Big Lychee, Various Sectors

It’s in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, it’s in the newspapers of Washington DC and Chicago, and it’s probably everywhere else. Tens of thousands of Hongkongers and their kids march in the blazing sun to protest communist brainwashing of innocent little schoolchildren.

Common sense says the government, which has pressing housing, welfare and pollution problems to solve, should simply scrap the Moral and National Education initiative. Like so many of its incompetent predecessor’s policies, it’s a lemon – badly thought-through and badly presented. What could have been (and in many ways probably is) a minor and innocuous, largely symbolic, addition to the school curriculum is now increasing opposition to Chief Executive CY Leung and his new administration. With Legislative Council elections looming, no political party will give the local leadership much support on this issue. Incredibly, MNE is also having the effect of deepening local distrust of the national government in Beijing. It’s a mess.

But top officials are trying to sail though it as if it’s no big deal. Whip up a quick committee of stakeholders, and everything will be fine, right? The problem is that something that isn’t a big deal (like a pointless weekly class on a clumsily named ungraded subject) becomes a big deal if and when enough people believe it is one. And when 32,000/90,000 people march for a specific cause, it has become a big deal. With the protestors boycotting the committee before it has even been assembled, it is not going to revert to being a small deal.

As a patriot with Communist ties himself, CY Leung would find it difficult to back down on national education, even though it would go down well and he could blame it all on ex-CE Donald Tsang. Ironically, it may fall to Beijing’s local emissaries in the Liaison Office to give him a call and tell him to drop it, on the grounds that the plan to develop warm and fuzzy feelings towards the nation and its rulers is having the precise opposite effect.

The Washington Post quotes a lone patriot railing at the ‘British devils’ marching yesterday. The MNE affair is widening the great gap between this city’s minority pro-Beijing and majority pro-Hong Kong cultures. The grisly visage of Miriam Lau, Liberal Party candidate on Hong Kong Island, greeted commuters alighting the Mid-Levels Escalator a few mornings ago, loudly demanding a suspension of MNE. She is driven by cynical electoral reasons, plus spite for CY Leung, but she also seems to have at least a shred of sympathy with the popular fears MNE has sparked. The Liberals have always been quick to shoeshine Beijing if it might help their business, but if forced to choose, they can’t bring themselves to come out in favour of brainwashing.

Are genuinely pro-Beijing Hongkongers born or made? My hunch is that it runs in the family (patriots have long formed a distinct and often unpopular community in the Big Lychee). But I sometimes wonder how inbred a cultural condition it is. Pro-Beijing types look like pro-Beijing types. The hairstyle, the spectacles, the grumpy, defiant, slightly brutish, ill-educated look on the face. Legislator Ma Fung-kwok, now running for the United Front-dominated Sports/Culture functional constituency, is in the movie industry and so is fairly photogenic. But just look at those supporters. It’s in the DNA.

Click to hear the Pancakes’ ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’!

Will the Euro fantasy-currency please hurry up and splinter into smithereens? Like many defensive-minded folk, I am sitting on a lot more cash than I usually would, reckoning that Europe’s sadistic monetary arrangement has to unravel at some point. There will be contagion, panic, chaos, plunging markets and Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang telling us we are doomed. And some sort of assets somewhere – I wonder which? – will be absurdly mispriced for a time, presenting the strong-stomached among us with an exceptional buying opportunity.

The data from Athens bring tears to the eyes, or at least make you think ‘yikes…’

Greece’s economy shrank 3.5 percent in 2010 and 6.9 percent in 2011 and is expected to contract 7 percent this year, a decline reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment is at 22.5 percent and expected to rise to 30 percent, while Greece’s main retailers’ association warned on Monday that sales were expected to drop 53 percent this year.

They are being told to take more of this. By comparison, Hong Kong’s only year of negative real growth in the deflationary 1998-2003 period was 1998 (-5.5%), and unemployment peaked at 7.9% in 2003. Still, Greece is just a sideshow; the real nightmare is Spain, and the more excitable commentators foresee Italy and France as dominos lined up behind it. The only ways to avoid some sort of break-up appear unthinkable (for example, the German people volunteer to donate their hard-earned retirement savings to foreigners). That said, I can’t avoid having a sneaking suspicion that European policymakers will, against all the odds, find some way of avoiding the inevitable through yet more summits, mini-bailouts and growth-and-happiness pacts with all the vacuous pomposity the continent’s bureaucrats have refined over decades of constructing their sacred project.

