Big Lychee, Various Sectors

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.

The recent Hong Kong-led incursion into the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands has highlighted a contradiction: some of the patriotic activists who planted the Chinese flag on the rocks frequently gather outside Beijing’s representative office in the Big Lychee to burn the same banner and call for the Communist regime’s downfall. This obviously puts the Chinese government in an awkward position. Sworn enemies of the one-party state – people probably barred from travelling to the Mainland – are promoting a cause the Chinese government exploits to garner public support for itself.

As today’s Wall Street Journal notes, the Hong Kong activists are attracting support and offers of donations among the Chinese population, thanks to approving coverage in the Mainland media. But we can be sure this coverage does not mention that these Hong Kong compatriots oppose the state. To protestors like Tsang ‘Bull’ Kin-shing, the Diaoyu Islands rank among a long list of anti-Communist Party causes. They oppose the one-party regime because it denies democracy, imprisons dissidents – and, in allowing the Japanese to get away with continued control of this piece of territory, fails to protect the Chinese nation.

(This raises an interesting question: why did anti-CCP activists carry the five-star red flag onto the islands? The reason is that the opposition, to the extent it can be called that, lacks its own symbols. The ‘white sun’ Republic of China flag (carried by the task force’s Taiwanese member) is associated with the Kuomintang and the more conservative wing of Taiwan politics. The amazingly cool imperial banner represents the corrupt and barbarian old Qing Dynasty. So they fly the red flag when they want it to represent the nation or people, and burn it when they want it to represent the state or party.)

If Beijing had firmer control over Mainlanders’ emotions and media access, it might be tempted to hush the Hong Kong expedition up. But instead Chinese officialdom has to join in and hail these guys as heroes. The theoretical risk is that Mainlanders who research hard enough will find out more about these Hong Kong activists’ other opinions and causes. The heroes want to pull the party down.

In practice, most Mainlanders will probably not know, or even much care, about some eccentric Hongkongers’ muddled political ideas. But the contradiction is very obvious here in the Big Lychee itself. Today’s China Daily (HK) tries to resolve it, and predictably ends up smothering the uncomfortable truths with platitudes.

The writer cheerfully suggests that the ‘protect Diaoyu’ activists’ “sense of national identity and of obligation to the nation is too evident to deny,” before admitting that “Hong Kong is a society with a complex political eco-system, where it is very difficult to reach common understanding … for example … over the country’s political system and the nature of some historical events.” The answer to the conundrum, the reader is thrilled and delighted to discover, is National Education.

The weekend is hereby declared open with a tribute (highlighted by Paul Zimmerman) to Hong Kong’s status as a city without ground, complete with brilliant three-dimensional maps, for people who like that kind of thing.

Click to hear ‘City of Tiny Lites’ by Frank Zappa!

Reading between the lines a bit, the Standard sort of announces that the Hong Kong government is going to transfer – via our favourite intermediaries, the property developers – the land along the border to Mainlanders. Welcome to the visa-free economic zone, presumably to be named Locustland. This is much bigger in scale than previous proposals to speed up that wonderful lovely integration with Shenzhen that we’re so desperate to have. Under this plan, the Lok Ma Chau Loop will just be where the hordes of visitors wipe their feet.

Those of us who by nature like to look on the bright side might see some advantages. The busloads of Mainlanders who come here to buy the tacky Made-in-China European designer label fashion will be able to do it up in the distant New Territories rather than in our downtown neighbourhoods. The vast Armani, Bulgari and other outlets in Central and Tsimshatsui will close down and the premises will gradually decay and return to nature, with creeping vines growing up the walls and little furry animals building nests.

The more negative among us might be worried about environmental degradation, overcrowding, illegal immigration, the swamping of schools, hospitals and housing, and a thousand other problems that might happen when you let 1.3 billion people into your front yard.

