to push his book on the subject. Let’s hope it’s one of those trashy airport paperbacks full of wackiness – though that hasn’t been his style in the past.

On a lighter note, I take pleasure in awarding a headline in today’s South China Morning Post the ‘Where have you been for the last seven decades?’ Prize…

Is the Hong Kong government’s proposal to develop new towns in the Northeastern New Territories New Development Areas going to be the next National Education trauma? In other words, are we going to see the administration of Chief Executive CY Leung insist that ‘x’ must happen, prompting huge numbers of people – especially photogenic ones – to take to the streets demanding that ‘x’ will not happen, followed by an eventual humiliating government retreat?

The answer is probably no. The NENTNDA proposal is not so much for an ‘x’ as for ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and so on. People who like ‘a’ will probably hate ‘b’, while people who like both of them will probably hate ‘c’. Ominously, the plan dates back to Donald Tsang, who announced New Development Areas almost as an afterthought during his vast orgy of infrastructure projects known as the 2007-08 Policy Address. It even has its own website.

The project is predicated on the assumption that Hong Kong has a severe shortage of homes and land. Some commentators say we don’t really need much new housing because so many apartments are in fact sitting empty. They don’t say how you can make them un-empty. As for land: yes, bits of the urban areas are horrendously overdeveloped, but that’s at least partly because other bits are underutilized. The problem is that in the eyes of the government, land must be used for what the lease and zoning regulations say. You can only change the restrictions via bureaucratic nightmares and the payment of such large amounts of money that you don’t bother. Another problem is that a large chunk of ‘residential’ land must be given to the Transport Bureau, who will cover it with gargantuan networks of highways, preferably with huge curling, multi-layered intersections over large expanses of bare concrete.

If we buy the ‘shortage of land’ story, then the NENTNDAs are as good a way to provide new housing as any. The main alternatives are to reclaim from the sea and kill pink dolphins or build over pristine country parks and ‘green lungs’ like South Lantau. (My favoured approach would be to evict Disneyland, the cruise terminal and other locust-bait and build dense but traffic-free new estates to flood the market with homes once and for all so we can forget property and get on with our lives, but what do I know?)

At this point, something has to go wrong, and that something is a One Country Two Systems Research Institute paper from around two years ago suggesting that the closed border area be used for things like mainland tourism. Around a month or so back, Apple Daily, in particular, dug it up and presented it as a plan to cede bits of Hong Kong to Shenzhen. Now NENTNDA is cursed as being part of a bigger strategy of Mainlandization. (To make things interesting, CY was a founder of the 1C2S outfit years ago.) An interesting semi-parallel here is the National Education Services Centre China Model booklet – a pro-Beijing group produces some lame publication and a government policy collapses.

The cast of participants and vested interests in the NENTNDA saga will be rich and complex. Among the more colourful are folk living (often rent free!) in a spacious, green pastoral idyll most of us can only dream of. Should 10,000 of these lucky amateur farmers, whose kids can ride bikes through deserted lanes, deserve space that could house 150,000 of the rest of us? Then you’ve got the ideological greens, people who spy a plot to serve Mainland interests, our own local developers, landowners eyeing fat compensation, the construction industry, the civil-engineer/bureaucrat lobby, tourism interests and probably more sniffing around.

In theory, officials could present a case that would win broad public support (as they say they have) for these mini-new-towns. The case would need to include clear, detailed pledges: all homes will be affordable and aimed at tenants or buyers currently stuck on public housing waiting lists or priced out of the private market; not a single square foot will be sold to non-permanent residents or non-occupiers; affordable retail/commercial space will also be provided for local small businesses to supplement the usual developer-landlords’ chains; there will be no tourist facilities; there will be cheap trendy transport options like electric buses so people can get to the urban areas with no problem; the butterflies and rare plants will be protected.

There you have it – a people-first vote-winner. Simple. But of course that’s not what Chief Secretary Carrie Lam is coming up with. It’s all vague, hand-wringing ‘trust me, I’m an official’. The government might talk tough, but there will be no-one to support it, so the vested interests and single-issue activists will smell fear. It won’t be a good-versus-evil struggle like National Education; it will be a messy, energy-sapping mud-fight.