Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The South China Morning Post celebrates the 15th anniversary of the handover with a magazine supplement cover that surely qualifies for Most Grotesque and Inept Graphic Design Concept of the Year Award: the official stylized bauhinia flower growing out of ‘roots’ in the shape of a British flag. It’s so bad, it’s hard not to grin.

Opening the ultra-glossy publication, I expect to find pages of advertisements for ugly watches with funny European brand names. But the ads are almost all from the big property developers, offering congratulations (to whom?) on the occasion. (One is from UGL Services/DTZ, which sounds like it’s related to new Chief Executive CY Leung; another is from the Kerry group, run by the SCMP’s owners, the Kuok family.) The features cover an almost clichéd selection of subjects, from worsening quality of life, to the happy smiling People’s Liberation Army, to forecasts of the years ahead written by… fung shui ‘masters’.

This exciting souvenir is on-line, minus the print-edition’s cover artwork.

The alternative is to read about CY’s cabinet, announced better late than never yesterday. The Standard hilariously if unwittingly sums it all up by not even bothering to include a full list of the incoming administration’s top officials. You can tease the details from this morass of a press release, or refer to China Daily. The line-up has been pretty much common knowledge for several weeks.

The first thing we should note is that this is to some extent an interim arrangement. When the new CE gets his restructuring through the Legislative Council, some old faces will be replaced by new ones; for example, Home Affairs Secretary Tsang Tak-sing will presumably be vanished away as a glamorous new Culture Bureau boss comes sashaying in. Still, there is something mind-numbing about the familiarity of the faces and the preponderance of bureaucrats, many of them mature in years and a surprising number who are balding (perhaps to compensate for the lack of that other persecuted group, women). Many officials are simply staying in place, while some are returning to government after having left years ago and being partially forgotten. What new faces there are do not exactly get the heart racing.

The basic problem is that CY cannot choose from a wide sample of Hong Kong’s 7-million population.

Being a bit of a loner, he doesn’t personally know many people. Being loathed by the property tycoons and much of the Donald Tsang-era establishment, he is something of a pariah in many business and so-called ‘elite’ circles. Then there is the nature of the job; even if you like CY, why would you want to subject yourself to the trials by media, the tormenting by legislators and the scheming and foot-dragging by civil servants?

A lot of potentially suitable people can’t be considered. No whites or brown folk need apply. No-one with a foreign passport. No-one who can’t pass a probably-paranoid Beijing loyalty test – to weed out any US-backed Taiwan splittist who might overthrow the Communist Party from the Mid-Levels one night. No-one, or at least hardly anyone, who has hung out with the pan-democrats in the past, because it will upset the local patriots (who are mainly too unpolished and unworldly to be considered themselves). No-one with illegal structures or bastard offspring or other skeletons stashed away somewhere.

It’s amazing he could scrape this lot together…

If any appointment is guaranteed to make 7 million pairs of eyes roll in exasperation, it is that of John Tsang, who remains in the post of Financial Secretary. However, he could prove interesting – without meaning to, of course. As one of know-it-all Donald’s archetypal smug and self-satisfied sidekicks, J Tsang hardly produced those dreadful budgets every year all by himself. The mindless accumulation and hoarding of wealth and the idiotic annual one-off distributions of candy to the masses have Donald’s unimaginative stamp all over them. That’s not to say there’s a bold and original fiscal genius in John Tsang bursting to get out, but a new CE could easily arm-twist him in different directions.

With President Hu Jintao clogging up the traffic and plunging the police into blind panic, radical protestors demanding the right to screech at Hu in person and up-close, and forecasts of rain, I declare this three-day, Bye-Bye Donald Weekend open and best spent quietly at home.

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Hong Kong Chief Executive-elect CY Leung’s trellis scandal has been upgraded to a ‘glass-covered frame’ outrage (with termites). Spy satellite photos revealing the extent of the barbarity appear in the South China Morning Post. Note how the colour of the water in the swimming pool shifts over time – without Buildings Department approval, you can be sure.

While anti-CY/pro-tycoon media are keeping the pot boiling (“there was no trellis…”), it is the pro-democracy legislators who are really stirring things up, with Audrey Eu and Lee Wing-tat both quoted as accusing CY of adding lie upon lie over the dreaded glass-covered frame. Audrey is additionally infuriated by the fact that some individuals are not joining in the hysteria.

