Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Anthem-Gate rolls on. The HK Baseball Association (yes, it exists) diligently reports a video of a 2010 game recently being redubbed with the Prohibited Wrong Tune on a YouTube site with 126 followers. Google tries to explain its search engine to the government. (Among other things you can Google – this.)

And rectification of schools continues. Officials issue a 30-page list of over 70 positive and negative rules for teachers – a not-so-subtle blend of professionalism and NatSec. Education Secretary Christine Choi sounds like she wishes the list could have been longer…

When asked if teachers can discuss topics such as the “white paper protest” in the mainland recently, Choi said: “Why do teachers have to discuss issues happening in society? What’s the meaning of explaining the meaning of a sheet of white paper to Primary One students?”

But she later clarified that this did not mean teachers cannot mention those topics, saying it is unprofessional for teachers to be influenced by emotion and occupy students’ lesson time. “There is no reason for a teacher to use some fake and ugly materials and intentionally occupy lesson time,” Choi said.

Time for a lapse in correctness. Not sure how this must-read made it past the SCMP’s quality control – maybe she’s out of town.  A HKUST politics professor skewers Beijing’s and Hong Kong’s approaches to Covid… 

Now that the mainland’s zero-Covid policy is in tatters, Hong Kong would look even more foolish if it were to maintain the rest of its pandemic restrictions.

…The mainland’s zero-Covid U-turn should be a wake-up call for analysts and commentators who believe Chinese authorities are pragmatic, adaptive, and capable of taking the long view.

…[China’s] vulnerabilities are largely the consequence of the zero-Covid strategy that created the delusion that the virus could be eliminated, and led to scarce resources being allocated to Covid-19 suppression – mass testing, centralised quarantine facilities, and lockdowns – rather than to mitigation, which includes increasing the vaccination rate, and ramping up hospital and ICU capacity.

He also diplomatically targets the deaf-cum-patriotic governing process for denying…

…the importance of maintaining cognitive diversity and having a (healthy) debate over policy alternatives – at least internally, if not publicly.

Which brings us to a translation of China Daily’s front-page commentary officially announcing that henceforward ‘Lying Flat is the New Zero-Covid’ – it’s all one big carefully planned continuum under the perfect leadership of the CCP.

Some riveting links for the weekend…

Nikkei asks whether or when China can overtake the US economy in size? Not for, er, a few decades…

Over the long term, labor shortages stemming from the country’s dwindling population will act as a drag on its economic growth…

Things don’t look much better on a per-capita basis, either. Beijing’s officials are targeting per-capita GDP of roughly the level of Spain (‘mid-developed’). This chart shows the country being left behind by Japan, Taiwan and South Korea (three of the few countries to ever escape the ‘middle-income trap’) and veering toward Brazil/Argentina territory. (Worth reading the whole thread on the Nikkei article starting here.)

A long, dry academic paper on how popular nationalism can influence Chinese government policymaking…

It argues that popular nationalists can play a bottom-up politicizing role on previously marginal policy issues such as immigration, surprising and constraining the state. Such politicisation further limits both public and elite policy debate, impairing state information gathering and exacerbating the tension between Chinese policy actors’ desire to both control and understand public sentiment.

Chinese nationalism versus science: thread on researcher pushing idea that modern humans evolved in East Asia rather than Africa.

Making it up as they go along – a review of Frank Dikotter’s China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, about China’s post-1976 economic development…

…in China, capital has remained a “political good, distributed by state banks to enterprises controlled directly or indirectly by the state in pursuit of political goals”.

(Is Dikotter still at HKU?)

HuffPost on the plucky little Lithuanians…

China sees Lithuania’s stand as an offensive and inappropriate gambit by a minor player that deserves a sharp response to keep other nations in check. 

War On The Rocks asks whether Beijing is really planning to invade Taiwan. (In a nutshell – no.)