Cynics, on the other hand, will wonder whether perhaps the Standard is pushing an agenda. The idea of a visa-free zone for ‘high-end production, service industries and retail business’ comes from the One Country, Two Systems Research Institute. The ‘individuals of social standing’ behind this quasi-think-tank comprise nearly all our most highly respected property tycoons and other plutocrats (I defy anyone to look down the list and spot more than a mere one, well maybe two, in ten who is or has been involved in some sort of alleged corruption, insider trading, illegal basement-building, luxury yacht-sharing or other jiggery-pokery (extramarital dalliances not included)). And, yes of course, Charles Ho – proprietor of the Standard and Sing Tao – is among them. As is the Honorable Lau Wong-fat of the New Territories’ Heung Yee Kuk. 

The property cartel has accumulated land in this part of Hong Kong. If Chief Executive CY Leung is going to divert more resources into affordable housing for local people, the tycoons would love a separate slice of the city that they could bundle up for sale to the money-launderers and princelings from up north. The services-sector possibilities are endless: the ‘My Father is Li Gang’ private college for gifted rich kids; the Gu Kailai luxury retirement community; the six-star Robert Mugabe Resort Hotel; a supermarket stacked full of guaranteed non-poisoned milk powder; and the Guangdong Province Corrections Department Number-One Harvested Organs Transplant Clinic. But…

Over at the South China Morning Post, Chief Secretary Carrie Lam, while ‘vague on the idea of the policy for the border area’ (and who among us, in all truth, isn’t?), seems fairly sure about one thing…

Maybe the Research Institute will have to rename itself One Country, Two Systems, No Locustland.

I had never heard much about Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin, and I was expecting to wake up to the news that he had backed out of the Senate race after his now-infamous remarks about ‘legitimate rape’. Even his party’s leader and presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, was begging him to spare the GOP the burden of having him around. But the deadline for withdrawal passed early this morning Hong Kong time, and the guy is defiant. Could other ultra-pro-life candidates, including vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, now lose the party women voters? Tough. More moderate GOP candidates could suffer too? Tough.

The parallels between having a position of absolute – thus extreme – opposition to abortion and having an unauthorized trellis are admittedly inexact. But Akin’s refusal to stand down, which is essentially an insistence on only partially (as in barely) apologizing for his comments, sets a magnificent example for the wimps who pass as politicians in Hong Kong.

The average Big Lychee office-holder getting caught with an illegal structure or subdivided apartment tends to act in one of two ways. Either he makes a big show of removing the clothes-drying frame and appears on TV almost in tears with his family pleading to be forgiven. Or he makes mumbling excuses about how it all happened decades ago, and his wife was looking after it, and the whole thing was buried and forgotten under a pile of holding companies and sub-tenancies.

Were Akin here, his response would be simple: “Yes I have a trellis; I know some people (who are probably the Cantonese version of atheist, progressive, un-American, gun-banning, baby-killing liberals) find trellises somewhat offensive, and I regret misspeaking like that, calling it a legitimate trellis – but it’s my trellis, I like it, and I’m keeping it, and my supporters back me, and I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.” Oh, for such bloody-mindedness.

Hongkongers find unauthorized building works morally offensive because most of them live in tiny overpriced homes, and it angers them if someone else has the good fortune, gumption or guile to grab extra space by cheating. In fact, nobody else gets hurt in most cases, but the sense is that warped land policies and building codes ration space artificially tightly, and UBW-owners are getting an unfair share of the ration. (Technically, they are depriving government of property-based revenue, so UBWs are not purely victimless transgressions.) Under certain circumstances, this relative sort of unfairness arouses burning rage among many Hong Kong people.

Killing an unborn child, on the other hand, is fine. The law in Hong Kong was pretty much drawn from that of the UK: abortion is legal within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy with the authorization of two doctors on grounds of the woman’s physical or mental health. In practice, that means on demand, and in the first 10 weeks it is simply all part of the service. For the price- or bureaucracy-sensitive, clinics over the border in Shenzhen will do it on a walk-in basis in less time than a hairdo; see the ads in the trains from Kowloon to Lowu for details. The Roman Catholics probably make occasional protests about it, but few pay attention. Even our local fundamentalist Evangelical born-again Christians seem uninterested. A few superstitious types bear terminations in mind when leaving offerings for ‘hungry ghosts’.

