Big Lychee, Various Sectors

…while we wait to hear if the outdoor mask mandate will be scrapped tomorrow ‘at the earliest’ (whatever that means).

On the NatSec front: an ex-cop is tried for ‘sedition’ (posting comments about the death of a serving police officer); and prosecutors use the co-conspirators rule in the NatSec 47 case (trying to win an election)…

Legal disputes concerning the application of the co-conspirators’ rule should be dealt with at a later stage, High Court judge Alex Lee said. He predicted that there may be arguments on whether the rule could be applied on a conspiracy that predated the enactment of the security law in June 2020. The prosecution argued that an agreement had been formed by February 15, 2020, at least by former law professor Benny Tai and ex-legislator Au Nok-hin.

Potential arguments may also arise from whether the co-conspirators rule could be applied to defendants who were yet to become part of the conspiracy.

The recommended reading…

An interesting thread on why Beijing will hold China back on ChatGPT and other AI development.

Swiss Broadcasting Corp article on the relocation of Beijing correspondents to Taipei and the feasibility of reporting on China from the outside…

“Ten years ago [Neue Zürcher Zeitung] would certainly have gone to Beijing, five years ago Hong Kong would have been our first choice, but now we opted for Taipei,” says Patrick Zoll, former Asia Editor in Zurich who opened the newspaper’s bureau in Taipei a few months ago.

From the Conversation, a measured analysis of Beijing’s position paper on ending the war in Ukraine…

Whether, when, and how China will [use its leverage over Russia to push for meaningful negotiations] will depend on what role Beijing sees for itself in the future of European security. What the Chinese plan indicates are ambitions for a greater and more pivotal role – their vagueness at this stage perhaps reflecting China’s own uncertainties more than anything else.

The paper is also mentioned by Chinese researcher Hu Wei – disciplined for warning against Beijing’s alignment with Russia – in his thoughts on the first year of the Ukraine war…

At this time, the battlefield momentum and the moral advantages are both in the hands of Ukrainians. To call for negotiation under this circumstance holds no realistic foundation. The publication of this document will not bring about any real impact on the progress of the Russo-Ukraine War, but it will have a huge impact on how China is going to position itself in the international community. As the prospect of the war gets clearer, China is in a dilemma with not much room to maneuver politically. 

National Interest on Beijing’s contrived framing of Taiwan’s history…

The CCP’s amnesic narrative about Taiwan’s history traps it in a circular argument. The government cannot abide Taiwanese independence because this would cause a loss of domestic legitimacy. PRC citizens would consider the “loss” of Taiwan a profound failure by the leadership. But PRC citizens feel this way because the CCP leadership has taught China’s people for decades that the party must and will annex Taiwan. Xi has even said China cannot achieve “rejuvenation” without unifying with Taiwan.

…Beijing’s argument that the past is determinative is unpersuasive, even setting aside the issue of Beijing describing a fake past. This is the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. The wishes of the people who inhabit a de facto state should matter more than another state’s indirect claim to ownership of the land.

Interview with a leftist Brit who would probably be a tankie – but he lived in Taiwan…

…advocating for Taiwan has made me an outlier certainly because much of the Left is critical of empire and particularly the U.S. empire, and by extension often reduces Taiwan to a U.S. proxy containing China.

… I am under no illusions when it comes to Taiwan about which empire it most benefits from aligning itself with, and it’s not the PRC.

Off-topic but strangely fascinating (if increasingly dense) paper on cats in the Anthropocene – the role of domesticated felines in present-day ecology…

…the cat–human relationship has endured, developed, and diversified over thousands of years and is best understood as a dynamic, mutualistic symbiosis, rather than an incidental or residual commensalism.

In postindustrial societies … their hunting habits are increasingly perceived more as a nuisance than a service.

We’ve had pricy PR consultants, senior officials’ overseas trips, multimillion-dollar Hello Happy Hong Kong campaigns, and numerous positive-energy speeches and press releases – and still the world remains unconvinced that Hong Kong is back to its old self. 