At the same time, the Legislative Council expresses ‘dismay’, no less, at the next CE’s ‘lack of attention’ 10 years ago when he failed to disclose a vague conflict of interest in a design competition for the West Kowloon Cultural District Hub Zone Complex.

The two alleged atrocities are similar. Both focus on whether CY Leung should have mentioned something of little consequence and of which he may barely have been aware. No-one gained anything. No-one lost anything. There are no victims. There is no evidence of malicious intent, and no evidence that CY even had a motive to do harm or wrong, apart from aiding and abetting creeping plants in his garden.

For a badly needed reminder of what is happening here, we turn to Southern District, where it so happens that Dutch-born civic activist Paul Zimmerman’s application for Chinese citizenship will soon be approved. He will therefore be eligible to run in the Legislative Council election later this year. Actually, it’s in September – ten weeks, three days away.

For various psephological as well as political reasons, that election is going to be even more bitterly contested than usual. We can’t elect the government, but we can elect an opposition. The pan-democrats’ main rivals – apart from each other – are the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK. The DAB are a front for the Chinese Communist Party and will support whoever Beijing tells them to. That means they will be pro-CY Leung. So in order to differentiate themselves and get elected, the pan-dems see no choice but to be vitriolically, mouth-frothingly, bed-wettingly anti-CY, regardless of who he really is (and especially if he introduces popular policies – because then the pro-democrats are screwed). The way they see it, they must smear him or die.

Strange system.

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The cataclysmic ‘Trellisgate’ scandal outrage mayhem shock horror massacre of 2012 continues. Sources vary, but it seems the Democratic Party has been threatening to apply for a judicial review or submit an election petition (normally used after dirty New Territories village polls) to – in effect – force Beijing to fire CY Leung days after he takes office as Chief Executive. DP boss Albert Ho declared that they will decide whether to go ahead depending on the response to a detailed questionnaire CY must complete and return to them by a set date.

There is some word that they are having second thoughts about some or all of this. The action has a whiff of ‘arresting Tony Blair’ about it – a sort of outlandish self-importance that Albert Ho is particularly ill-suited for. Plus the time period for such challenges to election results expired a good couple of months back.

We need a bit of light relief, and amazingly we find it in Communist-funded Ta Kung Pao, via China Daily, which gleefully lists many pro-democrats with illegal structures. The Confederation of Trade Unions has a suitably proletarian ‘tin-sheeted structure’ on its roof (no bourgeois trellises here). At the other end of the social scale, the Civic Party’s Ronny Tong has an unauthorized glass thing and an illicit swimming pool, as you do when you’re a millionaire lawyer.

The one I especially like is that of Social Welfare functional constituency representative Peter Cheung Kwok-che. He lives in the once-shabby, now gentrifying and increasingly bohemian district of Sheung Wan. Nearly half of his apartment in Po Yan Street was constructed illegally, the article says, yet he has refused to demolish it as the “the building was ‘too old’ for any reconstruction work.” I will make a note of that excuse.

Dwellers of dull, characterless, modern estate-type housing might wonder how you can illegally (or otherwise) double the size of an apartment in an urban area. A trellis, a place to store golf clubs (Education Secretary Michael Suen’s), a small verandah windowed-up and absorbed into a room (CE Donald Tsang’s) are one thing. But nearly 50% of the living space? In my neighbourhood not far from Sheung Wan, and probably quite a few other older areas, it’s perfectly possible. It helps to be one floor up from street level.

The photo from Google Maps below shows Cheung’s street, on the corner of sunny Hollywood Road (it’s chopped up a bit to compensate for the fish-eye camera lens). I have no idea whether this is Cheung’s place or whether it even shows an illegal structure. The fact that it overlooks the sidewalk suggests it is not unauthorized, as such additions are treated as a potential danger to passers-by and the authorities actually Did Something about them some years ago (though the structures sometimes reappeared in some form after the Housing Department enforcers goose-stepped out of the district).

