Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Perusing international press to see how they describe Sunday’s Chief Executive ‘election’. More than in the past, they tend to acknowledge that there is something shady about the process. Probably something to do with a poll where the sole candidate wins 99.2% of the vote after heading a committee that screened the ‘voters’.

Still, many lazily/naively imply in their reports that 1,461 ‘elites’ made some sort of active decision – when a box of dung beetles would have performed the task just as well.

Among better stories, Politico introduces Beijing’s ‘new enforcer’ in Hong Kong, and in Vice academic Steve Tsang says…

“Beijing clearly does not bother to pretend that this is an election in any sense of the word.”

Academic John Burns has some interesting comments about how not having political skills seems to be a requirement for Hong Kong CE.

CNBC quotes lawmaker Michael Tien as admitting that Hong Kong now has a Mainland-style voting format, and David Dodwell (author of incessant dull SCMP business columns) as saying it’s ‘a big stretch to describe Hong Kong’s vote as a genuine election’. A roundup from HKFP.

Or you could try a wackier offering from the SCMP…

As Lee marks the third devout Catholic out of five Hong Kong leaders since 1997 … the pious could almost be forgiven for believing that everything that has happened in our city in the past 25 years was designed by God to test the will, endurance and faith of Hongkongers.

Unpatriotic Hongkongers who do not wish to be part of China’s new Hong Kong are embarking on an exodus. The mass arrests of 53 pro-democracy activists in January 2021 for subversion, after they held a primary election in July 2020 – two weeks after China’s imposition of a national security law on Hong Kong – were a sign of God’s wrath.

(I assume this is clever satire. Right?)

Back to business as usual…

HKFP op-ed on the amount of time prosecutors are taking in political cases.

The Court of Final Appeal registrar denies Samuel Bickett an appeal hearing.

And in the Mainland, a journalist gets seven months [link fixed] in prison for pointing out that a fantasy-propaganda movie about China’s soldiers in the Korean War was stupid.

Christmas comes once every 365 days – but Hong Kong Chief Executive ‘elections’ happen just every four years. Hapless tools are today pretending to vote for someone pretending to run as the sole ‘candidate’. Along with the 7,000 police racking up a huge overtime bill today, we should cherish the strangeness of the moment like leap-year babies having a February 29 birthday. And let’s keep a special eye out for news media reporting the ‘result’ of the HK$228 million charade as if something real happened, other than the close of the final chapter of ‘One Country, Two Systems’. 

HKFP compares John Lee’s social media campaign with those of his predecessors…

Even Lee’s most popular Facebook post – a response to Google’s termination of his YouTube channel in accordance with US sanctions – garnered only around 7,000 reactions, nearly half of which were “haha.”

People are puzzling over Lee’s ‘election rally’ English slogan ‘We and Us’. The two words are of course subject and object forms of the pronoun. The meaning, I surmise, is ‘You are all objects, and you are all subjects’. 

(Interesting fact: in some languages, there are three words for ‘we/us’. One means ‘you and me and no-one else’. One means ‘all of us together here’. And one means ‘me and some other people but not you’.)

The Chinese version says ‘Me and Us’ – perhaps meaning ‘CE and subjects are all objects together (except yellow objects, which don’t count)’. Maybe. Or could the English ‘We’ simply be a mistranslation/typo of the Chinese ‘Me’? Or vice-versa? Having been sent off unenthusiastically by the Big Boss to briefly work on a past CE ‘election campaign’, I can confirm that the consultant and PR floozies involved are purely driven by the quick whatever-the-client-will-sign-off-on easy money donated by tycoons.

China Daily interviews shoe-shining useful barbarian idiots who are quoted as spouting meaningless inanities, like…

The electoral system had to change because it had been infiltrated by foreign forces seeking a Whitehall or US Congress system of governance. But every place is different, and one form does not fit all. 

Did these poor schmucks realize that rather obviously scripted replies would be attributed to them? Would it be more pitiful if the answer to that question is ‘yes’ or ‘no’?

Some reading for the next day or two…

Stuck in hotel quarantine, David Webb is searching enforcement and regulatory bodies’ websites for reports of transgressions by members of the financial services sector. One lesson: you’d be better off buying shares in AIA than paying premiums for their life products.

Oz ABC on ‘the movie that cannot be named in Hong Kong’, including an interview with director Kiwi Chow – amazingly still in town. And Variety on Blue Island. Will that be banned, too?