But now, a glimmer of hope that at least something of the city’s adorable and unique character survives: a millionaire model’s murder, motivated – of course – by a real-estate dispute, allegedly involving an ex-cop/rape suspect (obviously) and a thwarted escape by tai fei, all ending with missing body parts in the inevitable village house. A classic recipe (don’t forget the carrots and green radishes). It almost feels like a British governor is in charge again (with Dodo Cheng starring in the movie that comes out just months later).

(Whole gruesome cast here.)

Back to the reality…

Security chief wonders why prison inmates hate the government, blames their visitors. (So, logically, prisoners will start loving the authorities if you ban visits.)

Standard editorial points out that even Macau has scrapped masks outdoors, and says it is hard to believe the local authorities will extend the mandate yet again. Dr Siddharth Sridhar asks why we’re still wearing the things… 

…there is an innate cognitive dissonance in the Hong Kong mask mandate: people take off masks in high risk settings viz. restaurants, but have to wear them outdoors where the chance of catching a respiratory virus is negligible.

SCMP op-ed on government plan to enable Chief Executive to veto use of overseas lawyers in NatSec cases…

Having failed in court, the government now intends to make decisions on foreign lawyers itself. It is a bit like losing a football match and deciding that, in future, you will also be the referee. There will be no more inconvenient rulings on this issue by pesky courts.

…Judges in such cases already have to be approved by the chief executive. The Department of Justice can dispense with a jury and decisions of the high-powered national security committee are not subject to judicial review.

There are minimum sentences, a high threshold for bail, and now, under the proposed law change, the court will not even get to decide whether a lawyer from overseas can be hired.

And a HKFP one picks apart the government’s claims that the restriction doesn’t reduce defendants’ rights or judicial independence…

The Department of Justice could have argued that the effect of the changes proposed would be very limited, both in the number of instances in which it is likely to come up, and the effect on the proceedings when it does. It could further have argued that this occasional blip in the smooth progress of justice was a necessary price to pay for the important objective of safeguarding national security.

Instead, we get the “nothing is happening” argument again.

The Stand News trial gets slightly meta, as the prosecution raises the case of the NatSec 47 – proceedings taking place in parallel in another court…

[Prosecutor] Ng then asked [ex-editor] Chung what [op-ed contributor Nathan] Law had meant in stating that the case of the 47 “was not about the law” and that “the Chinese Communist Party blatantly abused its power.” The author was also cited as saying that the national security case was a “manipulatable state-level trial.”

(This prosecutor does not appear to have a great sense of irony.)

Chung told the court that the ex-lawmaker saw “the entire case as a political trial manipulated by the Beijing authorities, in the end they just use the Hong Kong court to carry out the suppression of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp.”

…“To always think of the public as irrational or capable of being easily misled, so that the authorities and elites need to censor thoughts and speeches beforehand – is what I will not accept in my heart,” Chung added.

The prosecutor also asked Chung if he agreed that Law’s accusations that the CCP could “hide the sky with one hand” and that the court “worked with the CCP to carry out a state-level trial” would be the most eye-catching parts of the op-ed.

Mandatory outdoor mask-wearing is extended for another two weeks. I had this deranged idea that after the last extension was greeted with mockery, the authorities would finally let go of this symbolic and farcical requirement – if only to belatedly accord with the Chief Executive’s claim two weeks ago in Saudi that Hong Kong had no Covid restrictions. I will now reluctantly concede to skeptics that we are going to be forced to wear these things until at least November. 2025.

On the subject of skeptics – they are recommencing their pub gatherings.

Some weekend reading…

The Guardian on Beijing’s barring of state companies from ‘big four’ audits.

CMP on Beijing’s China International Communication Center – which does friendly co-production with overseas media to ease them gently into telling good China stories.

