Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Beneath the turbulence of life in Hong Kong as Chief Executive CY Leung flagellates himself with the National Education whip, positive changes are afoot. We’ve had the City of Lifts initiative, which will install elevators and ramps to make it easier for the elderly and infirm to get around. Not exactly a manned lunar mission, but it’s the sort of thing a city government is supposed to do, and it’s more than CY’s predecessor Donald Tsang ever gave a damn about. On which subject, we’ve had the dumping of Sir Bow-Tie’s obsession with making health care a ‘pillar industry’. Hospitals will now be for Hong Kong people – a constituency the last administration saw as a nuisance.

The news this morning includes the government’s plan to reserve certain residential sites for Hong Kong permanent residents. It is just a gesture that will make little or no difference to anything in practice. But if applied on a much bigger scale, this idea could in theory give birth to a new category of housing: cut-price homes for families who want a place to live in rather than an overvalued asset to trade. It probably won’t come to that – the bubble real estate agents say we don’t have will go pop first. But the very principle would have been alien to the last government.

It’s a start. And these are relatively easy policies to unveil. Some others would be much harder; they would run up against vested interests or even provoke undue alarm and run into unexpected public opposition. Should our leaders stick to their guns and try to ram such initiatives through anyway?

Imagine a government announcement banning cars, vans and trucks from urban areas in daytime; imposing painfully high electronic pricing on all road use; rationing vehicle registrations; subsidizing clean new engines for all old trucks, buses and ferries; subsidizing replacement fleets of electric vehicles. Imagine the squeals from outraged drivers of black seven-seater SUVs who want to clog up the side streets. Imagine the protests – hunger strikes, even – of shop owners unable to take deliveries during the day. Imagine the tut-tutting of economists and bureaucrats nervous about dipping into the fiscal reserves. And imagine how clean the air and how spacious our downtown areas would be.

That would be worth bitter struggle, bloody-minded refusal to make concessions, dismissal of protesters as misguided, division, disharmony, even dips in the public opinion ratings if that’s what it takes. In order to clean the air. But in order to introduce a silly hour-a-week Moral & National Education class in schools for the sake of appearances? What a waste.

The Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ column makes one of its occasional good (OK, obvious) points today when it says CY would be making things even worse if he chose this moment before Sunday’s election to take the MNE monster and strangle it to death. The opposition would be so elated they would rush out to vote in even greater numbers on Sunday, while government loyalists would stay at home in despondent gloom.

So it’s a question of grinding away. We don’t know why we have to do it, but we do. The weekend is hereby declared open an hour early in order to ‘enhance parents’ understanding’ of MNE complete with pictures of balloons and butterflies.

They’ve printed 1,500,000 copies of this thing. ‘The first of a series’!

The Curse of Soho strikes candidate number 13 for the Legislative Council in Hong Kong Island, as a lone campaign worker struggles to erect banners beside the Mid-Levels Escalator…

As the redoubtable she-dragon representing the Transport functional constituency, Miriam Lau did what you would expect a small-circle Liberal Party lawmaker to do: consistently oppose measures to reduce pollution from commercial vehicles and increase penalties for minibus and taxi drivers who kill others by speeding and jumping red lights. The equivalent now would be to promise all voters living between Caine Road and Lyndhurst Terrace that she will get them the legal right to dodge taxes and shoplift.

Landlord Allen Zeman endorses her courage in running for a democratically elected seat. Liberal Party boss James Tien is doing the same – not for the first time – in New Territories East (also with the number 13!). As a voting bloc in Legco, these people have spent years lobbying against anything that would increase business competition or promote consumers’ interests. Now, realizing that Hong Kong is growing less appreciative of people who pander to vested interests, they hanker for the respectability and clout that comes with public approval and want your vote. Good luck with that.

By contrast, fronts for the Chinese Communist Party seem quite decent folk. In the geographical constituencies, candidates for the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK make a special point of pushing grassroots issues like bus services, building maintenance and school textbooks. In the District Council (second) Functional Constituency race, however – the five city-wide democratically elected ‘super seats’ – platforms will be less parochial.

The DAB’s big hope for an extra seat here is youthful, photogenic, etc Starry Lee, deputy president and unofficial member of the Executive Council. To show how serious she is, she has sent out a leaflet aimed purely at an English-language audience. (I am presuming campaign workers went through the electoral rolls and plucked out all the visibly non-Chinese voters’ names and addresses.) This is impressive enough as it is; most candidates, not without good reason, focus on Chinese materials. But so far as I can tell, this is no mere direct translation of something already sent out to the majority 95 percent of the electorate. It looks tailor-made for the ethnic vote…

Essentially, it highlights Starry’s commitment to focusing on the middle class, having a more diverse and fairer economic structure, improving air quality and pushing education, especially for ethnic minorities. In that order. These all appear in the DAB’s platform, but most of them are buried way down there past all the promises about public housing and welfare handouts. The leaflet also has only very moderate DAB branding and largely ignores her four colleagues running on the same list.

