Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The whole of Shenzhen – population over double Hong Kong’s – locks down in an attempt to eliminate China’s omicron outbreak of over 3,000 cases. This is what the authorities were planning for Hong Kong, with all non-essential workers sent home, public transport shut down, and the whole population subjected to three rounds of testing. 

Folks over there take the opportunity to hate Hong Kong, apparently for spreading Covid to them. Does that make sense? It seems to have been Mainlanders in Hong Kong who have been sneaking over the border and bringing the disease back home. Who cares? (A constructive response to them here.)

As an SEZ launched in the late 70s, Shenzhen was the testbed for allowing economic sanity from Hong Kong into China. Maybe the Mainland will learn how to abandon zero-Covid and adopt a more pragmatic approach through the same route. Does omicron give even the proudest all-powerful leaders a choice?

Regina Ip continues her not-very-subtle campaign to be seen as Chief Executive material by helping to deflect responsibility for Hong Kong’s recent Covid mess away from Beijing. The pan-democrats are in jail, and she must officially support Carrie Lam’s hapless administration – so she picks on the civil service. 

This is unfair. Without ideological and political interference, the local health and other bureaucracies would almost certainly have pursued a more expert-driven policy on Covid – if only to cover their backsides and reduce their workloads. 

Even a quarter of a century after the handover, we still hear some milder apologists for the government claim that Hong Kong suffers from a shortage of home-grown political talent. Yet many countries with even smaller populations – Iceland, New Zealand, the Baltic states, etc – can devise clever policies on Covid and many other issues. The difference is that these places have open political systems where people with the best ideas can participate in decision-making. In Hong Kong, such individuals are systematically excluded, even jailed.

However, former civil servant Reg is on to something when it comes to the enormous gap in pay and accountability between our public and private sectors, such as…

…a penchant for seeking regular salary scale reviews, in addition to the annual pay level adjustment exercise, as a means of enhancing civil service morale. Civil service unions react strongly if awards are made to any “grade” (that is, a specialized cadre of civil servants) that upset perceived relativity and balance.

These considerations continued to play out in the government’s effort to assemble a sizeable force to undertake emergency duties arising from the pandemic. The government felt obliged to pay volunteers, recruited mostly from retired civil servants, on scales benchmarked to civil service pay. That means the payments are substantial and exorbitant compared to the meager pay most Hong Kong people with midlevel management duties in the private sector get. 

On related subjects…

HKFP on why so few residents in elderly care homes got vaccinated (essentially: isolation of residents from outside contact; a peculiar anti-vax atmosphere – even among staff – within the facilities; and a lack of incentives to get vaccinated).

A Guardian/HKFP report in which hospital staff explain how Hong Kong ended up with corpses piled up in hospitals.

And a New Yorker interview with Stephen Kotkin on ‘the weakness of the despot’…

And so we think, but we don’t know, that he is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.

…The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk.

Last Friday, I doubted that the week to come could possibly be any worse – and so it came to pass. The Hong Kong authorities have now in effect ditched zero-Covid, and the 5th wave seems to be plateauing. 

However, fans of awfulness needn’t worry – there’s still lots of idiocy in store. Pointless quarantines for arrivals, frantic construction of vast and probably superfluous isolation facilities, and an official need to present any and all improvements in the pandemic situation as miraculous gifts from Beijing. 

The SCMP helps out with the face-saving redefinition…

Pursuing a “dynamic zero” strategy in Hong Kong’s coronavirus battle is not about aiming for zero infections, but saving lives first…

To celebrate, some painstakingly curated reading and viewing for the weekend…

World Politics Review not mincing words in its article on Hong Kong’s Covid mess as a ‘cost of pleasing Beijing’.

On the subject of doing harm to satisfy the emperor, the SCMP reports that China’s GDP can grow at 5.5% this year, but…

“The target can certainly be achieved if Beijing insists, but it will come at a cost,” warned Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie Capital.

“It may force the rise of [China’s] macro leverage ratio,” he said, referring to the measurement of an economy’s overall indebtedness.

In other words, they must damage the economy in the longer run (increasing debt, misallocating capital) in order to meet an arbitrary goal. Because not having a target – just living with whatever organic GDP growth comes along – is unacceptable to control-freaks obsessed with proving the superiority of their authoritarian system.

Which brings us to a YouTube video of HKU’s Frank Dikotter on how to be a dictator. “The moment you seize power you become afraid.”