China Media Project on the unwaveringly persistent Politburo Standing Committee’s reiteration of the need to comprehensively, resoundingly, indefatigably, resolutely double down on the latter-day ‘eliminate sparrows’ campaign. It seems ‘dynamic zero’ has become a loyalty/obedience test. The continuing re-locking-down in parts of Shanghai suggests that it is incentivizing local officials to care only about preventing outbreaks, and nothing about public welfare or the economy. 

From China Digital Times, a transcript of a posted-then-censored phone call from an irate locked-down Shanghai resident…

Male resident: …My family can’t keep going like this, either. You’ve closed down all the shops, forcing us to buy from these so-called “licensed suppliers.” Then you blame the delivery workers for spreading the virus … What a load of nonsense. You’re just looking for excuses, looking for scapegoats. You lock down the whole city, and yet we’re still having an endless stream of new cases. Don’t you find that strange?

Officer: I do find it strange, to be honest.

A Harvard Business paper on the Emergence of Mafia-like Business Systems in China. Scroll down to sub-headings ‘Plunder’, Obfuscation’, ‘Mutual Endangerment’ and ‘Manipulation of Financial System’ for some juicy examples.

A mega-thread of Orson Welles talking shit. You would want the guy at a dinner party.

An interactive map of Pangaea (this) showing modern-day borders (or ‘boarders’, as many people like to write these days.) 

Hong Kong experts say the city can further relax Covid travel and social-distancing rules. David Webb pens a letter from a quarantine hotel asking the government to let Hong Kong be part of the world again.

From Bloomberg via the Standard – tiptoeing away from zero-Covid looks like obvious common sense. But it contradicts CCP ideology and/or hurts the feelings of the compatriots on the Mainland. We must pretend we are not doing it, or at least not enjoying it. And be very, very surreptitious about it. Or something…

“A few months ago, the government didn’t want to admit that the strict Covid policy was hurting Hong Kong, but now they appear to be admitting it. It’s very difficult to go back to zero Covid — the public won’t accept it.”

Two AFP pieces. Holmes Chan looks back at the amazing successes of Carrie Lam. Among her many achievements: nearly one in four Hongkongers are living below the city’s not-exactly-generous poverty line. An infographic. And Su Xinqi considers the future under John Lee. That future does not seem to involve solving the problems left by Carrie.

CNN on what John Lee means for feminism and gender rights in Hong Kong…

“In the mainland model, civil society groups that advocate for liberal rights — including gender equality — are seen as conduits of Western influence.”

Lee says he will work to keep Hong Kong international. Will probably legalize cannabis too.

SCMP asks whether Christian churches should be worried by Beijing state media denouncing their prominence in education and other realms of life in Hong Kong, which is of course a rhetorical question… 

“They are actually paving the way to turn schools non-religious.”

Some links for the (another???) long weekend…

Reuters op-ed thinks China’s anti-Americanism is possibly self-defeating…

Infrastructure spending combined with data fudging – artful reweighting of inputs and prices, for example – will prop up China’s stats this year. 

Not everyday that you get Fuck the Popo, Sing Hallelujah to the Lord and Glory to Hong Kong all in the same story – music of the 2019 protests. 

A pithy review of City on the Edge by Hung Fo-hung…

Hung insists that the struggle for the future of Hong Kong has not ended. But his analysis of how Hong Kong arrived at this bleak state is so persuasive that it doesn’t leave the reader with much hope.

On out-of-area affairs: the Vanderbilt ball of 1883.

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Hopefully/possibly reassuring news for contributors to the comments section. All existing IP addresses in the comments archives now read ‘127.0.0.1’, the default IP that every PC calls itself for no doubt fascinating techie reasons. And the system will no longer store new IP addresses. Must dash – someone knocking at door.  

What have Hong Kong Customs been doing over the last couple of years of zero inbound travel, with hardly any arriving passengers with bags to check? Seems they’ve been training to switch completely to ‘Chinese-style’ (ie Prussian) marching at parades…

…in order to express [the department’s] sense of belonging to and patriotic feelings for the country.

The disciplined service said the People’s Liberation Army-style of drills will make performances more attractive, and help officers better integrate with the governance system of the country and enrich the practice of One country, Two systems.

‘Goose-stepping is more attractive than regular plain marching’ and ‘marching like John Cleese helps you integrate with the governance system of the country’. Discuss.

If you think learning to goose-step is a waste of taxpayers’ money – the ICAC is going to ‘work hard’ to bring exiled activist Ted Hui back to Hong Kong to prosecute him for encouraging people not to vote in the last legislative election. They have also been checking online to see if anyone is urging a boycott of the John Lee CE ‘election’, but haven’t found any cases (perhaps because it’s not really an election in the first place). Remember when these guys fought corruption?