In some parts of the US, you see drinks and snacks with ‘extra sweet’ on the label in Spanish. Manufacturers create separate recipes to cater for Latinos’ fondness for sugar. The DAB seems to be doing something similar. They are already active among the Indian and Pakistani communities in Kowloon; now, blathering away about air pollution, they’re even packaging Starry for the Westerner vote. Mainlandization comes in many forms and no-one’s going to be immune.

With this sort of capacity behind her, Starry has a good chance of getting one of the five Super-Seats, though three or four other candidates are almost certain to come ahead of her. The person to vote for if she and her generous campaign funding don’t appeal would be Frederick Fung of the less-than riveting Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood.

Some say that Chief Executive CY Leung has scrapped plans to attend the APEC conference, sending the Financial Secretary in his place, to pull a last-minute stunt to boost the pro-Beijing vote on Sunday. For what it’s worth, the word is that any ‘Hong Kong land for Hong Kong people’ policy will be purely symbolic. It does seem that CY has sorted out a solution to the liberalization of travel to Hong Kong for migrant workers in Shenzhen and other big Mainland cities: the scheme will be postponed indefinitely, supposedly for further cross-border discussion – and that will be the last we hear of it for a very, very long time. Maybe he is going to announce a similar suspension of National Education, so we’re not thinking of hunger strikers on Sunday? Or maybe we simply shouldn’t underestimate CY’s distaste for pointless time-wasting distractions. APEC and Financial Secretary John Tsang were made for each other.

When weirdoes start crawling out from under the woodwork, can the denouement be far away? Lifelong communist faithful and former Justice Secretary Elsie Leung warns that anti-National Education hunger strikes and occupation of the government concrete at Tamar will lead to anarchy. That is, a state of no functioning government – public administration unable to implement policies owing to protestors’ tactics that are emotive, effective and make patriots and officials look and feel humiliated. The old girl has a point.

Beijing-friendly broadcasters are onto something as well. When I checked the now-infamous ATV editorial on the protestors on YouTube yesterday, it had been viewed 10 times; it is now nearing 2,200 – and other versions floating around have been seen by a multiple of that number. It is a classic (and funny) example of Chinese Communist Party paranoia: the anti-National Education movement is part of a British/American plot to destroy Hong Kong in order to make China look bad (that is, in case anyone needs to have it spelt out, look incapable of running a city of 7 million that worked fine up to 1997).

Where are the evil Anglo-Saxon influences undermining the Big Lychee so the motherland loses face? They are not among the Westerners in our high-value service export industries who pay tax and give our retail sector a boost at weekends through their large-volume purchases of liquid refreshments. They are nowhere to be found among the gwailos who are so active in air-cleaning, heritage-preserving, dolphin-protecting and plastic-pellet-gathering circles. They are probably not even among the Native English Teacher brigade, despite being in the perfect position to poison malleable young minds.

No: they have infiltrated far deeper than that.

• Behold legislator Regina Ip (British-style HK University, Glasgow University, Stanford University, degree in Elizabethan literature, British-trained civil servant.) Her handling of the Article 23 legislation left Hong Kong authorities powerless to counter threats to Chinese national security.
• Behold ex-Chief Executive Donald Tsang (son of British-trained cop, British-trained bureaucrat, MA from Harvard, wears bow-tie). He crafted the original proposal for National Education in such a way that mainstream Hongkongers were bound to see it as a sinister, creepy, alien bit of communist brainwashing – even funding a United Front body to produce fatally propagandistic teaching materials.
• Behold Chief Secretary Carrie Lam (HKU, Cambridge U, British-trained bureaucrat, Fullbright placement with US Government in 1988, smarmy British accent). Her well-honed condescension and stubbornness have now almost certainly left Hong Kong officials incapable of indoctrinating local youths into correct thinking about the one-party system, and indeed has persuaded the kids to embrace resistance.

The London/Washington-backed Hanjian exposed.

Even so – there is now officially absolutely nowhere you can escape Mainlandization.

Click to hear Jacqueline Taieb’s ‘La Fac de Lettres’!

The new academic year begins, and just over one percent (‘at least’ six out of around 500) of Hong Kong’s primary schools are launching the new Moral and National Education curriculum, now simply referred to by many teachers, parents and schoolkids as ‘wash brain’. The ever-thorough Standard lists them. One seems to be run by an affiliate of the pro-Beijing teachers’ group that produced the now-infamous teaching guide about the superiority of the Communist Party’s ‘China model’. Another’s name includes an abbreviation of suspiciously United Front-style length. A third is the Fresh Fish Traders’ institution that seems to get in the headlines quite a lot (or is just that the name sticks in the mind?).

