Big Lychee, Various Sectors

A quick flick through yesterday’s China Daily before throwing it out reveals a couple of interesting(-ish) articles. First of all somebody really, really hates the ‘rotten’, ‘monstrous’ English Schools Foundation. It seems everyone hates the ESF almost as much as they want to get their kids into it.

Commentator Victor Fung Keung lashes out against a publicly subsidized network of schools catering almost entirely to expatriate foreigners who are rich and should send their kids to private schools here or abroad – or somehow put the little ones into local Chinese-medium institutions. However, that’s not the ESF system of reality. A large proportion of its students today are permanent residents, many of them ethnic Chinese. So what is Fung’s real problem?

It seems to be hatred of the ESF as a colonial symbol, but there may be more to it. Some ESF-bashers have a seething, barely rational loathing of these Anglo schools. Kids who go to ESF schools come out different from other Hong Kong kids, for example in English-language skills and maybe in critical thinking. They are (mostly) not hyper-brainy types like their counterparts who go to local ‘elite’ schools and become barristers and surgeons. But they will have advantages over the products of mainstream local schools in many future careers. They will be able to do more than occupy the intermediary/broker/sales positions that the mainstream local exam-obsessed system condemns many kids to. So maybe social envy is the root problem.

Today’s South China Morning Post has an item by Sin-ming Shaw mentioning that Chief Executive CY Leung’s son is reportedly at a pricy boarding school in England, where the oh-so-important-and-vital National Education curriculum doesn’t exist. Strangely, this sort of privilege enjoyed by Hong Kong’s ruling elite (at public expense if they’re in the government) doesn’t arouse anything like the bitterness that exists towards the ESF. Presumably, the latter’s denizens are of broadly the same caste as people like Fung. Less social distance, more to resent.

Meanwhile, everyone’s favourite mouth-frothing patriot Lau Nai-keung wants an ideological war against the Hong Kong City State concept, as promoted by the Autonomy Movement of that name. Interestingly, he dismisses the classical Marxist solution of just giving the people “better-paying jobs and bigger houses” to wean them off this splittist course. (Lau was an early supporter of CY Leung, whose socio-economic policy vision can virtually be summarized in the jobs-and-houses line.) Something more subtle is needed in addition. Lau is particularly worried by the slogan “Chinese people go back to China” seen at the Reclaim Sheung Shui Station protest (see here and here). Understandably. He calls for confrontation with the ‘dissidents’ and the city-state idea with the aim of clarifying Hong Kong’s Chinese-ness while accommodating its differences. Establishment leaders, he says, are failing in their duty by avoiding the issue.

With the ESF issue, officials are avoiding open debate on what to do probably because they fear highlighting local schools’ inadequacies and raising the possibility that ordinary riffraff should have more right to choose what sort of school their kids should attend. It would be interesting to know what Lau thinks of some people’s preference for the ‘colonial’ school system. Lau is probably right to say that an open struggle of ideas with what he sees as an anti-China force would be enlightening. But again, we can expect officials to do all they can to avoid it, for fear of finding out something they don’t want to know. Given the recent National Education mess, they can probably be forgiven for not overtly taking on supporters of local autonomy and identity.

Click to hear ‘This Town is Our Town’ by the Go-Go’s!

If, during his Chief Executive quasi-election campaign, Hong Kong’s ex-Chief Secretary Henry Tang had been caught on video saying “It’s not my job to worry about those people [who don’t pay salaries tax]” no-one would have been remotely surprised or given a damn. He was to run Hong Kong for the city’s (non-taxpaying) tycoons, and we all knew it. And if Republican US presidential candidate Mitt Romney had been found with a 2,000 square-foot luxury basement, it would barely have rated a paragraph on page six. After all, he’s already got a 3,600 square -foot subterranean cavern complete with car elevator.

But it was not to be. The revelation about Henry’s underground den caused public outrage, which one way or another led Beijing to re-write the script at the last minute and put CY Leung into office. And it was Romney who got recorded at a fund-raiser last spring dismissing the 47% of Americans who are retirees, students, low-paid or unemployed as dependents who expect handouts and refuse to care for themselves. He also revealed his election strategy: attract the roughly 7% of voters who are independent and voted Obama in 2008 by convincing them they made a mistake then. As well as the 47%, he also insults that target group in the video, explaining how his campaign would condescendingly help them accept that they had been fools last time. He goes on to reject any possibility of a two-state solution in the Middle East.