In the US, it’s the other way round. People are pragmatic about trellises; it’s between you and your conscience. But abortion is a matter of overwhelming moral principle: either a woman’s right to control her own body, or a fertilized human egg’s right to be carried to term. The unavoidable fact that a woman who wants an abortion will have one whatever the law says is not allowed to muddy the purity of these rival ideals.

Todd Akin’s stance is that the rights of an embryo equal, if not even override, those of the woman carrying it. On a theoretical level it is a perfectly logical moral position if you accept life as sacred. At the margins, pro-lifers concede that abortion is the lesser of two evils as an unavoidable side-effect of saving the mother’s life (the Catholics have a nifty four-point checklist halfway down here). Otherwise, abortion cannot be permitted. Making exceptions in cases of incest or rape is illogical, as Akin knows and accepts full well, and as does VP-candidate Paul Ryan. It’s like a trellis: there is nothing to apologize for here. The embryo committed no crime, and its right to live is absolute – end of story.

In other words, the mother’s interests, desires or feelings are less important than the embryo. In other words, ultimately, yes: an embryo is more important than a woman. Women are less important than embryos, if you insist. That’s the practical outcome of Akins’s strongly held belief. And it’s going to be a vote-loser for Republicans. And that’s why I am amazed at the news this morning, though it should not really be surprising when we consider that this is about someone – and others like him – for whom simple, clear dogma must override everything, however impractical in our imperfect real world.

Missouri’s gift to Obama.

My first encounter with a 2012 Legislative Council election hopeful takes place bright and early at the bottom of the Mid-Levels Escalator. Candidates must have some sort of roster for using this spot in the morning because you never see more than one group campaigning there at the same time, yet it’s a prime canvassing location, delivering a stream of voters commuting down to Central on Hong Kong’s human conveyor belt.

Today’s leaflet-thruster is the personable Avery Ng Man-yuen of the radical League of Social Democrats. He is cursed with the unlucky ballot number 14 but, on a more auspicious note, wears smart-casual rather than a silly party-branded jacket or sash.

A couple of other contenders have already been here in the last week or so, and they will no doubt be back over the next three weeks. One was the Federation of Trade Unions, who have an incredible five candidates running in Hong Kong Island. As pro-Beijing champions of the working class, they don’t hand out literature to people who look vaguely well-off, anyone under 50 or Westerners. Luckily, the Mid-Levels has a few elderly residents for them to greet and fawn over. Today’s South China Morning Post surveys election pamphlets and finds that most have little or no English content. Oddly, the FTU on Hong Kong Island is pretty much bilingual.    

The other candidate was an extremely forgettable nonentity. It might have been this guy, one Hui Ching-on, who’s an independent…

Would you buy a used car from this man?

Avery was the first one to press a leaflet on me, so he gets a special mention. Sadly, the website address on it – www.manyuen.com – leads to some language school in Canada. After experimenting, I track him down at www.manyuen.hk. The government has also allotted him a page at the Electoral Affairs Commission site. Neither contains all the content of his bilingual leaflet. If this sounds a bit amateurish, that’s because it is. From what I’ve seen of the 14 groups on the ballot on Hong Kong Island so far, his communications effort is above-average. (At least we don’t have people running for office who blurt out bizarreness about ‘legitimate rape’ or think the UN would have the wit to ban golf courses.)

Avery gives his life story (educated in New Zealand) and outlines the LSD’s manifesto (release political prisoners in China, report Donald Tsang to the ICAC, oppose brainwashing National Education, mourn for Li Wangyang). Then he lists his platform. It’s quite good – for someone in a Trotskyist group, anyway. I’m not sure about nationalizing public utilities or planning bits of the economy, but the items on land and tax reform make sense, as do little things like ending the school textbook scam.

The LSD are rabble-rousers who pull stunts like throwing bananas during the Chief Executive’s address to the Legislative Council (a witty allusion to the ‘fruit money’ old people’s allowance). To the pro-establishment media, they are malevolent social misfits and a reason to be wary of democracy. To mainstream pan-democrats, they are hotheads whose antics provide the government with excuses to curb potentially useful parliamentary devices like triggering by-elections and filibustering. To their fans, they are the only people in Hong Kong politics who have a clue.