A report from last night’s protest at the Tamar government HQ is here, and a reminder that the world is watching is here. Even apologists seem uncomfortable with what’s happening. The latest situation is that the hunger strikers are still doing their thing, and the bizarreness looks set to continue through to the Legislative Council election on Sunday. The administration of CY Leung, with Chief Secretary Carrie Lam bravely serving as representative on Earth, is undergoing a crisis of cluelessness.

Just to remind ourselves: what was National Education supposed to do in the first place? The truth is that it seems to have been a symbolic gesture put together to appease local and Mainland complaints about Hongkongers’ apparent lack of patriotism, CCP-style. But the ‘official unofficial’ aim is to instill in young Hongkongers the sort of social and civic consciousness that leads them to share Mainland Chinese people’s broad acceptance of and at least occasional pride in the achievements of the nation under the one-party state. Now look at this picture from today’s South China Morning Post… 

What we see is a well-groomed, roughly 12-year-old schoolgirl in a neat and tidy uniform. She probably has a big stuffed Hello Kitty on her bed at home, and when not eating curried squid balls or studying her Level 1 algebra, she plays Angry Birds on her iPhone. Except that’s not what she’s doing. With at least several classmates, she is handing out ‘No to Wash Brain’ tags for fellow students to attach next to the pink furry thing dangling from their backpacks.

National Education has radicalized 12-year-old girls: the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. It has turned entire classrooms of kids into thrilled freedom-fighting anti-government activists. The most cunning CIA operatives, the most determined Taiwan splittists, the most imaginative of Hong Kong’s pro-democrats couldn’t have pulled this off. For producing such a subversive movement, National Education would surely be illegal under the Article 23 security laws, had they come into existence. The cadres in Beijing’s Liaison Office in Western must be wondering who to shoot first.

To help them, I propose that the next Nobel Peace Prize be awarded jointly to Carrie Lam, the pro-Beijing National Education Services Centre and the porn website that shut down for the day to swell the crowds at Tamar.

Heck – Gandhi couldn’t have done it.

The Wall Street Journal wishes us to know the truth about Hong Kong’s tycoons. It appears they are in fact selfless and would love to compete even harder to bring consumers the cheapest of groceries in the most hygienic of environments, if only the government would allow them. The article concludes that “as long as there are low barriers to entry, they will not be able to earn excess profits.” Which is of course exactly what those less enlightened than the WSJ thought these cartel-operators were doing (though possibly not specifically in the supermarket sector). Reuters confuses the issue by announcing the end of “obscene” profits for Hong Kong property firms. Maybe the last word should go to the reader of Time Out Hong Kong who, I recently heard, called the magazine to say that she had cried after reading February’s Hemlock mega-opus on the plutocracy.

We will each get a chance to make a small, and probably all-but pointless, individual comment next Sunday when Hong Kong holds its quadrennial Legislative Council election. The bewildering profusion of candidates, lists and parties, and the absurd size of geographical constituencies, threaten to make the process even more of a farce than ever. Opinion pollsters have virtually given up forecasting results because candidates could win with percentages of the vote not much bigger than the surveys’ statistical margins of error.

In Hong Kong Island, we have 14 individuals/groups running for seven seats. Three are the sort of deranged/loners/no-hopers you always get, with at least two leaning in a vaguely pan-democratic direction. That leaves:

Pan-democrats, in rough order of militancy…

Democratic Party (Sin Chung-kai et al)

Civic Party (Chans KL and Tanya)

Independent (Dr Lo Wing-lok)

Labour Party (Cyd Ho et al)

League of Social Democrats (Avery Ng)

People Power (bunch of people never previously heard of)

Pro-establishment, namely

make-believe Beijing loyalists…

Liberal Party (Miriam Lau)

New People’s Party (Regina Ip et al)

…and true CCP believers…

DAB (Christopher Chung plus six)

DAB again (Tsang Yok-sing running alone)

FTU (five not overly proletarian types in orange T-shirts)

Miriam Lau imagines that endorsements from former Legco president Rita Fan and billionaire landlord Allen Zeman will win votes. So we can be reasonably sure that people who like this sort of un-communist conservatism will flock to Regina.

On the other hand, the devout communist DAB-FTU – which operate as a bloc in Legco – would appear to be cannibalizing themselves. In their favour are the black hands of Beijing’s local Liaison Office, and organized and obedient followers who can be guided to divide votes among, say, family members. Even so, the FTU have turned up for the first time in Hong Kong Island to get votes, and could in theory spoil the DAB’s supposedly cunning attempt to maximize gains through having two lists – though the working class is so thin on the ground here that it may make little difference.