How much will this actually damage his campaign? Romney already had ‘loser’ written all over him. Forget opinion polls: British bookmakers say so. Like insurers, these companies make money by calculating probabilities with cold accuracy. Romney’s offshore bank accounts and refusal to reveal earlier tax returns already hurt him. If Obama’s team can’t shred a multimillionaire opponent who pays relatively little federal income tax and who badmouths poor people who pay none, what can they do?

Henry Tang grinned, blamed his wife and just carried on safe in the knowledge that Beijing would hand him the job of CE on a plate. Romney has to try harder to recover. He’s doing quite well. Rule one: don’t apologize – don’t, that is, concede that you made a mistake (which, as his comments on the independent 7% made clear, he knows makes you look stupid). He has also explained the comments half-convincingly: he was talking about focusing campaign resources, and non-taxpayers won’t be receptive to messages about tax cuts, and that’s why he “doesn’t worry” about them, though of course he loves and respects them deeply in every other way. But it’s all a bit complicated and detailed for most people’s tastes. The Democrats could argue that Obama’s performance has been pretty good given that the alternative was a 1930s-style bout of debt deflation. But then you have to explain what debt deflation is. The basic default subliminal message is that Obama means well even if he’s learning on the job. So you just attack Romney the multimillionaire, and bingo – now he even gives you more ammo to do it with.

Has anyone sampled Romney’s comments in a rap/hip-hop/whatever song yet?

Closer to home, World War III still hasn’t started, but it seems the Germans have won. Mainland consumers are turning away from Japanese brands of vehicle, and Teutonic, and Korean, manufacturers will benefit. All these products are, of course, built in China by partly Chinese-owned, yes state-owned, ventures. This is shooting-yourself-in-the-foot cannibalization to make yourself feel good.

As part of China’s perhaps overly strenuous and elaborate propaganda efforts, state TV has now started to show a weather forecast for the Diaoyu islands (the TV screen shot here also shows the outlook – storms – for Nansha, the new ‘city’ covering China’s bits of the Philippines and Vietnam.) This undoubtedly useful new service started last week. And it raises one tiny, nagging question: why weren’t they already doing it? 

Click to hear ‘Uncle Henry’s Basement’ by the Jesters!

The Great 2012 People’s Righteous Japanese Car-Burning Diaoyu Uprising is hereby declared over. The usually semi-fascist Global Times declares that violence is never the solution, while Xinhua intones that the masses agree entirely and hate all the vandalism. Anyway, it was all Japan’s fault. Japan has been sent a message of infantile impotent fury, and Chinese people who feel a need, for whatever reason, to smash something up have been allowed to get it out of their system. Whichever Beijing faction decided to trigger the outrage may or may not have succeeded in its aim; we’ll probably never know.

The scary thing about the pictures in the first link above is not the flames and smoke rising from destroyed property but the signs and banners written by owners of businesses and Japanese-branded cars, pleading and begging with rioters. “We will agree to any insane racist wacko opinion you want us to,” they essentially say, “if only you promise to leave us alone.” There’s a whiff of Cultural Revolution here, with innocents competing to be extreme for fear of being labeled and persecuted if they don’t.

In civilized Hong Kong, the anti-Japanese protesters outside Exchange Square are displaying Nazi swastikas and likening Japanese Prime Minister Noda to Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. (Historians tempted to dispute the aptness of these comparisons should also check out the University of Hong Kong, where students apparently emboldened by their younger brothers’ and sisters’ fight against National Education, are portraying top school officials as deposed Arab despots. Mubarak is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Prof Roland Chin, while Gadaffi is Dean of Student Affairs Dr Albert Chau. Seems a tad disproportionate – or maybe HKU really is torturing dissidents and holding public executions.) Noda’s crime is ‘nationalizing’ the Senkaku Islands, buying the rocks so the governor of Tokyo doesn’t do it first in order to provoke trouble. This is the thanks he gets. His views on sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkakus are here, halfway down between the bit about how Japan, not Korea, legally owns Takeshima Island and the bit about how Japan, not Russia, legally owns the Kuril Islands, or Northern Territories.

