Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Things around here will be on-and-off over the next couple of weeks as I prepare for and undergo the torment of moving house. Not going far! But still a pain.

A couple of things left over from last week…

A fuzzy-sounding headline urges ‘Before tourism resumes, mend ties with mainland visitors’, which suggests we need to lay out an extra-plush welcome mat for the hordes of tourists that will, one day, inundate Hong Kong once more. But the op-ed is full of common sense on avoiding a repeat of the days when the city was swamped with 50 million cross-border smugglers every year, and crowding and retail rents went through the roof. (How about a 50% sales tax on designer-label luxuries crap?)

Will the government allow that to happen again? On the one hand, it makes landlords rich/pushes up land valuations, and it promotes the sacred cause of ‘integration’. On the other hand, it is guaranteed to renew hostility against Mainlanders. There are reasons to assume that officials will stick to their old ways of thinking (the word is that the upcoming Policy Address will include more infrastructure splurges). But then, some things are changing radically.

Which brings us to the decision to cease teaching ‘rights and responsibilities, freedom, rule of law, social justice and democracy’ and scrap a module called ‘Upholding the Core Values of Our Society’ in Hong Kong schools’ civics classes.

The authorities introduced the ‘Life and Society’ curriculum in 2010, when everyone thought it was a good thing to encourage kids to discuss and understand social and economic – also known as ‘political’ – issues from a standpoint of pluralism and participation. Now we have an emphasis on ‘national security’, or ‘Eradicating the Core Values of Our Society’.

Some worthwhile (or heavy) background reading for CCP Congress fans…

Minxin Pei on how Xi Jinping has abandoned the old rules.

And Geremie Barmé – part 1 of China’s Highly Consequential Political Silly Season.

On bigger issues – Russell Napier, formerly of CLSA in Hong Kong, sees Western economies returning to the 1940s-70s pattern of inflating debt away. Live long enough, and it happens all over again…

I think we’ll see consumer price inflation settling into a range between 4 and 6%. Without the energy shock, we would probably be there now. Why 4 to 6%? Because it has to be a level that the government can get away with. Financial repression means stealing money from savers and old people slowly.

…[central banks] are impotent. This is a shift of power that cannot be underestimated.

…Financial repression moves wealth from savers to debtors, and from old to young people. It will allow a lot of investment directed into things that people care about. Just imagine what will happen when we decide to break free from our one-sided addiction of having pretty much everything we consume produced in China.  

Mainstream Hong Kong media mostly, if not completely, ignored the Beijing Sitong Bridge banner protest, presumably fearing repercussions if they mentioned or showed photos of anti-government slogans. HK Free Press an exception (if it counts as ‘mainstream’). A bio of the guy behind the banner…

…Peng’s scant writings online make clear his opposition to dictatorship. He posted numerous clips of coercive Covid prevention measures.

A scientist, he decried the superstitious and irrational behavior of authorities.

It’s not surprising that a data-driven, science-oriented person such as a physicist should find the politics-driven public health mandates affixed to the ego and image of the paramount leader to be absurd.

The weakening of Hong Kong news coverage applies to local affairs, too. Here’s a brief and bland RTHK story about a man hit and killed on Friday by an anonymous cement mixer in Yau Tong. Now read Transit Jam’s report naming the China Concrete site, including details of how the company has apparently ignored past government orders to cease operations, plus video of Putonghua-speaking security guards chasing him away.

Thus declining government accountability, whether it’s Covid regulations, traffic safety – or location of bus stops. An HKFP op-ed looks at the de-facto (and not even legal) suspension of functioning District Councils after the authorities hounded the bodies’ mostly pro-democrat members into resigning. 

Yet censorship in Hong Kong still has some way to go: thread on a Wall Street Journal survey of attempts to search names of China’s top leaders online…

The true irony is that Chinese internet users can discuss U.S. politicians such as President Biden much more freely. Compare the zero results of Chinese leader Xi to 184,000 comments on Biden, with opinions ranging from respect to disgust.

Are we admitting that large-scale emigration is a worry now? A classic bureaucratic hairball-policy: let’s try to prop up the property market while reversing the brain drain, all at once. How many overseas ‘talents’ hearing that extra stamp duty on an apartment purchase will eventually be reimbursed will say ‘Yes! Packing my bags right now!’

Fingers crossed that the Mainland officials don’t notice: Hong Kong takes another giant leap towards normality by allowing live music in bars again, subject to regular Covid tests by performers and other measures to make it as complicated as possible. The authorities might even allow outdoor gatherings of up to 12 people. (Are our oh-so scientific advisors going to stop being neurotic about barbecue pits? Or is reopening them still the ultimate unthinkable risk. Did one of the health experts have a nasty childhood experience with a charred chicken wing?)