Foreign Affairs on why Taiwanese see no point in declaring an independence they already enjoy in practice. Quick but comprehensive summary of the article here…

It is easy to understand why unification is so unpopular. Over the last four decades, Taiwan has transformed itself into a liberal, tolerant, pluralist democracy while China has remained a harsh autocracy, developed an intrusive surveillance state, and executed a genocide against its own population. Unifying with the PRC would mean the end of almost all of Taiwan’s hard-won political freedoms, something that was made manifest when China forcibly integrated Hong Kong into the mainland despite its promise to allow the territory to remain self-governing under a formula called “one country, two systems.” And many, or perhaps most, Taiwanese people would not want to unify with China regardless of the nature of its government. Taiwan has its own history, culture, identity, and sense of national pride.

Chow Hang-tung (to her surprise) wins her appeal against conviction for ‘inciting’ others to take part in an illegal assembly – last year’s Tiananmen vigil. Expect the Department of Justice to blow taxpayers’ money trying to get that reversed. 

Quick summary of the judge’s reasoning. She concluded that the HK Police ban on the vigil was not lawful. Expect a sorely vexed Security Bureau.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xS8t4J3_Dc

More on what the decision means here.

Meanwhile, a teenager gets up to three years in a training centre for such sins as rewriting lyrics to the national anthem.

Australian Financial Review on the broader ramifications of the decline of Hong Kong’s legal system…

Lawyers … warn the effectiveness of Hong Kong’s legal system has already been undermined because it is becoming increasingly difficult to get quality judges to join the bench.

“The bigger concern is what sort of quality of legal reasoning and commercial justice you are going to be getting generally under a system where your best commercial lawyer brains don’t want to become judges. And having quality commercial law is a big thing for a market like Hong Kong,” says Kevin Yam, a former Hong Kong lawyer who moved to Melbourne earlier this year.

Yam expands on his comments here. (And, on cue, the latest judicial appointments.)

After insisting that ‘interpretation’ is the only way to go, pro-Beijing figures suggest that the Chinese government might not deliver one, and that local measures could instead be used to bar Jimmy Lai from having a foreign lawyer. This assumes that CE John Lee ‘requested’ an interpretation of his own volition rather than at Beijing’s prompting, which sounds unlikely. Perhaps Mainland officials have since decided that other ways to bar foreign lawyers from NatSec trials would look better. 

Health Secretary Lo Chung-mau calls on people not to uninstall LeaveHomeSafe from their phones, saying ‘there is more to the app than just scanning QR codes’. Almost sounds like his family secretly owns 50% of the thing, and they’ve been raking in millions in royalties every week. Presumably the mass-deletion of LHS is something of a loss of face.

And how’s this for great timing? Following authorization of virtual-asset ETFs, Hong Kong investors can now buy BitCoin and Ethereum futures funds – just as the whole crypto fake-money fantasy scam crumbles.

Rather obviously taking their cue from the Mainland’s sudden abandonment of zero-Covid, Hong Kong health authorities announce that you no longer have to use the LeaveHomeSafe app when entering such premises as restaurants. 

So you can delete the thing from your phone, right? Perhaps. But you still need to show proof of vaccination when entering restaurants etc – and that’s embedded in the app unless you want to carry hard copies around. Plus, according to Health Secretary Lo Chung-mau (who insisted LHS was here to stay just days ago), the app still has potential uses. And it ‘contributed to Hong Kong’s fight against Covid’. And it won an award! Why on earth would you want to uninstall it? You unfeeling brutes.

There are plenty of restrictions left: many groups have to do daily tests, apartment-block compulsory tests will be phased out ‘gradually’ (do they have a purpose or not?), and the outdoor-masks mandate remains (though half the Mid-Levels seem to have ditched them in recent weeks).

Why do I have a feeling that – if serious Covid cases rise significantly over the border – authorities there will panic by January and reverse their recent rushed relaxation, prompting Hong Kong to go back to LHS within weeks?  