The real mess is in the pan-democratic camp. In theory, they could clean up by coordinating everything and dividing the constituency up among different party lists on, say, a district-by-district basis (1 campaigns for Wanchai, 2 campaigns for the Mid-Levels, etc). In practice, such a diverse group is bound to splinter – but this looks more like atomization. It is perfectly possible that Lo Wing-lok and Cyd Ho will both fail to get in and prevent one or two other pan-dems getting seats to boot. Alternatively, votes could miraculously be scattered in such a way that they all just scrape in.

Why did then-Constitutional Affairs Secretary Stephen Lam choose to expand the existing five geographical constituencies rather than accommodate extra Legco members though additional, but smaller, clusters of seats? (Or, more accurately, why did Beijing tell him to do so?) When they offer candidates a feasible chance to get elected with just 5% of the vote, geographical constituencies have become too big to rig.

Since Legco is rigged (and constitutionally weak) anyway, maybe Beijing prefers encouraging internecine strife among its dreaded pan-dem enemies. A group of youngsters are on hunger strike outside government headquarters over National Education. (It’s a Cantonese type of protest, in which they take it in turns to stop not-eating; no force-feeding required here.) If there were fewer pro-democratic groups vying for seats, such a protest, continuing as Election Day approaches, could inspire a game-changing turnout. As it is, any such effect will be dissipated. Even Miriam says no to National Education.

On a brighter, heart-warming note: In a touching tribute to the Special Olympics currently underway in London, Louis Vuitton are advertising their latest range of impractical but very noticeable ladies’ hats with mildly mentally retarded models…

As a shareholder of Swire Properties, I can live with the HK$475 million apartment in Frank Gehry’s Opus project. Whoever bought it is now the proud owner of a supposed (rather disheveled-looking, to me) architectural trophy. As a transaction, the sale has no connection with the real Hong Kong housing market. The problem is that much of the other residential real estate in town seems to have become similarly disconnected: the city needs affordable dwellings for people and families, but interest rates, government and developers have turned housing stock into overpriced assets – stores of value for investors, if not quick punts for speculators betting on more ‘store of value’ fans joining the rush.

Recent land auction results and transactions in middle-class neighbourhoods suggest continued price rises. The property bulls scoff at the question of whether to buy or bail. They point to continued global monetary loosening, which debases the dollar and other currencies, which drives people to convert cash into real assets that will keep their value. Thus more quantitative easing or negative real interest rates must mean yet more upside for the Hong Kong property market. (The rest of the world has gold bugs.)

However, so far as we can see, the ongoing debasement of the currency is counteracting what would otherwise be a severe rebasing through debt-deflation and 1930s-style recession. This must be part of the reason why we are not seeing inflation soar (so far as we can distinguish ‘monetary’ price changes from ‘supply-and-demand’ ones). No-one’s pushing cash around in wheelbarrows to buy groceries. Hong Kong property prices are galloping far ahead not only of inflation, but of most other assets that can protect people from debased currencies.

There may be unique or unusual political, cultural or psychological factors at play. Maybe it is safer or easier to launder dirty Mainland money via Hong Kong property than any other way, so the launderers happily pay double what the asset is worth so the worst-case scenario is that they keep 50% of their illicit millions. Maybe well-off Hongkongers are so sheep-like that local property is their entire investment universe. But even so, how sustainable is it? How long can one asset class in one city outperform so many other assets and locations?

Property bulls like to point out that this time, at least, the Hong Kong property market isn’t over-leveraged as in 1997, when secretaries were buying multiple units with 100% mortgages. But that doesn’t necessarily mean current (or next month’s even higher) prices make sense. How much future debasement of currency has already been priced into middle-class Hong Kong property? What happens if less debasement than anticipated takes place?  How long can the nominal prices maintain their distance from the real economic value of these concrete boxes? Or, if the debasement does materialize, what happens to other real asset prices that have so far lagged (and what impact does that have on Hong Kong property)?

It wouldn’t matter if the only thing at risk was a herd of relatively wealthy people with a laid-back attitude to having lots of eggs in just a few baskets. The danger lies in the political unsustainability of these price rises. How many monthly declines in housing affordability will young people put up with before they get angry? How long before, say, a mob of 20-something ‘snails without shells’ burst into a luxury showflat and trash the place in front of terrified Mandarin-speaking apartment buyers? The amazing thing about a recent straw poll on the issue is that 10% of respondents didn’t think housing was too expensive.

