Big Lychee, Various Sectors

People’s Daily subsidiary Global Times declares that Chinese people aren’t upset about their country’s second-place ranking at the end of the ‘contest of national strength’ that is the Olympic Games. This is presumably the official face-saving line in reaction to a self-perceived humiliation that leads young nationalists to fume “…the West must be satisfied that we were defeated by the US.” The correct response would be that it is not a contest of national strength at all (the UK came third and India 55th). But to insecure China with its paranoid government, it must be.

Every country’s reaction to the Olympics probably tells us something about a collective national psyche. The US, to the extent it cares, seems reassured to be top, while the British appear bemused by their success, and the fifth-placed Koreans perhaps understandably impressed with themselves. Hong Kong is over the moon with one bronze. In all these cases the mood is positive. Not so in the country that came second; it is in a huff, whining about foreigners’ unfair treatment of Chinese athletes, and how the nation must not ‘fall into the trap’ of blindly obeying global rules. (There is also some questioning of such thinking going on.)

What is slightly jarring is that our very own South China Morning Post feels a need to get into this morose spirit in an editorial that sounds straight out of Xinhua…

The front-page story emphasizes China’s sportsmen, while the whole back page is dedicated to China’s, and only China’s, gold medal winners – echoing the fetish with coming first that even some Mainlanders in the Daily Beast article are criticizing. “The scale of [the athletes’] endeavour and achievements cannot be denied,” it insists. (And what on earth is it with this medal-biting thing? Come back ‘V’ sign, all is forgiven)

It is jarring for the same reason much of the SCMP’s China coverage has appeared odd ever since some time back in the 1990s when daily reports from far-flung Mainland provinces and cities started to appear. The paper’s readership is mainly Hong Kong Chinese (many educated in a Western style), with a sizable minority of Westerners. Apart from what seems to be a handful of vociferous patriotic letter-writers, most of these readers are going to be unmoved, and possibly not all that interested, in such China-centric coverage. But the paper has little choice: Hong Kong is a part of the PRC – what country do you expect one of its newspapers to cover in depth? The fault lies with the Hong Kong public, in effect, for not being Chinese enough. Yet another sign of how desperately we need national education, because, as we all know, you can enhance people’s emotional attachment to their country through classroom lessons.

China’s latest batch of astronauts have just passed through town, and the country’s Olympic medalists will be coming in a couple of weeks. The idea is that these high-profile visits will somehow inspire a spirit of shared nationhood with the Mainland, and maybe make us want to vote for pro-Beijing candidates at the September 9 Legislative Council elections. Maybe school children will be drafted in to enlarge the happy smiling flag-waving crowds, as with the Olympic flame four years ago. But is there any way to drag SCMP readers into taking an interest?

There is. The national heroes are a bit boring (unless you want to hear about having chili sauce in orbit), but Hong Kong has its own way to spice up these contrived appearances: demonstrations. In the astronauts’ case, protestors complained about the faking of a harmonious environment, and national education in general. For activists to picket the athletes would be churlish, and probably counterproductive. But at least we’d want to read about it.

Blink and you’d have missed it: a precisely scripted and performed piece of theatre leaves the world none the wiser as to who did what, where, when or why. Our local press report the trial of Gu Kailai, wife of disgraced ex-Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai, as if the pouring-poison-into-mouth account is factual, and they might as well; there is nothing else to go with.

All we can really say is that this is largely a human-interest story to divert attention from the real issues. How extensive was Bo’s reign of terror over Chongqing’s business community? How many local businessmen died, were jailed or tortured, or fled? How many billions in assets did Bo and his henchmen appropriate for the municipality, for their friends and families, and for themselves? How typical is this behaviour among Politburo-level officials and top-ranking provincial-level leaderships? What equivalent crime and corruption goes on among lower levels of government? How the hell can a country be run like this? Wouldn’t it all make a really cool Moral and National Education case-study for Hong Kong schools?

An aside… Anyone brought up on Little Bo Peep instinctively pronounces the name ‘boe’ rather than ‘baw’. Less forgivable is the pronunciation of ‘Beijing’ with a soft, mushy, almost French ‘xing’ or ‘zhing’ (in the non-pinyin sense) second syllable. As they sometimes do on RTHK’s English Radio 3 service’s news show in the morning (‘President When’ is another of their lapses).

