Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Reuters on how Hong Kong’s Covid cure is worse than the disease…

Tracing, testing, treatment and quarantine resources still target every infection instead of prioritising high-risk groups, such as the elderly, causing widespread frustration. 

(Not to mention arbitrary and cruel punitive enforcement.) Oh and…

The government did not respond to a request for comment on whether its zero-covid policy had contributed to the current problem.

Instead, top officials must now perform Beijing’s ancient ‘Several Somethings’ Ritual, and broadcast it through press releases. During a recent cross-border Covid cooperation teleconference…

[Chief Secretary John] Lee expressed gratitude towards President Xi Jinping for his important instruction on anti-epidemic work of the HKSAR. He added that the HKSAR Government would assume the main responsibility in accordance with the instruction, make every effort with staunch determination to achieve the target of “dynamic zero infection”, and fulfill the three “all-s” and two “guarantees” as instructed by President Xi.

(Editor’s note: CCP house style is ‘the “Three Alls” and the “Two Guarantees”’.)

Public health as political performance. Top officials know (presumably) they cannot successfully implement Xi’s orders because suppressing the spread of the virus in Hong Kong is no longer practically feasible. Yet they must overtly praise his wisdom and proclaim their eagerness to obey – with ‘staunch determination’.

So Hong Kong must pretend to embark on a futile attempt to suppress the pandemic through mass-testing and hospitalizing/quarantining barely symptomatic cases. Maybe this would/does work in the Mainland, where a city can go through this while the other 99% of the country absorbs the extra demand for personnel and overall economic shock. This won’t be the case in far more self-contained Hong Kong, give or take some token medics.

And there’s public acceptance. Thanks to official propaganda, Mainlanders believe that the rest of the world is in pre-vax Delta-era chaos, suffering millions of deaths (even Mainlanders in Hong Kong are susceptible – hence recent reports that some are fleeing illegally across the border). The CCP reinforces this narrative through high-profile but pointless measures like examining imports of frozen food. 

Most Hongkongers, on the other hand, are aware that other countries are opening up and increasingly ‘living with Covid’. They will know, when they are forced to stand in line in the cold for weekly tests, that the whole thing is a charade. Or, to the extent it has a purpose, it’s a pretext for a longer-term tightening of social controls. 

And preparation for further rectification of local elites and strengthening of rule by patriots. From the Economist (paywalled)…

With overt opposition crushed, attention is turning to “soft resistance” among Hong Kong’s administrators. Civil servants stand accused of nostalgia for British rule, and of secretly envying Western countries that choose to live with covid in the name of individual freedoms…

…Ren Yi, a Beijing-based blogger read by many of China’s media and political elites, thinks that pro-establishment Hong Kong politicians are reluctant to tell national leaders that they cannot enforce full, mainland-style controls. Mr Ren, whose pen-name is Chairman Rabbit, does not welcome this reality. But he felt a duty to write a much-cited recent post about the power of Hong Kong’s “deep state”, in order to “try to lower Beijing’s expectations”.

…Mainland scholars urge Hong Kong to accept pandemic help from the central government to boost national pride. They charge those seeking access to the outside world with elitism: opening to the mainland, they say, is what the masses want. China’s top official in Hong Kong, Luo Huining, last month warned the city against “self-pity” over its role as an adjunct to China’s overall development. Behind debates about public health, arguments about loyalty lurk.

William Nee in the Diplomat sees possible parallels between Beijing’s imposition of Zero-Covid on Hong Kong and repression in Xinjiang…

For powerful figures in Beijing it is not the infectious nature of the variant, but rather the corrupt Western sympathies of the Hong Kong elite.

…whatever the scientific and policy merits, it will be harder for the Chinese government to back down from a zero COVID policy now that it has been given a strong ideological dimension. 

…Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing elite may find that they are next on the chopping block.

And now on your knees to worship the ‘Chinese traditional medicine’ shipments.