His (and Japan’s) official line is that there is no territorial dispute. China also refuses to accept that there is anything to discuss. They agree on one thing, at least. The Japanese government’s decision to buy the islands, and its de facto policy of not stationing any armed forces there, show a pragmatic preference to avoid antagonizing China. Armchair generals are pontificating about Hollywood-style scenarios; for example, China lands troops at night, then Japan uses its superior submarine capabilities to starve them out, then face-saving unarmed cops arrest and deport them. It won’t happen: the US has said that while it doesn’t take sides on the sovereignty issue, it is committed to defending Japan. The PLA can’t be that deranged. We hope.

The Takeshima/Dokdo dispute with Korea is unsolvable. When all you have are faded maps and two peoples refusing to give up their claims – and bitter hatred from the past – there is no way out. There is no acceptable King Solomon to suggest cutting the thing in half. It is difficult for outsiders to comprehend how strong feelings are. If you think Arabs go berserk over the prophet Mohamed, and the Chinese go nuts over Diaoyu, wait until you see a Korean totally freak out over Dokdo. As for the Kurils, Stalin grabbed them along with southern Sakhalin at the last minute in World War II and kicked out the Japanese residents. Of all the disputed places, it’s the one that can really be seen as part of the Japanese homeland – originally Ainu-inhabited and colonized centuries back as North Ezo, like Hokkaido. Now Russian. Don’t like it? Don’t start world wars.

Click to hear ‘Was Ezo’ by Martha and the Muffins!

“On September 18, 1931,” we are told, “a small quantity of dynamite was detonated by Lt. Kawamoto Suemori…” It was Japan’s pretext for the invasion of Manchuria. Aside from (probably) marking the beginning of World War II in Asia, the 9-18 incident is noteworthy for three reasons. First, it is one of those occasions when the image of China as a poor, helpless victim of foreign bullying – so important to Beijing when it is not snatching bits of the Philippines and Vietnam – is a reality. Second, it made the incompetence and weakness of China’s government in the face of foreign aggression obvious to the whole country, not for the first time. Third, the anniversary is tomorrow, just as demonstrations and even riots are breaking out in the Mainland against Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, and with the national leadership transition due to get underway. Hong Kong’s own anti-Japanese activists are setting up shop on the walkway outside Exchange Square, home of Tokyo’s local consulate.

When the nationalist governor of Tokyo announced a plan to buy the islands from their legal, private owner, the Japanese government felt it had no choice but to purchase them itself. Otherwise, the militantly anti-Chinese mayor would have used municipal ownership of the property to provoke Beijing, for example by brazenly building structures there. The Chinese leadership should have been grateful that Prime Minister Noda stepped in to ensure that this didn’t happen. Instead, someone in Beijing decided that this (inevitably) hurts the feelings of the Chinese people, and sent the word out through the media that Tokyo is trying to grab the territory. The result is Shenzhen erupting in fury, with citizens attacking Seibu department store (correct) and the city government offices (not correct).

One theory is that this is part of a factional power struggle, with outgoing President Hu Jintao stirring up trouble to justify his continued chairmanship of the Central Military Commission after Xi Jinping (‘I once was lost but now am found’) takes over from him, assuming that’s what’s going to happen. (Another explanation for Xi’s two-week disappearance: he was ‘on strike’ in protest against Hu’s efforts to retain influence.) Another theory is that the People’s Liberation Army is stirring things up in order to gain more clout in the new administration. Both could be correct, or neither.

Some parts of the Mainland state-run media have been criticizing Hu recently for his lackluster performance while in power, while the South China Morning Post reports anti-Japan demonstrators carrying pictures of Mao and Bo Xilai and placards calling for political reforms. It is often said that if the Chinese people ever rise up against their government, it will not because of economics, corruption or persecution, but because the leadership betrayed the nation by failing to defend its territorial integrity against dastardly foreigners – in other words, lapsing into the old bullying-victim model.

