Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Saturday’s Financial Times and China Daily both featured photos of a Friday press conference given by Raymond and Thomas Kwok, the Sun Hung Kai Property bosses arrested by the Independent Commission Against Corruption. In the FT, they are the most depressingly, tragically grief-stricken creatures on Earth, looking so morose – almost suicidal – that I had to push my bowl of Foreign Correspondents Club congee away to protect it from the floods of tears streaming down my face. In China Daily, on the other hand, they appear gloriously overjoyed, every bit as deliriously happy as they would be if the government gave them sole rights to develop the whole of Lantau into luxury residential sprawl for Mainlanders.

Some experts quoted in the media say that the court case and appeals could drag on for years. The Standard reports that the brothers could be budgeting HK$100 million for legal fees, and have already retained one Lawrence Lok for three years at HK$30 million. HK$30 million per year, that is. (Apparently, “…renowned barristers can charge between HK$10,000 and HK$50,000 an hour just to study documents.” Sounds like my kind of job – though some barristers I’ve met would drool over 50 grand a month.)

Obviously Barrister Lok’s fee is chicken-feed to the Kwoks, but even so, to my nasty, sordid little mind, such sums and timescales suggest that the pair are indeed conniving, cheating rascals, and know it. As Article 87 of the Basic Law makes clear, it’s the prosecution’s job to prove the accused guilty, and truly innocent parties surely shouldn’t need to spend such astronomical resources in their defence. Even if they do have unnervingly shifty-looking eyes and come from a dysfunctional family.

If the brothers do end up in prison, they might be interested to note that the cells really are the 60-90 square feet that are advertised – none of the supposed floor area is in fact in marble foyers or swimming pools. Other inmates will no doubt be intrigued to find out what Thomas, after his trip to the barber, has been hiding all these years under his repellently styled long hair. The rumour is that he is cursed with some sort of hideous deformity to one of his ears. He is the born-again Christian, and will no doubt use time behind bars as an opportunity to contemplate and of course spread the Gospel among his fellow convicts. Raymond, I am reliably informed, is the one with such an explosive, high-decibel, profanity-laden temper that he has to take anger-management courses. Such people tend to have a hard time adjusting to life incarcerated among violent psychopaths, triad hitmen and disciplinarian correctional staff.

Estranged third brother Walter has not been charged as yet. Kidnappers once held him in a box for a week, while his loving family (so the story goes) prudently haggled over the ransom. Relations with his kin were never quite the same, and they ejected him from the company over an extra-marital but intra-company affair. Although understandably affected by such traumas, he is the normal one and would make by far the most preferable cell-mate. For a while, at least; suspicious gossips wonder whether it is he who informed on his brothers (who wouldn’t?), and we all know what happens to ‘rats’ and ‘snitches’ in the penitentiary.

Will the matriarch visit them?

But we are running ahead of ourselves: there are many years, many millions in fees and many documents to study at HK$50,000 an hour to go.

Shorter term: today is the day Chief Executive CY Leung appears in the Legislative Council. Which lawmaker will ask the most impertinent, the most trivial, and the least original questions? The competition will be stiff, and I may be able to help.

My domestic helper pointed to a picture of CY in the newspaper the other day and said, finger trembling with rage, “He is a terminaTORRRR!” One of her friends is a maid for a family near the Leungs on the Peak, and apparently it is common knowledge among the Filipino amahs in the neighbourhood that domestic helpers in Trellis Mansion do not last long. They probably do not end up six feet under some illicit structure in the garden; they have their contracts terminated – hence the dread, lethal-sounding expression. Serial terminators are usually wives who curiously can’t get on with any maid, and so fire and hire them every few months, causing financial and visa nightmares for the ex-servants. Word of such toxic employers spreads fast. An ideal subject for an embarrassing and personal question at this afternoon’s Legco appearance, surely?

Click to hear ‘Cash on the Barrelhead’ by the Louvin Brothers!

Participants in the Government Minister Deathwatch Sweepstakes are either rejoicing or mourning today. Those that had put their money on Development Secretary CK Mak have hit the jackpot, with their winnings automatically doubled – the man not only resigning from the cabinet but being picked up by the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Those who thought Education Secretary Eddie Ng Hak-kim or Chief Executive CY Leung himself would be the first victims of what we can only describe as Everything-Gate will have to regain their losses with whoever’s next in line.