In theory, what could have happened here is that the yellow box was originally a large open terrace. For some reason, many of the older tong lau-type buildings in the area were designed this way, with a sort of proto-podium; maybe the planning code allowed for higher density street-level retail space than upper-floor residential. The terrace would have had a short wall around it and you could have a barbecue or dry your washing out there.

Or you could wall it in and add a roof. A small flat becomes a much bigger one. Hey presto – ‘nearly half’ your apartment is illegal. Goodbye, 450 sq ft, hello 800. The next possible step would be to knock the previous interior wall in, or you could keep your old verandah as a separate room or rooms. This would all have happened back in the 1960s and 70s. In my neighbourhood, units like this were common, and there are still quite a few not overlooking public areas. In a city where the government sees the population as the enemy, to be deprived of living space wherever possible, people would be crazy not to do it.

Oh yes, the authorities know all about the contraband living space. They give owners a stern warning: you have three months to remove the UBW. Then, as lawmaker Peter Cheung’s gutsy-sounding riposte suggests, they do nothing. They put a note in the records so any future purchaser will know the property comes with an illegal add-on. The owner cries all the way to his sprawling kitchen for a beer.

The economics for a buyer are of course quite appealing. You pay the full market rate for the 450 sq ft, but only a modest premium for the ex-terrace. The extra money you would have spent on an 800 sq ft place goes into savings, compounded over the years and decades. If the slum district turns into a trendy neighbourhood, the value of the legitimate 450 sq ft multiplies as well. Peter Cheung could be quite a well-off social worker.

China’s President Hu Jintao visits Hong Kong this weekend to swear in trellis-wolf-man CY Leung as new Chief Executive and celebrate the 15th anniversary of the city’s return to the motherland. He comes in the midst of an opportunistic and somewhat unhinged backlash against the new leader. Pan-democrats determined to oppose anything and everything on principal demand CY’s head for having a clutch of decidedly lame unauthorized building works on his property. CY himself criticized rival Henry Tang for having an illegal basement; therefore, the logic goes, he is guilty of some sort of crime. If he knew his house/garden additions were illicit – which is impossible to believe – the offense would be hypocrisy by a politician whilst campaigning.

Meanwhile, legislative business is coming to a halt as lawmakers fail to turn up to the chamber. As well as wandering off just as a quorum is needed, legislators have been resorting to filibustering. As a result of such obstructive tactics, CY’s reorganization of government departments will probably have to be postponed until later in the year. Complaints that this is all the fault of reckless pro-democrats and radicals are misleading; pro-establishment figures are also discreetly enjoying the tormenting of CY. As a forecast on the forthcoming Leung administration asked (p.36): “Will the democrats and the commercial functional constituency legislators form an unholy alliance of sorts?”

That CLSA report has a stab at predicting the sort of policies we can expect in the next five years. Upgrading the Hong Kong fishing fleet to ocean-going status is one possibility (the agriculture and fisheries sector were among the first to nominate CY). Help for organic farming – quite a trendy activity in some patriotic/Buddhist-type circles – is another. The fact is that although he previously said some interesting things about Hongkongers’ homes being half the size of Shenzhenites’, CY toned down the radicalism and populism massively in the lead-up to the quasi-election, so we don’t know what he really plans, let alone whether legislators, bureaucrats and vested interests will let him do it. Still, CLSA rate most of the mainstream developers’ stocks as ‘sell’ or ‘under-perform’…

With less than a week to go, we still don’t officially know who CY’s ministers and other Executive Council members will be, though there are plenty of rumours. One reason is probably that someone (presumably CY himself, or maybe Beijing) is insisting on really, really, serious vetting of everyone’s background. This sort of thing is standard in the US and the UK, but a novelty here. The police Personnel Wing have been giving potential office-holders two- or three-hour (but friendly) interviews about their gambling habits, debts and finances, secret illegitimate children, past/present extra-marital escapades, embarrassing family members and much, much more. Oh – and illegal structures! 

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In America, everyone from ex-President Jimmy Carter on down admits to having lusted and thus committed adultery in their heart. In Hong Kong, where as we all know the definition of a queer is someone who prefers sex to money, the equivalent is having an illegal structure.