As in the past, it will all blow over – but not before everything has been ratcheted up another notch, with the Chinese people more convinced than ever of the rightness of the cause. One of China’s problems is that legally Japan has a half-decent claim to the islands in terms of treaties and recentness of the exercise of sovereignty. Beijing can argue a fairly good moral case: Japan took over the uninhabited rocks at a time of imperialist expansion, and a simple glance at a map suggests they would otherwise be Chinese territory today. It could also point out that under international agreements on the sea, such specks of rock are not entitled to a 200-mile economic zone. But the parallels with the Paracels and Spratleys in the South China Sea start to get too close for comfort. If China owns dots on the map that are close to China, so Vietnam and the Philippines must own their nearby dots as well. And we can’t have that. So we stick to lame arguments about thousand-year-old fishing practices and rely on volatile public emotion to make diplomatic points. Meanwhile, we wait to see if Hong Kong activists manage to get that rickety old fishing boat seaworthy enough to make another trip to the scenic outcrops.

Like other life forms, human beings are machines with only one ultimate purpose: to enable a complex bundle of protein molecules to replicate. Given the way we sometimes act, it would be depressing if this were not the case.

Our first outbreak of robotic, irrational behaviour follows the appearance on YouTube of an inadvertently surreal movie (judging by the ‘trailer’) in which the prophet Mohamed is portrayed as a gay, pedophile, donkey-molesting, etc, etc. Since the publication of the infamous Danish cartoons featuring the prophet, it has become apparent that anyone who wants to can trigger mass, mouth-frothing, frenzied, violent freaking-out by Middle Eastern Muslim men simply by publicizing the slightest insult against the man who founded the Islamic faith. Say what you want about Jesus or Buddha, and no-one takes any notice; disrespect Moha, and you get almost instant bearded insanity. The tricky bit must be actually getting the insult noticed, but once you get the required attention it’s like pressing a button and setting an atom bomb off.

As with the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute, which leads certain normally mild-mannered Beijing folk to go nuts and attack sushi restaurants and patriotically pirate Japanese porn videos, this collective madness is abnormal. Most Muslims can’t be goaded into screeching, burning and killing over a film or a drawing. Those who can are doing so because it is politically convenient for someone that they do.

Our second outbreak of mob-craziness is the imminent international orgy of paid-for overnight queuing, crowding, jostling, line-breaking, impulse-buying, hoarding, re-selling and profiteering – and hype – that is the launch of yet another Apple iPhone. Just months, it seems, since the last one. In Hong Kong, inevitably, the ritualistic scramble for the designer-label fashion accessory has a Mainland dimension to it, so we can add the phrase ‘parallel trading’ to the list of forthcoming excitements.

Getting people rampaging in the streets and destroying foreign property is a good way to divert people’s attention from real problems. It’s easier than saying, “you are all unemployed because this is an Arab country and that’s how things go,” or “yes, it seems Vice-President Xi has now been missing for 12 days.” Where new iPhones are concerned, the beneficiaries make hard cash and are laughing all the way to the bank. Not only Apple shareholders, but manufacturers of components and ingredients like rare earths, who must be giggling in disbelief: “We go to all this trouble to dig up these weird elements, and then just a few months after you buy the toy containing them, you chuck it away, and we have to dig more up.” (That’s an interesting question: what does happen to all the once-coveted old models? Do they gather dust, go to charity, get given to the maid, or are there geological-type layers of them in landfills?)

Oh, classic – the new iPhone needs different-shaped plugs, adapters and all the rest, so users have to buy new accessories too. Apple shareholders must be wetting themselves with gleeful mirth.

I declare the weekend open, and dedicate it to all people recovering from sports-related injuries, strokes, heart attacks or liver surgery, wherever they may be.

The Global Mayhem Index reading hits a suffocating high of 98 today, with hundreds dead in Pakistan factories, extremists killing the US ambassador to Libya and Hong Kong Police warning of men taking photographs up women’s skirts on MTR trains using intriguing-sounding ‘camera watches’. And the hunt for Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping continues.

The Daily Telegraph quotes a named and apparently sort-of authoritative source as saying the next President has had a heart attack. This does sound more probable than the more exotic theories flying around about his disappearance for over 10 days. However, the conspiratorial among us can console ourselves with the time-honoured riposte: Ah, but that’s what they want us to think. I like the idea that Xi is publicly refusing to endorse President Hu Jintao’s ‘scientific development’ theory as the greatest contribution to Sino-Marxism of the last 10 years, as he is planning to change course and usher in wonderful political reforms. (This blog at the finally revamped South China Morning Post website discusses it.) For the serially excitable, there are always comparisons with Lin Biao, the Vice-Premier whose plane mysteriously crashed over Mongolia in 1971.

