Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The judge sentencing four men for trying to help students at the siege of PolyU in 2019 calls their actions ‘nearly paedophilic’ (though he gives them up to two years in prison). Does this extreme terminology spring from the judge’s personal bias, or a lack of awareness of what was happening at the time? (And how can something be ‘nearly’ paedophilic?)

The Lantau reclamation plan could end up delivering a glut of housing – and costing HK$800 billion. Simple question: what else could Hong Kong do with that wealth? Other than sending a man to the moon?

I’ll be getting my ‘bivalent’ vaccination tomorrow, and then in theory a week or two of holiday-season inactivity. Some non-festive links…

Recent Guardian piece on the reasons behind Beijing’s persecution of Jimmy Lai.

Pithy British Medical Journal piece by Dr David Owens and Jane Parry asking what China can learn from Hong Kong and Singapore in extricating itself from zero-Covid.

A longish essay by a Hongkonger in Taiwan on the search for a new home.

China Media Project on Mainland media’s relentlessly positive coverage of the nation’s leadership.

If you can stomach any more Elon Musk, a thread on his ties to China.

From state-backed voice of warm-and-cuddly reason Sixthtone, an archaeologist counters claims that the bronze-age Erlitou site was the capital of the Xia – the mythical first dynasty…

Experts, including not just historians, but also many archaeologists, continue to view archaeology as a subdiscipline of historiography. They see it as a tool for proving the validity of historical texts…

…Chinese archaeologists believe their main task is to verify the authenticity of ancient historical records.

Worth a look just for the graphics – special ASPI feature on the border clashes between China and India.

ArtNet on how Beijing pressures overseas artists to self-censor.

And for photography fans: LeaveHomeSafe snapshots (at last – someone found a use for that app!) and an exhibition (ends Dec 31) at the FCC of Magritte-inspired surreal photomontages by Basil Pao…

Hard to believe they are still really going to do this Lantau reclamation – but in Hong Kong these days, unbelievable is normal. The plan is to spend HK$580 billion on something we already have: land. 

Research group Liber estimates that there are 2,000 hectares (that’s 20 sq km/7.6 sq miles) of underused land in the New Territories. But officials insist that there is a ‘shortage of land’.

The truth is that there is a ‘shortage’ of space for housing because ultra-high land-use taxes prevent landowners from developing. If landowners didn’t have to pay massive up-front premiums, they would be delighted to build housing on their property. 

What’s really perverse is that the HK$580 billion represents years of accumulated land premiums. We will now blow it on reclaiming land unnecessarily, which the government can gradually auction off at the highest prices it can – all to maintain ‘scarcity’ and artificially high valuation of space.

And, of course, to channel vast amounts of public wealth into the pockets of engineering companies.

(The ‘Northern Metropolis’ plan will unlock some underused parts of the New Territories. And Hong Kong’s population is falling. Even more reasons not to reclaim off Lantau.)

The government continues its fight with Google – apparently believing that the search engine provides content. But wait! There’s more! Ukraine is also in the doghouse for using the black version of the Hong Kong flag in a video. (Something tells me this wasn’t an accident.)

A court rules on the massage place where a NatSec cop was found last March…

“Of about 10 random visits during the relevant period of time, sexual services were being offered on about half of the occasions,” [Magistrate Jason Wan] said. “One can hardly say it is mainly used for vice.”

So that’s OK then!

The Education Bureau’s annual inspection of schools finds teachers are…

…[failing] to promote a sense of belonging to the country or duty to safeguard its well-being.

…Only a “minority” of teachers incorporated national security education into their subjects, the bureau said and “many others focused too much on knowledge-feeding” and “rarely did they try to enhance students’ … sense of belonging towards the country from the sentimental level”.

It said schools should create an atmosphere in the classroom and outside to instil “love for the country and love for Hong Kong” among pupils.