Such perpetual postponement of an ending would befit the limitlessness of man’s capacity for self-delusion. European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi proclaims that the euro is ‘absolutely not in danger’, is ‘irrevocable’, and that ‘imagining an explosion of the euro area underestimates the political capital that our leaders have invested in this union, as well as the support of European citizens’.

Mercifully we still have markets to enforce reality. Bond investors will eat ‘political capital’ for breakfast. And they provide writers with the chance to indulge in some vivid imagery…

…imagine an operating theater inside a betting shop. As surgeons prepare to amputate a gangrened foot to prevent infection spreading to healthier parts of the body, gamblers on the sidelines lay bets on which limb will be next for the chop.

Anyway, get on with it – it’s tiresome, and the cartoonists are running out of clichés.

Click to hear the Kinks’ ‘Tired of Waiting’!

In Beijing, the worst storm in decades leaves 37 dead from drowning and other mayhem (if you believe the official number – plus plenty are still missing). In Hong Kong, a once-in-10-years typhoon leaves a few dozen people sitting out the night in dry, air-conditioned Mass Transit Rail stations. It is hard to tell which community is freaking out in righteous anger more, as Mainland authorities have censored public criticism of the capital’s poor preparedness and third-world drainage, but it seems quite possible that the Big Lychee proudly takes the prize. In classic Hong Kong government fashion, officials jump on the bandwagon and sternly demand that the MTR submit a full report on why the rail operator disgracefully allowed such a powerful weather system to come this close to the city.

Meanwhile, another disaster is unraveling, which means someone is in search of another scapegoat. The Great National (and Moral) Education Brainwashing Controversy attracts more constructive debate, with government officials insisting it’s no big deal but nonetheless very important, and detractors declaring it is pointless and yet also highly dangerous. (One of the latter is Libby Wong, former civil servant and legislator back in the heady days of Governor Chris Patten. After many years’ retirement in New Zealand, she has returned, in her capacity as a cuddlier and funnier version of ex-Chief Secretary Anson Chan, apparently to share the benefit of her opinion with all of us, and generously.)

The word is that new Chief Executive CY Leung is adopting a strictly non-cuddly and non-funny stance on national education: he is simply going to tough it out. The plan is inherited from his hapless predecessor, but as a patriot he can hardly backtrack or abandon it. Anxious parents can march all they want; it is going ahead.

Although it sounds like a no-nonsense message, it essentially leaves schools and parents to backtrack or virtually abandon as they please. ‘Going ahead’ in fact means ‘going ahead in pretty much any way you want, using any textbooks you want, any time you want in the next three years, just so long as, by 2015-16, kids spend an hour a week or something they won’t even be tested on called National and Moral Education’.

And of course we need a scapegoat to blame for the misunderstandings and confusion that have led parents, teachers, churches, lawmakers and the media to fear a wave of red propaganda sweeping through our children’s innocent little minds. The big recent scare arose from the National Education Services Centre’s booklet for schools on the China Model. And the pro-Beijing body was funded by the Education Bureau, which must now hang its head in shame for failing to exercise proper oversight, and may have to lose extra face by commissioning better materials from some other groups – the John Birch Society, the Kuomintang and the Vatican, say.

I have seen a copy of China Model (efforts to nab it for sale on eBay were thwarted). It is aimed at high-school students and teachers, and contains a fairly straightforward account of modern China in terms of the ‘Beijing Consensus’ theory/story/fad (which the booklet mentions by name, along with the – boo, hiss – ‘Washington Consensus’). The Beijing Consensus holds that China’s gradualist, state-guided, authoritarian pattern of reform and development is a better way for poor countries to become rich than the ‘Washington’ (US/IMF) preference for free markets, open economies and of course laid-back groovy open societies. Depending on your taste, the Beijing Consensus is going to dominate the 21st Century, or is destined to fail.

Experience tends to show that trendy, jargon-clad miracle cures for planetary ailments tend to be 50% common sense and 50% self-serving twaddle. (Which reminds me: whatever happened to Asian Values?) Needless to say, economist-chatterers and conference-whores have come up with lots of other ‘consensuses’, some of which really come under the category of ‘you’re kidding’.

Coming tomorrow: the Shatin Consensus.