Security Secretary Chris Tang vows to ‘correct’ Google’s search results in order to ensure the right tune appears when people look for Hong Kong’s anthem. He says the company’s refusal to change the results hurts Hong Kong people’s feelings and is ‘unacceptable and unbelievable’. 

Does he realize that the more he makes a public fuss about this, the more people will probably – out of curiosity – visit and link to sites containing the wrong anthem, thus strengthening the algorithm’s ‘wrong’ results? Does he think Google is like a public library that can be ordered to remove Joshua Wong books from its shelves? Does he know that anyone can use Google or other means to find thousands of flags, banners, articles, memes and other materials that he would consider subversive online? 

The Hong Kong government has three options. One would be to calm down and live with it. Another would be to put paid ads on Google (which he mentions). The third is to ban Google, or indeed all unacceptable websites, via a Mainland-style firewall – though of course that would only have effect within Hong Kong. (Exciting fourth and fifth options from the Standard: an IT society boss suggests that the government sue Google, while lawmaker ‘Dr’ Elizabeth Quat proposes that the police ‘step up online patrols’.)

HK Democracy Council comment on latest prison sentences for riot.

No matter how much it mocks claims of rule of law, the unceasing persecution of Jimmy Lai  must continue. The former Apple Daily boss is sentenced to over five years for ‘fraud’. It is basically a minor (and probably very common but usually overlooked) lease contract infringement concerning 0.16% of the company’s HQ at a state-owned industrial park – a civil dispute turned into a criminal charge by alleged ‘deliberate concealment’. He was convicted in October of two other counts (covering different time periods) in the same case.

The judge is a designated NatSec judge, though it is not a NatSec case. He has given Lai a longer sentence than those recently given to an attempted murderer and a child abuser.

A statement from Lai’s legal team.

China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman defends the trial after criticism from the US…

“…evidence is clear, the procedure is law-based, and the judgment is open and transparent. The trial by the SAR court is totally legitimate and lawful and it brooks no interference or reproach.”

This is just the warm-up. Lai is also facing far more serious NatSec charges involving ‘sedition’ and ‘collusion with foreign forces’.

While Hong Kong’s health chief insists the Leave Home Safe app must stay (or maybe not), panic-buyers strip shelves of Panadol to send to the Mainland. 

In the Conversation, a look at how a retreat from zero-Covid will play out in China – possibly a scaled-up version of what happened in Hong Kong in early 2022…

Given the low level of immunity in China, a major surge would likely see large numbers of hospitalisations and might lead to a dramatic death toll. If we assume, say, 70% of the Chinese population becomes infected over the coming months, then if 0.1% of those infected die (a conservative estimate of omicron’s mortality rate in a population with hardly any prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests we’d see around one million deaths. 

From Carnegie Endowment, another (brief) analysis of Beijing’s Covid quandary…

[Xi’s problem] begins with how he wants China’s pandemic story to end, a story wherein the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist political system was able to manage the virus better than any other political system, especially those of the United States and other Western democracies.

…if Xi’s goal is to show the strengths of China’s political system through Zero COVID, how will the leadership be able to relax restrictive policies while avoiding the high transmission and mortality rates that would undermine his ultimate political objectives?

One obvious solution: manipulate the data.

Another solution would be to reverse the relaxation and go back to zero-Covid. Atlantic says whatever happens, Xi owns it…

…the new rules will also allow very large numbers of people to go about their daily life unmonitored. Without perpetual testing, the authorities can’t as easily pinpoint or tally the sick. Without incessant QR scanning, they can no longer automatically track close contacts. The new rules do not mean a full reopening, but they erode the machinery that made zero COVID tick, and the authorities may be overestimating their ability to contain the virus if it begins to run rampant.

…In Beijing, obtaining a timely COVID test has become a challenge. Some businesses, desperate after years of controls, are not enforcing the remaining rules. Many people are gripped by fear and staying off the streets. And where is Xi? So far, no words of reassurance or comfort have come from the top. The effort has been left to the state media, now frantically trying to convince the public that COVID is no longer the deadly plague it has warned about for years.