The list of the great and good with some sort of unauthorized addition to their property is getting ridiculous. We have Chief Executive Donald Tsang, ex-Chief Secretary Henry Tang, Chief Secretary Stephen Lam, Education Secretary Michael Suen, Environment Undersecretary Kitty Poon and Bank of East Asia boss David Li, not to mention my good self. And now, to this weighty directory of wealth, power and good looks we can add Chief Executive-elect CY Leung.

The discovery has provoked extreme wailing, gnashing of teeth and calls for the man to resign before even taking office. In Hong Kong, the presence of unauthorized building work on a home has become, as the saying goes, “an act of baseness, vileness or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellowmen, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between man and man.” Yet we all have one. (Lots of us, anyway. Mass-produced estate-type apartments are probably less suitable for such illicit renovation, but many older or stand-alone buildings have illegal structures, and many owners don’t even realize it.)

The herd of detractors seeking to skewer CY make the point that it is not the mere presence of a forbidden trellis, unlawful car port roof, proscribed metal gate, prohibited mini-basement and highly criminal garden shed, but the suspected dishonesty. As the Henry-supporting Standard asks: why didn’t he tear them down after the earlier outcries?

There is only one logical answer, and that is that he honestly had no idea they were illegal. Otherwise, not being stupid, and realizing that enemies would use anything they could against him, he would have removed them in a flash, reputation barely grazed. It would insult our intelligence as well as his to suggest that he would think, “Gosh, I really like that highly visible illegal trellis – I think I’ll just keep quiet about it and hope I get away with it.” He knows what an unauthorized basement can lead to, yet he let a police security detail use his. You don’t do that unless you are genuinely oblivious that there is a problem. Unlike Henry’s luxury subterranean palace, CY’s illicit structures are of marginal utility; his family wouldn’t miss them, and they would have been easy to remove.

If his opponents concede that he had nothing to gain by not removing these features, they can argue that he showed a lack of diligence in not checking for them. Indeed, he should have had the place checked over inch by inch with the architectural version of a Geiger counter. These are known unknowns, not unknown unknowns. But what on Earth is really going on when a guy is strung up for having a canopy on a bit of his own property?

RTHK reporter Francis Moriarty said on the radio this morning that it is all about the notion of one law for the elite few, and another for everyone else. That is a major concern in Hong Kong, where well-connected offenders seem to get light treatment, the Chief Executive accepts private jet rides and rich-kid Henry Tang blithely continued to enjoy his undocumented 2,000 square-foot cellar. But when we enter the murky world of trellis-scale illegal structures, we find that the law is applied uniformly. From rich to poor, from the New Territories to Soho, from slums to mansions, we all flout the law – often unwittingly – and we all get away with it. Except now, if you are in the public eye, you don’t, and the ‘one law’ that goes easy is the one that applies to the masses.

CY could usefully come out fighting and start a debate about the fundamental problem. Illegal structures exist because the government does not allow sufficient legal space for the population to live in. So obsessed are officials with this perverse policy of depriving the people of space that a trellis ends up being proof of evil. But sadly and predictably CY is playing along with his persecutors and offering apologies. Equally sadly and predictably, pan-democrats are essentially siding with the property tycoons and bureaucratic forces that hate CY and demanding his immediate impeachment and hanging. (Ex-Monetary Authority boss Joseph Yam and Michael Suen have both done their bit to make life more difficult for the new administration, and today it is the establishment alpha-poodle Ron Arculli’s turn.)

One possible bright side to all this is that CY will be under more pressure than ever to start delivering results soon after taking office and impress the millions who have more pressing worries than his trellis.

(The heinous item in question, for garden-less Hongkongers who are curious.)

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The body is still warm – still breathing, indeed – but the historical revisionism has already begun. China Daily reports that Chief Executive Donald Tsang believes he did a wonderful job, and adds that this is surely so, thanks of course to Beijing’s assistance in developing Hong Kong as a Renminbi blah-blah hub. Despite having to abandon his earlier arrangement with a property tycoon’s luxury apartment over the border, Sir Bow-Tie is, I am reliably informed, still determined to retire to Shenzhen, where he can expect this sort of glowing coverage whenever he wants it.