Interesting little thread from a former District Council member on the long-awaited opening of the Shatin-Central MTR Link…

…a textbook case of failure of #HongKong public administration. Intertia of the gov, wrong priorities, weak oversight and loose corporate memory.

Apparently, the UK House of Lords has an annual evidence session with the President and VP of the UK Supreme Court, Lords Reed and Hodge. In the latest one, a month ago, the two judges answered questions about why they resigned from the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (scroll down to Q23). As you would expect, their comments are infuriatingly measured.

Fernando Cheung reportedly leaves for Canada. In other NatSec news, dragged-out persecutions of Jimmy Lai, activists Andy Li and Chan Tsz-wah and Stand News editor Patrick Lam continue (here, here and here), and Hong Kong falls to 148th place in global press freedom. (Lai’s really big trial starts later this year.) But we will be allowed to go to beaches again!

Some 7,000 cops will be on duty to make sure the John Lee ‘election’ goes smoothly. (The SCMP story mostly reports that Lee – presumably a CCP loyalist of some sort – has ‘revealed’ that he is a Catholic. As if this whole thing isn’t sufficiently discombobulating already.)

For a full picture of the elaborate charade that is the quasi-election, check out the website (warning: only for the extremely bored).

A short thread makes the point that China’s extensive (big-manpower, big-budgets) zero-Covid social-control apparatus, now established, will be difficult to dismantle. At best, it will join character-simplification, cloud-seeding and (until recently) one-child enforcement as a bureaucracy that won’t go away. At worst, it will turn into a nationwide panopticon.

Speaking of which, LeaveHomeSafe has facial detection capacity?

One of the java files, originally known as “FaceDetectorUtils.java” but renamed “a.java” in LeaveHomeSafe, may be used to detect the positions of a person’s mouth, nose tip, left and right cheeks, eyes, ears and earlobes. It is also able to detect a subject’s head tilt in degrees and calculate the probability that they are smiling or has each eye open.

They probably won’t be smiling.

Some mid-week links…

CNN on the Mainland officials’ fondness for spraying antiseptic all over the place…

Seemingly any outdoor area is at risk of being targeted by workers wielding leaf-blower-style disinfectant machines, as China’s rigorous “zero-Covid” policy drives an obsession with sanitizing everything.

Reuters on Russia’s lessons for China…

“Many Chinese experts are monitoring this war as if they are imagining how this would unfold if it happened between China and the West,” said Beijing-based security scholar Zhao Tong of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

…”The Chinese can’t have any illusions now that they will be welcomed as liberators in Taiwan and given supplies and assistance”…

More signs China is overtaking the US: story on how Houston is subsiding says Tianjin is the world’s fastest-sinking city at 5.2 cm a year.

Can Kung Fu Hustle 2 possibly be as good as the first one from 15 years ago? (No. Probably.)

Presumptive (HK English media’s fave new word) Chief Executive John Lee releases his ‘manifesto’. Reuters report here. Even by the standards of Hong Kong’s past ritualistic ‘CE campaign’ documents, it is thin, full of platitudes and devoid of specifics.

One slightly noteworthy theme does emerge in the first third or so of the platform. It concerns proposals for district and citywide emergency response capacity to enable volunteers to help out at times of crisis, and vague but apparently parallel measures to enable the community to contribute ideas and feedback into government decision-making. This sounds – possibly – like an acknowledgement that the NatSec regime has depleted Hong Kong’s civil society by dismantling pan-dem District Council and other activists’ neighbourhood networks. Or that the NatSec regime sees a need to displace independent charities still functioning. (For example, we might well have seen higher elderly and overall vaccination rates if local pan-dem politicians’ ward offices were still operating.)

Otherwise, Lee promises to solve housing problems and boost Hong Kong’s competitiveness. just as every CE ‘candidate’ has in their own hastily patched-together platforms – and of course none of them have delivered. Can an ex-cop accomplish serious reforms in these areas? His non-answers to softball questions in the televised ‘Q&A’ session suggest he has little or no familiarity with social and economic issues.

If Beijing had wanted the new CE to have an exciting and detailed platform, it would have happened. John Lee looks to have been hand-picked to do whatever they tell him, and to waffle inanities until they’ve worked out what that will be. This could leave him vulnerable to bad advice from vested interests lurking among the shoe-shiners – hence maybe the weird thing on Saturday about keeping property prices stable in order to boost younger people’s home-purchasing power.