So there I was at 10 this morning, sitting at home in my pajamas, sipping lapsang souchong, reading the newspapers online, and thinking how nice today would be with the Number 8 typhoon signal up – and thus offices closed – until, say 3pm, when it is sadly too late for anyone to go into work. Vicious Vicente. And then some idiot at the Observatory ruins everything and lowers the signal.

I had in fact ventured out earlier to inspect the neighbourhood for damage after last night’s tempest. The Plaza in Discovery Bay was looking like this…

…so I thought we might have a few overturned buses or collapsed advertising hoardings in Central. But there was nothing, apart from the usual bits and pieces you would expect to be strewn around in the first Number 10 signal since 1999, including 100-mile-an-hour winds at Ngong Ping, home of the famous Lantau Death Ride Cable Car. Not even a comatose inebriate swept uphill from Lan Kwai Fong by an exceptional gust.

One thing I did notice, with no human or vehicular traffic in sight, was how many premises in Soho are empty. The shops are presumably being hoarded by owners waiting for prices to rise or landlords refusing to take a penny less than their dream price. This double-fronted (connected at the back) place on Peel Street…

…has been empty since the no-doubt trendy and much-missed Boca Tapas Bar closed at least one, maybe two, years ago. That must be one or two million in rent down the drain.

Just down in Staunton Street, I found a whole block – number 20-26 – vacant, full of deserted apartments with the windows open…

The hoarding along the ground level says the place is under renovation by Sino Land.

This is the place Sino wanted to turn into a 24-storey office tower with five levels of restaurants and a pledge to ‘preserve the unique cultural and historical character of the area’. Local activists fought against the plan, and Sino then said it wanted to build a boutique hotel instead. (The sidewalks here are barely 2ft 6 across and the street is clogged with trucks half the time.)

I am the only remaining resident who can remember the area’s original ‘cultural and historical character’, which was wiped out of existence some 15-20 years ago when the newly built Mid-Levels Escalator pulled in all the glitzy fake restaurants and other tat. Far from being unique, it was pretty much the same as you still find today in remaining low-rise, urban-area blue-collar neighbourhoods, like bits of Shamshuipo. All my neighbours from that time were ethnically cleansed via a clampdown on illegal structures and an influx of yuppies.

Now, thwarted by the newcomers’ aesthetic values and town planners, it seems Sino must simply renovate their property, apparently bought some 10 years ago for HK$160 million. They could, if they knock apartments together, make some serious luxury flats – say, two 1,200 sq ft units per floor, which would probably fetch HK$15-20 million (who knows?) each. No swimming pool, so buyers would actually get the space. And then there’s the ground floor – perfect for a couple of phony upscale themed dining concepts. All in keeping with the unique cultural and historic character.

“The reaction does not need to be so strong…” You can almost sympathize with Executive Council member and National People’s Congress deputy Fanny Law’s frustration. Not for the first time in Hong Kong, unremarkable-looking people you’ve never heard of appear from nowhere and derail a painfully (if not painstakingly) crafted government plan.

For the sake of appearances, with Beijing and local patriots in mind, the Hong Kong government decided several years ago that it had to introduce a new ‘national education’ school curriculum to teach the city’s children about their country. In theory, it needn’t have been a big deal. In practice, however, it is inevitably a sensitive issue in a city inhabited by refugees from communist rule. It needed to be handled properly. Instead, over several years up to now, just weeks from Legislative Council elections, officials goofed up.

The comparisons with the Article 23 security legislation introduced in 2002-03 are obvious. You have to wonder why the powers that be did not learn from that and anticipate the possibility that something that didn’t have to be a major problem could turn into one. If Education Secretary Eddie Ng has any sense he will at least anticipate what happens next and make a serious gesture (like withdrawal of the plan) while he can still appear to be in charge and making a free choice. Blame it on the widely discredited Donald Tsang administration.

What went wrong?

Pro-Beijing types claim that the previous colonial regime deprived school students of national consciousness as a matter of policy. They would certainly be correct in saying that kids should learn about the country they live in and of which they are citizens. It would not have been difficult to go for a calm and minimalist approach and expand the existing civics and history courses to include names of national leaders and provincial capitals with all the other facts stuffed into 6-16-year-olds’ minds. But no, that wasn’t good enough. Officials had to devise a big, separate subject.