You thought ‘Hello Hong Kong’ was depressing? Now try the ‘Happy Hong Kong’ themed promotion-cum-concept – promised (or threatened) in yesterday’s Budget. It combines the misery that is bound to ensue when someone asks bureaucrats to be creative, with the condescension that dates back to when colonial officials started acknowledging a ‘community’ back in the 60s-70s.

Also from HKFP…

When asked why the amount to be handed out during the upcoming fiscal year was lower than last year during a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Chan said, “HK$5,000 is the best we can do.”

There was talk of giving tax breaks to employers of overseas domestic helpers – so five grand of free beer for the middle class is relatively prudent.

David Webb looks at the government’s deficit: according to the Financial Secretary it’s HK$140 billion; net of proceeds from bond issues, it’s HK$206 billion. This is like saying ‘My family overspent by $1,400 this month, not counting the $600 we blew on the credit card’.

Don’t they read the news? The HK Democratic Party – still going after a fashion – has to cancel its Spring dinner after the hotel finds a convenient gas problem. 

‘These are not bugs in an otherwise reasonable system, they are features’ – two minutes’ comments by Michael Kovrig at the Munich Security Conference.

From Nikkei Asia – the vanishing of Bao Fan is a warning to Chinese business and investors…

…the technocrats now appear to be out of the loop as the Communist Party effectively disappears another leading face of China’s tech industry.

…How Bao might have run afoul of Beijing is anyone’s guess — and that is just the problem. The lack of transparency is part of a pattern that welcomes more comparisons to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s treatment of oligarchs than to the teachings of Adam Smith. Global investors are left wondering which of their favorite CEOs might get “Jack Ma-ed” next.

The FT reports that Bao…

…was preparing to move some of his fortune from China and Hong Kong to Singapore in the months leading up to his disappearance…

Remember when Hong Kong was supposed to be the big hub-zone for family offices?

Over at the Stand News trial, the prosecution continues its eyebrow-raising line of examination…

…lead prosecutor Laura Ng asked [former SN editor PK Chung] whether the 460,000 people who voted for localist candidates in the unofficial democratic primary election were more susceptible to misinformation.

The correct answer to this question is, of course, that far and away the most gullible electors in Hong Kong have always been those who vote DAB – especially the older ones. Chung was too polite to point this out.

But what’s this got to do with sedition?

At one point, the judge agreed with defence counsel Audrey Eu that Ng was repeating questions.

On the Good Hong Kong Stories front… 

The LSD warn that the coming crowdfunding law will make non-authorized fund-raising an indictable offense (ie a felony) and will criminalize donors as well as fund-raisers. (Yet another example of the authorities having to ‘plug loopholes’ no-one had noticed for decades.)

And the highest-profile recipient of Hong Kong’s visas-for-talent scheme is a bio-physicist called He Jiankui, who it says here ‘was handed a prison term in 2019 for illegally experimenting on human embryos’…

Kiran Musunuru, a leading genetics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said he was “appalled” at the decision by the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

“He Jiankui is a convicted criminal,” he told AFP, and “woefully incompetent as a scientist”.

Ouch. Something tells me he won’t bother coming here.

Update: Immigration Dept revokes his visa.

More here. It seems the Top Talent Pass scheme does not require applicants to reveal criminal records. Or it didn’t, but does now.

It all sounds like a case of bureaucrats under pressure to prove a talent-attracting policy a resounding success.

Attempting to cast journalism (even merely quoting dissenters’ views) as a crime, the prosecution in the Stand News trial is asking some desperate-sounding questions…

Lead prosecutor Laura Ng said the message conveyed by the profile of [pan-dem] Fergus Leung was that the national security law was suppressing political participation, adding that the interviewee’s claims about the law in the article were often “groundless.”

…Ng argued that the phrase [‘liberate Hong Kong’] was not outlawed in August 2020 when the article [in which Leung said he would be arrested for saying it] was published … “…His claim was groundless,” she said.