Chief Executive CY Leung came into office promising to fix the problem. If he hoped his mere presence would cool the market, he has been proved wrong. Like his predecessors towards the end, he is petrified both of prices going up and coming down. On Planet Earth, cheaper housing is good because it means families have more money left over to buy education, food, shoes, health care, cars, books, plasma TVs, scuba-diving vacations, ice cream, kitty litter, and a million other things. In Hong Kong, the prospect is sinister and fearful; we would rather talk about cancer.

Also like his predecessors, CY has an almost-irrational fear – almost a superstition – about cooling the market with words. All he has to tell the public, on prime-time TV, is: “If you want a home, don’t buy at these prices – they’re out of alignment with any sane measurement of the true worth of a concrete box. Just wait.” The last official to do that was then-Financial Secretary Donald Tsang in early 1997. When prices carried on rising for a few months, the secretaries and taxi drivers whined bitterly that he had made them miss their chance. How grateful they must have been a year later.

So – voila: CY’s first stab at solving what will end up as a political crisis at some stage. It’s more PR than anything else, but three things stand out.

First is the reliance on ad-hoc ring-fenced schemes like HOS, MHPP and URA. This is like demarcating little zones on a map in which small numbers of apartments will be effectively tax-free for some lucky winners; the rest of the market remains ‘healthy’ – that is prices can rise or stay stable, but never come down, no, no, no.

Second is the rezoning and other planning jiggery-pokery to convert or redevelop industrial and other non-residential sites for housing. A six-year-old would consider it, but there is a huge bureaucratic hang-up about this sort of thing, based on the colonial assumption that the government’s main job is to extort wealth from the population via land sales. Just minor liberalization is a good precedent.

Third is the ‘Hong Kong land for Hong Kong people’ idea – or lack of it. Some purists oppose the concept by bleating about free markets (where all the land is nationalized?) or even a slippery slope leading to capital controls. A more pressing problem would be the danger of appearing to indulge populist anti-locust feeling at a time like this, and increasing anti-Hong Kong sentiment on the other side of the border. There are also supposed to be implementation and legal issues, too, though other jurisdictions manage it OK.

Long term, CY is no doubt serious about designing a proper system for planning and providing sufficient housing for Hong Kong. After the lurching and panicking and ratcheting-up of property prices under former CE Donald Tsang, anything will look like good governance. But in the nearer term, the policy remains the same: make some gestures and keep your head down for when the market suddenly decides of its own volition to stop being so ‘healthy’.

Click to hear Roxy Music’s ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’!

‘Mass-tourism from the Mainland probably rescued Hong Kong from certain doom after SARS in 2003. Now, with the purchasing power of China’s middle class hitting a peak, Hong Kong needs to expand the pie to include poorer groups like Shenzhen’s migrant workers.’ That, more or less, is the Standard’s line, via the ‘Mary Ma’ column, on the ill-timed announcement that an extra 4 million Shenzen-ites will be allowed to come and go as they please.

Until recently, the Hong Kong Tourism Board would – to put it daintily – climax without disrobing at the news. The HKTB has long had an almost autistic obsession with increasing the number of visitors to the Big Lychee as an end in itself. But on this occasion, its titular boss, Liberal Party rich-kid James Tien, expresses doubts. The extra visitors might engage in smuggling, he says. Such smuggling would be in a northbound direction, thus mainly a concern for Mainland customs officials; the main threat to Hong Kong would be all the extra giant boxes and bags being dragged through our train stations. Still, the fact that Tien has come out against cramming extra people into our crowded city is noteworthy. The reason, of course, is that he is running for a Legislative Council seat.

My fabricated conspiracy theory about resentful Shenzhen officials hasn’t chimed. Indeed, the Special Economic Zone doesn’t seem to benefit at all from allowing more residents to shop across the border (they just have more Yakult and God knows what else being smuggled back in). It would be hilarious to think that someone thought the ‘4 million influx’ idea would be popular and give pro-Beijing parties a boost in the election. One distinct possibility is that years ago Hong Kong officials actually asked for the individual visit scheme to be extended to Shenzhen’s migrant workers. It does ring some bells – maybe back in Tung Chee-hwa’s time? Someone for our press to name and shame.

The word on the street is that this, along with the proposal to set up a ‘Locustland’ zone in the New Territories, is part of something bigger. One thing that clearly alarms Hongkongers is that foreign visitors in town might think that Mainlanders who squat everywhere and let their kids pee on the sidewalk are locals. And they do not see this threat to their city’s reputation as an accident: they think it is part of Beijing’s grand design to absorb and neutralize Hong Kong. Make the Big Lychee look like a Mainland city, make foreigners think it’s a Mainland city, and before long – it is a Mainland city. Other elements of the strategy: the sort-of imposition of National Education, the astronaut-adoration rituals, the spread of simplified characters, overweening security measures for senior Beijing officials, and so on.