Throughout the English-speaking world, newscasters have come to pronounce ‘Beijing’ in a way that is not only wrong in Mandarin but in English itself. You don’t sing ‘xinglebells/zhinglebells’ at Christmas, so why put the consonant into the name of China’s capital? The Atlantic has been pondering this question for ages. One theory is that, in the speakers’ minds, ‘all foreign languages are French’. A more serious explanation is hyperforeignism, in which people try too hard to make a foreign word sound suitably alien; a related phenomenon is the sort of hypercorrectness that leads Anglophones with a bit of high-school French to pronounce a rather nasty shade of blue-green ‘turquWAAZ’ rather than the ‘turqWOIZE’ the well-bred among us were taught. A third explanation is that these RTHK newsreaders are ignorant and in need of remedial national education. I would hate to have to start naming and shaming them.

The other big story today is the demise of businessman and broadcaster Albert ‘Taipan’ Cheng’s Digital Broadcasting. In his over-frequent South China Morning Post column, he claims that his investors have been scared off by interference from Beijing’s local officials, who dislike the station’s anti-government stance. This sounds perfectly believable, but so does the argument that broadcast media today is a money-loser. The Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ makes a case for internal feuding.

If it really is politics that kills off DBC, it would be because politics started it. We may recall that during the height of Donald Tsang’s disastrous spell as Chief Executive, radical activists demanded the right to acquire a broadcasting licence so they could launch a legal on-air radio station. This led to pointed questions about why Hong Kong had a (half Li Ka-shing-owned) commercial radio duopoly. And voila – something called DBC suddenly got the go-ahead.

The founders were a group of friends, shoe-shiners and hangers-on of Sir Bow-Tie himself. Cheng is an old buddy; Wong Cho-bau was later to offer Donald that luxury apartment in Shenzhen; banker David Li had been Donald’s self-appointed ‘campaign manager’; Arthur was David’s brother; Allan Wong was a businessman on the Executive Council; Ronald Arculli was an all-purpose lackey who supported anything Donald asked him to. They might as well have called it Radio Donald.

Or Tang Dynasty Radio, because of course the thing would start operations around the time the new administration – then to be under Henry – took over. It was as if the bureaucrat-tycoon nexus was to have its own propaganda machine. Round-the-clock coverage of Chamber of Commerce bore Anthony Wu’s views on the aging population and why we need a 12-lane bridge to Hainan Island.

Yet it was not to be. The lesson is worth endlessly repeating: those who live by the shoe-shine die by the shoe-shine.

I declare the weekend open with Headline of the Day: Paediatrician accused of waterboarding daughter … “known for his research into near-death experiences of children…”  They do say father-daughter relationships can be complex.

(Anyone with an interest in the art of documentary film and/or intergenerational child abuse with 75 minutes to spare should see the little-known Just, Melvin – Just Evil, directed by a victim who manages to use ironic humour to introduce his thoroughly messed up but hilarious family, culminating in the main perpetrator’s funeral, at which a stunned pastor pleads with mourners to say something nice about the deceased – here.)

Iodine deficiency in babies used to cause widespread irreversible mental retardation in China. Whole villages suffered cretinism for as many generations back as anyone could remember owing to a lack of the mineral in the soil, and thus the diet. Meanwhile, in prosperous, bustling, well-nourished Hong Kong, manufacturers of infant milk formula implicitly discourage nursing mothers from breast-feeding their newborns, and market their pricy canned powder by suggesting that it will boost its little recipients’ intelligence. Use brand X baby food, they pretty much claim, and your child will get into top schools, do well in exams, go to college, become a lawyer and go on to enjoy a life of shiny luxury cars and expensive real estate.

So it is understandable that more than a little panic breaks out when the Hong Kong government withdraws all batches of two Japanese brands of formula from the market because iodine content is ‘rather low’. It is not that the Japanese manufacturers are deliberately trying to stunt little Hongkongers’ future mental abilities. The reason, officials say, is that Japanese mothers have naturally higher levels of iodine, so – presumably – the makers of formula adjust the composition of their product accordingly.

This sounds plausible: the Japanese diet is rich in seafood and seaweed, and thus iodine. But of course the mother’s intake of various nutrients is irrelevant unless she breast-feeds. The implication is that Japanese mothers breastfeed more than their Hong Kong counterparts. Hong Kong women eat plenty of sea produce, too.