…Ng said she was keen to understand the circumstances in which Chung would take down an article out of national security concerns. She also asked him several hypothetical questions, including whether Chung would publish a commentary calling the Nazi uniform “stylish” if he was the editor in a European news outlet during World War II.

…In response to another question on whether he would conduct a feature interview with Osama Bin Laden after the September 11 attack in New York, Chung said a news editor should never turn down an interview with a political figure of such importance. However, some precautionary measures must be made beforehand, he added.

“Don’t you see it would endanger national security? What if some Americans think the country deserves to be bombed after hearing his speech?” Ng asked.

I’d have thought the judge would step in and tell her to keep the questions relevant (or stop displaying her ignorance of journalism) – but what do I know?

The government plans a law formalizing Beijing’s ‘interpretation’ effectively giving the Chief Executive authority to bar (or not bar) overseas lawyers from NatSec cases…

The DoJ … proposed that the certificate apply to all national security cases no matter if it is civil or criminal or otherwise, including offenses under the national security law, or other offenses endangering national security.

“The legislative proposal will not have adverse implications on the rule of law, the court’s independent judicial power as guaranteed by the Basic Law, and the parties’ right to choose their legal representation and the right to a fair trial,” it said.

With a straight face.

Jimmy Lai is still trying to get round the original interpretation.

From HKFP, the latest from the Stand News trial. With prosecutors obsessively questioning why the outlet’s editors covered particular subjects (why shouldn’t they?), it almost seems the aim is to criminalize opinions – and independent journalism itself.

Ted Hui gets the ‘Hello Hong Kong’, ‘please visit’ treatment.

Desmond Shum (author of Red Roulette) thread on the disappearance of tech financier Bao Fan.

Foreign Affairs on the aftermath of Beijing’s Covid U-turn…

…as the years wore on, the zero-COVID strategy, sustained at enormous social and economic cost, seemed to have more to do with tightening the government’s grip on society than with effective pandemic mitigation.

…Reuters has reported that Chinese provinces spent more than $50 billion on COVID containment measures in 2022; over the three years that zero-COVID was in effect, the government is estimated to have spent as much as 200 billion yuan—$29.2 billion on PCR testing alone, according to data compiled by Hua Chuang Securities and Goldman Sachs. These immensely costly and invasive programs came at the expense of more efficacious policies such as full vaccination programs for the elderly.

From an observer of CCTV, an interesting article on how Russian propaganda is driving Chinese state TV news coverage of Ukraine…

Volodymyr Zelensky almost never gets airtime … On most days, Kiev is denied even the pretense of sovereign respect, Although the state media is a notorious stickler for exactitude in nine-dash maps that shore up contested claims of sovereignty, its studio map of Ukraine is tellingly borderless. Ukraine is depicted as a land open to contest, up for grabs. The Donbas, Luhansk, Donetsk bleed imperceptibly into Russia.

…China’s coverage of its place in the world is right out of the technicolor wizardry of the Wizard of Oz. The promised land is blooming and pristine, full of vivid hues, flowers in blossom and a landscape undergoing magical transformation, while the US-led West is cinematic Kansas; a stark, gritty, storm-blown land of suffering rendered in black and gray.

From the Lowy Interpreter – the Philippines’ reset to the US as another failure of Chinese diplomacy.

On other matters: for amateur artists and/or Studio Ghibli fans – how to paint like Hayao Miyazaki.

The Stand News sedition trial continues with the former editor defending the outlet’s opinion columns by politicians…

Citing how now-deceased Hong Kong novelist Ni Kuang was once allowed to say he “hates the CCP to death” on RTHK, Chung said more radical voices criticising the CCP had been heard in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2020.

Chung said his own understanding was that only speeches or comments which advocated immediate violent acts would constitute sedition. He believed [Gwyneth] Ho was only speaking of her political stance.

As with people charged for things like reposting Facebook content, Stand News is on trial simply for quoting or publishing others’ views.