The greatest intrigue we can conjure up in the Big Lychee is about newly appointed Environment Undersecretary Christine Loh. The insinuation is that the think-tank she founded accepted funds from China Light and Power, therefore, in return, she will let the electricity company off the hook over emissions in due course. This assumes the funding was underhand, when Civic Exchange has a policy of transparency and the Kadoorie family who own CLP are openly keen on green and similar issues, in their own tycoon-like way. It also assumes that Loh, after years of hard research and thankless lobbying, doesn’t really want to make any impact on air pollution and other problems, but just wants a semi-fancy job title so she can feel important.

In truth, she has been fobbed off with an insultingly junior position, probably to appease the many people who have reservations about her. There were mutterings that previous Chief Executive Donald Tsang would have liked to have her in government, but Beijing and/or its allies vetoed the idea. This was probably disingenuous; Donald and other bureaucrat-psychos obsessed with covering Hong Kong with concrete fear and loathe the likes of Loh, not least because she runs rings around them in terms of policy ideas and just plain intellect.

That’s not to say that Beijing and its loyalists like her. Her book on the Communist Party in Hong Kong (reviewed here) wouldn’t be a problem; she thinks it would help everyone if the CCP came out of the closet here. But she was appointed to the Legislative Council by Governor Chris Patten, the ‘sinner’ who defied China before 1997 and allowed us to vote in city-wide democratic functional constituencies, long before anyone had heard of Super-Seats. To reward someone tainted with such symbolically charged pro-democracy connections is insulting to the many patriots who, since the handover, have been left on the sidelines while tycoons and ex-colonial civil servants have been allowed to have control of the city. To them it’s tribal. Fortunately, they seem almost to enjoy being slapped in the face repeatedly, decade after decade, by their beloved party.

Loh became pretty much the only legislator before or since to get her own bill (on harbour protection) into the council and passed into law. Then she quit Legco because she couldn’t get much done. She doesn’t need this joke of a public position, let alone the money, and she knows from experience that vested interests and pestilential bureaucrats will oppose much of what needs to be done to clean the city up. So CY Leung knows full well that she will walk if she can’t change things, and he knows that would be a major humiliation for his administration – and yet he chased and hired her anyway. An approving article in China Daily last June set the tone. We can conclude this is good, if long-overdue, news.

It is now some 10 days since China’s next President, Xi Jinping, didn’t show up at a photo-op with the visiting Danish Prime Minister. Officials denied that the meeting had been in the schedule at all; the Dane must have imagined it in his diary. Then they spread the word that the 59-year-old imbiber of Guinness had hurt his back while swimming and will be fine.

In the absence of a simple PR photo of him smiling and recovering well, elaborate rumours of assassination, defenestration and backstabbing have inevitably surfaced. Bell’s palsy, which leaves the face distorted – that’s a good one. Maybe he has been secretly parachuted onto the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands to retrieve the sacred territory for the motherland, along with Vladimir Putin’s camera team. After all, the Chinese naval vessels sent to reassure the Mainland public have disappeared as well. Or he could be languishing in prison – he is, after all, China’s Nelson Mandela.

There is an alternative explanation: Xi Jinping never existed. There is no record of any such person ever holding any public office in the People’s Republic. The photographs you thought you saw him in didn’t include him at all. You must have dreamt it. It was in fact a blank space after all, with just a faint smudge of Winston Smith’s fingerprint on it. And his family’s multibillion dollar luxury apartments here in Hong Kong? Not empty, as once thought, but occupied by people not called Xi, who insist they’ve been there all along.

Unperson or not, the official truth will no doubt become clear in the pages of the South China Morning Post. The paper’s overt patriotism has been especially wearisome recently, with full-page articles lavishing breathless praise upon senior officials who will be taking the reins of power in the forthcoming transition of government, and Xinhua-style quotes around the word ‘buy’ to dispute the Japanese government’s right to purchase the Diaoyu Islands from their private owner – or should I say ‘owner’? Today’s back page predicts who will join the found-safe-and-sound Xi and sidekick Li Keqiang on the nine-or-maybe-seven-strong Politburo Standing Committee. Each one is helpfully colour-coded so we can satisfy our urgent need to know which of three China experts is forecasting which individual; they are David Shambaugh (George Washington U), Zheng Yongnian (Singapore National U) and Wang Xiangwei (editor, SCMP)…