And a CNN op-ed on how Xi Jinping’s unworldly zero-sum outlook keeps China from playing a big-boy role in the Russian war on Ukraine.

A fairly weighty essay in Made in China Journal on Hong Kong as an example of political restructuring in the context of ‘contemporary autocratisation’.

How the film Revolution of Our Times is playing in Vancouver…

All 3,000 tickets for 14 Vancouver screenings in two cinemas, running from February 11 until March 13, were sold out almost immediately, organisers say.

Attendees said emotional scenes on screen were reflected among audiences; some wept throughout, others chanted the protest slogan “Hong Kong, add oil”, and at the end many stood and sang the unofficial protest anthem Glory to Hong Kong.

…Jenny Kwan, a Hong Kong-born member of Canada’s parliament, said that the screening she attended was an “emotional, heartbreaking” experience.

“You could hear people in the audience quietly sobbing. There was an intensity in the cinema, all around me,” said Kwan, the member for Vancouver East.

… and in Taiwan…

The aftermath of Hong Kong’s protests have been warily watched from across the Taiwan strait, where some Taiwanese saw a warning for their own future. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has vowed to “unify” Taiwan with China, by force if necessary.

“I think with these screenings, the most important thing isn’t to get people to focus on Hong Kong, the most important is that they are focused on Taiwan, their home,” Chow said.

An interesting thread on how commercial and political pressures make China’s social media a haven for ultra-nationalism.

And for econ/history buffs, Andrew Batson on the reversal of roles in the China-Russia economic relationship from the 1950s to the 2020s.

Am I the only person in Hong Kong who didn’t get the Government End Of The World Panic Alert Freak Out thing about Queen Elizabeth Hospital on my phone? It seems not – a small and no doubt select group of us did not receive the emergency message, with the (by all accounts) near-terrifying audio alarm that led some to believe the city was under imminent nuclear attack. We missed out on that little excitement. (I have decided that the only way to stay sane in Hong Kong is to treat the whole time and place as an existentialist endurance-thrill.)

The government officially announces its new Covid policy – prioritizing the saving of lives rather than organizing elaborate and futile lockdowns and mass-testing. There is an unspoken parallel priority, namely presenting whatever happens as a heroic Beijing-dominated victory. Expect continued warfare analogies and endless expressions of gratitude for Mainland contributions of manpower and quack herbal medicines as infections peak and the virus burns out naturally. If mass-testing ever does go ahead, its only purpose will be to save face – presumably without lockdowns. 

And what then? Continued restrictions on travel even as other countries drop quarantine requirements – just so we can be in step with the motherland? ‘Zero dynamic overseas travel’. Or will they find a way to present common sense as a gift from Beijing?

Questions and (rather pointed) answers about how Hong Kong got to this and what happens next…

We are likely already at herd immunity as our wave peaked a few days ago.

…[before we could have] a rational plan of a graduated transition to living with Covid. Under this scenario border controls are already unnecessary and they could certainly be removed by the end of March. There is no reason why our city could not be getting back to relatively normal life within 2 to 3 months.

And a helpful guide to Covid rapid antigen tests.

So the government is indeed scrapping the planned compulsory universal testing farce…

On the internal discussions to delay universal testing, insiders told the Post that carrying out the exercise with so many cases emerging every day would be “useless”, given the city still did not have an adequate number of isolation facilities.

The (still not officially announced) decision is presented as a reprioritization. Anonymous sources say the mass-testing will be postponed to late April (presumably watered-down), and the main aim will now be the rather obvious one all along of ‘saving lives’. To save face, the new approach – more like ‘living with Covid’ – will probably be termed ‘zero dynamic blah blah with Asian characteristics’ or something.

After the confusion-horror-mayhem of the last month or so, the Hong Kong government’s credibility is in even more tatters than anyone had previously thought possible. But it looks like there has been something of a power struggle in the background between Mainland political ideologues and more practical health experts.

HKU’s Gabriel Leung thinks the 5th wave has peaked and will end up with approximately 4.3 million infections and 5,000 deaths. Graphs and link to report here.

Watch Regina Ip suddenly proclaim support for the approach she dismissed up until yesterday.

In an uncharacteristic little fit of common sense, the government will even allow hair salons to open again.

Now Hong Kong can return to normalcy – Tam Tak-chi’s sedition conviction, Ta Kung Pao turning on Cardinal Zen, and Winnie Yu back in jail.

Some mid-week reading… 

The expats-fleeing-HK story du jour – from AFP via HKFP.