A protester unfurls a banner in Beijing criticizing anti-Covid controls and the government. Censors reportedly respond by banning the word ‘Beijing’ on social media. Hilarious propaganda guy insists ‘there is nothing to see here with this thing that isn’t happening, please look in the other direction’.

Some weekend reading…

Foreign Policy asks why dictatorships can’t do ‘soft power’.

Despite the vast resources these authoritarian trendsetters have poured into media, education, technology, and entertainment, public opinion surveys suggest that they are largely failing to generate soft power: the ability to get people to view a country positively and obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than coercion. Scholarly research and journalistic investigation is struggling to explain this disconnect.

Successful ‘soft power’ is mostly non-state-driven – popular culture, awareness of heritage, lifestyle, tech – rising from vibrant civil societies and private enterprise. By definition, it can’t exist (much) if the government controls everything. Also, dictatorships are just uncool, if not obnoxious.

Instead, authoritarian states are reduced to public diplomacy by ranting and co-opting clapped-out and self-serving elites.

CNN on China’s future under Xi Jinping…

As Xi ages, and further tightens his grip, his circle of friends and advisors will inevitably shrink, as will his ability to process new information and new ideas.

We’ve already seen this in the Xi administration’s decision to blindly follow its “zero-Covid” policy, despite overwhelming evidence that it is now counter-productive. Will this sort of inability to correct course become the norm?

In this situation, it’s not out of the question to foresee a period of slow but steady decline setting in, with the leadership around Xi unwilling to engage in economic reforms or allow the sort of freewheeling intellectual life that in previous decades had allowed China to flourish.

China Media Project on the ‘dualism of Xi Jinping’s status’ ahead of the 20th CCP national congress…

On the one hand, there is the “core status” (核心地位) of Xi as general secretary. On the other, there is the “leading status” (指导地位) of his ideas. This is a balance that Party propagandists have signaled repeatedly in recent months through the so-called “Two Establishes,” a phrase that emerged at the Sixth Plenum in November 2021, along with a resolution on CCP history that put Xi solidly at the center.

A (long) Asia Society Policy Institute analysis of China’s forthcoming leadership reshuffle. Seriously hardcore tea-leaf readers might like the latest CCP Watch.

Hong Kong History Project on the boom in Hong Kong history online. Lots of links.

In The Wire China, Orville Schell looks back at 60 years of visiting Taiwan, including an invitation to tea with Chiang Kai-shek at the (take a deep breath) Republic of China’s Anti-Communist Regain the Mainland International Kuomintang Save the Country Youth League. 

Taiwan’s soft power has come a long way.

The suspension of kids at St Francis Xavier College for ‘disrespecting’ a flag-raising ceremony gets the school’s vice principal into trouble. She…

…broke down in tears at the meeting [with teachers] and she did not turn up in school yesterday morning, though she was spotted by students in the library in the afternoon.

What were the school administrators thinking? We can assume that they were petrified of repercussions – possibly prompted by informants’ leaks – for not disciplining the students, so they over-reacted to be safe.

On the subject of over-reaction, the thin-skinned cops complain at great length about a Zunzi cartoon in Ming Pao…

Assistant Commissioner of Police (Public Relations) Joe Chan wrote that he feared the cartoon’s content could lead to misunderstanding among readers that the police would actually deploy staff to handle such matters

…it was possible that the illustration might mislead readers into thinking the school had reported the students accused of “disrespecting” the flag-raising ceremony to the police.

The cartoon was likely to place pressure or stress on the school’s headmaster, teachers and students, Chan said.

“The false descriptions in [the illustration] might make the public misunderstand police work. They not only damage the Force’s image, but also harm the cooperation between the police and the public, as well as our effectiveness on cracking down crimes,” Chan said.

The police force that arrests people for publishing cartoons of sheep or playing the harmonica is beyond criticism, let alone satire. Perhaps the funniest (or saddest) thing is the police PR boss’s insistence that editorial cartoons be ‘factual’. CY Leung joins in about the cartoon ‘smearing’ the police, of course. No wonder if, faced with the threat of denunciation, institutions like schools (or PayPal) fall over themselves in their attempts to appear obedient or loyal to the system?

Education bureaucrats – themselves nervous about displaying insufficient patriotism – must now draw up detailed guidelines on how schools should handle students who ‘disrespect’ the flag. You must take such transgressions seriously, but not too seriously, but then again quite seriously. 