There is an opportunity here for the Hong Kong government’s Information Services Department to do something useful and toss out their sillier propaganda campaigns in favour of one that directly links natural mother’s milk with better health and intelligence – that is, something deliberately designed to reduce artificial formula’s market share. I’m sure formula is a pretty acceptable substitute, and I have no doubt that breast-feeding must be a huge inconvenience, but why not openly undermine the formula companies’ dubious claims?

In a similar vein, the government has a lame campaign – you see the posters at the Macau ferry terminal – imploring people not to gamble to excess. Obviously, by definition, you shouldn’t do anything to excess. But why not put out proper hard-hitting ads, telling people clearly what the odds of a decent win are (you’re more likely to be murdered), and humiliating people who gamble at all by stating simply that they are stupid to throw their money away like that?

The answer in both cases, no doubt, is that we must ‘strike a balance’.

On a happier note, the death is announced of one of ex-Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s many ridiculous schemes. This particular one was yet another plot to eradicate Hong Kong as a place where Hong Kong people live and replace it with a tourist zone where local people are shoved aside to make room for Mainlanders and other aliens buying overpriced junk from international chains paying huge rents to our local property developer families.

No-one ever clearly articulated the obnoxiousness of the Tsim Sha Tsui piazza, because it wasn’t so much this single project as a series of decisions that, when you look back, reveal a malevolent bureaucratic mentality. When you add up the removal of the Central Star Ferry pier, the defacement of the TST marine police HQ (reborn as 1881 Heritage) and the plan to relocate the TST bus terminus several minutes’ walk away, the sum is a message. That message says: ‘this part of the city will henceforth serve only interests that profit from tourist traffic; the rest of you can f**k off’.

We are told that the design is unviable essentially for engineering reasons, but the root cause is the clash of local residents’ transport needs with landlords’ desires to attract more overseas shoppers, and the local residents won where the piazza is concerned – something you don’t see everyday.

Nor is this: filial piety – a good wife suckles her toothless mother-in-law while her own baby goes hungry…

Click to hear ‘Safe as Milk’ by Captain Beefheart!

For many smaller businesses in our cartelized, monopolistic, anti-competition World’s Freest Economy, advertising presents a problem. There are only two broadcast TV stations and a small clutch of commercial radio outlets, and the airtime is far too expensive for most companies. Space in newspapers isn’t cheap, and there is no equivalent of the suburban editions published by city papers in the US, in which advertisers can target just one neighbourhood. Prominent billboards and neon signs cost big bucks. Many small businesses have no choice but to add to the clutter of street-side signage, install garish audio-visual displays or push fliers into mailboxes or into the resistant hands of passing pedestrians.

With a few high-profile exceptions, our politicians are mostly like small and medium enterprises when it comes to publicity. In some districts candidates stand by the roadside waving at passing traffic – begging for sympathy votes, presumably – or they wear costumes and canvass on bike or open-topped bus. Mostly, however, they hand out leaflets. And they drape banners on railings, just as housewives in the more third-world parts of town dry bed sheets.

The government allocates candidates patches of railings known as ‘designated spots’. They cannot be visible from traffic junctions or pedestrian crossings, in case they distract drivers and you get an accident (note that this ban doesn’t apply to any other eye-catching signage, like graphic ads for breast enhancement services). The guidelines for electioneering are detailed and inflexible, and politicians’ banners are similar in size and shape.

The design of these banners is often dismal. The grumpy old pro-Beijing guys have the worst: an unsmiling portrait in a circular frame, and little thought given to typefaces or colours. But some are OK, and this one for ‘big sister’ Pamela Pak, the radio personality running for the new and confusing at-large District Council Functional Constituency is almost worth stealing and sending to a young relative who would love it on her bedroom wall…

The name is pronounced ‘baak’, as in ‘baak choy’ – as befits someone with a cadaverous white face. But most people write ‘Pak’ in English, while she seems to have adopted Peck. Are we supposed to subliminally think ‘…on the cheek’? I would like to think so; it’s one device the Electoral Affairs Commission hasn’t banned. Any resemblance of the candidate to Audrey Hepburn is possibly not coincidental, and indeed is a testament to the wonders of PhotoShop. The photo is close-up and cropped and goes right to the edge of the poster with no margin or frame (‘bleeding edge’ in graphic-speak). This is a modern look; traditionalist old grouchy pro-Beijing types wouldn’t want to portray themselves this way, not least because it’s bad feng shui to ‘cut’ a bit of yourself off.