A quick Axios summary on Beijing’s internal pro-Russia propaganda. A good thread on what China can and can’t do as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. A Chinese academic goes anti-Semitic on Ukraine. And Vice on China’s (or some Chinese men’s) creepy thing about Ukrainian women.

The Hong Kong government continues to grope and fumble its way to a decision on citywide lockdown and compulsory universal Covid testing. The latest signs are: the performance will last from March 26 to April 3; public transport will continue to operate, partly; essential workers (healthcare, stock exchange, etc) can go about their duties; and one designated shopper per household will be allowed out on some sort of roster to buy food. 

This is, of course, just tentative – maybe someone will see sense and scrap the whole idea. But there are patriotic voices demanding a full-scale Wuhan-style population house-arrest. The Standard story has former Health Secretary Ko Wing-man at the ‘two meetings’ in Beijing apparently thinking it is still possible to nip the 5th wave in the bud. Regina Ip also staunchly sticks with the ‘zero dynamic etc’ ideology.

Meanwhile the overnight lockdowns (still taking place as if identifying and isolating individual cases will stop the spread of the disease now) provide more or less random samples of the population – suggesting that maybe 15% of residents are Covid-positive.

Nine days without leaving your 400 sq ft home, going for a walk, seeing friends, or letting your dog pee on fire hydrants. Nine days when riot police roam the streets ticketing anyone outdoors without a permit – special teams to clamp down on midnight joggers? And when the results are published, we find that, of the Hong Kong population, 33% have rickets, 33% obesity, 33% insanity, and 100% terribly need a haircut.

Your regular expats-fleeing-HK story – today from AP…

Over the last fortnight Hong Kong has looked more like New York or London at the start of the pandemic than a city which had two years of hard-won breathing room to get ready.

The Chief Secretary assures Hongkongers that they will have ample time for more panic-buying before lockdown. And a 4,000-strong HK Police ‘riot squad’ will help with the Covid mass-testing…

Although their exact duties had not yet been spelt out, a source said they might be assigned to escort infected patients to hospital or community isolation facilities, and enforce lockdowns in sites where residents had to stay at home until they were tested. 

We could read between the lines of these reports and conclude that the mass-testing exercise is indeed going to happen, and lockdowns will be on a district basis – but that would assume that officials actually have a fixed plan. 

By the time it goes ahead (if it does) a large percentage of the population (30%? 40%? 50%?) will have been infected. Compulsory universal testing will essentially be a hugely disruptive days-long census to determine which of two large groups – Covid-positive and Covid-negative – each resident falls into. While they are at it, maybe the examiners could also find out exactly how many of us are left-handed.

(There is some alarm over the fact that the Security Bureau will allocate patients to isolation facilities. This probably does not mean cops will do triage. Bureaus were given different Covid responsibilities at a Shenzhen meeting, presumably as a display of smooth governance by Hong Kong officials, and Security got the operation of the prison-like camps. Home Affairs, for example, got distribution of test kits.)

Even Mainland officials seem divided. The senior CCP guy rants about the correctness of zero-Covid as an ideology, while the health expert stresses more practical matters. 

Hongkongers seem to be drawing their own conclusions from the confusion and are devising anti- or ‘living with’ Covid strategies of their own. For example, small-businesses close for a few days if an employee is infected – but without government involvement, with its risk of kids being separated from parents or asymptomatic people being sent to quarantine camp. Some snippets from a discussion…

Before I knew of ppl testing positive & self-isolating, but not informing authorities. Increasingly now seeing ppl just say “don’t know, don’t care” & not bothering to test. Even some who have tested positive … example is a pro-China Mainland friend who was very pro COVID zero & controls, but now sees everyone has it and thinks continued restrictions are pointless.

It’s also that people have now seen first hand people they know who have had Covid and are doing just fine with no severe symptoms and recovered comfortably at home. They finally realise living with Covid is possible and not malicious rumors by Western media.

Healthcare workers complain about how ‘zero dynamic etc’ diverts vital resources away from their facilities – and from genuinely sick patients. 

And the latest from Dr Owens…

Public health policy decisions in HK have increasingly been performative rather than substantive with very little, if any, grounding in science or evidence

Substance or performance?