Some planned Mainlandization is obviously underway and is unavoidable as part of the constitutional transformation from British colony to Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Put it in the context of China’s development – with a new middle class yearning to travel – and it is easy to see why Mainland cultural influence has extended beyond just symbols (look at how many Hongkongers have worked on their Mandarin without having a gun pointed at them). But to what extent is this process non-organic: deliberate, designed, scheduled, and actively implemented and enforced? And what do the forces engaged in remodeling a civic psyche think they’re trying to achieve?

For an answer, we can turn to the Hudson Institute, one of those L Street think-tanks that churn out worthy policy documents pushing rugged, but not rabid, right-of-centre positions. Avid fans of this sort of thing might like to start with this review of a book on Taiwan, and how Beijing has successfully convinced the world, not least through manipulation of language, that the place only half-exists or half-deserves to exist.

The same author compares the apparently all-powerful Mainland with its peripheral ‘mini-China’ offshoots – notably Taiwan, but also Hong Kong, Singapore and Chinatowns. Where have China’s energy, knowhow, creativity and resources come from? Which of these two parallel Chinas is the more advanced, and which the more backward? Which looks more impressive to the subjects of the Chinese Communist Party: the mainland of the People’s Republic, or those renegade and ex-colonial entities and diaspora? He says:

The Communist Party of China seems to believe that at least one way to deal with … widespread deterioration in civic morale is to deprive Chinese on the mainland of the sight and the sound of an alternative “Chinese” way of doing things. This is what the PRC’s desired “liberation” of Taiwan is all about.

…and so, if we embrace this analysis, is the gradual imposed Mainlandization of Hong Kong. Hongkongers must accept at least nominal conversion to Mainland-hood because their current state of cheerful rebelliousness (getting weepy at the sight of the wrong flag, for heaven’s sake) could be interpreted by true Mainlanders as proof that the CCP is a false ruler and should give up power. Seen from Beijing, Hong Kong’s separate identity threatens one-party rule.

Which all sounds really heavy. On a less paranoid note, we should look not only at Beijing’s apparent determination to eliminate evidence of a successful non-CCP ‘alternative China’, but at the quality and effectiveness of its attempts to do so. If the best they can do is disgust Hongkongers with the sight of urinating toddlers in Causeway Bay, it’s going to be an uphill struggle. 

Click to hear ‘Alternative Ulster’ by Stiff Little Fingers!

Shenzhen’s 4.1 million non-permanent residents – migrant workers, in other words – will be able to visit Hong Kong with Shenzhen-issued multiple-entry permits starting Saturday. Previously, they had to return to their hometowns to get the paperwork. While Commerce and Economic Development Secretary Greg So blathers away about how this will be a boost to the Big Lychee’s retail and catering industries, everyone else (even China Daily quotes anti-tourism activists)  is asking pointed questions.

Where the hell will all these people actually be wedged in, on our sidewalks, in our trains and in our shops? Please show us the empty space they will physically occupy. And what have we done to deserve this? Why does Shenzhen hate us so much that it would commit such an act of plain malice?

The Hong Kong government, which clearly was not consulted about this, is scrambling to assure the 99% of us who do not own Greg So’s beloved retail outlets that it will somehow manage the expected new influx. No details, as they say, are available. With 270 million Mainlanders already eligible to visit Hong Kong on an individual, multiple basis, it could be that this extra number may make relatively little difference. Having said that, they are right next door, not living hundreds of miles away in Shanghai or somewhere.

Stereotypically, the migrant workers are the social and economic underclass of modern urban China. They live in shanties or dorms; they work for pittances on construction sites; they have no access to subsidized public health or education services; they are prone to commit crime. In reality, most are probably clean-living, hard-working factory workers saving to start a business back in their home province or hoping to qualify for local ID.

The fact is that, while each one takes up the same space as your standard Mainland tourist, they probably on average have far less money to spend. So maybe they won’t come here because they can’t afford it. Alternatively, it could mean trouble. How long will it be before they find out that our hospitals treat patients for no fee and present bills on trust? How long before they find they can commute across the border to wash dishes or break scrap metal for double their Shenzhen wages? How long before some of them find Hongkongers are wimps who are easy to mug and carry lots of cash and fancy accessories?

Defenders of the government like to point out that we are all one country now, and Hong Kong must in time be as accessible as anywhere else. Shanghai, Chicago and Munich aren’t sealed off from the rest of their countries, and ultimately Hong Kong can’t be. But the differences between Hong Kong and its hinterland are so great as to cause serious distortions in travel patterns and the local market. Up there, there is a tax on luxury goods, the milk powder might be poisonous and the cosmetics might be fake and even dangerous; down here, designer labels are tax-free, the milk powder is pure and goods are real and safe. Until things have evened out, Hong Kong will be under artificial pressure from people wanting to visit. For poorer Mainlanders, it’s an arbitrageur’s (or smuggler’s) paradise.