More here and here on the kids suspended for skipping the school flag-raising, and the UN criticizes the sentencing of minors on subversion charges – appetizers before moving on to Nikkei Asia’s piece on Hong Kong’s uphill struggle to ‘tell its story well’ by despatching overseas delegations…

Many were taken aback. “The DAB visit [to Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand in September] was actually met with resistance within the civil service because, by convention, the government does not help non-executive politicians in their overseas visits,” said a former senior government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It also creates a precedent … but it’s a political order from the top in government.”

(Historically, many Southeast Asian countries have had problems with supporters of the CCP. But leaving that aside – would you send DAB lawmakers anywhere to enhance your image? Maybe the members of Mirror turned the job down.)

The article adds an optimistic note…

…The removal of quarantine, some say, could be an opportune moment to restore a semblance of autonomy, or at least counter the perception that Hong Kong’s policies are set in Beijing’s halls of power.

A nod to the ‘semblance of autonomy’ theory from Samuel Bickett, who thinks the local ‘Article 23’ NatSec Law is being delayed to soothe concerns of overseas business.

You can see the logic – it may well be that local officials feel the time to push Article 23 is not exactly ripe. But there is an underlying assumption here that a) Beijing’s officials care about overseas business, and b) overseas businesses care about NatSec stuff.

CY Leung bemoans the ignorance of foreign investors…

“Not only do they not know [enough about Hong Kong], they have plenty of misunderstandings or superficial knowledge. Or they were misled, because of smearing campaigns by overseas media and politicians about what’s really happening in Hong Kong,” Leung said.

In an AP report on the Russian plutocrat-owned yacht in Hong Kong, Chief Executive John Lee responds to questions about whether he is paid in cash…

“The second thing about the so-called sanction imposed on people in Hong Kong without justification, it is a very barbaric act, and I’m not going to comment on the effect of such barbaric act, because officials in Hong Kong do what is right to protect the interests of the country, and the interests of Hong Kong, so we will just laugh off the so-called sanctions,” Lee said.

That’s ‘so called’ cash.

ASPI Strategist on how things aren’t going to plan for Xi Jinping…

The tide turns against China’s helmsman, domestically and internationally.

One bad period doesn’t negate all China has achieved since Xi took office in 2012, yet the power meter blips. This is not the 2022 that Xi ordered—a masterfully staged Beijing Olympics was supposed to be followed by a calm, ordered progress to the 20th National Party Congress.

The CCP gathers to bury the collective leadership model and remove all checks on Xi as China staggers on through Covid-19 lockdowns.

For years, hard-headed realists have doubted that China will displace the US as the world’s number-one economy. It’s all about compounding: if 2% of something big is more than 5% of something smaller, the smaller thing growing at 5% a year will never catch up with the bigger one growing at 2% a year. A China Project report… 

Due to low real growth in China, modest inflation and sharp depreciation of the yuan, the gap between China’s and the U.S.’s GDP will jump from $5.3 trillion in 2021 to an estimated $8.3 trillion,” tweeted National University of Singapore professor and former World Bank China chief Bert Hofman on September 29.

“This is the single most mind blowing statistic I have read about China’s slowing economy and its effect on U.S.-China relative economic heft: The dollar’s rise is outpacing Chinese growth, so China’s economy will SHRINK in U.S. dollar terms this year,” tweeted Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, responding to Hofman’s prediction.

Another prophecy that came true, and was probably self-fulfilling: ‘the West is plotting to contain China’…

China’s containment conspiracy theories finally came true, however, when the Biden administration announced its Oct. 7 semiconductor export control policy. The new approach is unabashed containment, albeit in a narrowly defined technical domain, with the explicit purpose of hobbling China’s advanced semiconductor technology progress. 

Newsweek on the CCP’s presence in China’s overseas ports and shipping…

On the COSCO ship Rose, “the ship’s party branch educates its members about the latest theoretical achievements of the Party,” the [in-house] publication says. It rattles off obscure but important dogmas that permeate life in China, such as “enhance the four self-confidences,” before concluding the ship’s party branch is “a core for uniting the masses and a fortress for overcoming difficulties.”

And more on the renegade province, from National Interest…

The legal issue today concerning Taiwan is not whether Beijing has title to Taiwan, given that China has not held title to the island since 1895, and has as weak a claim to it today as Spain does to Cuba. 

The ‘No-one Could Possibly Live With Him’ Award goes to the commenters who, concerned and confused that my household consumption of water is (almost exactly) double that of the average Hong Kong individual, can only assume I gorge myself on the stuff.