– Universal PCR testing

– 21 day quarantine

– Airline bans

– Closing wet markets for deep cleaning

– Masks whilst running in country parks

– Taped children’s playgrounds + BBQ pits 

Persisting with the narrative around CUT is an example of science and performance pulling in different directions

Failure to pivot from PCR testing to RAT makes no sense

The pivot would transfer control to individuals. Educate, inform and incentivise +ve behaviour

(Interestingly, up at the ‘two meetings’ in Beijing, a Vice Premier asks whether Hong Kong private hospitals are ducking their Covid-related responsibilities. Covid aside, many, if not most, private hospitals are built on land granted by the government decades ago at little or no charge – the idea being that the institutions would serve the community. Today, they poach the underfunded public system’s manpower and cater mainly to wealthy patients needing undemanding treatment. Maybe, like the tycoons, they will have to do more to prove their loyalty in future.)

The weirdness goes on… My latest follower on Twitter is a company offering help to people who want visas for Hong Kong. Guess they have time to scroll through a timeline these days.

Why people in Hong Kong don’t let the government know of their positive Covid test results. (Basically, they’re not stupid.)

You couldn’t have thought, as 2022 began, that Carrie Lam’s administration still had much more credibility to lose – but oh boy did they find ways to do it. In the last few days I’ve gone from being skeptical that a serious or semi-serious lockdown will happen, to less sure, and now back to cautious doubt that it’ll happen (give or take some light symbolic theatrics).

Latest indication: the Mainland health expert seconded to Hong Kong sounds humble (that is, no mouth-frothing rants demanding lockdowns). Government mouthpiece RTHK reports skepticism from local medics. Science reports signs that Chinese officials are looking beyond zero-Covid. 

(Loads of useful HKFP Covid coverage, including info on transport arrangements, here.)

Some weekend reading…

Latest on Hong Kong as tech-hub – a Mainland tech-game company with a Mongkok address operates one of the world’s biggest Bible apps…

Many user actions on the KJV bible app, including pressing the “Amen” button, will lead to pop-up video ads. 

Wish I’d thought of it!

Good discussion of Beijing’s future strategy following Ukraine invasion…

China is likely also shocked to watch Western countries butcher 🇷🇺’s economy & isolate 🇷🇺 government. It probably swears never to allow this happen on itself.

Russian chess king (therefore gifted strategist?) and longtime Putin-dissenter Gary Kasparov on what the West should do in Ukraine.

For some light relief, check out Noah Verrier – an artist who does still lifes of such items as hamburgers and jelly beans.

And a three-minute dummy’s guide to the evolutionary, historic and economic theories for male supremacy…

I have condensed the entire literature on the origins of patriarchy into 10 hypotheses. 

’No full lockdown’ and other glimmers of common sense – until further notice, hurry while stocks last – from the CE as Covid cases go past 50,000 a day. (Background on how officials compile the data.)

Breaking through the Covid gloom, a few rays of NatSec… Human rights lawyer Paul Harris leaves Hong Kong. And criminalization of speech continues with a NatSec judge’s conviction of Tam Tak-chi for sedition. Some depressing details and analysis of the judgement here and here. A round-up of the round-ups.

Some recommended reading for the mid-late week…

A thread linking the declines in Covid-era Hong Kong’s governance and in political and human rights…

…over the course of two years of Beijing eroding the city’s democracy and local politics, Hong Kong’s ruling class has been completely severed from the people, and chained ever-more tightly to performative acts to signal fealty to China, rather than its own residents.

…The panic-buying and hysteria in Hong Kong is a natural outcome of the confused public messaging that comes from a govt that no longer truly has the autonomy to craft, tweak and shift policy on its own…

Similar comments here…

[The Hong Kong government] lacks strategic ability; it operates in excessively siloed ways; it is almost innumerate; it privileges performance over substance and seems oblivious to actual human behaviour; it is often callous in the extreme; its communications are appalling.

Where are political talents like Eddie Chu Hoi-dik, Gwyneth Ho and all those energetic community-minded Legislative and District Council members again?

More international coverage of Hong Kong’s descent, this time from AFP. CNBC marks the 100,000th BNO Hongkonger applying to emigrate to the UK.

DW on the documentary Revolution Of Our Times showing in Taiwan – the article omits the title of the film.

If you’re getting bored reading how China will come out of the Ukraine crisis a big winner, some alternative – and probably more realistic – views. In HKFP, academic Paul G Harris examines the damage to China’s reputation…

What was Beijing thinking when it embraced an autocrat who had already annexed a huge chunk of a neighbouring country’s territory – the Crimean Peninsula – and deployed his war machine and mercenaries to other parts of Ukraine as well as to Georgia, Libya, Syria and beyond? At the very least, Chinese officials seem to have displayed poor understanding of Russian history and the psychology of Putin.