Thoughts of Sean Tierney – university teacher, ‘token evil gwailo’ movie star and reluctant guest at his recent farewell party – on leaving Hong Kong. Including the shift in Mainland students’ attitudes over the years…

When I told them that phrases like “Blood ties of the Chinese race” were not accepted in the West, either because it was eugenic pseudoscience or, more simply, the vague whiff of Zyklon B, they responded as if the world’s opinion was irrelevant. These students, at least judging by those who spoke up most often, seemed utterly uninterested in the outside world or learning about it on anything but their own terms.

Even if teachers’ (or students’) problems aren’t your thing, scroll down halfway for his account of the transformation of Hong Kong governance to a ‘slovenly union of craven authoritarianism and malignant stupidity’.

CY Leung tests positive and goes into home quarantine…

Leung said that the risks associated with travelling were often high but had to be taken so he could help create opportunities for Hong Kong abroad.

An edited snapshot of recent government press releases shows he is not alone (although being in isolation, he is). These officials deserve an award…

Have a healthy weekend!

A lot of NatSec news in HK Free Press. Notably, Chow Hang-tung fights ‘foreign agent’ charges – the prosecution’s evidence consisting of a small donation from an overseas group. (Are all NGOs in danger of prosecution if they accept funding from overseas? Could someone maliciously entrap an NGO they dislike by sending a donation from offshore?) 

In the same case, Lee Cheuk-yan is denied bail. 

On the subject of fund-raising, HKFP could always use some help.

The Diplomat on the apparent failure of China’s censorship mechanisms to prevent widespread online criticism and protest on Covid measures…

… [while] netizen’s cleverness and the sheer volume of ongoing responses might have circumvented China’s cutting edge, AI-powered internet censorship, officials and internet companies could also be “letting the steam vent before the pressure inside gets too high.” 

Still, would China now be relaxing Covid measures (sort of discreetly/tastefully) without the protests? And can loyal local authorities in Hong Kong now feel comfortable dropping the rest of our own masks/tests/apps regime?

Fifth/bivalent vaccinations are coming – bookings start tomorrow.

Something that popped up – a 2016 book extract in the Guardian on what Anne Stevenson-Yang calls ‘China’s historical self-loathing’ – manipulation of the past…

The project to catalogue and study the [ancient texts on bamboo] slips is led by China’s most famous historian, Li Xueqin. Li has headed numerous big projects, including an effort in the 1990s to date semi-mythical dynasties from roughly 5,000 years ago, such as the Xia and Shang, which are seen as the earliest dynasties in Chinese civilisation. For millennia, their existence was taken for granted, even though no texts or archaeological material relating to some were traceable (the historicity of the Xia in particular remains in doubt). In the early 20th century, historians in China started a “doubt antiquity” movement that challenged the existence of these dynasties, positing that they were merely myths … it challenged the deeply cherished certainty among Chinese that theirs is one of the oldest civilisations on the planet, going back as far as ancient Egypt. Li’s efforts essentially pushed back against this scepticism, marshalling evidence that these dynasties did indeed exist.

A fascinating subject. Some extreme Chinese quasi-historians insist that China introduced civilization to Ancient Egypt. Others prefer the theory that China received civilization directly from the Middle-East – see Sino-Babylonianism. Other Chinese academics find all this embarrassing.

So there’s a tension between wackiness that makes Han nationalists feel good, and the sort of evidence-based history and archaeology that has international integrity. A bit like zero-Covid versus ‘living with it’.

RTHK, with a straight face, reports that…

Students of a secondary school said they mourned former state leader Jiang Zemin’s death with a heavy heart on Tuesday morning.

[One student said] “We didn’t mourn in silence just for the sake of it or to comply with the Education Bureau’s guideline. We knew in our hearts the meaning and why we mourned.”