Simply from an educational standpoint, it looks clumsy, with plenty of potential overlap with civics and Chinese history. What’s worse is the charge of brainwashing. The syllabus does not require any such thing, but it does not make it impossible for teachers to introduce political bias if they want. Since pro-Beijing schools at least will want to, a leftist group produced a suitable China Model textbook, with its glowing descriptions of communist rule and its dismissal of multiparty democracy. The irony is worth every penny of their public subsidy: the pro-Beijing National Education Centre has delivered the critical blow to the project. Now you’ve got the Big Lychee’s mild-mannered middle class raising funds on Facebook and planning a march, and yet another grand government idea bites the dust. As Fanny Law said, the reaction did not need to be this strong. But someone made it so.

It wouldn’t have been hugely impossible 10 years ago to draft a national security law free of loopholes that worried people. But no, they had to produce a bill full of scenarios that would probably never happen but would – if they did happen – not require the cops to have a warrant or the trial to have a jury. Thanks to such stupidity, Article 23 is probably irretrievable.

National education will probably be implemented at some stage in some form in mainstream schools. But only following humiliation and backtracking, and only alongside rigorous guidelines against bias, and only after doing the exact opposite of what it was supposed to achieve – greater empathy for the motherland among Hongkongers. All easily avoided, if they had done the job properly from the start.

The (or a) definition of intelligence: the ability to detect patterns.

The South China Morning Post reports that 51% of Hong Kong students think their city was more democratic under the British; 40% of their counterparts in ex-Portuguese Macau agree, as do – perhaps most startling of all – a quarter of Mainlanders.

For a brief few years under Governor Chris Patten, Hong Kong was technically more democratic than it is today, thanks to his reforms of the voting system for the Legislative Council, which gave everyone a vote in a functional as well as geographical constituency. Those reforms were reversed at the stroke of midnight on July 1, 1997. But this was marginal, at best: the citizenry then, as now, had no official role in the selection of the government, which has always been decided in the sovereign power’s capital.

You could argue that Hong Kong became more democratic in practice in 2003-05 when the population forced failed Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa out of office. This principle was formalized in 2011 when Beijing specified that whoever took power the following year would have to be, among other things, acceptable to the people of the city. Amazingly, the Chinese government kept its word when at the last minute it dumped Henry Tang and picked CY Leung over the heads of the local establishment. There was never a de facto popular veto over choice of British governor.

Do these 51% of local students genuinely believe what they are saying? It’s quite possible. They would have been brought up by people who came of age in the booming 70s and 80s and went on to rail against Tung soon after the handover. To their parents, things would have seemed better than they are today. Their grandparents, on the other hand, might have less positive memories from earlier times.

The survey’s organizers, which are Beijing-friendly bodies, put it down to ignorance. But it’s also possible that some students, ignorant or not, saw the question in the survey as an opportunity to register a protest against the current regime. Certainly that seems to be the case with the quite jarring phenomenon of protestors too young to be nostalgic for the pre-1997 era carrying the colonial Hong Kong flag and, in one case (below), a picture of the Queen. While these demonstrators may savour the shock value of these props, they do not seem to realize just how provocative the symbolism is. To Beijing officials and doctrinaire patriots here in Hong Kong, this is little short of treachery or blasphemy. Indeed, it is almost to the credit of Communist loyalists’ patience and sophistication that they have not utterly freaked out over the flag thing.

Perhaps they are too busy getting incensed by the partial collapse of plans to launch ‘national education’ in primary schools. Catholic authorities have joined many other groups – covering up to 40% of schools – in putting off the new subject for a year. All because, hilariously, a pro-Beijing group produced an optional textbook that rather overdid the patriotic bias. Even the usually nationalist, mouth-frothing Global Times, quotes a Mainland academic as saying that the book “…is not so objective… and mostly focuses on the bright side.”

Meanwhile, new Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen says that if Chief Executive CY Leung asks him to obey the Basic Law and implement Article 23 to introduce national security laws, “I will tell him no.” This was, as Tung Chee-hwa patiently explained to us all those years ago, a ‘sacred duty’.

All in all, China’s control of Hong Kong stops abruptly at the city’s hearts and minds. One reason is that China’s paranoid government appoints Hong Kong’s leaders from a small pool of trustworthy people. They goof up, which provokes popular discontent with Beijing, and thus the cause also becomes the effect. Another reason, with which we can declare the weekend open, is ancient wisdom dating back thousands of years: “If you wish to be loved, you must first be loveable.”