Then we have the colours – so rich you can almost taste them. The warm raspberry flavour of the fuchsia-pink clothing is echoed in the background to the characters announcing her name and is in sharp contrast to the fresh, crisp mint of the green background, while the dark blues of some of the lettering add a hint of respectability and gravitas – as if to say “I am more than just a tax-dodging, ex-convict joke-candidate with an embarrassing clown for a partner, with whom I have become a poor man’s Brenda & Kai-bong Chau.” Design-wise, as we shall surely see when we take a few steps further down the pedestrian walkway outside Exchange Square to examine Pamela’s rivals’ efforts, this is a classy Legco 2012 banner.

On other matters (1)… You are Paul Chan. You have been given the job of Development Secretary to solve Hong Kong’s appalling housing problems. The public finds out that you in fact make money out of the suffering caused by Hong Kong’s appalling housing problems. A man stands up to defend you, but he is property tycoon Henry Cheng, who could fairly be said to be one of the reasons Hong Kong has its appalling housing problems. The South China Morning Post intones: “…analysts are not sure this will be enough to steer Chan through the crisis…” You are inclined to agree.

On other matters (2)… Looking through some rather weighty material on the South China Sea – or Sansha City, as we should now call it – I read that Beijing is discouraging Mainland citizens from visiting the Philippines. Voila! Do we finally have an explanation for the Hong Kong Security Bureau’s mysterious continued ‘avoid all travel’ Black travel advisory for the islands, so long after the freak Manila bus hijacking in which Hong Kong tourists were killed? Could it be one of those little duties the Big Lychee’s authorities have no choice but to perform owing to pressure from above? Like turning away exiled dissidents and Falun Gong members at the airport, or like having a brave stab – at least – at introducing Article 23 security laws or national education? A riddle solved, maybe.

Click to hear Audrey Hepburn sing ‘Moon River’!

The History News Network has voted The Jefferson Lies by evangelist David Barton the Least Credible History Book in Print. Plugged by professional freak and broadcaster Glenn Beck, it is an attempt to re-invent Thomas Jefferson as what today’s Christian Right would have liked him to be, notably a devout non-secularist – and one who wouldn’t have fathered children by a slave girl, or think bits of the New Testament could and should be ignored.

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is a runner-up. It is in many ways exactly what Barton’s readers would most hate: the archetypal leftish liberal collectivist interpretation. Unlike a rewriting of history to suit Biblical literalists’ fantasies, it is simply biased – laboriously so. It was still newly published when I was at college, and sure enough the brainwashing national education system of the time expected us to read it. Even then it seemed overly PC (as it would now be called), recounting a centuries-long series of noble downtrodden groups bravely rising up against the vicious you-know-what-colour, you-know-what-age, you-know-what-gender oppressors. It starts on page 1, paragraph 3… 

Which bring us rather neatly to another book in HNN’s generally American-focused list of pseudo- and junk history. It’s none other than Gavin Menzies’s 1421: the Year China Discovered America. Even six years ago, it was being dismissed as a joke, and I can’t remember how many times I have transferred it from a bookshop history shelf to the fiction section. It is, to quote the HNN panelist:

…a stunning farrago of deceptions and misrepresentations of sources and scholars, [bringing] false historical writing and intentional public deception to a new level … the publishers have classified this volume as “non-fiction” with full knowledge that the book was fabricated by persons who had no knowledge of the Ming voyages … concocted to be sensational … depicting academic historians as unbending conservatives trying to keep knowledge of pre-Colombian voyages from the public … the Da Vinci Code of the historical realm … no book has done more harm in terms of misrepresenting the American (and indeed global) past…

Ouch. Chinese officials and state-managed academics, not always averse to hijacking archaeology and anthropology for the greater glory of the motherland, have kept their distance from Menzies’s claims. They have, over the years, suggested unique descent of the ethnic Chinese from Homo erectus, adopted barbarian Mongol leader Genghis Khan as a Chinese, and declared millennia-old fishing trips as proof of ownership of the whole South China Sea, well into the 200-mile limits of the Philippines and Vietnam. But discovery of the Americas is a step too far. Which is just as well, since Menzies followed up his 1421 fantasy with an even more deranged 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. I can’t wait for 1447: The Year the Ming Dynasty Landed on the Moon.