Bubbling up from the bewildering stew of scandals and quasi-scandals is Constitutional Affairs Secretary Raymond Tam who, in 1993, used a HK$500,000 government housing loan to buy a property from his parents. It is hard to see who the victim is here. In Mak’s case it seems clear that the taxpayer was being cheated. On the surface, he and a civil servant colleague were renting homes from each other with government housing allowances. But in reality it seems they essentially owned each other’s apartments, thus in practice paying rent to themselves, which is a no-no. (Did he bribe himself, too?) Whoever is dredging all this stuff up – and you don’t have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to realize this isn’t all happening by accident – needs to dig deeper on Tam.

(The Standard also reports that the ICAC might finally charge the brothers Kwok and former Chief Secretary Rafael Hui today – as if clearing a backlog of high-profile cases to make room for the next batch.)

If CY Leung were as cunning and devious as we are led to believe, he would go on the offensive. The muckraking-ambush, we could postulate, originates at the level of CY-hating tycoons, or even the Beijing officials who backed Henry Tang, making full use of bureaucrats with grudges and our famously freewheeling press. Fighting back directly isn’t an option. Ideally, he would make some big populist announcements, but the longer he holds back on this, the bigger they will have to get to avoid looking contrived and defensive and thus backfiring. It’s getting to the stage where he’s leaving it too late.

A PR guru would accuse CY of reacting to events rather than controlling them. But the truth is that he isn’t even reacting. He shows no sign of panic, or even awareness that his administration looks like it’s collapsing around him. He refuses to comment because it’s ‘not appropriate’ and merrily carries on planning his next town hall meeting. It’s almost as if he is numbed by the successive shocks, as an amateur in these dark arts would be. Which suggests he is naïve: the wolf is in fact a lamb, and a slightly simple one at that. Has Jerzy Kosinsky’s Chance the Gardener turned up in Government House?

What is more likely, and certainly more in keeping with his reputed character, is that he is dismissing his tormentors as trivial compared with the important tasks ahead. Substance not style. But cabinet ministers are not ornaments. A CE does actually need some, and at the rate things are going he will run into supply problems. The pool of talent is small enough to start with; Henry’s old pals aren’t interested, Beijing has its loyalty test, and the local pro-Beijing crowd have their own reservations about many individuals.

Now, on top of all that, top officials must come completely unblemished. (Imagine what would be happening if CY’s officials had not all been through unprecedented two-hour police interviews to vet candidates for sex/drugs/money problems. The word is that not everyone passed.) One trellis, and you’re dead. No 20- or 25-year-old property deals with long-forgotten creative details allowed. Absolutely no infractions of our newfound, unattainable and almost otherworldly code of ethics can be permitted. Hardly anyone can seriously be sure of meeting this threshold of total lifelong innocence, and no-one in their right mind will volunteer to find out in full public view.

Maybe Beijing will move in and stamp out the campaign against the new administration (which it had to do on a smaller scale for CH Tung all those years ago). Another is that CY will just tough it out and win over some grudging public opinion when he starts to direct more resources to the elderly and other quarters. Several letters in the South China Morning Post in recent days have pleaded that CY deserves a chance to do his job. Some people are determined that he won’t get it.

Some light reading for the now-declared-open weekend: a learned paper on Hong Kong’s contribution to cyberpunk sci-fi cinema.

Click to hear ‘A Public Execution’ by Mouse & the Traps!

Following the shocking revelation a few days ago that 99.98 percent of Hong Kong Chinese preferred to marry Westerners, we now learn that no fewer than two out of three schoolchildren are depressed because of exam pressure.

As well as lies, damned lies and statistics, there are also statistics as summarized by the Standard. The ‘two thirds’ is actually 57.3 percent – closer to half (out of a sample of 1,260 6 to 16-year-olds). Further down the article, the percentage is whittled down to 22 and ultimately it transpires that 3.5 percent are seriously at risk of depression, leaving us with a textbook example of a non-story. (Then again, ‘97.5 percent of HK schoolkids not depressed’ is a story.)

