Big Lychee, Various Sectors

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.

Government broadcaster RTHK announces an exciting new show designed to inspire young people through interviews between former official Fred Ma and the elderly mega-rich…

In the first episode that aired on Saturday night, Ma interviewed gambling tycoon Lui Che-woo, founder of Galaxy Entertainment Group and K. Wah International Holdings, who encouraged Hong Kong people to remain resilient amid hardship.

The twin themes are ‘shut up and listen’ and ‘you can’t make this stuff up’…

Asked if the show would be able to connect with youngsters – among the city’s most disgruntled residents following the protests – Ma said his plan was for them to learn from their successful predecessors.

…this is not about them sharing their stories as we have listened to quite a lot of their voices elsewhere,” he said.

The SCMP helpfully provides some background…

[Ma] said he had spotted a societal trend since the anti-government protests in 2019 and the start of the pandemic in 2020.

“There has been a lot of negativity. Society has been through a lot,” he said. “Our show has a lot of positive energy.”

…He quit the private sector in 2002 to become a government official but resigned in 2008 due to a brain condition. 

David Webb on the arithmetic of Covid spread and time-lags. On the day 350 cases are reported, another 1,000 people are infected. On the day those 1,000 are detected (five days later), another 3,000 are infected. Cue hundreds of transmission chains. The real positivity is in sewage samples.

With the Hong Kong government finally starting to admit failure in its ‘dynamic’ zero-Covid policy, Regina Ip makes one last desperate attempt to offer herself as worthy Chief Executive material. (Trigger alert: contains extreme toadying that may distress some readers.)

Beijing officials do a last-minute ‘consultation’ on ‘candidates’ for the CE ‘election’. Loyalists claim the absence of pan-dems accounts for the CCP’s insouciance.

Your weekend NatSec stuff…

A thread on moderate pan-dem Fernando Cheung, just jailed for three weeks for protesting – as a serving lawmaker – in LegCo… 

At sentencing on Friday, magistrate Peter Law said Cheung had “seriously disrupted” the LegCo meeting and created a “negative impression that civilisation has regressed.”

The same judge has denied Chow Hang-tung the right to make bail review applications in person.

Police arrest activist Koo Sze-yiu before he can protest the Olympics – which is apparently now sedition.

And the HK Journalists Association continues trying to fight government attempts to shut it down.

A property agent gets an eight-month sentence for sedition for putting up posters saying ‘corrupt Hong Kong communist officials buried their conscience, their families must die’, and possessing more in digital form describing the HK Police as a criminal organization and Chief Executive Carrie Lam as a ‘wicked woman’. 

You may wonder whether these are particularly misleading statements, especially for a property agent. I couldn’t possibly comment.

It is the first prison sentence for sedition since the 1967 riots. Another person was given 13 months (thread on judge’s reasoning here). The Article 23 NatSec law will no doubt attach heavier sentences to this crime. 

A must-read: Samuel Bickett not pulling any punches about his experience with Hong Kong’s courts: ‘Magistrate Lam lied – repeatedly…’.

It is not possible that Magistrate Lam believed his characterizations of the facts were accurate. He was not simply mistaken – he was lying. He was committing serious, criminal misconduct from the bench. He betrayed his oath to the law. And he sent me, an innocent person, to prison.

An HKFP op-ed asks whether Hong Kong still has an independent judiciary.

An American legal scholar who had previously worked for Human Rights Watch was offered a post at HKU, but has been refused a visa. Perhaps the real story is that he thought the government might grant him one.

Provoke Media on Consulum’s apparently hasty exit from its Relaunch HK job. The office has closed, the staff have moved onto other careers, and the government contract hasn’t been renewed. In the NatSec/Covid-era, a PR campaign now looks naive.

From Transit Jam, transport psychopath-bureaucrats convert a West Kowloon lawn popular with picnickers into a car park for Culture Hub-Zone visitors who presumably don’t plan on having picnics.

Al Jazeera on Hong Kong’s gloomy new year holidays…

For ordinary citizens, Beijing’s demands of zero COVID have turned what was one of the world’s most dazzling, cosmopolitan, and eclectic cities into an isolated, anxious island of pique.

Weekend reading…

A UK Daily Telegraph story on Hong Kong immigrants. Other than misusing the ‘grassroots’ label, it paints a positive picture of the newcomers as hard-working, wealthy, educated, church-going, child-rearing, property-buying potential Conservative voters, deserving of help in operating central heating…

For many, the lifestyle here is a pleasant surprise. “It’s less crowded, less of a headache, less claustrophobic both physically and mentally, less materialistic. You spend more time with [your] family…”

(A reminder of how Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demographic overlaps with the less wealth- and status-obsessed parts of the population.)