(It should be obvious by now that someone somewhere does not want Hong Kong to have affordable housing, instead prioritizing the accumulation of massive government reserves through sales of artificially scarce land. For a clue, remember that Beijing insisted on limiting land sales back before the 1997 handover. Where competitiveness is concerned, bear in mind that Hong Kong’s only comparative advantages since the 1840s are due to the city being different from – and not being run by – the Mainland.)

Post-weekend reading…

The sentencing of Lui Sai-yu, in which a NatSec judge delivers a more-severe decision at the behest of prosecutors in an ‘inciting secession’ charge. A learned discussion.

Forbes’ William Pesek asks whether China has been ‘juicing’ its GDP growth numbers. (Meeting economic growth targets that are maybe double the underlying real rate is like achieving zero-Covid – officials must appear to do it.)

A major dose of personality cult from state media in the run-up to the CCP’s 20th Party Congress later this year (probably November).

Locked-down students in Guangdong singing Beyond.

Interesting article on how Beijing is having a hard time adapting to a resurgent Western alliance apparent following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine…

…China arguably senses it is under attack politically, economically, ideologically, and militarily by the US-led West. And, like any living being – from a tiny organism to a titan organization – China reacts in three distinct ways to the threat: freeze, flight, and fight…

One US official was quoted as saying that the US intends to “make Beijing feel pain over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” an idea elaborated by Pottinger: “the way to break the dictator-to-dictator entente of Putin and Xi is to lash them ever tighter together, so they have to live like Siamese twins with each other’s mistakes and miscalculations, and then they’ll be begging for surgery to freaking rip them apart.”

Today’s obscure charges and other lawfare… Labour rights activist Lee Cheuk-yan is convicted of breaking (wait for it) aviation regulations. For flying a balloon. Pro-dem media tycoon Jimmy Lai pleads not guilty to a desperate-sounding office lease transgression. And pan-dem politicians who took part in a primary election have their never-ending case adjourned to June.

The BBC looks at the plight of the last group undergoing detention without trial…

Critics say this pre-trial detention undermines the idea of innocence until proven guilty – and is designed to break the will of those accused.

…”They put them in prison and don’t try them with anything, and just wait and wait and wait – until they plead guilty,” 

Your tax dollars at work: the government is training civil servants to carry ballot boxes and count ballots.

Sing Tao reports that, as a hip young groovy ‘lady killer’ teenager, John Lee was (allegedly) into soft-rock band Bread. Two possible explanations: 1) he genuinely was a fan of the group that produced sickly ballads like If and Baby I’m a Want You; or (far far worse) b) he and his PR advisors think that claiming to have been will make him look cool and in touch with the kids. By coincidence, Bread are today’s guest stars (click on a pic).

Some quick weekend reading…

Five BNO refugees tell their stories.

A German businessman and boss of a European chamber gets quite undiplomatic about the Chinese government’s ‘Zero Covid’ policy…

For the past two years, the party leadership and government have spun the narrative that China has handled the pandemic much better than the decadent West. Now this narrative is blowing up in their faces. 

…The authorities have spent a year bad-mouthing Western mRNA vaccines, with the result that people in China don’t trust the vaccination. That’s the problem: The political leadership can’t admit, so close to the Party Congress, that there is another way in dealing with Covid. 

Atlantic on the Foreign Correspondents Club’s dropping of the Human Rights Press Awards…

The FCC’s moves are emblematic of the broader tension that now exists across Hong Kong, where Beijing has imposed a new political order. Red lines are deliberately left blurry, including the definition of foreign collusion and what, exactly, constitutes subversion. So institutions across the city have had to play guessing games, stabbing around in relative darkness, figuring out for themselves what their risk appetite is, ultimately exposing how willing some of them are to collaborate in actions that undermine democracy.

You could substitute the phrase ‘to collaborate in actions that undermine democracy’ with ‘to avoid being sent to jail on absurd trumped-up charges’. The FCC’s statement on suspending the awards was pathetic, omitting any real mention of either Stand News or the threat of sedition/collusion-with-foreign-powers charges. But no-one today would seriously consider martyring themselves, including over awards that – however deserved – get little attention outside the world of journalism. The FCC self-censors (think of all the speakers not invited over the last couple of years) for the same depressing reason everyone self-censors. You’re up against a massive Leninist dictatorship here. Chances are, the FCC will not even exist this time next year.

For anyone tempted to push against the CCP’s blurry red lines (or if you thought you had it bad because ParkNShop ran out of pork chops), read Samuel Bickett on his time behind bars in Hong Kong during prisons’ Covid lockdown…

Far more harm was done to prisoners’ health and welfare by stripping away our already-limited rights and privileges than any harm caused by the virus. But that was irrelevant: all that mattered to CSD, and to the Hong Kong Government, was pandemic prevention. The Central Government had ordered “Zero-Covid” to be Hong Kong’s priority, and prisoner welfare wasn’t going to get in the way of that.