Over the last 24 months, my apartment’s water consumption has almost halved. Can’t think of an explanation…

• Reduction in size of household: none.
• Gradual long-term shift to drinking beer: no.
• Repair of leaking plumbing and/or installation of more efficient appliances: no.
• Increase in showers/cooking/washing off premises: no.
• Massive collapse in domestic/personal hygiene: certainly not.
• Conscientious effort to reduce usage to save planet/money: not really.

At this rate, I will cease to use any water by mid-2025. A mystery. Whatever it is, it doesn’t apply to electricity.

Your NatSec weirdness du jour: according to a Tweet, ‘14 students at Saint Francis Xavier’s School in Tsuen Wan were suspended for three days for failing to attend a flag-raising ceremony on Friday. The vice principal allegedly scolded them and threatened to report them to the NatSec police, and a uniformed cop was spotted in the school today’.

The jailing of primary-election participants; the conviction of sheep-cartoon publishers; the arrest of erhu- and harmonica-players; the trial of a 90-year-old retired Catholic bishop. And now, another great moment in the thwarting of mortal threats to the security of the nation: a court sentences kids who were 15 or 16 at the time of arrest to juvenile detention for ‘conspiracy to incite subversion’…

Even though there was no evidence to show the defendants had succeeded in inciting others to act, [Judge] Kwok said it could have been a possibility if the group had met someone who shared the same ideology. People’s minds could be changed quickly, the judge said.

(Would someone who shared the same ideology need to be incited or have their minds changed?)

AFP adds…

The defendants cited the French Revolution and Ukraine’s struggle for democratisation over the past decade to support their cause, the court heard.

Flyers handed out by the group also quoted the Chinese Communist Party’s Mao Zedong saying that “revolution is not a dinner party” and is instead “an act of violence by which one class overthrows another…”

To repeat: Hong Kong now hosts a massive NatSec establishment that must justify its existence by finding local plots to overthrow the government of the world’s nuclear-armed second-biggest economy. Either they move next onto subversive toddlers and triangle-players, or declare ‘mission accomplished’ and downsize.

CNN on how – more to the point, why – Hong Kong has been inching away from Beijing’s zero-Covid policy. Essentially, China’s policy makers see the collapsing property market, rising youth unemployment and other problems and feel desperate (though not desperate enough to extricate the Mainland from the zero-Covid mess)…

Chinese authorities “see a role for Hong Kong in helping to restore the mainland economy,” said John Burns, Emeritus Professor at HKU. “This would be another reason why the central government gave the green light to Hong Kong authorities to open the border – and I think that’s what happened. Hong Kong has no autonomy to decide things like this on its own.”

Seems about right. The only other explanation is that local officials and/or sympathetic Mainland ones are craftily disobeying commands from higher up. Still, the idea that Hong Kong will serve as an ‘experiment’ for the Mainland sounds more like an excuse than anything else.

BBC on the effects of zero-Covid on China’s people…

China has successfully minimised the impact of the virus – and if it re-opened tomorrow, the disease would spread like wildfire.

But, at the moment, it feels like the government is just kicking the can down the road. Remaining cut off from the outside world is coming at a cost.

There are no easy options, but China can’t go on like this forever.

‘Honey Badger’ Cummins, it transpires, is a rugby star and reality TV personality. And now, some say, an apologist for an oppressive regime, not to mention its idiotic Covid restrictions.

…critics say the ads depict a Hong Kong that no longer exists after COVID-19 restrictions saw many of its top restaurants shut down including one visited by Cummins during the campaign, Tung Po Kitchen.

More from HKFP. The HK Democracy Council wade in.

This is in the context of a major tourism relaunch, alongside a campaign to reverse the brain drain (thanks to the San Tin Technopole Hub-Zone) and the much-hyped forthcoming ‘financial summit’. Officials’ desperation to somehow bounce back offers rich pickings for the PR floozies. But on the bright side – the Oz promo was shot pre-Covid, so we can be sure the avalanche of marketing exercises and celebrity endorsements to come will be far more in tune with reality, and not all misleading or offensive, right?

‘Honey Bear’ also says ‘come to Hong Kong to watch the Civic Party possibly disband’.

You mean it hasn’t already? What is the purpose of a formal opposition political group under a one-party state, where democrats are jailed for trying to win elections, and elections themselves are now rigged by a candidate-screening process (such that barely 30% of voters bother to cast a ballot, and urging a boycott has been made a crime)? Either you expose your members to greater risk of persecution on subversion or sedition charges, or you become co-opted as token ‘centrist’ stooges. Under these circumstances, abdication/absence/invisibility is noble. Clinging on looks tawdry.