Even without demanding America and Italy, China has a lot of other countries’ de facto territory on its shopping list. Beijing claims a bit of India on the grounds that the British grabbed it from Tibet (which of course has always always been part of China). It demands the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands to some extent on the grounds that they weren’t historically Japanese, and, therefore, who else’s could they be?

The big worry – and puzzle – now is the South China Sea. In a recent opinion piece, Kishore Mahbubani asks Is China losing the diplomatic plot? After years of finessing the issue, Beijing has recently openly declared its claims to sovereignty over what are clearly other countries’ territorial waters. In doing so, it has wrecked the trust it has spent decades building in Southeast Asia and guaranteed a bigger American presence in the region. And, by officially confirming the demands implicit in the infamous nine-dotted map, it has done so in such a way that it can’t really back out. (Wang Gungyu’s Straits Times article on the Japanese/KMT-derived map – like the SCMP’s version of Mahbubani’s article – is sealed away in an Internet vault, but can be seen here.)

Mahbubani blames overzealous junior officials, but it also sounds like some sort of tiff in which the PLA gets one over on the Foreign Affairs wimps. Either way, as with Taiwan, Beijing has painted itself into a corner. Any leader who tries to make concessions will have Politburo enemies or millions of nationalistic students wanting to string him up. If China carries on pushing idiotic, bullying demands, we can lay good odds that in five years’ time the US will have a base at Cam Ranh Bay and there will have been anti-Chinese riots and lootings in at least one or two ASEAN capitals – plus all the global ramifications. All because of junk history.

Just when we thought Hong Kong had all the mayhem it could handle with illegal trellises, plagues of Mainland locusts, the fiercest typhoon in a decade, sweltering temperatures, record-breaking air pollution, government ministers’ wives’ companies’ subdivided apartments and Maoist ‘national education’ brainwashing for kids, the city is buried in a tidal wave of 28.6 trillion tiny plastic balls washed up on shorelines after falling off a ship during the aforementioned tempest.

The things are technically called nurdles or, more charmingly, mermaids’ tears; they are readily available (20 tons minimum order) and are used to make things like bottles. The amount reaching Hong Kong’s beaches is probably just a small fraction of the total quantity released, which itself is of course a tiny percentage of the plastic junk already floating around in our long-suffering planet’s oceans. So all you can really do is give the volunteers sweeping them up a pat on the back, wait for the rest of the pellets to get washed or blown away and leave it at that.

But that wouldn’t be any fun. What activists on our outlying islands want is environmental devastation to put on YouTube. Ladies and gentlemen: the Great Hong Kong Plastic Disaster of 2012, complete with doom-laden music. They are also demanding the immediate establishment of a Tiny Plastic Ball Early Warning System, so the city can prepare its defences against future inundations of pellets. The campaigners concede that the things are not radioactive, explosive or even poisonous – in fact, these are the most boring tiny plastic balls ever devised by mankind. The things are so inert that even middle-class Discovery Bay housewives will go to the beach and clean them up. However, apparently they act like a sponge and soak up nasty chemicals like insecticides and carcinogens. Which sounds like a good thing but of course isn’t. Officials have been sent out to Lantau and Cheung Chau to squat on beaches, roll a few pellets carefully between the fingers and look very serious.

And the trauma continues. According to the radio this morning, the government is warning well-intentioned beach-sweepers: if you feel a sort of crunching beneath your feet as you wade through the white plastic drifts, that’ll be rare, new-hatched baby turtles you’re stepping on (the sort you see on TV nature shows struggling valiantly to reach the sea). Whatever calamity can strike the Big Lychee next?

Maybe here’s a clue…

Thought for the day (as we return to reality and note the Centa City property market index’s latest high last Friday): “Kevin Walsh, after retiring from the Board of the Federal Reserve last year, revealed that central banks are now influencing asset prices so heavily that investors are unable to ascertain market value.” (Henley Outlook investment newsletter)

Click to hear ‘The Eve of Destruction’ by the Turtles!

The South China Morning Post juxtaposes articles by radio and print commentator Albert Cheng and National People’s Congress deputy Lau Nai-keung on what is starting to look like ex-Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s revenge – national education.