Howard French on Ukraine/Taiwan comparisons…

As Ukraine and Zelensky have shown, aggressors face even stronger sanctions from global opinion when they launch attempts to take over democratic underdogs. And China, in this regard, seems even less prepared than Russia to deal with the toxic fallout.

A Forbes op-ed looks at the economic price Beijing might have to pay for aligning itself with Russia.

And CNN reports on how China’s stance is endangering its citizens in Ukraine.

A Stimpson Center report speculating that Putin hoodwinked Xi over Ukraine. Some Chinese historians feel the same.

(Politico asks an expert whether Putin is really deranged enough to use nukes. You might not want to read this.)

From the Standard, pro-government landlord Allan Zeman…

…wrote a letter to Lam and said there have been so many conflicting messages over the past few weeks in Hong Kong about the virus from experts which left the public being very confused and nervous, citing the recent panic buying.

…”We need clarity on what’s the way forward. If the experts do feel like it would peak at mid-March then let the government say it loudly and send the message so that people can relax.”

He also said that the public need words of encouragement from authorities because they are scared about their livelihood and future and feel they are getting punished for being infected.

(Update: full letter here.)

In the last 24 hours we have gone from ‘Lockdown in mid-March or no?’ to ‘definite lockdown from March 17’ to ‘lockdown at end March 26-April 3 (rumoured)’. God knows what it will be by lunchtime today. With this sort of leadership, panic-buying at supermarkets is quite rational.

We are told that keeping everyone at home is necessary to ‘facilitate testing’. But why is this so? Perhaps the real reason is that those uppity Hong Kong civil servants still wedded to Western thinking had deviated from Beijing’s correct path by saying a lockdown would not work for Hong Kong. Maybe Mainland officials are now intent on forcing millions of people to stay for days stuck in tiny homes just to prove that the local bureaucrats were wrong.

HKU’s Gabriel Leung says that, if used, compulsory universal PCR testing … 

…should be deployed mid- to late-April when case numbers will already be at very low levels in order to truly achieve elimination, or “zero covid”…

Doing so earlier, especially when case numbers will still be too high to properly and appropriately isolate and care for, paying particular attention to population mental and emotional wellbeing in HK’s unique context, would not be recommended.

Another thread gets Righteous Anger of the Day Award.

The authorities are still capable of being focused when they want: ex-Bar chair Paul Harris is questioned by NatSec Police. Has he left town already?

And a glimmer of hope: a Chinese expert is talking – quite nicely – of moving on from zero-Covid.

Hong Kong’s Health Secretary says a full lockdown might still take place, despite previous denials. Thus panic-buying. That said, even a ‘full’ lockdown would not be a really ‘full’ one – with the stock exchange staying open, for example. And private and international schools (known to officials as ‘the ones our kids go to’) are exempted from the early summer vacation. 

One of Beijing’s top health people arrives to great fanfare, and Chief Executive Carrie Lam delivers a not-very-reassuring speech stressing the importance of and need for Mainland support… 

The CE said Hong Kong is not able to handle the Omicron outbreak on its own and that’s why in early February she asked the central government for help.

“The central government is highly concerned about Hong Kong’s epidemic situation and it cares about Hong Kong people’s wellbeing. It has been coordinating everything Hong Kong needs and has been responding to us immediately and actively,” she said.

…“With the strong support from the central government, the SAR government will firmly follow the instruction of President Xi Jinping, and will bear the main responsibility and make it its top priority to contain the outbreak,” she said.

“The epidemic is ruthless and the situation is critical. But with the full support of the central government, Hong Kong will be able to come out safely from danger.”

There is a gap between Carrie’s patriotic alarmism and her leading officials’ actions (or lack of them). Reading between the lines, it looks like local officials are trying, in their inept way, to adapt to the realities of Omicron – but are being pulled in the opposite direction by Beijing’s determination to prove it must and can suppress the outbreak. It’s hard to tell incompetence not just from malice, but from resistance.

The semi-‘full lockdown’ that may or may not happen is still another two weeks away – by which time the exercise will be more futile than ever. (Tests for 7.5 million every three days?) Yet Beijing has put a lot of effort into convincing everyone that it’s the only way. HK01 looks inside grim-looking Mainland-built isolation and treatment facilities (English summary here), which Xinhua hails as magnificent feats of ultra-quick construction.

Some interesting charts on Hong Kong’s Covid situation here.

To add to the mood of despair – births in Hong Kong hit a 56-year low.