Several years ago, officials in Shenzhen drew a small box on a map of the Western part of their city and proclaimed that it would be an international financial global mega-hub zone. Hong Kong officials, in their usual pathetic desperation to give Mainland counterparts face, traipsed up there to sign meaningless agreements on cooperation and partnership. Then, more recently, Beijing essentially told the uppity Shenzhen cadres that they weren’t going to be getting any special privileges on foreign exchange or tax, so they should just forget the mega-hub zone scheme and go back to churning out fake Hello Kitty phones. And we assumed that was that.

But no. It’s back. We can assume that this has nothing to do with Donald’s imminent relocation to Shenzhen, but quite a lot to do with the arrival in Government House of CY Leung in just over a week. The Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone has been given some sort of ‘national strategic importance’ classification. Among the ridiculous ideas being spouted by grasping Mainland officials and Hong Kong hangers-on:

• Individual Mainland investors to be allowed to access Hong Kong securities markets via (of course) Qianhai (the old Tianjin ‘through train’ wall-of-money thing).
• All Hong Kong’s banks and brokerages, plus the stock exchange, to set up branches in (you guessed it) Qianhai.
• Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing to relocate its newly acquired London Metals Exchange to (yup) Qianhai.
• Tons of blather about Yuan-denominated offshore/onshore sounds-like-money-laundering RMB hub zone blah-blah stuff, all taking place in (obviously) Qianhai.

Qianhai, for the record, is a patch of concrete-covered wasteland up the road from a container port. Whether CY Leung will rush up to Beijing and beg the national leadership to exempt the area from foreign exchange controls and other tools of economic control vital to a centrally planned, one-party state is unlikely. But maybe they think it’s worth a try.

For one thing, CY will be too busy sweating the small stuff. His proposed rearrangement of government furniture failed to continue its tortuous progress through the Legislative Council yesterday. The Standard describes lawmakers who should have been there to help him but weren’t as ‘pro-establishment’. Which they are – but as we see, that doesn’t mean pro-CY. Functional constituency representatives like Timothy Fok and David Li are yesterday’s men, but supporters of the Henry Tang old guard will remain on the scene for some time. Meanwhile, the pan-democrats (with a few exceptions) are too inept to see the obvious opportunity that CY’s alternative ‘establishment’ offers them.

CY is making it known that his priorities on taking office will be housing, housing, welfare and housing. A populist doesn’t need a Culture Bureau to do that, and he should just get on with it. What will his approval ratings be on the day he goes round to some impoverished family in a subdivided slum to help them pack their bags and move out?

That’s after he’s removed his illegal structure, of course. I knew he was human.

As the Hong Kong Tree Team trundles through my neighbourhood after hearing rumours that a large woody perennial exists in the area, I declare the weekend open – with a gasp of disbelief as I find some vile boorish oaf of a cad is daring to question the saintliness of handsome and virile Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Is there no end to this heresy?

With more than 20% of the world’s population, it would not be surprising that China has over a fifth of its disaster, outrage and tragedy. And, oh boy, does it deliver. There is only so much you can read about municipal street patrols killing hawkers, blind activists escaping house arrest, despotic provincial warlords’ wives murdering foreign fixers and physically disabled dissidents mysteriously committing suicide.

For many of us in and out of Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post is as dependable a source as any for one-stop, day-to-day coverage of the mayhem. The supposed suicide of Li Wangyang was a case in point; the paper’s full-length reports on the case were almost certainly exhaustive enough to lead many readers to skip bits halfway through and still not have time for the latest tainted milk and poisoned lake stories. (For relief from the non-stop horror I recommend a weekend in Zhongshan, Guangzhou or someplace where life seems blissfully normal, everyone is happy and nobody seems to get tortured. They don’t even have anyone carrying mountain-size bundles of plastic bottles on bicycles. It’s a big country.)

Such is the torrent of pandemonium coming out of the Mainland that many of us wouldn’t notice an occasional delay in the reportage. Indeed, all print media content is late in this day and age; the SCMP presumably publishes all its international coverage for the benefit of readers who are not on the Internet – I’ve already read it online the day before. But apparently Asia’s century-old ‘newspaper of record’ was tardy in covering the Li case, and deliberately. Thus we have this year’s ‘self-censorship at the SCMP’ flurry, here, here and here, and in much of the other local press, happy to pick on their rival and its sort-of Communist-linked editor (Wang Xiangwei, ex-BBC and current member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress talking shop).