The outspoken, semi-flamboyant Cheng is an old friend of Donald and is at the free-thinking end of the Donald-tycoon-bureaucracy spectrum that ran Hong Kong until CY Leung became CE. (He joined Donald cronies Ron Arculli and David Li in founding a radio station designed to make Sir Bow-Tie look more liberal about handing out broadcasting licences.) Lau is an ultra-patriot and supporter of CY (and fellow organic food fan) who has detested the pro-democrats – and by extension most of the Hong Kong population – ever since the city’s first political grouping split along what are now Democratic and Liberal Party lines in the late 70s-early 80s.

Cheng sees national education (or MNE) as a Beijing-ordered plot to brainwash Hong Kong into loving the Communist Party. Lau essentially sees the anti-national education movement as part of a splittist US/Taiwan (Vatican/Dalai Lama/etc) conspiracy to keep China enslaved by evil foreigners. Both are heavy on bold assertions and light on evidence and analysis. Cheng probably doesn’t entirely believe all he says; much of the anti-MNE rhetoric we are hearing is aimed at getting you to vote for pro-democrats in next month’s Legislative Council elections, or to make life hard for CY. The patriots who support Beijing-sympathetic textbooks in schools are mostly more discreet than Lau but, like him, sincerely believe what they are saying.

It is no secret that Beijing advised Donald Tsang a couple of years or so ago that Hong Kong needed to be less alienated from the nation and the Communist Party. Since the party is perfect, this sense of alienation must be a failing on the part of the Hong Kong people. If we go back to the time the MNE project was launched, we will recall how the whole thing looked trashy, unconvincing and contrived. Almost as if Donald had said, OK let’s put some flashy-looking crap together to please the old guys in Beijing and make them think we’re getting kids to love the motherland. By making it high-profile, rather than subtly inserting China studies into existing civics classes, officials were setting it up to be controversial – maybe out of over-eagerness to please Beijing and/or out of arrogant disdain for public opinion. (Or, we can fantasize, it was a deliberate act of sabotage by ‘two-systems’ separatists in the bureaucracy, strings being pulled by former Chief Secretary Anson Chan. The mishandling of Article 23 often looked a bit deliberate.)

For patriots, however, MNE was a deadly serious cause. Once a persecuted and mocked minority in foreign-run Hong Kong, the pro-Beijing faithful are finally able to forcibly inject a bit of the race’s universal creed into government, Catholic and other schools. Opposition to MNE makes them livid; this is supposed to be ‘one country’ now, all 1.307 billion together under one god, yet patriots are still barred from proselytizing among this small, stubborn group of heathens. The only explanation must involve something unseen, something evil – indeed satanic. To Lau the mouth-frothing Taliban, those who refuse to convert can only be put to the sword.

Will mainstream Hong Kong public opinion suddenly see the light, drop to their knees and believe that schools that collapse on kids are good, that persecuting blind lawyers is good, that poisoned milk is good? Sounds like it would take a miracle.

Ever since I bought my then-Lower Mid-Levels now-Soho apartment 20 years ago, I have never ventured up to the fifth or sixth floors at the top of the building. I’ve never had a need to, and the lack of an elevator has dampened any curiosity I might have. But a while ago a builder doing some work up there described one particular unit, which I know belongs to an absentee landlord who manages to be even less active than others in our barely functioning owners’ committee. The property was made up of tiny rooms off an extremely narrow internal corridor, and some occupants were Filipino women. And there are, indeed, a couple of Filipinas in the building who come and go wearing the staff uniform of a Central-based finance/loan shark company catering to overseas maids. So, on top of the illegal structures that give the place so much character, we also have a subdivided flat in our midst.

Given the tendency for Chief Executive CY Leung’s top officials to have property-related problems, it was only a matter of time before the media revealed that one of them was a slum landlord. Take a bow, newly appointed Development Secretary Paul Chan. His wife is a part-owner of a couple of subdivided apartments in Kowloon.

Older residential buildings in downtown areas are especially suitable for subdivision. Unlike with modern high-rises, the units on or near the top floors fetch the lowest rents; but landlords can make quite a bit more by splitting them up with plasterboard into what are basically self-contained cells. To members of a particular low-income group, HK$2,000 a month for such a space seems to make sense, since it saves on travel time/costs. In less convenient neighbourhoods something similar happens, but the occupants are the real underclass – typically the elderly or single-parent mainland families. The Wall Street Journal did a good expose of the latter type of residents here with a sample floor plan here.