Hong Kong authorities consider city-wide Covid testing. How can they roll this out with just one or two weeks’ notice? Do 7.5 million people have to line up for hours? In the streets? In bad weather? (Apparently, it would be done by ID Card number.) Actually – 22 million people…

Up to a million people would be tested every day, and everyone would have to go through three tests within three weeks.

All 177,000 civil servants will be on standby, with their boss mentioning Xi Jinping’s instructions to battle the outbreak.

What will the authorities do with the 100,000, 200,000 or whatever cases they detect? Why not put the same effort into vaccinating the elderly? 

Strange to think that after National Education, fake universal suffrage, the extradition law amendment, the National Security Law, elimination of a semi-representative legislature, the shutting of Apple Daily and arrests of pan-dem figures, Beijing’s ultimate alienation of Hong Kong would result from imposing bad, PR-driven public-health policy.

Meanwhile, hospitals and staff are exhausted, stressed and buckling. More pictures here.

Advice from OT&P…

In our opinion the majority of people in Hong Kong are likely to be infected over the next 2-3 months. A recent review in the Lancet suggests that up to 90% of these cases will have no symptoms^[1]. For the majority of the rest, especially the vaccinated, it will be somewhere between a mild cold and a bad flu.

CMP looks at how Xi Jinping’s ‘important instructions’ on Covid to Hong Kong have not been reported in the Mainland…

Given the preeminent status of Xi Jinping within official CCP discourse, we would generally expect anything bearing the label “important instructions” to have pride of place on the front page of the official People’s Daily as well as top provincial CCP papers. But this is not what happened with the directive on Hong Kong. Instead, it has been entirely absent from the mainland media.

Some weekend reading…

George Magnus’s forecast for China…

Common prosperity is supposed to build a superior socialist society in which innovation and productivity define a confident and modern China. It might. Yet it is more likely to be a governance own-goal in which the contradiction between the political control the party craves, and the incentives for innovation and productivity it needs cannot be resolved under current political settings.

How to categorize China? Communist? State capitalist? Something with Chinese characteristics? Andrew Batson asks… 

[Jude Blanchette remarked] “It’s patently obvious that China is not a state for workers and the proletariat, and has become one of the most deeply unequal societies in the world … your European welfare state will do better than China.”

China today obviously does not look like much like China in the 1960s, or the Soviet Union in the 1950s, or Yugoslavia in the 1970s: all uncontroversial examples of actually existing socialism. 

(His answer is to focus not on the economic system but the governmental/control structures. It’s Leninism.)  

From Geremie Barme, a translation of an essay by an anonymous writer with the pen name of Fang Zhou – an appendix to a larger piece entitled Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, on what Barme describes as Xi’s ‘totalitarian nostalgia’.

Vice asks whether Eileen Gu is a suitable role model for China’s young women. (On my ‘to read if bored enough’ list, so the answer remains a mystery to me.) 

On out-of-area matters for the hardcore curious – a long but engaging YouTube look at NFTs.

How’s this for a dilemma? Local state newspapers again warn Hong Kong – in Xi Jinping’s name – to suppress the Covid outbreak at all costs. And a loyalist advisor says that Beijing above all fears social instability here. Does anyone in Carrie Lam’s administration have the courage to tell their bosses that Mainland-style anti-Covid measures are more likely to provoke public anger (maybe civil disobedience or even protests) than the lack of them?

Lau Siu-kai’s comments on Wednesday came after Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao quoted President Xi Jinping as saying that the SAR government must shoulder the main responsibility of reining in the pandemic.

“If the Covid situation gets out of hand and people’s dissatisfaction accumulates, leading to all sorts of anti-government behaviour… that would not be what the central government wants to see,” he told RTHK.

…He said local authorities may now be under pressure to consider measures less welcomed by society, including real-name contact tracing and getting more people vaccinated “through harsher means”.