Could stories like this change the minds of those Brits who have been in Hong Kong for decades and laugh/cry at the idea of ever returning to a place they remember as a grimy hellhole with bad food and horrible weather? (Asking for a friend.)

More on the Hong Kong emigres in Britain from Nikkei Asia. Politico looks at those who are former protesters keeping the flame alive in exile.

SCMP reports that 96% won’t be coming back to Hong Kong. (For those with kids, in particular, the massive improvement in living space and housing affordability surely makes a move to the UK virtually irreversible.) 

And more on that ever-popular subject: people leaving Hong Kong hiring private jets for their pets.

The Spectator lists British universities that have given honorary degrees and awards to the CCP’s useful Hong Kong idiots.

Benedict Rogers on the CCP’s looming clampdown on religion in Hong Kong.

Louisa Lim’s new book.

HKFP op-ed on the Hong Kong government’s hang-up about kids playing.

In Dissent – Peng Shuai as a victim of China’s ‘violent power structure’.

Chinafile looks at China’s New Era Civilization Centres – day care, evening classes and community voluntarism, all wrapped up in Xi Jinping Thought. And at the disappearance of verdicts from the courts’ website.

From the Conversation – what could happen if Xi Jinping does not appoint a successor.

In case you’ve been away the last five years or so, a quick intro to China’s declining international image from Council on Foreign Relations.

Bob Davis in Politico on how the US’s Asia trade policies hamper efforts to counter China.

Geremie Barme in a quick aside on Beijing’s Winter Olympics…

…the second time that Xi Jinping has demonstrated an unrivalled talent for overseeing China’s security state in its stage-management of an international event at which patria is the tenebrous doppelgänger of individual excellence. Collective displays and martial precision of the kind vaunted by the Beijing games of 2008 and 2022 remind us of Clive James’s caution about ‘that feeling of having one’s identity strengthened by being absorbed into a mass’. This, James observes is what lies ‘at the heart of fascism’s appeal in all of its varieties.’

George Soros on CNN takes note of China’s property market woes. Any contrarians willing to bet that the aging investor-sage’s attention indicates an imminent rebound in the market? 

An inspiration to any ‘man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks’ – American guy takes North Korea off the Internet from his living room.

And if you missed it – Knownot does William Blake right down to the annoying/archaic non-rhyme in the first verse…

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the festive New Year night,

What redeeming hand or eye

Can re-awake autonomy?

The latest time-waster: Dordle – two Wordles side by side. Judging by my first attempt, not too demanding once both your brain cells kick in…

(Wordle apparently has its uses.)

Music by pro-democracy artists including Denise Ho, Tat Ming Pair, Dear Jane and Charmaine Fong is now apparently barred from RTHK’s programming. 

And after 33 years, the June 4 slogan on HKU’s Swire Bridge gets the Pillar of Shame treatment. Thread on the removal work here.

On a brighter note, the government confirms that it will not imprison you for debating the effectiveness of the ‘Zero Covid’ policy:

In response to media enquiries about whether discussions on the effectiveness of the “zero infection” target in the fight against the epidemic would violate the Hong Kong National Security Law, a spokesman for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government said today (January 30) that making general remarks and discussion is not illegal…

Well gee, thanks! This follows an outburst from DAB lawmaker Junius Ho, who seemed to think he was patriotically defending national policy, and a tentative shift in the Hong Kong government’s stance in the form of pushing ‘dynamic’ Zero Covid.

In another slap in the face for the DAB, Home Affairs Secretary Casper Tsui looks set to be ‘let go’ for his Party-gate embarrassment. The regime is also cleaning up its dim-witted loyalist trash.

A damning must-read essay by Jerome Cohen in Academia Sinica Law Journal on ‘Hong Kong’s Transformed Criminal Justice System: Instrument of Fear’…

The CCP, the NSL agents it sent from the mainland, and its minions in the SAR government promptly demonstrated that the power to arbitrarily deprive people of their personal liberty, as well as their freedoms of expression, is the power to silence a dissatisfied community by destroying the careers, families and civic support systems of the targeted resisters.

It particularly covers the depressing impact of the NatSec regime on the judiciary. 

A lovingly curated selection of regional and international reading, viewing and listening to usher in Tiger Year…

Human Rights Watch hails the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Chinese state media whine about Taiwan classifying Taiwanese/Hoklo as an indigenous language. (Some background here.) Note the underlying fear of what the CCP sees as de-Sinicization.

The Top 10 Rumours about China’s demographics. 

Some extracts from a 1973 trade meeting between Mao Zedong and Henry Kissinger, in which the Great Helmsman becomes obsessed with the possibility of exporting thousands of Chinese women to the US.

A long interview with Michelle Garnaut on the closure of M at the Bund, where I dined around 20 years ago alongside Shanghai’s ‘most lovely and terrific people’, apparently. As with her previous M at the Fringe in Hong Kong, a more-memorable-than-average restaurant thanks to the founder’s personality. Contrast with today’s cookie-cutter dining ‘concepts’.