The report allows that schools might lack appropriate teaching materials. The bureaucrats need to tell educators how, exactly, they should ‘enhance a sense of belonging from the sentimental level’.

The Standard’s story on the crowdfunding-permit idea stresses the ‘transparency angle. But if that’s a problem, why not improve regulation of all charitable fund-raising, regardless of the method of collecting donations?

A reminder that Google has experience of dealing with Hong Kong. A decade ago, Emperor Holdings tycoon Albert Yeung took legal action took legal action against the search engine, claiming its autocomplete function smeared him…

Yeung filed the lawsuit after Google refused to remove autocomplete suggestions such as “triad,” as organized crime gangs are known in China, which popped up with searches on his name.

The billionaire’s business empire includes an entertainment company that produces films and manages some of the city’s biggest celebrities. He argues that his reputation has been “gravely injured” and wants compensation.

Judge Marlene Ng disagreed with Google’s lawyers, who argued Yeung was better off asking the websites where the defamatory information was published to remove it. She said Google had the ability to censor material.

“Any risk of misinformation can spread easily as users forage in the web. The art is to find the comfortable equilibrium in between,” she said in her ruling.

Just tried foraging in the web: the offending word still jumps out at the user in third place on the autocomplete list.

Possibly not a coincidence: just before the winter solstice/Christmas/New Year/CNY season starts, the government ‘proposes’ a wacky new NatSec restriction. They want to (can’t believe I’m writing this) require online crowdfunding campaigns to get permits from some sort of regulatory body (reports from SCMP, RTHK). 

The idea seems to be to prevent funding of ‘colour revolutions’. A few questions spring to mind…

Surely the CIA, not local populations, finances uprisings? Also, how will this help Hong Kong become a tech/culture/innovation hub-zone, if budding entrepreneurs and creative types need a permit just to raise small sums for their startups and projects?

And how do you even enforce it? How does the government prevent anyone from registering a cause with GoFundMe, Kickstarter, Patreon or any other platform? Can the authorities determine whether such an appeal is Hong Kong-based? Do officials expect the platforms to turn away would-be fundraisers from Hong Kong who do not have a permit? Will officials complain – as with Google – when the platforms do not cooperate? What other online applications will we need a permit to use? Whatever happened to laissez faire and ‘none of the government’s business’? 

Will officials react badly when commentators tell them the idea is absurd? 

Which brings us to the worst example yet of an embarrassingly over-whiny official press release in response to Ming Pao content. As usual, the government expresses ‘regret’, which Google defines as feeling…

…sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that one has done or failed to do).

Since the government is not a person, it cannot experience emotions (though a named spokesman speaking personally could complain that an op-ed ‘hurt his feelings’). More to the point, the government did not write the Ming Pao column, so does not need to regret it. Officials could, on the other hand, regret making decisions that invite criticism in the newspapers.

Meanwhile – there goes any hope of turning Hong Kong into Asia’s leading bathroom accessories hub…

After school that day, Gary said the school had summoned all 30 members of the running team and confiscated their towels, telling them the case would be reported to the police.

This is a patriotic/petrified school administrator at work, not law enforcement. We do not know if the nifty design that sort-of reads ‘香港’ in one position but ‘加油’ in another is banned as a national security threat. Maybe the whole ‘Heung Gong ga yau’ phrase is prohibited. If it is, what are Hong Kong fans supposed to shout at international sports tournaments? Should the government set up a committee? It could urge spectators to make a ‘T’ sign with their hands if they hear the words, and devise a new officially recommended correct phrase, like ‘Go Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China!’

Next step: hounding Google for still including the phrase in search results? (The Google-angst continues, by the way.)

In other matters – an interesting article on former Global Times editor Hu Xijin attracting criticism from other, more devout nationalists for backing Beijing’s Covid U-turn…

After China’s abrupt change on Covid policies, the nationalist influencers and the “zero-Covid camp” are having a hard time pivoting themselves.

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!