One quick fix to the problem would be for Hong Kong to introduce its own tax on luxury goods; bingo, half the Mainlanders would go somewhere else. But this is looking at it logically from the public’s point of view. To our policymakers, millions of tourists are good, therefore tens of millions of tourists must be better, and hundreds of millions must be so utterly wonderful that words cannot describe it. No-one has ever done a cost-benefit analysis on all this, presumably because vested interests (landlords, basically) don’t want us to see how much the rest of us are subsidizing their huge profits.

Every time a mall puts a rent up to levels only a Mainland-serving luxury brand tenant can afford, the effects ripple out across the rest of the city. The previous tenant goes somewhere else, and a chain of relocations must take place, ending ultimately in a local store serving local people vanishing. And unlike small local operators, the labels and landlords promptly send much of their income out of Hong Kong, so it doesn’t circulate much in the local economy. For every job created, another has probably been lost. And prices and/or inconvenience go up for ordinary residents. Like so many others, South China Morning Post columnist Michael Chugani swallows the ‘retail-is-good’ line and says the sector would ‘die’ without Mainlanders. It wouldn’t die; it would simply go back to serving local needs. Abercrombie & Fitch’s multi-million emporium would die; the harmless China Tee Club would come back.

(The current market distortion also takes a toll on us through mental and physical stress created by the extra crowding and pollution. No tourist has yet been hurled to his death from the Mid-Levels Escalator, but I swear it is only a matter of time before a local resident snaps. Like so much of our infrastructure, it is clogged with guidebook-clutching hordes who think the transport system is a Disneyland ride just for them. I will happily be a defence witness.)

Of course, this way of looking at it presumes this phenomenon is being contrived to benefit the landlords – the same oligarchic property developers who already extract so much of our wealth. But it could be more subtle than that (or, indeed, less subtle). It could be that this is part of the whole sinister National Education, astronaut-worship, Mainlandization, conditioning-through-immersion preparation for 2047. A lot of not especially paranoid people perceive it that way, because it feels like it, and the benefits to the landlords and costs to everyone else are so extreme that they look like unintended consequences of a totally different and heavy handed policy that is being implemented too quickly.

A bureaucrat’s paranoid conspiracy theory to answer the above question on evil Mainland motives: Shenzhen’s leaders are unhappy that the Hong Kong government isn’t taking seriously their efforts to launch numerous financial and other grandiose-sounding hub-zone projects, so they are taking revenge by unleashing 4 million of their unwashed on us and landing the CY Leung administration in yet more doo-doo. (A purely fictitious idea, © 2012.)

After all those attempts to make Hong Kong a centre for cruise ships, high-tech, Chinese medicine and a hundred other lost causes, the city has inadvertently become a fetal gender testing hub. It is possible these days to detect a fetus’s DNA in the mother’s blood from around eight weeks after conception. Check for a Y chromosome, and you can find out whether the baby will be a boy, who will grow up to continue the family line, or a girl, who will grow up to look after her husband’s aging parents while you rot.

Such tests are illegal in the Mainland, where – thanks to the one-child policy – abortion of undesirable unborn females means that the country now produces 18% more boys than girls. But there is no such bar in the Big Lychee, so entrepreneurial testing labs are apparently doing a thriving trade. What the Global Times story doesn’t make clear is how, in cases where the expectant mother’s blood is drawn in Shenzhen, the sample moves across the border in violation of customs regulations. It does seem likely that Hong Kong regulations are being broken in this sordid trade/weird example of ‘1 country 2 systems’ in action/exciting new business opportunity.

We are also violating national policy. Just three months ago, authorities in Beijing announced specific targets to reduce illegal sex-selective abortions. Now along comes Hong Kong, even under loyalist Chief Executive CY Leung, flagrantly opposing the central people’s government, tut tut. As if rejecting patriotic education in schools weren’t bad enough.

What is Hong Kong facilitating exactly here? The demographics may not be quite as distorted as they seem, since some newborn baby girls in the Mainland aren’t registered, but they’re not drowned in buckets either. And experts say that a surplus of men increases the social status and power of women as they marry up – at least, for the ones who aren’t kidnapped and sold. Generally, though, it’s bad news: a large cohort of unmarried lower-class men will contribute to crime, social instability and even make war more likely. But hey – that’s what being a hub is all about: having influence beyond your size. Trafficking of women from Southeast Asia will probably rise too, so we’d better get on with that third runway.

Needless to say: it’s all Westerners’ fault, anyway.