In the 2004 election, future LSD founder ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung more than trebled his previous vote at a time of intense anti-government feeling. Analysis showed that much of the grassroots street-fighter’s support came from well-educated 20-somethings. In 2008, he and his comrades won 10% of the vote (the FTU won 5.7%, the main pro-Beijing DAB party got 22%), leaving the LSD with a proportionate 3 out of 30 democratically elected seats. With seven seats now up for grabs in Hong Kong Island, and both pro-Beijing and pan-democrat groupings set to cannibalize their ideological allies’ support, young(ish) Avery looks like a tempting protest vote.

Click to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing ‘Climb Every Mountain’!

“Nobody understands Marxism. It is ridiculous … So it is right to turn to nationalism. It is the means by which the party can maintain its system and ideology.” The ex-cadre, speaking during the 2005 anti-Japanese protests in China, said ‘ideology’. But what he really meant was the absence of one. Dreams of an egalitarian workers’ and peasants’ paradise are gone. The Chinese Communist Party’s only ideal today is its own perpetual monopoly of power and the right of its officials and their families to acquire an unfairly large share of the nation’s wealth.

Domestically, nationalism is a strategy of desperation. It is easy to whip up public opinion against evil foreigners, but it can just as easily get out of hand. China has a long tradition of popular uprisings against governments for allegedly failing to protect the nation from overseas threats. The iconic picture of yesterday’s anti-Japanese protests is a guy in Shenzhen whacking an overturned Japanese-brand police car. The vehicle is a symbol of the hated barbarians who are illegally occupying the motherland’s sacred Diaoyu Islands, but it also represents the authority of the Chinese state.

How does Beijing ensure that the people’s venom remains healthily focused on the foreigners and supports rather than erodes trust in the leadership? It can’t. As so often, they’re winging it. So far, the government has done a pretty good job of stoking enough nationalism to keep people on side without getting itself into a situation where it has to take serious economic or military action against wayward and disrespectful neighbours. But recent official comments, especially on the South China Sea have ratcheted things up. For example, at some point Beijing will have to explain to its population why it is still tolerating the presence of Vietnamese, Filipino and such weak nonentity countries’ armed forces in little detachments on atolls throughout the Spratly Islands.

The good news is that parallels with the rise of Japanese militarism and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere are weak. The pre-war Japanese leadership and wider population saw the country as divinely unique, with a god for an emperor, and the race as superior, while the culture emphasized group consciousness over individualism to an extreme degree. Modern China just doesn’t do that fanatical faith, the ideological racism or the ant-like discipline and self-sacrifice. Its ethos is more about chasing foreign passports, money, money, money and the occasional bit of contemporary art.

What China definitely has in common with pre-war Japan is a shortage of natural resources in which nature made Southeast Asia abundant. Another potential similarity is the leading role of the military – but we still don’t know how much or whether the civilians in Beijing are losing influence to the PLA amid the ongoing transition of power.

So the outlook remains something more along the lines of Latin-style corporatist-type vaguely quasi-fascist nationalism: cynical, corrupt, materialistic and ultimately pragmatic enough to avoid suicidal or counterproductive overseas excursions. Unless, perhaps, the country’s people force the leadership into it.

The most likely cause of that would be serious economic trouble. Maybe a bursting of China’s economic bubble, or just a big enough slowdown to hurt, would divert attention away from disputes over tiny islands onto more local matters. But maybe it would prompt an angry population to look for someone to blame, leaving the CCP with a choice between relinquishing the mandate of heaven or picking a fight with foreigners. Or maybe the build-yet-more-railways-with-borrowed-money approach will work, the economy keep growing, and we will all live happily ever after.

Click to hear The National’s ‘Afraid of Everyone’!

Japan looks set to deport foreign activists who landed illegally in the Senkaku islands, or release citizens who have been illegally detained in Diaoyutai – according to taste. Although we have seen Diaoyu protests and expeditions before, the uniformity of opinion among virtually all conceivable Greater Chinese parties is unprecedented. Beijing, Taipei, the Hong Kong government, Mainland netizens, their Hong Kong counterparts, the Big Lychee’s pro-Beijing working-class Federation of Trade Unions and (snapped as I passed Exchange Square yesterday) the anti-Beijing middle-class Civic Party are all toeing the same line. How often does that happen?