Carrie’s (perhaps understandable) tactic is to thank Beijing profusely. Back in Hong Kong bureaucrats’ comfort zone, she asks property tycoons to find hotel rooms for quarantine.  According to the SCMP…

The liaison office said Xi’s message had “injected strong, positive energy” into the city. “Sectors in society are greatly encouraged and expressed one after another that President Xi’s important instructions have made Hong Kong people feel extraordinarily warm,” it said.

Among Beijing’s priorities: to show that the CCP can outperform the West through its PR-driven zero-Covid approach; and to use Covid as a pretext to encourage ‘integration’ and to impose Mainland-style social controls like surveillance apps on Hong Kong. If only it were just a deadly public-health issue!

Oh no – God the Anglican church has entered the picture. If a city-wide mass-testing takes place next week, the authorities will no doubt find tens of thousands of Covid cases. Reverend Koon, in his capacity as a lawmaker, suggests quarantine camps over the border. Another member of the all-patriot legislature proposes a Berlin-style airlift dropping cattle from drones (or something) to ease Hong Kong’s food-supply problem. 

The pandemic rages, and it is clear that Hong Kong’s leaders never bothered to plan for the stage when infections hit over 2,000 a day. But relax – the authorities have everything in place to protect us from a singer with ‘seditious intent’ (performing a song including the words ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times’).

The government’s Covid measures are less robust. But beneath the confusion, it seems to be transitioning to a more pragmatic approach. Not through conviction, but because – without extreme large-scale lockdowns that paralyze the city – there is no choice but to accept that the virus is going to spread. Officials can’t admit this, so the shift is likely to be awkward and tentative (don’t panic!) and presented as fine-tuning rather than abandoning the sacred ‘zero-dynamic whatever’ policy. 

From Dr Owens…

Counterintuitive, but in a pandemic the last thing you want is infectious people in hospital, unless needing treatment. Risk to other patients/HCWs.

‘More pragmatic’ by the way, does not mean ‘humane’.

Some mid-week reading…

From Michael C Davis – Hong Kong: How Beijing Perfected Repression…

Beijing seeks to justify this [NSL] imposition by asserting its inherent sovereign authority to govern Hong Kong as it wishes. To accept that reasoning, however, would be to undermine the very foundation of Hong Kong’s separate system and make nonsense of the many guarantees that the PRC has offered under the “one country, two systems” rubric. Hong Kong’s comprehensive transformation reflects an effort, common to autocratic regimes, “to hollow out from within critical institutions safeguarding fundamental freedoms.”

And in The Diplomat, how foreign judges are complicit in Hong Kong’s crackdown.

I thought everyone at the SCMP had gone to Bloomberg, but apparently there’s still someone left. This story crystalizes (perhaps unwittingly) the deranged politics behind Hong Kong’s futile campaign to eradicate the Covid virus from its shores.

After much blather about cross-border task forces, it describes a (non-official) proposal to emulate Mainland practice by locking down entire districts of the city (generally contiguous urban areas with an average population of 750,000) on a rolling basis in order to test every inhabitant. Shoe-shiners and ideologues ponder bans on all travel between these districts, the fanciful logistics of locking down and testing hundreds of thousands per day, and the exercise as a test of patriots-only governance.

And finally, the token sane person…

Former Hospital Authority chief executive Leung Pak-yin said district-based lockdowns could not help curb the virus’ spread even after testing capacity was ramped up, as cases could go undetected during the incubation period or there could be false negative results.

“After the testing, the uninfected people will get infected once the restricted areas are released. The cycle will repeat itself,” he told the Post, suggesting resources instead be spent giving rapid self-test kits to residents and guiding patients on recovering at home.

From David Webb – a searchable breakdown of the Employment Support Scheme, which spent HK$90 billion subsidizing companies. HKFP report. Coming top with HK$800 million was Dairy Farm (Wellcome, 7-Eleven, Mannings, etc), who probably wouldn’t have laid off many workers anyway. Here’s a table showing companies in order of average amount received per member of staff. It would have cost a fraction of 90 billion to have put the newly unemployed on the dole.