One statistic I would like to have is the percentage of school-age children who have been badgered by do-gooders conducting research for busybody non-government organizations freaking out about some threat or other to the well-being of Hong Kong’s youth. Studies show that, as well as suffering dire mental health due to exam stress, hefty percentages of the Big Lychee’s kids are stricken by gambling, smoking, drinking, hanging around Internet cafes with bad elements, compensated dating, computer games and Facebook, with a smaller proportion of nostalgic traditionalists who are still being turned into crazed drug fiends by good old-fashioned violent comic books.

Kids are obviously hardened to church and other groups coming around and surveying them for vices, morals, psychoses and other potential opportunities to panic. The children, welcoming a few minutes’ break from their books, regale the inquisitive social workers with lurid tales of substance abuse and rampant sexual promiscuity, and everyone is happy – not least newspapers in search of horrifying stories.

The reality, readily observable on the street before and after school every day, is that most kids are pretty normal and apparently happy in spite of everything. This is just as well, because the next time-wasting idiocy adults have decided to hurl at the poor mites is on the way: national education.

Our pro-democracy politicians have spent the last three weeks dredging up, elaborating and bleating themselves senseless about supposed high crimes and misdemeanours committed by almost every member of the new administration. They are exhausted, and so we can be sure that when a genuine scandal surfaces, they will be too distracted to do anything about it.

This scandal is a double-edged one, however. It concerns The China Model, the communist propaganda textbook that, Reuters-subscribing news media around the world are reporting, Hong Kong will use to warp and twist its innocent children’s minds. The book states that the American political system is a screwed-up mess, and so obviously isn’t completely inaccurate rubbish. But of course it lauds the one-party dictatorship as a blessing, reportedly using phraseology intended to make young readers’ hearts swell with pride. Since most kids know BS when they see it, and since their parents study their textbooks just as hard as they do, the content will backfire. There is, we are told, no acknowledgement that the system has delivered tainted milk, high-speed rail crashes, Bo Xilai, corruption, nepotism and injustice along with its policymaking decisiveness and economic growth. The book undermines its own message.

So the scandal is not the silly text, which is intended to ‘balance all the negative stories’ and probably also to appease officials here and to the north. The problem is in the funding of it. For some five years now, the Education Bureau has been giving the United Front-linked National Education Services Centre and associates HK$12-13 million a year to produce this stuff. Needless to say, there doesn’t seem to have been a tender. The NESC and related National Education Centre are endorsed by the usual leading pro-Beijing political and labour figures.

Compared with the fortune Hong Kong squanders on textbooks, the money is a drop in the bucket. But you do have to wonder what they were doing with it. Not stashing it in their pockets, obviously; but renting spacious offices from old friends perhaps, or conducting lengthy study tours of provinces with famous cuisines?

The United Front embraces a sprawling parallel civil society. In education, you get groups like the zippy-sounding ‘Love Our Country and Contribute to Hong Kong’ Civic Education Association and the Association of Hong Kong Flag-guards (which teaches kids to salute – hey, at least it’s not the Scientologists). Perhaps this is where our money is trickling down to.

There is a precedent for the Education Bureau to embarrass Hong Kong. A few years back, someone had the bright idea to use the Society of Truth and Light, which sees gays as sinful and in need of curing, to train teachers in human rights and, as you would expect, nondiscrimination.

So, total damage done: HK$13 million a year of our tax money down the drain; the Big Lychee made to look stupid in the international press (plus whatever people must be thinking on the Mainland); the integrity of the ‘China Model’ and one-party rule left in even greater tatters than before in most Hongkongers’ minds. On balance, it probably all evens out.

Click to hear ‘A True Story of a Story of True Love’ by the Books!

A China Daily columnist denounces a Wall Street Journal article describing the installation of new Chief Executive CY Leung as ‘the real handover’ (presumably this or an op-ed piece very like it). The ‘real handover’ theorem/cliché holds that the first 15 years of Chinese sovereignty post-1997 were a kid-gloves exercise, and CY the Wolf is now here to impose the genuine thing. The meme is not new. The Dow Jones-run Far Eastern Economic Review might have created it back in 2002 over Article 23 (and we all remember how real that turned out to be). So this, now, in 2012, is the real real handover – really.