Click to hear ‘England’ by the National!

The 2012 Legislative Council election race begins. Candidate nominations so far for geographical constituencies are here; ‘super-seats’ are here, and functional constituencies (not many right now) here. Why is the government listing the super-seats, officially the District Council (2nd) Functional Constituency, separately from the other FCs? It is a multi-member constituency, and it will be a universal-suffrage poll rather than a small-circle affair, so perhaps the tidy-minded bureaucrats instinctively felt it was different enough to form its own category.

The five super-seats will grab, or are grabbing, a disproportionate amount of attention. They are the result of Beijing’s extraordinary concession to the Democratic Party, presumably at the behest of then-Chief Executive Donald Tsang, to get a constitutional reform package through Legco two years ago. They form an FC as all candidates must be District Council members, yet they will be elected by the whole electorate (except those with existing FC votes). Needless to say, the concession was tweaked in the small print to minimize pro-democrats’ chances. In particular, the seats are at-large rather than divided along geographical constituency or other boundaries. Campaigning will take more resources, which favours the pro-Beijing camp.

The assumption is that being elected at-large, probably with hundreds of thousands of votes each, the five super-seat members will have an exceptional mandate of some sort. However, their voting power will be the same as any other legislators, and it’s arguable that people are getting a bit too worked up about these seats’ ‘super-ness’. Still, we’ll enter into the spirit of things.

Apart from the gruesome ‘media personality’ and former prison inmate Pamela Pak, all super-seat nominees as of this morning are from the well-organized DAB/FTU camp. It is quite possible that the top candidates in each DAB/FTU list will win a seat if the pro-Beijing establishment can guide voters’ behaviour to prevent everyone wasting votes on the same candidate/list. Lau Kong-wah is a popular veteran of the early democratic movement’s split; Starry Lee is the one oozing glamour and sexiness; the magnificent Chan Yuen-han is an authentic fighter for workers’ rights who manned the barricades alongside Longhair Leung Kwok-hung’s mother back in the days when factory workers did seven-day weeks.

The pro-democrats will of course go for the anti-charisma vote, probably with Democratic Party boss Albert Ho and sidekick James To, along with Frederick Fung, the moderate who resigned from the Equal Opportunities Commission a few days ago in a tiresome fit of pique. With such a feeble line-up, it is not impossible for someone more exotic (but not embalmed like Pamela Pak) to scrape in. And this may be a way for China’s newest citizen, Paul Zimmerman of Southern District, to get into Legco.

The alternative is for him to run as an Independent on Hong Kong Island, but that could cannibalize his Civic Party buddies’ share of the vote. You could ask why, if Zimmerman seems likely to attract more votes in the Island constituency, the CP are nominating someone else.*  The fact is that this sort of thing is going on throughout the pan-democratic camp all over Hong Kong. Too many parties with too many chiefs.

Even if and when mainstream pan-democrats agree on not competing too much with each other in the geographical constituencies, the conflict between the DAB faction and the pan-dems remains. This is going to be seriously bitter, with Chief Executive CY Leung’s popularity, or lack thereof, playing a key role. Beijing’s local officials will be pulling strings (if not organizing outright vote-rigging), and you can be sure they are already finalizing their extra big list of pro-democrats’ extra-marital affairs and, in response to a recent surge in popular demand, illegal structures.

Some functional constituencies might see interesting fights (Margaret Ng is standing down in the Legal FC), and the super-seats will have a high profile. But the geographical constituencies will be the main battlefield, and the fight could be Hong Kong’s dirtiest ever. Enjoy! 

Click to hear ‘Little Margaret’ by Obray Ramsey!

* That is, he wouldn’t run as an Independent if he thought he wouldn’t win, and his fear of cannibalization suggests that it would be at the expense of the CP’s (by definition less-popular) number-two candidate. In other words, who’s Kenneth Chan?

HSBC avoided the worst of the banking industry’s orgy of perverted lust over the last few years. Stupidly, it had previously diversified into US mortgage lending, which resulted in big losses in the 2008-09 crisis. But it wasn’t wiped out by exposure to credit default swaps, didn’t let some teenage rogue trader flush billions down the toilet, doesn’t appear to be owed much by Greece, and hasn’t so far been implicated in the LIBOR-fixing scandal (which has every small retail lender and half-bankrupt municipality in the Western world lining up for the class-action suit of the century).