If any one element is slightly deviating from the consensus, it is Taiwan officials, who are differentiating their phraseology a bit. This is mainly for branding purposes, to emphasize that they are not part of the PRC. But it may also reflect something people there don’t talk about too much: many Taiwanese thought Japanese occupation from the 1890s to 1945 was OK – good infrastructure, decent schools and all that.

Japan is the reason why the Senkakus/Diaoyu is unique in uniting Chinese who would normally hate each other. In Hong Kong people as far apart as pro-democrat Audrey Eu, Chief Executive CY Leung, patriot Lew Mon-hung and former Legislative Council president Rita Fan have all reportedly donated to the Diaoyu activists, who include such radical anti-government firebrands as boisterous League of Social Democrats activist Tsang Kin-shing (aka the Bull).

After years in which United Front work in the Big Lychee has left much of the community estranged from if not hostile to all things Mainland, this must please Beijing, which ordered/allowed the Hong Kong government to openly support what is largely a Hong Kong-organized expedition. But will it be possible to build on this and unite the community behind other patriotic causes? Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea? Chinese sovereignty over Tibet? The injustice of American complaints about China’s exchange rate? The need – for the sake of harmony – to persecute blind lawyers and other busybodies protecting the little guy against corrupt officials? The glory of the Communist Party and the need for one-party rule? The coolness of weeping astronauts? The importance of National Education in local schools (opponents of which I snapped yesterday in Wanchai)?

It sounds unlikely. It is Japan that brings everyone together. The Chinese government’s hurt ‘innocent victim’ act can be tiresome, but Japan’s is nauseating. Unlike the Germans in Europe, who have never stopped beating themselves up over World War II, the Japanese still don’t quite see what the fuss was about. We needed resources from Southeast Asia; we displaced alien Western colonial regimes there and provided Asian rule; our soldiers used a few prostitutes here and there; then the evil Americans slaughtered hundreds of thousands of our civilians with atom bombs, and we’ve been feeling sorry for ourselves at candle-lit peace shrines ever since.

It’s a wanton obliviousness to history that makes other Asians’ – and non-Asians’ – blood boil. An old neighbour of mine talked about having to bow to Japanese soldiers in the street when she went to school in the Mid-Levels, otherwise they would chop your head off. It happened. My own father, whose contact with the Chrysanthemum Throne’s forces was brief and as a victor, bought bad-quality cars, cameras and electronics throughout his life rather than touch any Japanese product. Shanghai’s World Financial Centre had to be re-designed because the hole in the top reminded people of the rising sun flag. Don’t forgive; don’t forget. It’s the one thing everyone can agree on.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung summons the Japanese Consul General to complain about Tokyo’s treatment of Diaoyutai protestors. As well as demanding the return of the arrested activists, his government’s statement on the late-night meeting declares that the disputed islands are Chinese territory. Such matters would usually be handled by Beijing or the local branch of the Foreign Affairs Ministry (who have also commented). The Big Lychee’s usual role in foreign affairs is to keep its head down; Asia’s cosmopolitan world city officially loves its trade, investment and residents from everywhere in the world equally, including Japan. Now, Hong Kong is getting openly involved. In other words, Beijing is now using the city as a diplomatic tool.

This is part of Beijing’s shift to a visibly more assertive stance on the international stage, the prime example being recent moves to split ASEAN and militarily intimidate individual countries over China’s extravagant territorial claims in the South China Sea. The assumption among overseas observers is that a successful leadership change in Beijing later this year requires a satisfied and acquiescent public, which means absolutely no concessions to evil foreign countries. There is also a theory that the more aggressive posture is being stoked by the People’s Liberation Army’s demands for a bigger say in policymaking.

It would be comforting to think that this is temporary, and that by end-2013 the new leadership will be settled in and China will go back to being a relatively warm and cuddly regional player. But even if they could contrive a way to do that in Beijing, it would have to be mirrored in Japan and ASEAN countries, which have their own, anti-Chinese, nationalist sentiments strengthening. To complicate things, there’s also the Takeshima/Tokdo Islands tiff between Japan and Korea. And there’s the United States. The most hawkish Chinese general must know that while his nation’s forces might look good in a National Day parade, they would quite likely be a humiliating embarrassment under fire. At least we should hope he does.