While eye-catching in a headline, the phrase suggests that the messy, last-minute insertion of CY Leung where Beijing’s longstanding plans called for limp-wristed Henry Tang was in some way planned all along – or that Communist hawks have been able to pounce on it as an opportunity to bring rebellious, spoilt Hong Kong to heel.

If this is a clash of rhetoric, the WSJ wins on points. China Daily is owned and subsidized by a government that proclaims devotion to the people but is implementing a highly corrupt and possibly moribund system of corporatist capitalism. The WSJ doesn’t need taxpayers’ subsidies but is a commercial product with customers who willingly pay for and read it. They are both biased/selective/self-censored, but while China Daily can state that black is white with impunity (and indeed sometimes has to), the WSJ must at least submit to logic and reason in its arguments.

The two columns bear this out. The WSJ admits that CY’s role in Hong Kong is complex but fears his loyalty to Beijing could threaten the city, citing a variety of circumstantial evidence with a dash of Mandarin speechmaking and a military parade for zest. China Daily lapses into that almost infantile whining that patriotic apologists employ in response to questioning and doubts. It rebuts the WSJ’s points too insistently for its own good, undermines its case by ignoring valid points and seals its fate with such ‘black-is-white’ arguments as Hongkongers’ adoration of the PLA. It would be far more credible to call the WSJ out for accusing CY of ‘class warfare’ (advocating social measures that have widespread popular approval). But that would mean admitting that Beijing’s last appointee, Donald Tsang, screwed up horrendously by – in effect – deliberately widening the wealth gap.

So there we have it: a classic bit of propagandistic/ideologically driven/values-based West-vs-China diatribe, with shards of red-hot polemic flying all over the place, mostly missing any useful targets. But how about adding an extra participant to the debate?

Behold: a Trotskyite analysis of the July 1 march. If this piece in World Socialist joined the fray it would start by going straight for China Daily’s jugular by repeating the dastardly lie that over 60,000-100,000 were on the street. Then it would swat the WSJ for its dismissal of CY’s class warfare with a plain list of all that’s wrong in the Big Lychee.

But then it would confound both of the other two by laying into most of the organizations behind the march:

…the Civil Human Rights Front, comprised of the official opposition parties, such as the Democratic Party and the Civic Party, as well as the trade unions, student unions, women’s associations and churches [and] various parties of the exiled Chinese “democracy movement,” including the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, which advocates the official recognition of “independent” trade unions within China.

While the DP and CP no doubt puff with pride at being named ‘official opposition parties’, we ask where we have seen those inverted commas around apparently innocent words before, like “democracy movement” and “independent” trade unions. Why, of course, in organs like China Daily, where editors and censors grapple with things that ideologically cannot exist but nonetheless do. Thus Taiwan doesn’t have a president but a “president”, etc.

So in our three-way fight, China Daily and the WSJ are now left speechless as the Trotskyist newcomer World Socialist runs over to Emily Lau, Lee Cheuk-yan and a bunch of radical nuns and starts stomping on them for advocating one-person, one-vote. Sorry – “one-person, one-vote”.

…the common role of these groups is to contain the growing discontent in the working class by sowing illusions that protests can pressure Beijing into making concessions for limited parliamentary reforms. They advocate pro-market restructuring that would only worsen the social divide … These organisations represent no challenge to the profit system responsible for the widening social chasm between the billionaires and ordinary people.

(Trotskyites are determined that change must come through bottom-up revolution by the working class, as, supposedly, in 1789 France or 1917 Russia. Hong Kong-style urban middle-class demands to share power with landed and traditional interests – which worked in the English-speaking world, or in South Korea and Taiwan for that matter – spoil everything.)

Not content with leaving China Daily looking just a few inches away from the WSJ on basic economic principles, our Trotskyist exposes the American capitalist organ’s true timidity towards Beijing by calling the regime up there something Dow Jones or Rupert Murdoch never would: a ‘Stalinist police-state’. Ouch.

Calm and objective analysis hasn’t featured much in this battle from the very start. And at this stage the judges realize it can only come down to originality and flair, and entertainment value. And World Socialist no doubt flings its gold medal aside as bourgeois decadence.