Former lawmaker Gary Fan – one of dozens of pro-democrats jailed in February 2021 without bail to await trial for participating in the mid-2020 primary election. Later in 2021, he tried to get bail, but…

High Court judge Esther Toh upheld her decision to deny bail to Fan arguing that he was a “determined and resolute man” who called for all parties to act together in opposing the government.

He recently tried again, his submission stating that…

(1)  The health conditions of the Applicant’s parents and sister have deteriorated;

(2)  the procedural development in WKCC 813/2021 suggested that there will be a long delay before trial, and Ms Ng submitted that the earliest realistic trial date will be somewhere in mid-2023;

(3)  the Applicant has already severed all political affiliations and resigned from all public offices.  So objectively his political life has ended. 

Therefore, his main priority now is his family, and therefore, the possibility he will continue to commit acts endangering national security is virtually non-existent.

What does Judge Toh decide this time? What do you think? However, she goes to some lengths to urge prosecutors to speed up the trials. (HKFP story.)

Samuel Bickett on the use of pre-trial detention in these cases.

An HKFP op-ed looks at another judge’s questionable measures to ensure order in court.

Other stuff…

Further to the Foreign Correspondents Club’s self-censorship, the Guardian on Hong Kong Watch’s report on press freedom in Hong Kong. 

Stating the obvious, but nonetheless interesting to hear it straight… 

Police officers outshone bureaucrats and won Beijing’s trust to take on Hong Kong’s top jobs after they showcased their qualities and overcame difficult circumstances during the social unrest of 2019, according to the force’s outgoing deputy chief.

As well as rights and freedoms, things aren’t looking good for the old bureaucrat-tycoon crony-nexus. 

If you think Hong Kong shoe-shining isn’t sufficiently odious, try the Mainland type…

Eager not to be left behind in the race to bend the knee before Xi, top leaders in Guangdong province sent strong signals of obedience during a meeting [in which] governor Wang Weizhong (王伟中) was quoted as using the phrase “Ever grateful to the general secretary” (始终感恩感怀总书记) no less than 10 times in his address.

What’s happening while Hong Kong awaits new CE John Lee and his priority of passing Article 23 local National Security laws?

Activist Benny Tai pleads guilty to ‘illegal election spending’ – placing ads advising the public on tactical voting to boost pro-dem candidates’ chances in 2016. Pleading not guilty (the ads were surely just an expression of opinion) would have run the risk of a much harsher sentence. He is already in jail awaiting prosecution for helping organize a primary election.

The Hong Kong Journalists Association is considering disbandment. Not disbanding exposes the group’s leaders and members to risk of arrest on ‘national security’ or ‘sedition’ charges, with no hope of bail.

The deputy head of the widely respected Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute suddenly leaves the city. He suggests he is subject to intimidation here.

Another sudden departure as pro-Beijing media hound human rights lawyer Michael Vidler at the airport as he leaves Hong Kong just days after announcing closure of his law firm. As happened to former Bar Association head Paul Harris a couple of months back.

As a reminder of what happens when you courageously stand fast, former Tiananmen vigil organizers Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho and Chow Hang-tung (all now in jail) appear in court in connection with ‘incitement to subversion’ charges – but restrictions prevent the media from reporting any details.

All of which sets the scene for the Foreign Correspondents Club’s cancellation of its annual Human Rights Press Awards for fear of unknowable repercussions from the NatSec authorities. Nominations included work by Stand News, which was subject to a raid, arrests for ‘sedition’ and shutdown last December. 

Many prominent and principled journalists resign from the Club’s Press Freedom Committee in protest, and onlookers ask what’s the point of the FCC still existing? If it comes to that, what is/would be the point of the HKJA, HKPORI, Vidler and Co Solicitors or Stand News existing?

This is Hong Kong freedom of expression in microcosm: self-censor or potentially suffer.

This is not about the FCC trying to keep its nice club house (it will no doubt be ejected when the government lease comes up at the end of the year); it’s a case of ‘shut up or be shut up’. It sounds easy to say ‘take a stand’, but perhaps it’s not so simple if you’re an individual likely to be arrested for ‘collusion with foreign forces’ or ‘sedition’ and denied bail for a year before being sent before a specially picked judge, where only an idiot would plead ‘not guilty’, and the decent defence lawyers have left town.

(Maybe just routine – but meanwhile, HK University is accepting applications for FCC President Keith Richburg’s media-studies job.)