When the story first broke, the SCMP had a big report written, which was then spiked in favour of a tiny snippet before normal service resumed the following day. Looks like a pretty clear case, until you stop to ask: why the Li story? Why not the Bo Xilai story – a vivid example of the inevitable rottenness of a one-party system – or Chen Guangcheng, a story of even greater injustice than Li’s? And what purpose would be served by ‘nibbing’ the story, other than making the editor look stupid?  (As if that striped shirt/spotted tie combination weren’t bad enough.) A thousand other outlets ran with it and told the world.

I guess it is theoretically possible that the SCMP’s proprietors, Malaysia’s tycoon Kuok family, alarmed at the incessant flow of Chinese cruelties in their organ’s pages, told Wang to spike the next one, and – mindful that the life expectancy of an SCMP editor is around 18 months – he complied. And it’s theoretically possible that Party Central sent him a 24-hour gagging order on this specific tale of nastiness. But it looks just as likely that the guy goofed up, possibly unaware that rival newspapers were going to make a big splash on this particular human-rights atrocity du jour. Which is unforgivable but not evil. (The snappy email to a complaining staff member suggests a humiliating loss of face has occured.)

Self-censorship at the SCMP seems to come around every few years in a smoke-but-no-fire sort of way. Apart from the departure of China editor Willy Lam for tycoon/Beijing-related lèse-majesté, most allegedly sinister disappearances of SCMP journalists seem to have been only tangentially political. The two other most-cited examples, long ago, were of a clichéd cartoonist and unfunny humourist and were, if anything, overdue.

One example of self-censorship in the Big Lychee that I know of was at Time Out HK earlier this year, and that backfired, with a bowdlerized print run apparently being withdrawn and pulped – and the upheavals over that are barely over. Other examples in the past concern negative coverage of tycoon Li Ka-shing’s businesses, which also happen to be mega-advertisers in the local press. Otherwise, any hint of it provokes instant, loud, local and international alarm. In an age with a million instant, uncensor-able information channels, the only reason a Hong Kong newspaper proprietor would seriously censor his economically precarious plaything is by way of a masochistic display of loyalty to Beijing. It no doubt happens, and Beijing is no doubt as unimpressed as ever. By definition we can’t say whether anything earth-shattering was ever covered up from the planet by a Hong Kong publication, but it seems unlikely.

Talk about futile. Want to self-censor? Fine – we stop buying and reading.

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After one ‘Hong Kong-based activist Tom Grundy’ tried to make a citizen’s arrest for war crimes of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair here last week, I thought the award for Self-Righteous Pretentious Bore of the Year had a clear winner. How cosmic (mildly, at least) would that be – this much-valued prize going to someone who heckled a previous multiple awardee, founder of his very own Faith Foundation?

But now Julian Assange, the peroxide-blond pin-up super-stud founder of Wikileaks, has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, asking for political asylum like a blind Chinese lawyer, but more groovy. Named after the equator (a local landmark). Capital: Quito. Bananas (probably). And that’s about all we know about the place. It seems that although its president has all the right, trendy, anti-American, Gringo-baiting credentials, the small Latin American country is not renowned for its press freedom.

What makes me think ‘Hong Kong-based activist Tom Grundy’ teaches English in one of the Big Lychee’s esteemed educational establishments? Or could he be ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung’s gwailo running dog? It’s not just tycoons who have them! I am reliably informed that a professional full-time Trotskyist from the UK is attached to the legislator’s band of radicals. Could be him. And doesn’t the name Tom Grundy have an earthy, proletarian ring to it? You can imagine folk songs about such a man joining Wat Tyler’s peasants’ revolt or fighting evil Victorian mill owners.

On balance, Assange has a bit of an uphill struggle in the contest to win the Award. He occasionally shows a very slight glimmer of a sense of humour. You need an electron microscope to detect it, but the merest hint disappoints the judges terribly. And then there is the indisputable fact that he knows pleasures, specifically of the flesh with Swedish women; enjoyment of anything loses points in this contest. He will certainly lose them for actual persecution by authorities – even Scandinavian ones (and certainly for something that could sort of, approximately, more or less happen to any of us with the gift of catching ladies’ eyes).