And CMHK and PCCW bar Hong Kong Watch…

So – we won’t be confined to our apartments for weeks gazing down as the Women’s Detachment of the Rodent Rectification Regiment come goose-step down the street in their mink-fur mini-skirts bringing us groceries. Not yet, at least. The cross-border meeting aimed at ‘coming to Hong Kong’s rescue’ results not in a Mainland-style lockdown, but five joint task forces with Guangdong, which will…

…focus on boosting Hong Kong’s ability to carry out testing and pathological examinations, constructing quarantine facilities and maintaining a steady supply of medical goods…

An anti-climax, and indeed perhaps a surprise. It looks more like an opportunity to fabricate problems for the Mainland to solve, to create cross-border bodies for appearance’s sake, and for Chief Secretary John Lee to name-check Guangdong Party Secretary Li Xi (whaddya mean, ‘who?’). Carrie appoints ceremonial-looking task-force-bosses…  

The secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, Erick Tsang, will be responsible for nucleic acid testing.

Despite shoe-shiners’ ranting about Hong Kong civil servants’ evil ‘Western’ anti-Covid approach, it seems someone knows better than to try completely shutting Hong Kong down (and moving the PLA in, or whatever). Maybe they are more aware of the public mood – or even their own fallibility – than we realize. 

The test will come when they start detecting thousands of cases a day – then we will see how far the authorities can move from obsessing with suppressing cases to focusing on suppressing disease. (Comparison of the two approaches here.) Perhaps Beijing’s people know there isn’t really a choice; maybe someone up there even sees Hong Kong as a test case for China to move towards mitigation. If so, the gradual backtracking away from absurd hospitalization and quarantine policies will continue until ‘dynamic zero-Covid’ exists only as a slogan. 

(Update: Dr Owens sees a glimmer of hope. So I’m not just imagining it.)

Otherwise, it’ll be more of this – a pithy video summary of ‘Hong Kong Zero Covid Policy 2022’.

Hong Kong’s ‘Dynamic Zombie’ approach reaches the beginning of the end – or is it the end of the beginning – with authorities desperately trying to maintain the pretense that mass testing and preventative quarantines still make sense in dealing with Covid. Mass-testing in Tung Chung – or did officials put up a sign saying ‘last chance for haircuts and vegetables’? A pro-Beijing party proposes district-by-district testing to ‘flush out all silent carriers’, and a government advisor mulls a modest citywide lockdown (imagine the panic-buying).

Some more or less worthwhile reading for the weekend…

The LARB’s review of Guobin Yang’s The Wuhan Lockdown.

From The Star – a good intro if, like most right-thinking people who ignore the Winter Olympics, you’re wondering what all the Eileen Gu fuss is about (she’s the American-but-Chinese skiing-backwards and money-making champion). A thread on the complicated ‘dual nationality’ of people like Gu.

Remember FECs, checkpoints when entering Shenzhen from the north, foreigners-only compounds and all that? A little nostalgia from Anne Stevenson Yang on China’s 1980s-90s attempts to isolate foreign influences as the country started opening up.

From HK Post – Greater Bay Area stamps, featuring ugly property-ad-style portrayals of regional landmarks and scenes.

CMP on China’s online system for informing on people spreading evil ideas. 

Democratic Party head Lo Kin-hei, one of the few remaining Hong Kong pan-dems not in captivity, criticizes the government’s latest social-distancing measures and says officials are ‘not affected by worldly concerns’. 

Obviously, the people thinking up these rules enjoy nice homes, chauffeur-driven cars and minions at their beck and call, and are oblivious to the concerns of, say, a senior citizen using a wet market, a hairdresser with shop rent to pay, or a waitress trying to feed a family. But this does not mean they are free of earthly desires.

Many of us fantasize about a post-trauma Hong Kong in which forces beyond our control deliver a return to a free society and vaguely enlightened government. These daydreams no doubt include arrests, public trials and punishments of quislings and incompetents. My own also involve quite detailed adjustments to civil servants’ remuneration. 