China’s employment of Hong Kong as a small but perfectly formed new instrument of foreign affairs may also reflect the fact that the city now has a leader willing and able to play the role, and no doubt with relish. It would be hard to imagine Sir Donald Tsang ordering a foreign diplomat to come in for a good dressing down and spouting off about Chinese territory. Again, it would be nice to think this is temporary; the city’s de facto neutrality as a semi-autonomous region is important. You can’t be the Switzerland of Asia if you get dragged into all of China’s barbarian-bashing, victimhood trips and more-or-less racism.

The Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ column has fun wondering if the CE’s new role will lose the pan-democrats votes in next month’s Legislative Council election. Launching military action – or at least encouraging a rickety ship full of activists – against another country is a time-honoured way to get a boost in the opinion polls. And there is something pathetic about Democratic Party leader Albert Ho failing in his legal attempt to remove the CE from office just as CY emerges as an international statesman avenging China’s suffering during World War II. Next thing, all those people opposing National Education will drop to their knees and read out self-criticisms for their incorrect thinking.

Aside 1: Fans of Bunny Chan, the ultimate shoe-shiner of the Donald Tsang era, have been wondering what their hero has been up to recently. I can pass on the word that, in his capacity as Chairman of something called the Youth Commission, he is concerned about a spate of panic attacks sweeping Hong Kong’s middle class, for which he blames property prices. And why not?

Aside 2: This is an ad (not sure what the product is, but that’s not the point) in today’s South China Morning Post. Let’s remember that the purpose of these things is to make you want to buy something…

Click to hear the Seekers’ ‘Island of Dreams’!

This just in: Body found at or near inappropriately named place for the first time in a while…

In the old days, there was a story that appeared in the Hong Kong press pretty much every few weeks. It always happened in a ‘hut’ in, it goes without saying, Kowloon, usually late at night. It would involve several men and one woman. The woman would apparently have been raped, but police inquiries would have been continuing. The key point, however – and this was the common feature to this alleged crime on every occasion – was that all those involved, male and female, went for noodles afterwards.

More nostalgia: amateur seafaring heroes are sailing off in rickety vessels to reclaim the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands from Japan. As they have for decades…

Apart from that, everything went like clockwork.

This goes back to the 1970s (when the US transferred Okinawa back to the Tokyo authorities). For many of the older generation, it was their first political activism, which is probably one of the reasons feelings run so extraordinarily high about it. It is a rare issue that unites pro-Beijing and pan-democrat activists, just as it puts Mainland China and Taiwan on the same side. You might see ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung on the pier next to some seedy businessman from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK, with Communist and Nationalist flags both on display. By tradition, either someone drowns or the boat falls apart, or at least turns back for lack of insurance cover.

Usually, the Hong Kong government keeps its head down; the official policy has been to prevent the activists from sailing if their vessel was unseaworthy. Colonial-era Chief Secretary Anson Chan referred to the rocky outcrops by their Japanese name and clearly found the expeditions a bit low-class. But our new Chief Executive CY Leung has been more positive and voiced concern for the brave ‘all at sea’ patriots, who find themselves in the unusual position of having something nice to say about him.

The post-World War II treaties clearly make Diaoyutai Japanese under international law, though the PRC was not a signatory to the documents. If you look at a map, the islets look pretty much part of Taiwan – but that is an over-simplistic way of determining ownership, and Scarborough Shoal ‘looks’ clearly Filipino and the Paracel and Spratley islands ‘look’ clearly Vietnamese, so we can’t have that. China’s claim is based on history: ‘our fisherman landed there centuries ago’. Beijing also uses this justification for its claims to places like Scarborough Shoal (as if no-one else’s fisherman went near it).