This is in stark contrast to Tom Grundy, to whom the judges feel bound to award extra points out of sympathy. The poor guy expected that the local oppressive capitalist powers would respect his rights as a crusading martyr and drag off him off to jail to rip his fingernails off, or at least give him a squirt of pepper spray. Instead, the  henchmen of the Hong Kong Police ignored him. Totally. No tap on the shoulder. No ID check. No word of warning. Not even some mumbling about not getting involved in arguments between Westerners. Like he didn’t even exist. He just went home to his teddy bear and cocoa (or whatever the most righteous people on the planet do after work).

There are still six months to go, but it would be the first time the Award came to Hong Kong, so fingers crossed.

(Not my job to push commercial products, but with the hot weather coming I strongly recommend that everyone follows Tony Blair’s fashion advice on casual days off, and wears a pair of his stylish Faith Shorts.)

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Is it too early to be writing Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s obituary? The man does, after all, have another dozen days to go before handing over to sinister Wolf-Man populist unknown-quantity Spartan/Transylvanian/Tartar CY Leung – and the latter might, for all we know, have us all begging Sir Bow-Tie to come back, all is forgiven.

The Wall Street Journal decides ‘sure, why not?’ and starts off with a graphic swift kick in the pants. In fact, two…

Back around 2004-05, I distinctly recall voices of reason and sanity calling on the government to resume land sales, otherwise we’d end up with ballooning housing prices. Throughout Donald Tsang’s watch, even as low real interest rates and Mainland buyers put extra upward pressure on the property market, the government’s policy was inaction. Was it a deranged belief that ever-higher prices are good? A high-level decision to favour property developers’ interests over the community’s and economy’s? Or just plain stupidity?

He had the same do-nothing response to rising air pollution. Here we can be certain that the government’s inaction was due to a policy decision to boost poisons in the local atmosphere. As I understand it, Donald thinks our air is not quite of Scandinavian levels of purity, but like Barcelona’s, and this has left us with one of the world’s longest life expectancies, so we must boost air pollution in order to reverse the aging population problem. If you disagree, you oppose development and are a bad person who will go to Hell when you die. To speed that up, his administration watered down a law against idling vehicle engines to such an extent that it only applies to about 12 cars in the whole city. Something along those lines. Essentially it is pure malice: your kids’ lungs cannot be more important than concrete-pouring.

The WSJ could also have mentioned the wealth gap. Government statistics people have just released their latest data on household incomes, revealing that Hong Kong’s gini coefficient is down there almost with the Central African Republic and Bolivia. Officials protest at credibility-straining length that redistribution through taxes and welfare makes things far better. This might not, however, put us as neatly into the New York/London league as they would like.

The well-off here pay very low direct tax (10-15%) by US/UK standards, while the poor probably pay at least that much as a proportion of their wealth through the invisible quasi-sales tax that feeds through land sales into the cost of living. (We don’t know for sure, but all those fiscal and other reserves must have come from somewhere.) The transfers side of the equation is also murky. For example, some public housing is occupied by people rich enough to be property owners. Payers of salaries tax – the better-off half of the work force – get allowances through tax breaks for each kid and dependent parent, while the worse-off half of workers get no equivalent handout. This looks like subsidy of the rich by the poor.

What we can all agree on is that the situation has deteriorated in the last 15 years, and during the major and more recent part of that time, we were led by… Sir Donald.

The sleazy private jet and luxury yacht trips were a smart PR move, making it less likely that we will remember Donald primarily for chucking several hundred billion dollars away on pointless infrastructure projects, hoarding hundreds of billions more in the reserves, the continued inadequacy of large parts of the school system, deliberate under-funding of hospitals, the gut-wrenchingly awful annual budgets, plus all the planning horrors, tycoon-coddling, cronyism and sheer jumped-up, arrogant, contemptuous snottiness.

On the brighter side, we have a minimum wage and competition law for those who like that sort of thing, though the latter in particular looks like a waste of paper. If you ask Donald (in private at least) what he is most proud of, it would be the constitutional reform breakthrough that led to the Democratic Party sitting down with Beijing officials and agreeing on the directly elected District Council Functional Constituency seats for this year’s Legislative Council election. It was a pretty impressive achievement in terms of pure principle. Sadly, you can’t live in, breathe or eat unprecedented talks between sworn enemies or the slightly less-rigged nature of elections they produce.