If the top two or three layers of bureaucrats in each department seriously contribute to policy-making, they are garbage at it. If they are just following instructions and implementing politicians’ policies, they are merely box-ticking managers. Either way, they qualify for an immediate 50% cut in pay and pensions.

Such reveries keep us sane.

‘Dynamic Zero-Brains’ Covid precautions leave hospitals overwhelmed by asymptomatic patients. New measures here and here. The good news is stronger incentives for hold-outs to get vaccinated. Otherwise it’s a mess. Outdoor gatherings of more than two thirds of one person are banned. This will not be proactively enforced except sometimes. No hamsters allowed in hair salons where all staff are vaccinated. You will need the LeaveHomeSafe app to enter supermarkets unless there are no vegetables for sale. And you must have the app to go through malls except when you don’t have to…

“If there are certain individuals who have to go past a certain premises like a shopping mall to get to where they live or where they work, they can be taken as a reasonable excuse of not observing the vaccine pass…”

Letting the sloppy English pass, this last point is startling as it suggests someone senior in the government realizes that, for many of the 90% who do not use private cars, malls in Hong Kong offer de facto essential public rights-of-way between housing/offices and transport nodes. At the same time, officials decide to give handouts to front-line workers and the unemployed, and to tighten statutory employment protection.

This uncharacteristic sensitivity to the masses may seem refreshing. Or, to the paranoid, it could be more sinister. In what other policy field have the Hong Kong authorities been painstakingly thorough and no-expense-spared in the last couple of years? 

It is getting hard to distinguish NatSec Gestapo from Corvid Gestapo – as if the two are merging into the same thing. The LeaveHomeSafe app is becoming a general-purpose surveillance and tracking device, as if we are all being tagged like a suspect on bail (remember bail?). The state finds a way to shut down churches and temples. Government can intrude into your home to make sure too many families aren’t there, but enforcement can be selective (hello pan-dems).

Which brings us to the latest in the courts. Samuel Bickett is sent back to jail. A statement from him. And after nearly a year in custody for most of them, the 47 pan-dems arrested for taking part in a primary election see their case dragged out yet again.

Chinese state media warn Hong Kong against abandoning ‘zero-Covid’ and living with the disease…

[Xinhua] said achieving “dynamic zero” remains the most useful strategy for the city as its vaccination coverage of just 80 percent receiving at least one shot is insufficient and giving up measures to achieve zero infections will lead to “unbearable consequences” for the economy and public health.

“It is too early to adopt the ‘live with the virus’ approach, which is not supported by science and will only heavily shock Hong Kong’s medical system, not to mention [delay] quarantine-free cross-border travel with the mainland,”

Just when it seemed Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her administration might start to ease off, Beijing expects her to go full King Cnut on the virus. 

What’s the purpose? Presumably, Hong Kong cannot be allowed to prove Beijing wrong. The CCP must save face and maintain the line that it is saving China from the calamitous barbarism of other countries that are opening up and adjusting to Omicron as endemic. (And from evil foreign vaccines. Or – if paranoid conspiracy theories seem more rational in these times – because the NatSec-Covid regimes are killing Hong Kong nicely in preparation for the city’s absorption into the Greater Bay Area hub-zone.) 

As the virus spreads regardless, some cross-border truck drivers are inevitably going to test positive. Panic-buying of fresh vegetables means there are virtually no greens in the supermarkets. People must now resort to eating hamsters. Oh no wait, they can’t because the government has shot them all. But hey – at least we have patriots-only running Hong Kong.

Which brings us to this… Not sure why the Foreign Correspondents Club saw fit to host supposed CE ‘election candidate’ Checkley Sin, but the Q&As proved to be quite entertaining and indeed illuminating about how loyalists think. OK, ‘think’. Watch here to see him refuse with a disturbing, almost petrified, grin to answer any questions about his platform or government policy on the grounds that it’s ‘quite dangerous’. More here.