Some academic reading, or at least perusing…

From Alvin Cheung of Queen’s University, Sole and Despotic Dominion – a lengthy examination of how governments can abuse their powers as land owners. Sounds dry except exhibit number one is the case of Apple Daily’s eviction from the state-owned industrial estate at Tseung Kwan O. (Link is to abstract, pdf free to download.)

Which leads to CUHK journalism professor Francis Lee’s somewhat lighter paper on the ‘politics of legalization of press control’ in Hong Kong and the city’s ‘democratic backsliding’ in the last 10 years. Very topical.

And of course Kevin Carrico’s Two Countries, Two Systems. The (pretty short) book expands on his 2016 article.

Expect quite a lot of sociology/anthropology jargon, frequent use of the word ‘differend’, and references to obscure works on the theory of people-state relations (including at one point 1950s Algeria). But there’s also a lot of more digestible – and entertaining – analysis and anecdotes about what has been happening in Hong Kong in the last few decades. Specifically, the rise of Hong Kong ‘nationalism’ or sense of self-determination among Hongkongers who perceived that ‘One Country, Two Systems’ was failing.

Subjects broad and narrow include: the impossibility of ‘One Country, Two Systems’; the role of cross-border smuggling in alienating Hongkongers; initial disbelief at police brutality; being followed by CCP newspaper staff; eccentric genius Chin Wan’s city-state idea; Beijing’s ‘Orientalist’ view of Hong Kong; and how – according to Mainland logic – permitting pro-independence speech undermines rule of law.

Perhaps the best part is the examination of Beijing officials’ hilariously bad explanations for why Hongkongers are resentful of Mainland influence, and the psychology behind the CCP’s attitude towards a city that so vividly contradicts and disproves its ideology.

A former – quite prominent – economist I know spent the 2017-18 period writing what he hoped would be the definitive book on post-1997 Hong Kong, only for the project to be derailed as he (so far as I know) frantically amended and ultimately abandoned the near-finalized ms as 2019 unfolded. Carrico was luckier with timing. But most of all, he is able to argue that the events of 2019-21 confirmed the basic thesis in his original article.

Worth a read.

(‘Differend’.)

Not that you’re likely to notice, but the Civic Party decides to disband. No-one wants to head up an organization likely to be targeted as unpatriotic or subversive. Besides, there is no purpose for independent groups in a system that rules out even slightly representative government or pluralism in politics.

Some background on the party from Oiwan Lam, who notes…

Currently, most pro-democracy parties and groups have become inactive as their leaders are in jail. 

That includes three CP members.

Don’t forget to honk in silence at a designated location at 10am today, to ‘express deep condolences to President Jiang’. (‘Sorry to hear you died.’) Among other acts of mourning: the stock exchange will not display the Hang Seng Index and other data on the outdoor screens at Exchange Square for three minutes; Christmas lights at malls will be switched off for the day; and public hospital staff will be expected to stand still for the three minutes – unless they have, you know, something important to do.

More patriotic performance from local sports boss Ronnie Wong, who criticizes the Dubai ‘powerlifting’ (whatever that is) association for the latest anthem mix-up. He doesn’t buy the explanation that it was a mistake – reasoning that the playing of the specific tune Glory to Hong Kong could only have been deliberate…

“If you were careless, you could have played any other song. Why was it this one?” he said.

In a way, he has a point. A purely random accidental choice of music could just have easily yielded Rwandan drums, a five-hour Wagner opera or Laibach’s The Lonely Goatherd. The problem is that an online search for ‘Hong Kong national anthem’ produces a list of tunes Internet users tend to like and link to. A search for ‘China national anthem’ would get you March of the Volunteers in an instant. But it’s unlikely that a Middle Eastern sports bureaucracy has been infiltrated by Hong Kong nationalists. (Or is it?)

Speaking of which – will do a quick review of Kevin Carrico’s book soon.