The bad news: it has been caught helping terrorists, drug cartels and Syria. The bank’s pursuers were US regulators and senators, who it must be said are an excitable bunch of people prone to seeing crime and disaster wherever they look. And in the grand scheme of things, the sums involved are probably mere crumbs among the dirty money being laundered round the world. Yet even wild wonderful West Virginia, as unworldly and innocent a place as you will find, has been dragged into the disgrace.

Their actions, HSBC people plead, were inadvertent. This suggests that other institutions could well have been making the same mistakes, which implies another more-or-less LIBOR-scale scandal. Lawyers and real estate agents must be smirking as the banking industry’s reputation plumbs unknown depths.

Now the weird bit. Transfers of some funds that should have been prevented slipped through because HSBC’s automated detection system ignored… spelling mistakes. The world’s most international, global, we-know-every-culture-inside-out financial institution could spot money flowing to or from ‘Rangoon’ but not ‘Yangon’? And yet to and from ‘Myanmar’ but not ‘Mynmar’? The Windows 95 edition of MS Word could have done it.

And the bad news continues. For a short while back there, it seemed that there really was a God, and Hong Kong would not be cursed with the overblown, semi-fascistic bore-fest that is the Olympics on broadcast TV. Now, the ever-sadistic Commerce Secretary Greg So brutally forces the city’s viewers to watch hundreds of hours of over-trained, doped-up halfwits running round in circles and jumping into swimming pools for national glory. Two weeks in a cave beckon.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung finally unveils some interim measures to remind everyone that he is here to do a bit of people-oriented government. The mini-policy address he gave to the Legislative Council yesterday contained no radical reforms, but the handouts were more coherent than in the Financial Secretary’s average budget. If John Tsang released a Greatest Hits album it would be like this: only half a dozen tracks, competently done but not especially memorable.

The whole package is worth HK$7 billion – roughly 2 percent of this year’s government expenditure, or a tenth of last year’s budget surplus. Most of the money goes towards doubling the means-tested Old Age Allowance to HK$2,200 a month. To multi-millionaire lawmakers in the Civic Party, this might be a blatant and desperate attempt to divert everyone’s attention from CY’s trellis and carport roof, but for some 300,000 elderly poor getting by on HK$3,400 a month, it’s a major deal. (Such people can apply for basic CSSA welfare support, but are dissuaded by the system’s more rigorous (or humiliating) procedures.)

Medical vouchers that go to all elderly will double from HK$500 to HK$1,000 a year. With public hospital visits often free to poorer over-65s and much private health care costing megabucks, it’s hard to see what the old folk will spend the vouchers on, but they will no doubt find something.

A re-jigging of second-hand sales of subsidized housing and of public housing eligibility criteria gives a glimpse of the mess Hong Kong is in after years of a widening wealth gap and a surge in housing costs. It can be summed up with the Transport and Housing Secretary’s words, “Because we have to accommodate more people within public rental housing…” Why do we have to? Because we’re too petrified to even think about making private-sector housing more affordable.

The rest of the measures are to some extent gimmicky money-flinging, but are at least targeted in vaguely deserving directions.

The plan to provide 3,000 mini-units for up to five years in subsidized youth ‘hostels’ to below-35s earning less than HK$17,000 a month looks a bit silly; you don’t know whether to envy or pity the lucky winners of this lottery. Still, it is another reminder of what happens when you make private housing too expensive for most people to afford, and a credit to the makers of the King’s Cube video, whose satire must have played a role in this.

Also announced by the Home Affairs Secretary: HK$500 million for social enterprises’ micro-financing something-or-other, which sounds all very trendy. Such businesses strive to make a profit while serving a particular cause, like hiring disabled workers. In many cases, public subsidies make them viable because it means they can afford workspace – another reminder of land-policy failure.

It would have been nice to hear CY say something to make people think about what genuine reform could mean. For example: “If housing is expensive, people have less to spend on other things, and as a result we have fewer businesses and jobs. But if housing is cheaper, people have more money to spend on other things, which means more businesses can start up in different industries and provide more jobs. I would like everyone in the community to ask themselves which they think is the better course for Hong Kong to take.”

Maybe later. Maybe not.

Click to hear ‘Revelation in Slow Motion’ by Count Five!