In his defence, he could point out that as a British-trained bureaucrat from the 1970s, he was bound to be a hopeless, out-of-his-depth, unimaginative idiot in the top job, and it’s ultimately Beijing’s fault for being so paranoid that it won’t trust better people to be in power in Hong Kong. In fact, I will email that very sentence to him so he can learn it off by heart and reel it off at cocktail parties and in interviews after he retires.

Epitaphs have to be positive; fortunately, they don’t need to be lengthy. Donald Tsang, 2005-2012: He wasn’t Tung Chee-hwa and we don’t have to work Saturday mornings any more.

To some commentators in Britain, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing’s takeover of the London Metal Exchange is part of a diabolical plot by Communist China to control or manipulate the world’s commodities markets. Or it is a last vestige of Victorian imperial might falling into the hands of the awakening Oriental superpower. At the very least, there is something unfair about it; while HKEx is free to buy the London company, the reverse would be impossible as the Hong Kong exchange is in practice run by the Hong Kong government and is off-limits.

Seen in a global context, it is yet another example of Asia buying up everything in the bankrupt West. From a regional point of view, the transaction means that Hong Kong has sprinted ahead in the race (apparently one is in progress) to become Asia’s number-one throbbing and dynamic commodities trading hub and overall international financial centre. Visionary leaders will be especially miffed in Singapore, whose stock exchange’s attempt to merge with its Australian counterpart was rejected last year by Canberra on grounds of national interest.

For us in Hong Kong, the response is more along the lines of “You paid how much?” GBP1.4 billion? For a company that made GBP7.7 million last year?

Like the MTR, the airport, the Mortgage Corporation, the panda bears of Ocean Park and even in many ways the Jockey Club, HKEx is one of those de-facto state entities inhabited by the finest minds Chief Executive Donald Tsang can find among his exclusive circle of favourite best friends. It is a milieu of bureaucrats, loyal businessmen and dependable hangers-on like the ubiquitous Ronald Arculli, self-important and basking in the greatness of their organisations as if government-granted monopolies, aid or protection had nothing to do with it.

HKEx’s people claim success in being the number-one centre for initial public offerings in the world every year. It would look better if Shenzhen weren’t in third position; with the listing of China Inc in full flow over the last few years, they couldn’t fail. Note how they can’t find a way of de-listing penny stocks, reducing trading spreads or sorting out their lunch arrangements. Since the Mainland IPOs won’t last forever, the HKEx folk have been scurrying around such benighted places as Mongolia and Kazakhstan in search of listings glory. Hugely over-paying for a trophy acquisition in London – being taken for a ride by the sellers, in other words – sounds all too possible. If the deal goes ahead (some concerned Brits are still worrying about corporate governance at HKEx, namely the technical possibility of Beijing’s interference via the Hong Kong government’s control), it will be something to remember the Friends-of-Donald old guard by in the years to come.

Not everyone is concerned about GBP1.4 billion. Over in another corner of quasi-public-sector-land, fury breaks out over 10 cents…

In other words, you pay 10 cents less if you pay cash to buy a ticket. The MTR PR person puts it down to ‘different methods used to calculate fares’. So when the MTR calculates its fares, it does so twice: once for passengers who pay cash and once for people who use an Octopus card. All is clear.

On an especially heart-warming note from the hard core of the public sector, the Hong Kong Police in Yuen Long are recruiting ethnic minorities to spread peace and love and understanding between majority residents and brown people (whites and Japanese are ‘expatriates’ and thus rich, law-abiding and unobjectionable)…

Who can fail to be impressed by such tolerance? Those bongo-banging Congolese who have become such a familiar feature of life in Hong Kong these days are loud. I look forward to other noise nuisances being dealt with the same way:

“I wish to complain about my neighbours drilling holes in their apartment wall/playing ear-splitting disco music/torturing cats at 2 am.”

“Thank you for your enquiry. Upon investigation we determine that your neighbours enjoy getting together and drilling holes in their apartment wall/playing ear-splitting disco music/torturing cats at 2 am.”

“Oh is that so? I never realized. That’s OK then – they’re welcome to carry right on. Good night.” 

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