Another overseas sporting event, and another mix-up of audio files results in Glory to Hong Kong being played instead of the Chinese national anthem – this time in Dubai. The HK Police Organized Crime and Triad Bureau are investigating what is apparently the fourth mishap of this sort, and you can almost see why they might suspect some sort of plot out there in international-athletics-stadiums-land. Unless, maybe, tournaments have been playing the wrong tune for years, and no-one noticed until now? Since most of us never watch sports, we would never know.

From the Standard…

Authorities should create a designated website introducing the correct Chinese national anthem for Hong Kong and request search engines to pin the page as the top result to avoid mix-ups, an IT expert has said.

On the subject of suspecting plots, we recall Security Secretary Chris Tang’s claim last week that Hong Kong blank-paper protesters sympathizing with the Urumqi fire victims were possibly leading to a ‘colour revolution’ and threatened national security. A Ming Pao columnist questions this and asks whether it also applies to the similar gatherings in the supposedly more patriotic Mainland. 

That could have been that. But the Security Bureau has to respond with a whiny ‘deep regret’ press release that doubles down on the alarmist paranoia. I’ve added emphasis…

The writer intentionally mixed up the recent activities in Hong Kong which were called for on the Internet in the name of commemorating the event in Urumqi but in reality [evidence?] were attempting to incite against the Central Authorities, with certain incidents happened in the Mainland. The commentary is misleading and downplays the signs of instability in Hong Kong. Members of the public may be easily led to let down their guard against being incited to participate in activities suspected of endangering national security. 

But maybe they won’t be easily led to etc etc… 

Standard editorial points out that Xi Jinping says the Mainland protests were due to students’ frustration, but helpfully adds…

Critics … may like to ridicule Tang for moving ahead of Beijing to give the incidents a political definition. Yet, the critics may also consider giving Tang some kind of credit for jumping the gun because he may have prevented a “color revolution” from budding.

Something to watch: is a ban on urging a vote boycott constitutional?

Chow Hang-tung, Albert Ho and Lee Cheuk-yan won’t get a jury trial. Did anyone expect them to? Meanwhile, in Taiwan…

…lay people are to be randomly selected as citizen judges who would participate in trial proceedings and adjudicate cases alongside professional judges in certain felony cases.

A must read: a former Hong Kong barrister – now living abroad – has a lot to say about the presence of foreign judges in Hong Kong and offers reasons why Beijing is determined to deny Jimmy Lai an overseas lawyer? 

Moreover, a defence lawyer from outside the jurisdiction, unburdened by the need to maintain relationships with prosecutors and judges, will be free to put forward a vigorous defence. Perhaps most damaging of all, however, is the prospect that a lawyer from outside the jurisdiction might witness the extent to which Hong Kong’s legal system has been debased — and tell the truth about it.

Tam Yiu-chung’s latest position on Jimmy Lai’s trial, if you’re trying to keep up.

A round-up of articles on problems facing Beijing…

Adam Tooze on China’s impossible Covid quandary – probably the best thing you’ll read on the subject.

The FT on the same subject – more quotes, fewer stats, and uses phrase ‘control-freakery’…

Chen Wenqing, a former state security minister who now heads the party’s internal security apparatus, vowed to “resolutely crack down on the infiltration and sabotage activities of hostile forces as well as illegal and criminal activities that disturb social order – social stability must be ensured”.

George Magnus on how the broader economic situation could add to Covid as a cause of unrest in China.

The NYT on the longer-term response to the recent protests…

…the flash flood of defiance suggests that Mr. Xi’s next years in power could be more contested and turbulent than had seemed plausible even a month ago. His hold on the party elite seems unassailable; his hold over parts of society, especially the young, seems less sure.

…Mr. Xi’s advisers are likely to be figuring out how to redouble censorship and ideological indoctrination in universities … another ideological offensive to reassert the party’s hold over minds, especially among students and young workers.

“It will be a grinding, planned-out, constant response,” said Barmé…