To no-one’s great surprise, Hong Kong’s new government gives up trying to push its bureaucratic restructuring through the Legislative Council. The spin is that a few filibustering radicals should not be allowed to prevent innocent Hong Kong people from enjoying the life-enhancing measures being held up by the delay. It is a predictable enough angle, but it ignores the role played by lack of support among supposedly pro-establishment lawmakers.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. The phrase ‘executive-led government’ in Hong Kong’s Basic Law is a euphemism for government securely led by trustworthy folk acceptable to and appointed by Beijing. Just as the Election Committee that pretends to choose the Chief Executive is rigged, so – in theory – is the Legislative Council. The composition of Functional Constituencies is carefully designed to guarantee a loyalist bloc in the legislature that has the power to veto undesirable measures and the ability to join with directly elected pro-Beijing members to override pro-democrat opposition to desirable ones.

In practice, it doesn’t always work. This is partly because some FC members are billionaires who balk at getting out of bed at night to help get budgets through. But increasingly it is because some of the supposed loyalists are sullenly unreliable. The Liberal Party in particular, partly in a huff about CY Leung rather than Henry Tang becoming CE and partly out of self-preservation ahead of September’s legislative elections, are acting as a semi-opposition. (They did the same in 2003 by withdrawing support for Tung Chee-hwa’s Article 23 law.)

This means that they – in theory, again – are blocking the Chinese Communist Party’s ultimate and absolute control over the Big Lychee. Of course, if Legco tried to pass measures to pass control of Hong Kong to American and Taiwanese splittists, the Liberals would fall into line without question, but it is a supremely important principle. To Beijing officials monitoring Hong Kong, something and/or someone will need to be put right.

Meanwhile, today’s Standard leads with a ‘shock survey’ showing that “people willing to be interviewed on the street tend to be more liberal,” so rough and ready polls carried out by political parties are unreliable. Which is something we have long known; such surveys, employing leading questions, just create cheap publicity and give interns something to do. And that’s just as well given that this most recent opinion poll reveals Hong Kong people to be miscegenation-obsessed race-traitors. The research shows that 59% of males and 70% of females would rather marry a non-Chinese (we have to presume that the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK, which did the survey, questioned only ethnic Chinese).

DAB spokeswoman Elizabeth Quat, perhaps forgetting momentarily that she is supposed to adhere to Beijing’s line on everything, breezily concludes that Hongkongers are more liberal and (you almost get the impression) are perfectly right to think Western culture is superior. A Chinese U academic on the other hand, stuck in his ivory tower and deluded by crackpot sociological theory, insists that Hongkongers are just money-grubbing vermin gold-diggers.

Either way, who would have thought it? For Americans who believe the Book of Genesis is science and Barack Obama is a Muslim; to Canadians whose response to external stimuli is to stare into space with blank, uncomprehending eyes; and to the British, grunting monosyllables and stuffing deep-fried pizza into their faces… there is hope.

Click to hear the Byrds’ ‘I Knew I’d Want You’!

Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung’s second town-hall meeting ends in the same sort of chaos as the first one. Governor Chris Patten did one or two public Q&A sessions like this to great acclaim, but he was a pro and perhaps they were more innocent times. Given the lack of substance in these forums, and the scuffling outside by protestors demanding his resignation, Leung must be wondering whether it is worth bothering with such laborious PR-driven gestures. Or just do them on air. (Or use focus groups and surveys, if you really want to research district-level problems.)

The impression from the media – most of which have a bias of some sort against the new administration – is that CY is chased out of the neighbourhood by a local mob each time he goes through one of these performances. The reality is that it is the same familiar group of radicals, accompanied by equally rabid camera crews. Small, informal (and statistically meaningless) polls around the office water-cooler suggest that a silent majority of the public wish the new regime well. But that was the case with Tung Chee-hwa and Donald Tsang. The difference is that while its predecessors took months if not years to go into terminal decline, this government is starting to look like it’s floundering after just days in office.