On a different note: Juxtaposition of the day from the South China Morning Post… 

China can launch nukes from anywhere in the country (left)… but can’t build bridges (right).

According to the Standard, the focus in China is shifting from politics to the economy. Reuters, on the other hand, says politics is the priority for China as the economy slows. You be the judge. In Hong Kong, with Legislative Council elections looming, we all know where the focus is. Yesterday’s South China Morning Post reported the curious story of West Kowloon independent candidate Lam Yi-lai, who might have the Equal Opportunities Commission chasing her for publicizing a policy that ‘could be’ racist. To add to the fun, the government is also somehow culpable…

A candidate for next month’s Legislative Council election is at the centre of a racism row over her campaign call for Hong Kong’s 300,000 foreign domestic helpers to be denied traditional Chinese public holidays.

The government could also be in hot water for allowing the production of election material that may be in breach of the city’s racial discrimination laws, says the Equal Opportunities Commission.

Lam Yi-lai, an independent candidate standing in the Kowloon West constituency, was cautioned by the commission after minority-rights group Unison filed a complaint last week.

The commission says Lam and the government could be in breach of the Race Discrimination Ordinance for distributing offensive election pamphlets.

The pamphlets suggest that for “Hongkongers’ benefit and family enjoyment”, domestic helpers should not be given days off for the Lunar New Year, Ching Ming festival, Mid-Autumn Festival and Chung Yeung festival because they are not holidays meaningful to “foreigners”.

A commission spokesman said: “The EOC will write to the candidate to warn her about the potential breach of the Race Discrimination Ordinance, as her idea of depriving non-Chinese domestic helpers of their rights could be racially discriminatory.

…

Unison director Fermi Wong Wai-fun says that by Lam’s reasoning “Chinese [Hongkongers] should not enjoy Easter and Christmas holidays either”.

A spokesman for Lam says the government’s insistence that traditional Chinese public holidays are statutory holidays for foreign domestic workers is causing stress for local families.

“These are the times when their employers need them the most,” he said.

If Lam’s name is vaguely familiar, it could because of her record of accusing men of taking liberties with her mammary glands. First it was legislator Paul Tse in a radio studio. Then it was a residential estate security guard.  The latter complaint earned her a two-month jail sentence, which was suspended, for making a false police report. A suspended sentence was also, of course, handed out to disgraced Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai’s wife, Gu Kailai. And Paul Tse, of course, is the celebrity lawyer and nude photo model associated with ex-convict and current Legco candidate Pamela Pak/Peck.

If you think the links between such grotesque people are cosmic, we’ve only just started. Lam used to be a director of the Po Leung Kuk, the venerable children’s charity. This does not mean she was managing orphanages; she is one of those second-tier ‘elite’ socialites who enormously value the traditional prestige attached to honorary posts with old local charities. Such bodies’ members’ grotesquery is as curiously obvious as the institutions’ missions are noble.

A glance at the current line-up at the Po Leung Kuk shows casino king Stanley Ho’s fourth wife and a daughter born to – if I recall – his second one; these add much of the serious class to the Kuk’s board. Most of the other members are closer to Lam’s social station, with barely a Justice of the Peace or Bronze Bauhinia Star to be seen. One member seems to belong to the Order of St Joseph, which you don’t see every day; this brings to mind our old friend Duke Dr Raymond Lee of the Tung Wah Hospital board. (If we absolutely must gawk, the most noteworthy Po Leung Kuk luminaries in terms of raising eyebrows and questions are surely the guy called Human and the almost-guy called Miss Catherine, both understandably tucked discreetly away on the bottom row.)

Lam’s election proposal to abolish Chinese holidays for maids may look like bigoted populism of the sort that undeniably appeals to a strand of the Hong Kong electorate – typically people who can’t afford domestic help and have no-one but dusky Southeast Asian menials to look down upon. Yet our trendy and liberal younger generation, so far as it lives and votes in West Kowloon, and non-Chinese will probably find the idea mean-spirited. So bang goes the youth and ethnic votes for Lam.

But that’s not all. She also proposes criminalization of men who keep mistresses on the Mainland. There are quite a few of these cads around, and quite a few men who don’t rule out the idea in principle, so that loses the candidate a fair bit of support among the male half of the electorate. To compensate, she might attract straight-laced, puritanical women voters. (And any civil servants who are looking for a really tough policy-implementation challenge.)

But she will lose them almost immediately when they see the third leg of her policy platform: legalization of gay marriage. There are people lobbying for legal status for same-sex unions in Hong Kong, so she could attract support from them, especially if they are racist and prudish.

But still: triangulate that. It’s an odd mix of positions. Then again – odd candidate. Not suitable so much for a protest vote as a semi-suicidal-with-despair one.