Of course, we really should know who these top Chinese officials are, but most of us don’t (which reminds me: Foreign Correspondents Club monthly quiz tonight). It’s not just lack of National Education or laziness. I have no trouble recalling the names and faces of many leading government hopefuls in open societies. Sarah Palin, for example, never disappeared for 10 days. When a Ferrari crashes with two nude women in it in America or Britain, you usually know for sure whether the girls were from Tibet or Xinjiang, and you don’t have to wait months before finding out which cabinet member is the young, dead, naked, male driver’s father. And there’s no maybe-nine-maybe-seven stuff: everyone agrees on how many people sit on the cabinet.

We are ignorant of who runs China because that’s the way they want it. Similarly, we have an election system in Hong Kong no-one can understand because that’s the way someone designed it. The SCMP today also reports calls for reform of the bizarre proportional representation system. An incredible 21 candidates won seats in the Legislative Council with less than 8% of the vote. (We could use quotes for the word ‘won’ here: to me, 8% means you lost.) The NeoDemocrats’ Gary Fan got in with 6.2%.

The reason for changing from a simple first-past-the-post system was to limit the success of the Democratic Party. Hard to believe anyone thought it was necessary, but times change. The system now delivers extreme fringe candidates like the NeoDems into Legco. But it also screws the Civic Party quite nicely. In Hong Kong Island, one CP candidate (Christopher Chan) gets in with 70,000 votes, while New People’s Party candidate Regina Ip gets in with 31,000 votes; the second person on the CP list (Tanya Chan) – who you would have thought could have 35,000 of Christopher’s votes – doesn’t get a seat. This looks like a voting system Beijing can live with.

Just in: Christine Loh is to be deputy-sub-vice-assistant-under-secretary, stoically reporting to some nonentity, at Environment. The air smells better already.

The split between pan-democratic and pro-Beijing votes in geographical constituencies in Sunday’s Legislative Council election was 56.6% to 42.3%. The rigged nature of the overall political structure means that the pan-democrats end up with 33% of the seats.

They suffered numerous disadvantages: several factions hate one another more than they hate the pro-government folks; even the ones that are on speaking terms didn’t coordinate campaign strategies; their past records as legislators highlight poor judgment and inability to prioritize; their opponents had far greater organization and resources. Many pan-dem voters were not voting for the charisma, skill or ideologies of Emily, Alan or Claudia; they were voting against something – a force, a threat.

But around a third or so of them did cast their ballots positively to put a particular sort of individual into Legco. The result is that hardcore radicals from People Power and the League of Social Democrats (and to some extent the semi-radicals of the Labour Party and NeoDemocrats) make up a large part of the pan-dem camp in Legco. The PP/LSD grouping might in practice not serve as part of the pan-dem camp at all, but as disruptive banana-throwing, filibustering deniers of the validity of the whole system. An anarchic faction, but not necessarily a fringe one: Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung came top in New Territories East, with over 48,000 votes.

The one thing all these people and the 56% of voters have in common is a lack of trust in Beijing and in the local administration of CY Leung. After the Moral and National Education saga and the ‘4 million Shenzhen visitors’ plan, it seems self-evident to many of these people that the Chinese government is determined to push Hong Kong’s absorption into the motherland. The Chinese Communist Party has every incentive: its main reason to stay in power from now on is to enable its senior members’ families to continue plundering the country’s wealth; most Mainlanders have little idea how corrupt and criminal the kleptocracy has become, but Hongkongers know all about it.

Maybe paranoia about, and within, Hong Kong will ease after the transfer of power in Beijing. As Bloomberg writer William Pesek suggests, the MNE push backfired so horribly, complete with help from Pink Floyd, as to substantially reduce Beijing’s credibility among Hongkongers. Hong Kong people have been reasonably impressed with China’s leaders since the handover, but the whole Bo Xilai/Ferrari sex-crash/Chen Guangcheng/Mainland locusts/MNE series of disasters has changed that. Beijing appoints the Hong Kong government, so the potential repercussions of this are serious. It’s not so much that Hong Kong will, for example, sprout an independence movement, but that dissent will be such that Beijing perceives one. Marketwatch’s Craig Stephen goes so far as to warn that “Investors might need to reappraise political risk in Hong Kong equities as the gulf between its government and the local population widens…” because, the article concludes, “Hong Kong may become a Mainland Chinese city before it knows it.”