While they could be unveiling exciting, controversial and popular initiatives, officials are reacting to events. CY apologizes endlessly for his wretched trellis, top Executive Council member WK Lam agonizes over far-fetched allegations of a conflict of interest, and half a dozen more squirm over such outrages as an illicit washing line sticking out of an apartment. Among the trivia are signs of some genuine potential problems.

First, there are Director of Audit David Sun Tak-kei and new Independent Commission Against Corruption boss Simon Peh Yun-lu. The former was a close supporter of CY’s campaign, while the latter met with CY and other appointees shortly before the new government was formed. Under normal circumstances, these might not matter too much, but in these times, in the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, “It’s always something – if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.” Right now, if it’s not integrity (failure to publicly confess one’s garden ornamentation) it’s credibility (already knowing someone).

Pessimists already have grounds to oppose the pair. Sun isn’t a civil servant (if he was, presumably they’d complain about that) and has some sort of past issue too tedious to imagine concerning Ernst and Whitney. Peh was Director of Immigration, and therefore had to enforce Beijing’s edicts to turn away Falun Gong and other counterrevolutionary elements at the airport.

The real concern is that the audit and anti-corruption functions are highly sensitive and must be seen to be independent and impartial. In theory, the ICAC may have to drag CY himself into the dungeons for interrogation over his plant-frame. More worryingly, both agencies may have to go after parties that hate CY. If they do it, there will be claims that it is personal; if they don’t, people who might deserve attention won’t get it.

Second, there’s new Development Secretary Mak Chai-kwong’s civil service housing scam back in the 1980s. If your employer was dumb enough to pay your rent if you lived in a property legally owned by someone else, you’d do this too. And if it had been a private-sector employer, no-one would care. But he worked for the government, and we the taxpayers were paying the rent he put in his own pocket, so it stinks. The law apparently let him cheat taxpayers. And he did. His only hope is that amid all the mayhem as the lynch-all-trellis-owners brigade rampages around the place, people will forget it or not mull over it too much. Otherwise, Mak’s quite possibly a goner.

Third, we have the new administration backtracking on a pledge to tighten up the sale of local homes to Mainlanders. In the grand scheme of things, this probably won’t make much difference to the overall plan to boost affordable housing; that will depend on earmarking land for ‘subsidized’ homes (ie ones without inflated government revenues and developers’ profit margins built into the price). But to the extent that Mainlanders will continue to buy luxury real estate here, a clampdown would hurt the developers. Maybe President Hu had a word with CY last weekend about creating harmony with tycoons; that big North Point seafront site won’t be auctioned with awkward conditions attached.

These are, or are not, big deals – according to taste. But added together, in the absence of some quick and inspirational policy announcements, they have a flavour of 1999-era Tung or second-term Donald. After one week in power.

During my annual inspection tour of a local Park N Shop, I make an impulse purchase of toothpaste (three for the price of two – opportunistic, small-scale wealth preservation). But which sort? One dentifrice has a special whitening ingredient, another has a special cleaning additive instead, and a third focuses on tartar control.

For a few seconds I debate with myself about which one to get: choose one and you have to forego the benefits of the alternatives. Why, I found myself asking, don’t these idiots combine all the space-age biochemistry wonders in one tube? Or would these substances react with each other and blow up? Why, at any rate, don’t they package three different variants in one three-for-two package, so you can rotate pastes each day?

Then I come to my senses and just grab the sort that looks like the one I’m currently using. (Wrongly, as it happens. If the special ingredients work, my teeth will be more whitened than before, but they will simultaneously be less cleaned. I will monitor the situation closely.) For a brief moment there, I was succumbing to the spell of the evil out-of-control brand managers; it can happen to anyone. Thank heavens for a supermarket duopoly that allows Park N Shop to offer consumers a lousy range of goods: I could have been stuck there for 90 minutes pondering 35 different varieties produced by just one manufacturer.

If some sociologists and psychologists are right, Li Ka-shing’s monopolistic and exploitative retail practices do not simply save shoppers time. Having to decide among bewildering arrays of options in day-to-day life increases anxiety; we can thank Hutchison and Jardines (owners of the Wellcome chain) for playing their part in soothing us all. But it goes even further. By depriving us of the right to select from a plentiful range of goods, the tycoons may actually be contributing to community cohesion and, strange as it may seem, social justice. Because, if the egghead academics are correct, “the more choices we have, the less empathetic we become, and the less supportive of public policies aimed at benefitting society.”