The Standard says Paul Chan’s wife’s family’s friends’ whatever’s company’s subdivided properties may be illegal. The South China Morning Post also identifies some tiresome-sounding possible tax dodge associated with another Chan-related property trade. Rather conveniently – so conveniently it starts to look almost desperate – an intermediary has cropped up in person to announce himself as the individual who did the subdividing without, of course, telling the Chans about it. It is not yet clear whether any of the subdivided flats have a trellis.

What we are going to have now is another scandal about integrity and/or common sense and nothing else. Chan (or wife, etc) will undergo crucifixion for infringing some obscure building code, or for not being more careful and checking and rectifying the infringement earlier. The outrage will be that he (or wife, etc) is criminal or, failing that, was negligent. The pro-Henry Tang camp will especially enjoy it when Democratic Party boss Albert Ho goes to court or the United Nations about it. Will Chan outlast his predecessor, CK Mak of housing allowance scam, who lasted less than two weeks?

The real scandal will probably go unmentioned: our land and housing policies force people into third-world living conditions. If I were Chan, I would come out fighting: “You should thank my wife’s family’s blah-blah’s company for providing this sort of housing, because without it, thanks to Donald Tsang and other previous leaders’ inaction and heartlessness, those tenants would be on the streets. Nothing will make me happier than to pull down the plasterboard after my bureau completes its mission to ensure everyone has affordable housing, but we can’t do that if you idiots keep disrupting us with blather about integrity, and by the way I can’t help noticing that some of our detractors have major financial interests in keeping homes unaffordable.”

If you have the nerve to produce blue-shirted Mr Wu who subdivides flats without telling the owners, why not? And anyway, we’re going to run out of ministers before long.

Intelligent, thinking, inquiring laymen should have no problem reviewing all the information accessible to them and accepting that the overwhelming majority of highly trained and equipped scientists who accept the theory of evolution do so for good reason. Much the same can be said about climate change, even if the mechanics of what is happening are less well understood than DNA and natural selection, so things are a bit hazier. But when it comes to Hong Kong government statisticians’ population forecasts and the Great Aging Society Menace, we are entitled to be skeptics.

You don’t need a PhD in number-crunching to know that a straight-line extrapolation is often meaningless, but that is how the last government of Chief Executive Donald Tsang, in particular, did demographic forecasts. Although the scarier predictions seem to have been toned down, the latest figures still lead to alarming reports that ”…growth in our gray-haired population will strain medical, housing and welfare services and probably increase the waiting time for a place in a care home.”

This doesn’t have to be true. We could have a higher retirement age, youthful immigration from the Mainland or the Philippines (or Burma? – we’re talking 2041 here), encouragement for the old to retire offshore, robots that wash the dishes and do hip replacements, a comet that wipes the whole planet out… Anything could happen.

But that’s not the message that the residual propagators of Sir Bow-Tie’s thinking in the bureaucracy want to spread. Their agenda is: keep recurrent spending down (so we will have some spare when 90-year-olds are flooding the hospitals) and meanwhile devote lots of funds to infrastructure, so all those extra people will have roads and bridges to drive on. In short, give our wealth to Donald’s tycoon friends.

In the CY Leung era, it would be nice to think that some politicians would stand up and question the Census and Statistics Department’s stale scaremongering. Chances are, they will be too busy flinging mud around.

With nominations for September’s Legislative Council elections now closed, there will be an average six candidates fighting for each geographical constituency seat. Although Legco has been enlarged, the number of GCs remains the same, so a constituency can return up to nine members, meaning we will probably see people get in with below 10% of the vote. The pro-democrats, when not abusing each other, will accuse the pro-Beijing folk of supporting national education brainwashing; Beijing officials based in the Liaison Office will leak all the dirt they can find about the pro-dems’ illegal structures and Mainland mistresses. It will be terrific fun.

But before that, we need to get a bit of dullness out of the way. First off the blocks this morning on the Mid-Levels Escalator – a transport system almost purpose-built to funnel voters past campaign workers – was former Security Secretary Regina Ip’s exciting New People’s Party. Soho was festooned with bright banners featuring the lady, plus a slightly gullible-looking candidate called Dennis Wong. He won’t win a Hong Kong Island seat, but Regina presumably will. Funny thing: you will never meet anyone who admits to voting for her.

Click to hear the Blues Magoos’ ‘The People Had No Faces’!