The only way out of all this is for Chief Executive CY Leung to convince China’s new leadership to reverse an approach that is clearly so counterproductive as to be dangerous. “Lay off Hong Kong (and get your own house in order),” he should say, “and leave me to swamp the new Legislative Council with lifestyle-type policy measures that people will really like and even the most radical politicians will find hard to oppose.”

(This is assuming CY can find Xi Jinping, the mysteriously missing next President. What the hell is it with this country?) 

I wonder how many people voted yesterday in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council election without having heard the news from the day before that the government had withdrawn its tragi-comic Moral and National Education plan. Except there is “no question of withdrawing this subject.” A useful little face-saver: MNE lives on for the handful of schools that wish to adopt it. Still, so much for the vital importance of “enabling students to be moral, think independently” and all the rest of the BS. This really was Son of Article 23 – a sacred duty to the nation unceremoniously scrunched up and tossed in the bin.

Although the timing of the climbdown looked desperate, Chief Executive CY Leung did a tolerable job of looking comfortable about it, essentially blaming the last administration for introducing the project and saying he would rather focus on housing and poverty. The truly humiliated here, aside from hapless Education Secretary Eddie Ng, are the faithful drones who were ranting that MNE was essential, the patriotic fools who produced the fatal China Model teaching booklet, and – not least – the puppet-masters in Beijing’s Hong Kong Liaison Office who surely had some input into the self-defeating tactics used to implement the policy. If I thought CY was really as cunning and ruthless as some say, I would suggest that it was he who has taught them a lesson here.

(So what happens to those 1.5 million pamphlets? Will they be pulped, leaving a precious few going for megabucks on eBay? )

The election results essentially show a win for the pan-democracy camp, at least compared with what could have been. One interesting thing is that internecine competition seems to have hurt the pro-Beijing camp as a whole more than it did the pan-dems, thanks no doubt to the high turnout inspired by our friends in the Liaison Office. (The DAB’s Starry Lee did an impressive job of swiping votes from her colleague Lau Kong Wah and the FTU’s infinitely more deserving Chan Yuen-han in the race for the five ‘Super-Seats’, three of which look set to go to the pan-dems as of 10.30 this morning.)

Another thing to note is that only the number-one person in a list gets a seat. No number-twos have made it into Legco, including the Civic Party’s Tanya Chan on HK Island (partly my fault for voting for Cyd Ho) and Audrey Eu in New Territories West, even though both lists got over 70,000 votes, far more than any other lists.

Even a ‘big’ vote is a small one, however. The Civic Party’s share of the total on Hong Kong Island was 21%. Lots of legislators will be in office despite winning less than 10% of the vote in their district – many of them no doubt complaining that the Chief Executive lacks a mandate. This explains why unexciting middle-ground candidates like Regina Ip, her buddy Michael Tien and his brother, the Liberal Party’s ghastly James Tien, all get in.

Although MNE and the wider Mainlandization concerns helped the pro-dems on this occasion, the pro-Beijing camp and the United Front organizers in the Liaison Office will be examining structural factors that failed to work to their advantage. The multi-seat constituencies and wacky proportional representation system were designed to compensate for the electorate’s 1990s-era lack of enthusiasm for pro-Beijing candidates. Yet despite the pan-dems’ self-destructive splits and obsessions, and despite the growing number of Mainland-born patriots on the electoral register, and despite the DAB/FTU’s lavish funding and the shadowy tactics they use to manage voters, they are still not winning the seats they should. The system’s supposed to be rigged, for heaven’s sake. Proposals for constitutional reform in the coming years may include a re-look at the geographical constituency system to redress the balance and restore its intended imbalance.

Lastly – where was the dirt? Where were the leaks about candidates’ illegal structures? Where were the photos of pro-democrats’ visits to sleazy Shenzhen massage places? Where were the revelations about the offices they rent from their in-laws? Disappointed… Presumably the Liaison Office was distracted by the MNE fiasco. They seem to have been the biggest losers here.

Click to hear ‘I’m a Loser’ by the Beatles!