At least that’s the case with Westerners. They like to believe that society and life are meritocratic: people who are successful have earned it. ‘Earning it’ means making the right decisions throughout life. It follows that the poor deserve to be at the bottom of the pile because they made the wrong choices. So there’s a huge amount riding on every decision you make, and even having to choose among different consumer brands adds to the pressure; pick wrongly, and end up being a loser. Little wonder that Americans suffer the most anxiety in the world.

It might not apply elsewhere. The Atlantic article doesn’t dwell on this but says that Asians’ “sense of self and self-worth are not tied up so much with notions of individual autonomy and choice.” (Until, the article points out, they migrate to the US, after which they fall into line and start getting panic attacks. Maybe Westerners who move to Asia get mellow like the locals. That said, the Big Lychee is perhaps semi-Western in this respect: few humans freak out about making the right choices in schooling, brands, career and investments than second-generation Hong Kong Chinese. And what about Singapore’s kiasu syndrome?)

The implication of all this is that Asians do not believe that life is meritocratic. A quick look at either the US or Hong Kong confirms that if this is so, they are right. Add sexual selection and genetics to the mix (privileged and educated families are increasingly marrying among themselves, which reduces social mobility and entrenches the wealth gap) and we’re heading for Morlocks and Eloi.

If cultures that think they are meritocratic and drive themselves nuts with constant decision-making are creating more social injustice, could the reverse be true? Could communities that don’t think meritocracy is real and keep calm with a choice of only three types of toothpaste be on a trend towards greater fairness and equality? A question lawmakers might care to ask new Chief Executive CY Leung on Monday, but probably won’t.

I declare this weekend open and tartar-free.

Frank Ching writes that Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung’s Executive Council “…is the first since 1997 with no representatives of big business interests. Leung has announced that the council will no longer break for the summer, but only recess for two weeks. He is a workaholic and expects members of his team to be the same.”

A Wen Wei Po editorial approvingly adds that ExCo meeting hours will be longer and states that the body was ‘passive’ in the last few years and “…members were informed only after principal officials finished drafting the bills and policies [so] non-official ExCo members were not able to fulfill their roles [and] put forward amendments and suggestions [and so] a number of policies introduced were not quite people-oriented…” (The following column, reproduced here at the bottom for fun, features an exquisite Communist rant about 7-1 marchers’ use of the British colonial flag and opposition to ‘national education’.)

One way of putting it: “…not quite people-oriented…”  Under Donald Tsang, non-official membership of ExCo was a symbolic pat on the head. Academics, NGOs and think-tanks all reported a near-contemptuous rejection of any idea or proposal from outside his smug little ‘elite’ circle of zombie-bureaucrats. It is hard to believe that ExCo members’ views, if and when they had any, were of any greater interest to him. We do know that agendas and papers were sent out not long before meetings, and that the gatherings didn’t take too great a chunk out of non-officials’ Tuesday mornings. CY is threatening to extend them into day-long affairs.

Frank Ching’s comment raises the question of how you define ‘big business interests’. Bank of East Asia’s David Li – not known for enjoying lengthy meetings in which he is not the centre of attention – is undoubtedly a tycoon and was in Sir Bow-Tie’s ExCo until US regulators accused him of insider trading. If we go by size of real-estate portfolio, Li’s co-member then-stock exchange boss Charles Lee was as well, with “20 properties … including a 200-room hotel in Vancouver…” (Fans of such stats should watch this space for an update on how many apartments and parking spaces Arthur Li owns. Has he overtaken his brother’s last known tally of 82?)

Donald’s ExCo certainly had business people on it, but few were from the major league of tycoons (who nonetheless had their own malevolent influence on the leadership). CY’s business-linked non-officials are on average perhaps a bit younger and with a bit more Beijing exposure, but there’s not much in it. The key is that they are willing to be identified with CY’s housing and welfare policies, and they might have to put some time in.