The Guardian on the trial of the NatSec 47…

“The Communist Party believes civil society is a threat to a dictatorial regime. They need to crackdown on the most outspoken voices in society because those are the free voices that refuse to bow to government control,” said Dr Teng Biao, a former mainland rights lawyer…

And a UN committee notes the closure of dozens of unions and other civil-society groups, and asks…

…how Hong Kong could ensure that the security law would not be used as a “pretext to suppress civil society and severely undermine the… fulfilment of economic, social and cultural rights.”

Hong Kong’s population continues to drop, by nearly 1% in 2022. There was a sharp fall in the number of births and a rise in deaths – that latter (if not both) presumably related to Covid. And another 60,000 emigrated.

A couple of links for the weekend…

We view China’s real-estate/construction sector as a massive chunk of GDP – but now try it as a percentage of global carbon emissions? 

From New Bloom, all you need to know about the barring of Mainland officials from the funeral of Taiwan Buddhist monk-luminary Hsing Yun.

Providers of government-subsidized adult education courses – aimed at spurring a knowledge-based economy – have been advertising their classes as preparation for emigration…

The [Audit] commission cited one case where a course provider had marketed its education services to people hoping to work as electricians and plumbers after emigrating to the United Kingdom.

(If it’s any help, the government launched the funding scheme 20 years ago as a response to globalization.)

A business-related lawmaker called Jimmy Ng notes that the labour force in Hong Kong has dropped by some 140,000 in the last two years. There are lots of stats covering various time periods and/or age groups, and of course various ideas on which factors – aging, emigration or plain ennui – are the main causes. But it looks at least like a drop of maybe one in 20 of the overall working-age population, and more like one in 12 for the 20s-30s segment. 

Legislator Jimmy asks officials to ‘mend [the] social rift and create a relatively relaxed and tolerant political environment’ to reduce emigration. Radical stuff for today’s LegCo (other members dragged NatSec into the adult education fuss). The Labour Secretary replies that… 

…Chief Executive John Lee will continue to lead efforts to unite and motivate all sectors of the community, resolve economic and livelihood conflicts, develop a sense of national identity and strengthen communication with the people.

I guess that’s a ‘no’.

A pointed HKFP op-ed on the removal of a pair of banners supporting gay participants in Saturday’s Hong Kong street marathon…

No good story here. Hong Kong is better than this. Or is it?

Best not answer that.

As i-Cable ceases operations, we get yet another reason not to watch TV any more. Under new licensing conditions, on-air TV and radio stations will have to broadcast at least 30 minutes of national education and identity a week.

…questions have been raised over whether the mandated content would prove effective in getting the intended messages across, with one media expert saying the government should address the reasons behind residents’ reticence towards the state, rather than churning out propaganda.

An official examination of ‘reasons behind residents’ reticence towards the state’ must be 100 times more unlikely as an independent inquiry into government handling of Covid.  

On the subject of ‘churning out propaganda’, I don’t usually look at the wearisome My Take self-parody column in the SCMP, but took a peek today. Building up to hackneyed anti-Western tankie stuff, he asks…

Why did Hong Kong enjoy more democracy and freedoms for more than two decades under Chinese communist rule than it ever did under British colonialism?

…Beijing was perfectly willing to accept democracy in Hong Kong…

First, I didn’t notice any extra ‘democracy and freedom’ in Hong Kong in 1997-2019 compared with the pre-handover 1980s-90s. But the key fact here is that since the 1950s the PRC had specifically warned the UK not to introduce representative government in Hong Kong. The Brits were more than happy to democratize 50 or so other colonies in the 1940s-70s.

Second, the CCP was absolutely not ‘willing to accept democracy in Hong Kong’, assuming we define democracy in the normal sense of having free and fair competitive elections. Beijing made it overwhelmingly clear in 2014 that the city could elect its Chief Executive only if it decided who was on the ballot. Could a Leninist one-party system do otherwise?

Is it just me or does his reference to ‘more than two decades’ seem to implicitly admit that whatever democracy and freedom we had for a while post-1997 are now in any case over?