This approach offers an intriguing opportunity for the government in Manila. Before Chinese settled Taiwan – as recently as the Ming Dynasty – the island had a longstanding aboriginal population who were Austronesians. They might have come via the mainland or, being an island-hopping culture, from Luzon to the south. Either way, they were of what we would now call Malay stock, and the few who keep their traditions alive up in the mountains still have the colourful stripy costumes and the funny dances where girls skip over bamboo poles. In short: they’re Filipino. Thus, so is Taiwan, thus so are the Diaoyu/Senkaku. Problem elegantly solved.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong weirdness continues: While parents’ backs are turned, girl sells entire family’s worldly possessions for enough to buy a few rounds of drinks. Full details at ten.

During the recent Hong Kong appearances by the crew of Shenzhou 9, the astronauts’ interactions with local residents were characterized by mutual admiration filled with true sentiment. Today’s South China Morning Post shows one of them crying and another playing a harmonica… 

Yesterday’s SCMP quoted a young visitor to one of these events as complaining that it had been about trivia rather than science. But that’s manned space missions in a nutshell. Putting humans into space is absurdly costly (even though China has done it on the cheap by creating the Tiangong space station out of an unmanned supply craft design). Once all the life-support systems are in place, there is little room left for serious experiments. The Hubble telescope does ground-breaking cosmology, and the Rover vehicle Curiosity just landed on Mars might tell us whether life can form beyond our planet. Fox News takes it all seriously, but astronauts are really just an expensive PR gimmick to bolster national pride.

Rather like China’s top athletes – at least those who didn’t shame the motherland with mere bronzes and silvers – who will be following the astronauts on a tour of the Big Lychee. They will demonstrate their physical skills at Queen Elizabeth Stadium (the arena’s Chinese name is less horrifying) before gathering for the modestly titled Olympic Gold Medalists’ Extravaganza, for which the government is happy to discuss TV rights if anyone’s interested. It is not known whether any of the sports stars will cry or play the harmonica, but I am assured that the evening will end with The Who playing My Generation. The Social Welfare Department is reserving some 4,000 tickets for the underprivileged – not that the government is afraid half the seats will be empty or anything.

Meanwhile, the National Education mess lurks in the background. The Hong Kong government is reduced to writing pitiful letters to the New York Times in an attempt to limit damage to its own – and actually Hong Kong’s – reputation. And the Ombudsman is investigating government grants to pro-Beijing organizations to produce teaching manuals containing now-infamous brainwashing propaganda (they also take students on trips to the Mainland to see Chairman Mao’s much-repaired pajamas). Asian Sentinel views it all with suspicion. The reality is probably more humdrum; officials threw money at the patriotic groups to shut them up and to get Beijing off their backs. Look, we’re subsidizing Leftist educational work, so we must be taking all this motherland BS seriously, right?

The same goes for the ever-shifting justification the government is using in its attempts to sell the new curriculum to the Hong Kong public. The original approach of bundling ‘national’ with ‘moral’ education led officials to claim, in effect, that nurturing national pride was all about encouraging independent thinking. For some reason, this has failed to convince, so the new spin is that this is all about filling a hitherto unnoticed but apparently yawning gap in kiddies’ schooling. Liberal Studies teaches kids how to think, and Chinese History teaches them facts, but – oh my god! – they’re not learning values. It’s a gap. We must fill the gap. Moral and National Education fills the gap by teaching values.

Pragmatic government apologists are also pointing out that students need to learn about their country. This may be true, but that wasn’t why Donald Tsang’s administration introduced the National Education policy. Sir Bow-Tie did it so Beijing would think his government was taking national pride seriously. However, because it actually did not, it introduced a half-baked policy with no credibility.  (Looking back, most of his time in office was about gestures). Now a new administration – led by someone who does take patriotism seriously – is left trying to implement this rubbish. Unable to admit to senior leaders in Beijing the terrible truth that Hong Kong has been trying to fob them off with a joke National Education policy, CY Leung has no choice but to stick with it. What a tangled web we weave…

Meanwhile, away from all the infantilism and delusion, in the Western world where people are brought up to think critically, a man in Beeville, Texas, finds a taco with an image of Charles Manson on it. (He thinks it’s Jesus, but – to put it gently – the poor guy is in adult care.)

Click to hear The Who play ‘My Generation’ (live at Monterey)!