CY apparently wants to assign non-officials to particular policy areas. CH Tung did this before, but nothing much ever came of it. Are they supposed to provide specific policymaking input? Or are they supposed to be wheeled out to support ‘their’ bureau’s plans, like the undersecretaries and political assistants? Like CY’s planned restructuring of bureaus, with secretaries and undersecretaries handling separate sub-portfolios, this might at least be of passing interest to students of organizational psychology.

Literally the day after assuming office in the late 1990s, Tony Blair’s new Labour administration in the UK gave the Bank of England independent control over monetary policy. Something similarly sweeping would be a good idea for CY’s team now. One example would be to declare that, starting from next week, the government will adopt the 2006 World Health Organization air quality objectives in favour of the less stringent 1987 standards currently used. Yesterday’s performance by new Environment Secretary Wong Kam-sing in the Legislative Council was, instead, a big flop. Lawmakers complain that all he did was stick to the waffle provided by his civil servants – the people who have resisted meaningful action on this issue ever since Sarah Liao’s time in the Tung era.

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CY Leung becomes Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. A significantly above-average-size crowd turns out for the annual July 1 march, with CY (and the not-unrelated Beijing) being the most prominent of protestors’ many and varied targets and demands. CY, on a folksy, meet-the-people trip to Tuen Mun, is ambushed by young activists denouncing the visit as a sham. The world’s media, doing their annual post-1997 story, report an alarming gap between rich and poor, expectations of reduced press freedom and a new leadership’s integrity in tatters – inexplicably but irreparably – over the trellis in his garden. Welcome to political crisis.

The careful cultivation of his public image would strike CY as a trivial distraction, so by default throughout the two decades or so he has been in the public eye he has come across as enigmatic and sinister. Now he is at the top, anything he does – from having a roof over his car port to speaking Mandarin in the presence of China’s president – is interpreted as indicating that he poses a threat towards his home town. He has few friends, hardly any natural allies in the legislature or bureaucracy, and a high proportion of enemies among Hong Kong’s traditional movers and shakers. Former Chief Secretary Anson Chan can’t resist offering catty but vacuous advice; CY was a key advisor to our first CE Tung Chee-hwa, who basically kicked Dame Conscience out for disloyalty.

By going around groveling and humbly apologizing for such sins as trellis-ownership, CY is feeding the frenzy. Ideally he would quickly sweep this ‘crisis’ aside with some big and exciting announcements. Legalization of residential units in old industrial and commercial buildings; zoning, land premium, building and other nonsense rules to be turned upside down in order to maximize supply of cheap homes. A speedy 30% increase in health care spending funded by income from the reserves to eradicate backlogs and waiting lists, using overseas staff or services as required. Abolition of the New Territories ‘small house’ scheme with immediate effect. It would be CY and the people versus the tycoons, democrats and other vested interests.

The chances of this happening are of course next to zero. Hong Kong needs serious reform, but it must have – on President Hu’s own orders on Sunday – harmony and stability and all that.

It would be surprising if a new CE’s choice of non-official Executive Council members were to inspire hopes of decisive and radical action, and sure enough this one doesn’t. Several members are holdovers from the last Council, and the best we can say is that it could be worse. Several new members stand out.

One, Lam Woon-kwong, is also boss of the Equal Opportunities Commission (a predecessor, Anna Wu, is also on board, giving the Council an unexpected dash of human rights-type expertise). Under other circumstances, many thinking people would welcome Lam’s presence as providing our top policymaking body with the input of someone genuinely interested in subjects like ethnic minorities’ and gay rights. But so perverse is the mood that these people are instead frothing at the mouth about Lam having a conflict of interest (the theory presumably being that he will weaken the EOC’s oversight of the public sector).

Another new member of ExCo is a familiar face: academic and surgeon Arthur Li. As Education Secretary under Tung, he was by Hong Kong standards refreshingly outspoken and actually had an original policy idea in the form of kindergarten vouchers, which went on to become one of that administration’s few successes.

Of the other newcomers, one of the less well-known but more interesting is Franklin Lam. He doesn’t sound exactly fascinating, but his little think-tank, HKGolden 50, has come up with dangerously freakish thoughts (from page 89) proposing solutions to such problems as…

Tuesday being ExCo day, they should all be meeting as we speak. ‘Crisis’ management is no doubt on the agenda.

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