A long and prurient fascinating look at the comings and goings of Thailand’s (now King) Vajiralongorn, who has for years spent far more time in Germany than in his home kingdom (where family and harem are ‘cooped up in the same palace’). Everything you could possibly want – from German quack clinics to uniform fetishes to assassination plots to chinaware-splurges. 

David Corn on that Tennessee school board’s banning of Maus – it’s ‘dumber than you think’.

On other neolithic peoples – thoughts on the Beaker Culture’s arrival in Britain…

It’s possible that Stonehenge was a crisis led cultural response to this demographic disaster. Isotopic and other evidence shows that animals were brought from all over the British Isles for the communal construction.

Slightly less ancient history – memories of interoffice mail (like email, but on paper, with the inbox and outbox made of wood and sitting on your desk).

Many many years ago, I worked at one of Hong Kong’s esteemed and venerable hongs. Messages (often with attachments) from people in other parts of the company landed on my desk in a reusable string-sealed envelope. Addressees’ name were written consecutively on a grid, so you could see that Mary Wong, Accounts Manager, 6th Floor had previously sent something in the envelope to Fred Chan, Marketing Flunky, 3rd Floor, who had then sent something on to Me, Company Genius, 7th Floor. Sometimes, you would notice that Mary and Fred had sent messages back and forth to each other several times. Endless possibilities for traffic analysis.

Although I was just a young minion, my corporate duties often involved senior management, so I received memos from The Chairman, 8th Floor, The CEO, 8th Floor, The Financial Director, 8th Floor and similar top executives – sometimes in envelopes I had previously sent to them. The grids on these envelopes often showed an earlier succession of memos circulating among these demigods. I reserved these as ‘power envelopes’ and used them when sending polite requests for action or whatever to peers in other departments if I needed to subliminally intimidate them. If the medium (ie envelope) was the message, the message was ‘I work with the Chairman, so don’t mess with me’. Especially useful when dealing with Personnel or IT.

It was a huge relief to move from that colonial hierarchical corporate culture to the more informal feudal atmosphere of the Chinese family-run mega-business, where everyone knew the Company Gwailo worked directly for the Emperor and kowtowed instantly.

And finally, after groveling to the CCP, the WHO gets into Neil Young and Crazy Horse in the documentary A Band A Brotherhood A Barn. Scenes from Colorado and rehearsals (or actual takes – hard to tell with NY) for the new album.

Consulum, the PR agency given US$5.7 million to do a strategic something blah-blah study on relaunching Hong Kong, has handed in its report. A Factwire story reveals that it’s bursting with all the exciting and incisive findings and recommendations you would expect. For example, the Japanese are ‘unreachable’ and find official feel-good blather about Hong Kong particularly unbelievable. And our officials should keep quiet about politics, but pitch this city as great for hiking.

Links to the opinion research summaries are here. Jazzy re-positioning stuff is here, if you can stomach slogans like (I can’t believe this is real) ‘Raise capital. Raise a family. Raise your heartbeat.’

According to Factwire, Regina Ip – previously a skeptic about the PR exercise – has changed her mind after seeing these materials.

When Consulum started its work in mid-2020, the project to restore Hong Kong’s image looked desperate. Eighteen months later, with NatSec and Covid regimes in force, the whole thing seems absurdly irrelevant – almost quaint.

We now have CCP-style PR. Cue the Civil Service College subjecting government employees to ‘In-depth Study of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy for a Brighter Future of Hong Kong’. 

Some weekend reading…

Jerome Cohen on the Chief Justice’s remarks on how Hong Kong still has judicial independence.

From HKFP, an interesting explanation of the business model and economics of food delivery platforms like Deliveroo and Foodpanda, including ‘ghost kitchens’. The platforms clearly offer restaurants access to a bigger market, but also extract rents as rapaciously as landlords. For some restaurants (especially with Covid lockdowns) not playing along isn’t an option.

Samuel Bickett sees selective and protectionist action in the Hong Kong Competition Commission’s investigation into the two main food-delivery services, which are apparently European. (He sees echoes of Mainland discrimination against foreign companies, though this may be reading too much into it. It could just be that the Competition Commission, yet another bloated public-sector bureaucracy, doesn’t have enough work to do.) However, the allegations sound familiar – a bit like past complaints about the two big supermarket chains’ policies toward wholesale suppliers that sell to smaller players that undercut the duopoly.

Samuel Bickett’s appeal comes up on February 8. You can subscribe and donate to him here.

From the Diplomat, signs that Beijing is curbing the more rabid aspects of wolf-warrior diplomacy.

Francesco Sisci on the role of taxation in China’s governance (more interesting than it sounds if you’re into that sort of thing).