Weekend reading…

From InMedia, why 4,000 Hong Kong teachers quit in 2020-21. If the salary of one high-school department head – HK$90,000 pm – is typical, leaving is no small deal.

UnHerd on Xi’s Putin and other problems…

While [Xi’s] own position appears relatively unthreatened, the same can’t be said for his plan to pack the Politburo (the CCP’s top 25 leaders) with his protégés and factional allies, ensuring his path to lifetime rule and completing his personality cult. Xi’s economic mismanagement and strategic misstep of personally linking himself too closely to Putin have exposed him and his political faction to internal criticism in a manner that was almost unthinkable even two years ago. 

In the Nation, Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch on the Vatican’s deal with Beijing…

By renewing a secretive deal with Beijing, the Vatican is effectively endorsing the Chinese government’s perversion of religions and is dangerously close to being complicit in the country’s deepening rights abuses.

Spot the censorship: Mainland edition of a history textbook versus the original English-language version.

Following Biden’s recent remarks, Gerrit van der Wees on why you should ignore blather about US ‘strategic ambiguity’ on Taiwan…

Many in the press and think-tank world mistakenly equate “current policy” with “strategic ambiguity.” 

The Carnegie Endowment offers helpful hints on how to tell if and when China is about to invade Taiwan.

What’s On Weibo explains why Chinese netizens call Russia ‘vegetable goose’.

On sort-of out-of-area matters, Timothy Snyder on how the war in Ukraine might end…

The scenario that I will propose here is that a Russian conventional defeat in Ukraine is merging imperceptibly into a Russian power struggle, which in turn will require a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. This is, historically speaking, a very familiar chain of events.

…regime survival has depended upon two premises: what happens on television is more important than what happens in reality; and what happens abroad is more important than what happens at home.  It seems to me that these premises no longer hold. 

A local angle: a yacht (over half the length of the SS Titanic) belonging to Russian sanctioned billionaire tycoon and buddy-of-Putin Alexei Mordashov has moored in Hong Kong.

Cue the rickshaws: the story behind the Tourism Board’s promo down under…

Director of the Hong Kong Tourism Board Australia and New Zealand, Karen Macmillan, said, “The video series shows the incredible variety of experiences you can do in Hong Kong and really captures its distinctly East meets West vibe.

Maybe it would help if you knew who ‘Honey Badger’ Cummins (and his performing ‘infectious larrikin persona’) is. Though then again, maybe not. Oddly, he doesn’t appear on the lengthy credits (bottom of article), which make the production sound like Ben Hur. Wretchedly over-cliched content aside, it’s hard to imagine the potential size of the Australian inbound market justifying the budget for these videos. Even as the most onerous idiotic Covid restrictions are relaxed, Hong Kong looks set to be a place outsiders visit only if they have to. And Virgin pulls out.

Part of a backlog of recommended reading for the gentry…

How the government turns a blind eye to developers’ (and their contractors’) poor safety standards. Truth is, we all (apart from Transit Jam) take this stuff for granted. 

George Magnus in a long but worthwhile analysis of China’s economic prospects…

…it is a moot point whether the PRC can resolve these problems satisfactorily, partly because the CCP itself is one of the main architects of the economy’s current ailments, and partly because of the systemic nature of the problems. Changing the system is simply not an option.

Covering similar ground, but also essential – Michael Pettis in Foreign Affairs on how China has trapped itself economically…

…it is difficult to abandon a successful development model. Its very success tends to generate a set of deeply embedded political, business, financial, and cultural institutions based on the continuance of the model, and there is likely to be strong institutional and political opposition to any substantial reversal.

Hong Kong is proud to help with the recruitment of astronauts, following an invitation that shows Beijing’s trust in the city. Or at least some of the city. Several million sighs of relief echo around the streets as non-patriots learn they will not be eligible to be sent up in China’s space rocket.

Much excited chatter about suitable candidates – for example, how about lawmaker Dr the Hon Elizabeth Quat, famous for her dazzling academic qualifications, including (surely) a PhD in astrophysics, or two?

A gushing Standard editorial advises…

As space missions involve highly sensitive state secrets for authorized eyes only, it can be expected that applicants will be subject to thorough background checks.

Which brings us to a Financial Times scoop revealing that China’s Foreign Ministry is asking foreign diplomatic missions in Hong Kong to disclose details of their consular and residential premises…

Officials want floor plans, details of rental or sale terms, as well as lease or sale agreements.

Scene at the NatSec police: “Hmmm… The Bolivians have converted their spare bathroom into a limbo-dancing studio. Better check it out.”  Should keep them busy for a few months while they’re waiting for the next clampdown on subversive erhu-players.